Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization 1788733835, 9781788733830

Citation preview

Neither Vertical nor Horizontal

4

Rodrigo Nunes is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. He is the author of Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective Action after Networks and of numerous articles in publications such as Les Temps Modernes, Radical Philosophy, South Atlantic Quarterly, Jacobin , and the Guardian . As an organiser and popular educator, he has been involved in several initiatives in Brazil and in Europe, including the first editions of the World Social Forum.

5

Neither Vertical nor Horizontal A Theory of Political Organisation

Rodrigo Nunes

6

First published by Verso 2021 © Rodrigo Guimaraes Nunes 2021 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-383-0 ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-385-4 (UK EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-386-1 (US EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Control Number: 2020948742 Typeset in Minion by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

7

Contents

____________ Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Towards a Theory of Political Organisation 2 One or Two Melancholias? 3 Revolution in Crisis 4 Critique of Self-Organisation 5 Elements for a Theory of Organisation I: Ecology, Distributed Leadership, Organising Cores, Vanguard-Function, Diffuse Control 6 Elements for a Theory of Organisation II: Platforms, Diversity of Strategies, Parties 7 Radically Relational: The Problem of Fitness Conclusion Notes Index

8

Acknowledgements

__________________________ A full list of those to whom I owe affective, intellectual and political debts would be unfeasibly long, but special thanks go to my colleagues and students at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio); Steve Wright and Antonis Vradis for help with locating references; my editor, Sebastian Budgen, and everyone at Verso; all the friends and colleagues who invited me to share parts of this research over the last five years: Rene Gabri (16 Beaver, New York), Ben Trott (Heinrich-BöllStiftung, Berlin), Stevphen Shukaitis and Steffen Böhm (University of Essex), Javier Toret and Eunate Serrano (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), Marcelo Branco (Conexões Globais, Porto Alegre), Rosana PinheiroMachado (University of Oxford), Tadzio Müller and Mario Candeias (Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Berlin), Gustavo Chataignier (PUC-Rio), Fernanda Bruno and Fernando Santoro (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), João Roberto Lopes Pinto (Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro), Katja Dieffenbach (B-Books, Berlin), Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths), Déborah Danowski, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Felipe Süssekind, Alyne Costa and Juliana Fausto (Casa de Rui Barbosa), Jason Wozniak, David Backer and the LAPES group (Columbia University), David Mesing and Salar Mohandesi (Wooden Shoe, Philadelphia), Teivo Teivainen (University of Helsinki), Creston Davis (University of Athens), Verónica Araiza and Silvia López (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico), Guiomar Rovira (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Xochimilco), Samir Haddad (Fordham University), André Mesquita (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), Victor Marques (Universidade Federal do ABC), Jean Tible (Universidade de São Paulo), Lars Bang Larsen (Bienal de São Paulo), Colin Barker (Manchester Metropolitan University) [ in 9

memoriam ], Paolo Gerbaudo and Nick Srnicek (King’s College London), Bernardo de Souza (Fundação Iberê Camargo), Ulisses Carrilho and Keyna Eleison (Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage), Antonio Pele and Florian Hoffmann (PUC-Rio), Daniel Gutiérrez and Antje Dieterich (Werkstatt für Bewegungsbildung, Berlin), Imre Szeman and Eva-Lynn Jagoe (Banff Center for Arts and Creativity), Cinzia Arruzza (New School for Social Research), Gabriel Tupinambá and Jean-Pierre Caron (Fosso), Ulysses Pinheiro (Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro), Fernando Silva e Silva (Associação de Pesquisas e Práticas em Humanidades, Porto Alegre), Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter (University of Western Sydney), as well as to all who attended those events and whose questions and comments have helped me refine my own thought. In 2013, when I was already working on what would become this book, Josephine Berry and Clemens Apprich invited me to preview some of my thoughts on organisation for the Post-Media Lab project that Mute magazine and Leuphania University were doing at the time; the result was Organisation of the Organisationless , published in 2014. Although that delayed the writing of this book to some extent, as it forced me to do more work to differentiate the two publications, I am grateful to them for giving me the chance to get some of these ideas out at a moment when they had some immediate utility. While working on this book, I received support from PUC-Rio in the form of a Productivity Grant (2015–2018) and a research leave grant for a period at Brown University. At Brown, thanks are due to Bonnie Honig, James Green and Jasmine Johnson. An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared as ‘One or Two Melancholias? 1917, 1968 and the Question of Organisation’ in Crisis and Critique 5:2 (2018). Chapter 5 contains elements from ‘The Network Prince: Leadership Between Clastres and Machiavelli’, which appeared in the International Journal of Communication 9 (2015), and chapter 7 from ‘Tension and Telos in Pedagogy and Politics’, published in Lápiz 2 (2015). I thank the editors for their kind permission to use that content. My ideas about politics and organisation would certainly be much poorer were it not for the friends and comrades in and around several collectives, campaigns and research groups over the years: Amiz, COA, the 10

World Social Forum, Grumo, Fluke, Turbulence, Justice for Cleaners/Cleaners for Justice London, the Micropolitics Research Group and the Precarious Workers’ Brigade, Plan C, Comitê Popular da Copa de Porto Alegre, Materialismos (in all its different iterations), Werkstatt für Bewegungsbildung. As they say, ‘you know who you are’. Eduardo Luft might find a strange echo of the ideas I absorbed at his lectures in some of the arguments here. A conversation with Javier Toret about Lenin and immanence in a Hackney squat in 2004 helped me first put a finger on some of the problems that I have tried to elaborate in this book. That was the same night I met Valery Alzaga for the first time; two years later she invited me to work with her as a labour organiser. That experience and her friendship have been greatly formative for this book and for me. It was Kylie Benton-Connell who convinced me in June 2013 to put the other book I had been writing on the backburner and dedicate myself to this project; the protests then breaking out in Brazil sealed the deal. Throughout, Kylie remained this project’s greatest supporter, inter-locutor, critic and enthusiast, and the best companion I could have hoped for; my most special thanks could not but go to her. I hope the delay has not made the book any less urgent than she thought it was then.

11

Introduction

________________ The insurrections came and went. This book is, to a large extent, a response to the cycle of struggles that began in 2011 and whose impacts, direct and indirect, are still unfolding around us today. It is a response to the hope that they offered, but also to the limits they encountered and which have prevented them from fulfilling that promise – at least until now. It is, above all, about those limits: how one might overcome them or, perhaps more precisely, how one might overcome the patterns of thought and behaviour that ensure they keep coming back. Said limits have been the object of much discussion: the fitfulness of those uprisings and their incapacity to sustain themselves over time; their inability to move on from the tactics around which they had initially coalesced, typically square occupations, and the decline in their capacity for tactical innovation as circumstances changed; their inability to scale up in a viable way, and tendency to fall apart when they tried to do so; their propensity to demand large investments of time and energy from participants in return for little by way of clear strategy and decision-making; their relative lack of rootedness and strength to defend themselves when repression came bearing down. Many if not all of these have come to be associated with the tag that many people used to describe the spontaneous philosophy behind those mobilisations: ‘horizontalism’. To highlight these internal limitations is obviously not to deny the magnitude of the external obstacles that they encountered: police repression, media blackout and misrepresentation, the unresponsiveness of institutions and political elites, let alone the inertia of existing economic structures. Ultimately, however, these are simply the obstacles that any process of social transformation will always have to surmount if it expects 12

to win. More than cause for lamentation, relative weakness in the face of them must therefore be taken as a challenge: how can one grow powerful enough to defeat or disarm them? Doing so, in turn, demands overcoming internal limits; hence the focus of this book. The importance of recovering the momentum of those struggles in order to go farther than they could hardly needs to be stressed. Somewhat schematically, we can break the past decade down into two disparate moments, each responding in its own way to the overlapping crises of our time: the global economic crisis that began in 2007, and the crisis of political legitimacy arising from governmental reactions to it; the crisis of liberal democratic institutions, whose long-term hollowing out those reactions put under a sharp light; and accelerating climate change. While, in the first half of the decade, the wind seemed to blow in favour of demands for political and economic equality, in many places that transformative impulse has since been captured and rerouted. Appropriated by elites and a resurgent far right, it has served to bolster the entrenchment of unequal structures and regressive identitarianisms of all kinds (nationalism, white supremacism, patriarchalism, xenophobia, homophobia …). The global system has become highly unstable, and it seems clear that things cannot go on as before. As the possibility of even darker alternatives looms on the horizon – not least an ever more exclusive capitalism geared to protecting only the very few from growing surplus populations and environmental collapse – regaining the initiative becomes ever more urgent. 1

In parallel to this rightward turn, however, the latter half of this decade has seen something that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago, when the notion of ‘horizontalism’ first gained currency among alterglobalisation activists. In places like Spain, the United States and Britain, networked movements have rallied around political parties and openly discussed the need to build their own electoral alternatives; even a section of Greece’s notoriously combative anarchist movement publicly gave a then newly minted Syriza government an initial vote of confidence. 2 Are we witnessing the end of horizontalism?

13

For some, the answer is unqualifiedly affirmative: at last, movements are rediscovering the importance of organisation. That we are seeing the return of what was once known as ‘the question of organisation’ – the old Organisationsfrage – has in fact been a claim made several times in recent years. Shortly after the mobilisations that rippled across the world in 2011, Alain Badiou wrote that, ‘however brilliant and memorable’ in themselves, they ultimately came up against the ‘universal problems of politics that remained unresolved in the previous period . At the centre of which is to be found the problem of politics par excellence – namely, organization’. 3 Regarding the revival of the idea of communism that Badiou (among others) has promoted, Peter Thomas remarked that ‘a coherent investigation of the meaning of communism today necessarily requires a reconsideration of the nature of political power, of political organization and, above all, of the party-form’. 4 Jodi Dean, herself a prominent advocate of a return to communism and the party-form, has summarised the question thus: ‘the idea of communism pushes toward the organization of communism’. 5 In turn, Mimmo Porcaro has argued that, since the ‘evolutionary vision’ of a postcapitalist future developing without moments of rupture has been discredited, the need for ‘coordinated action, articulated in steps and phases’ invites us to reconsider a kind of organisation that can be identified by a proper name: ‘The crisis thus rings in, once again, the hour of Lenin .’ 6 Finally, Frank Ruda has suggested more recently that overcoming a ‘paralysis of the collective and social imaginary’ regarding ‘new ways of conceiving of emancipatory politics’ is necessarily ‘linked to rethinking the question of organization’. 7 As this superficial sample shows, however, accounts of the ‘return of organisation’ tend to fall into two general types. Either they call for a search for new forms but are frustratingly reticent when it comes to spelling out what those might be; or they are in fact pleas for a return to some redefined notion of the party, the contours of which tend nonetheless to be left equally vague. As Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover observe in a review of Alain Badiou’s take on the 2011 protests: The exhortation to organize has been often heard in the dissolution of the various Occupy encampments here in the US, from left thinkers as various as

14

Noam Chomsky, Doug Henwood, and Jodi Dean. And ‘organize’ must in some regard be the right thing to do, in so far as it is a term both common-sensical and capacious in its lack of specificity. It risks being what Fredric Jameson calls a ‘pseudoconcept’: the imperative to ‘organize’ comes down to, do that thing that causes you to be more rather than less effective . But lacking any further tactical clarity, the word inevitably backslides into the meaning it offered the last time around, redolent of sad-faced activists trying to sell you copies of Socialist Worker . In the face of this vast and mercurial irruption which Badiou’s book wishes to register, the call to ‘organize’ serves for the moment as the chorus to a paradoxical song: this new politics is fantastic, but it seems to have reached its limits; we need … the old politics! 8

To drag organisation out of that pseudo-conceptual state and to dissolve its presumed synonymy with the party-form are certainly two goals to which this book aspires. Doing so demands a substantial change in perspective. With that in mind, I have set myself three principles. The first was that a theory of organisation had to be a theory of what organisation is before it could be a theory of what it ought to be. Rather than begin with questions such as ‘what kind of organisation must one build?’ or ‘what is the correct form of organisation?’, it should first attempt to define what political organisation is in its most general terms, what it is for, what it can and cannot be. Instead of prescribing a determinate result, in short, it should set out to specify as precisely as possible the variables involved in the problem, mapping the choices, trade-offs and thresholds that determine the points at which different possible solutions diverge from one another. A few important consequences follow from taking this approach. By thinking organisation as a domain with its own relative autonomy in relation to any specific political doctrine or goal, it is more likely that one can pose problems that retain their power of interpellation regardless of whether those to whom they are addressed describe themselves as Leninists, anarchists, autonomists, populists, verticalists or horizontalists. The question of organisation thus ceases to be an arena for the endless reiteration of fixed positions and becomes instead a shared worksite in which everyone has to deal with the same set of problems, even if coming at them from different angles. What is more, sidestepping the prescriptive approach to the question of organisation allows us to spotlight the unspoken assumptions that normally 15

surround it: that the question admits of only one answer, that there is a single organisational form to which all organisations should conform, or even a single organisation that should subsume all others. 9 As a matter of fact, the very idea that the question ought to be posed at the level of individual organisations comes into the question. If we start by asking what organisation is , the first answer we will find is that it comes in various forms and variable degrees. That means, in turn, that we must also be capable of taking into account the relations that organisations establish among themselves, those that unaffiliated individuals establish with one another and with organisations, and the system that all these relations constitute together. In other words, we cannot think organisations in isolation from one another until we have first conceived organisation as pertaining to the entire ecology to which they belong. This shifts the conversation from ‘what form should all organisations have?’ or ‘what kind of organisation should subsume the whole ecology?’ to questions such as ‘how can different organisations complement each other?’, ‘what strategies can make the most of available resources and potentials?’, ‘how can one improve coordination without that necessarily bringing everything under the same roof?’ All of this suggests, finally, that we have moved away from the supposed synonymy between ‘organisation’ and ‘party’. It is not just that the party ceases to be presumed as the telos of all organisation, its most advanced form and the point towards which all paths converge. ‘Organisation’ comes to refer to a much broader range of phenomena, many of which are not contained in any single organisation, let alone one of a specific kind. The tendency to reduce ‘organisation’ to ‘party’ can perhaps be traced to a more elementary reduction of ‘organisation’ to ‘intentional organisation’; and that, in turn, to a residual anthropocentric exceptionalism that denies novelty and historical development to nature and restricts to the ingenuity of humans the capacity to produce the new. If ‘organisation’ could be treated as the opposite of ‘spontaneity’, then, it was exactly in the sense that it was supposed to be a break with what ‘comes naturally’: what is unreflected, mechanically determined to happen, inscribed in nature or in some kind of original essence. As we shall see in chapter 4 , even when 16

spontaneity is given a positive value, it still does not quite shake off those associations. Yet that exceptionalism is something we have learnt to mistrust – because scientific developments since the nineteenth century have served to disabuse us of it, but maybe above all because of its share of responsibility in creating the conditions for rampant anthropic climate change. 10 The second principle I set myself for this book was therefore not to make intentional political organisation into an ‘empire within an empire’, but to conceive it as part of, and in fundamental continuity with, ‘organisation’ in the broadest possible sense – that is, natural organisation (if we understand ‘nature’ in a Spinozan sense). That choice, too, has some important consequences. The first of them concerns precisely the relation between organisation and spontaneity. If the former is everywhere, the latter cannot be properly understood as an absence of it, but as its emergence ; it names the appearance and spread of an identifiable pattern or structure, however week or fleeting. In fact, there is properly speaking no such thing as absence of organisation. Or rather, as I claim in chapter 1 , nothing that we can say anything meaningful about can be adequately described as being ‘organisationless’. This is also to say that even those individuals who are not affiliated to any organisations, or those movements that are largely independent from traditional structures, are organised in their own way. Another consequence has to do with the relation between organisation and self-organisation. If we take nature to be self-organised, this means that intentional organisation must be seen as a regional case of self-organisation, and not the other way around. (If this sounds counterintuitive, it is because people often use ‘self-organisation’ both in this broad sense and to refer to a specific kind of intentional organisation that we could call, to avoid confusion, ‘self-management’.) It also follows that ‘political organisation’ must encompass both intended and unintended forms of organisation; and that all forms of human organisation must be understood as particular ways of shaping dynamics and tendencies that are common to self-organisation in general, instead of being islands of exception in which those tendencies and dynamics would somehow not apply. This entails that organisation can and must also be thought outside of the intentions, beliefs and ideological 17

justifications of agents – which is another reason why one can and must be able to pose problems that apply to organisational practices of all kinds. Finally, picturing political organisation as a branch of a more general theory of (self-)organisation enables us to seek inspiration in different fields of knowledge that deal with self-organised processes. This demands, in exchange, that we try to make our findings compatible with theirs, meaning not that we follow them slavishly, but that we look for explanations whenever compatibility cannot be found. With that in mind, I have borrowed here from such fields as thermodynamics, cybernetics, network theory, information theory, Aleksander Bogdanov’s tektology, Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, the thought of Baruch Spinoza, institutional analysis and poststructuralism. It is possible that this attempt to partially derive a theory of political organisation from a more general conception of organisation will open the book to the accusation of formalism or excessive abstraction. While I hope it will be clear that I am drawing as much from personal experience and social movement literature as I am from theoretical texts, the accusation is one that I am ultimately happy to accept. This is not a book on how to organise, of which there are many good ones, 11 nor is it on what strategy to follow. In order to answer either of those questions, one must inevitably start from a set of premises, and my goal here is to focus on premises more than on conclusions. As a consequence, this is a book on how to think about organisation and strategy , and it is less concerned with finding solutions than with providing adequate definitions of problems. This approach strikes me as justified for two reasons. The first is that it is only if we try to pose the question of organisation from outside any particular political tradition or doctrine that we can hope to arrive at the problems they all face and to develop a language they all could share. To avoid being just another verticalist or horizontalist arguing their position, it was necessary to invent some other perspective to occupy. The second reason is that it is only when we begin to pick apart the categories we normally take for granted that we realise the extent to which our thinking can be loaded with inconsistencies: incompatible desires and ideas, the remnants of outdated habits, empty slogans and pieties, false associations, unexamined dogmas, wilful self18

deception. Occasionally taking distance from our readymade schemata and moving to a higher level of abstraction can function as a mental hygiene of sorts – an exercise in revising our assumptions and clarifying the theoretical decisions that must be made. None of this would be of any use, however, if it did not also serve to clarify practical decisions, helping us understand the potentials, risks and trade-offs that they involve. After all, even if there is no ‘right’ way to organise in absolute terms, there are still better and worse choices to be made here and now. It is this first-person perspective that is often missing in attempts to translate scientific and philosophical discourses on selforganisation into politics. That is because the problematic from which they typically start is that of limiting the scope of action of agents (the state, the party, collective subjects above a certain size, and so on). Doing so requires positing that interference from such agents is at best redundant and at worst detrimental; the assumption is that not only can some ideal result come to pass without them actively pursuing it, but also that their intervention is bound to prevent that result or produce something much worse. Yet one can only guarantee that this is necessarily the case if that outcome is assumed to be either the equilibrium towards which a selforganised social system naturally tends (as in the Austrian school of economics) or the telos towards which that system progresses over time (as some activist accounts imply). Only then can one make a distinction between, on one side, the self-organised process as it is ‘in itself ’, without interference from meddling agents; and, on the other, the results of what agents actually do, which may or may not be the desired ones. Yet there are three obvious flaws in that move. The first is epistemological. In their quest to restrict the sphere of what agents can know and do to ‘the local’, these discourses are usually blind to their own condition as observers who describe society not from some neutral external position, but from within. They thus infringe the very limits they wanted to set, and occupy a point of view of the totality they denounce as impossible. Thus, for example, an analogy between ant colonies and human societies will argue that ‘if one ant began to somehow assess the overall state of the whole colony, the sophisticated behaviour would stop trickling up from 19

below, and swarm logic would collapse’. 12 But to say this is not just oblivious to the fact that humans differ from ants (as far as we know) in that they form their own notions of what constitutes justice and a good life; it also ignores that statements like ‘individuals in a society should refrain from assessing it as a whole’ are themselves global assessments of a society. The second flaw, then, concerns the practical consequences of this lack of self-reflexivity. If we believe ourselves in possession of a knowledge that sets legitimate limits to the actions of agents – even if this is a knowledge that according to our own premises no agent should legitimately have – we are justified in taking actions that, according to our premises, no agent should take. In neoliberalism, this manifests itself in what Phillip Mirowski has described as its ‘double truth’: the fact that its advocates can simultaneously deny that anyone could process all the information circulating in markets and affirm their own capacity to design and intervene in those markets; or that they will combat demands for state intervention while lobbying for various kinds of state action at the same time. 13 In the case of activist interpretations of self-organisation, on the other hand, this tends to translate into a strong aversion to any attempts to think or act beyond ‘the local’ – a slippery term if there ever was one. This takes us to the third flaw, which is ontological. The notion of an ‘ideal’ self-organisation against which the actions of individuals can be measured could only make sense from the perspective of an external observer; from within a system, no one is really in a position to guarantee that, ‘left alone’, it will necessarily go this or that way. ‘Self-organisation’ is not some transcendent reality existing apart from our actions, like some blind logic that will unfold independently of what anyone does or a benign providence that our best intentions can only hinder. Precisely because it is contingent on the actions of the agents that participate in it, its fate cannot be determined in advance. Self-organisation is the emergent effect of what those agents do and nothing more . That includes ‘local’ decisions as much as efforts to influence the behaviour of the system at a higher scale. For exactly that reason, it makes no sense for agents to renounce acting on anything but the smallest scale on a priori grounds.

20

My third principle for this book was therefore that it should provide an account of self-organisation not as seen ‘from above’ – from a supposedly objective perspective – but as seen from the inside . That is, by agents with limited information and capacity to act, for whom the future is unknown and open, and who wish to increase the probability of certain outcomes over others without ever having absolutely certain knowledge of what might be the best way to do so. In doing this, I realised that I was repeating the gesture that second-order cybernetics had made in relation to first-order cybernetics, and that Lenin and Luxemburg had made in relation to Second International orthodoxy. In a nutshell, this gesture consists in resituating the observer in the world regarding which an observation is made, exposing the falsehood of assuming a contemplative stance. If we are not outside the world that we describe, but inside or alongside it, not only are the descriptions we make themselves actions within that world, our actions in general have effects on what is described. In second-order cybernetics, this amounted to making the observer who describes a system into the object of a description by another observer, thus showing that all descriptions are partial perspectives within a shared world. In Lenin and Luxemburg, it entailed arguing that, dialectically understood, historical materialism was not a scientific prognosis of how history would pan out independently of what anyone did, but an instrument to guide the actions of those who made history happen. In my case, it means asserting that, since self-organisation is nothing but the emergent outcome of what we (and our environment) do, it makes no sense to restrict our sphere of action a priori in the name of a ‘spontaneous’ process of whose outcome we cannot be sure. This is, in fact, precisely why the question of organisation matters, as it concerns the problem of assembling, expanding, coordinating and deploying the collective capacity to act. There are, of course, perfectly good reasons why people grew so wary of action and organisation above a certain scale that they began to rationalise that mistrust into arguments demonstrating their superfluousness. Organisation, as I argue in the first chapter, is historically and by its very nature a site of traumas, not least those that surround the twentieth 21

century’s large socialist parties and regimes. This is because, in gathering and focusing the collective capacity to act in certain points, organisation opens that capacity to the risk of its appropriation by particular interests and the transformation of power to do things into power over others, potentia into potestas . Yet this is to consider the question of organisation exclusively from the angle of its excess and to ignore the implications of its lack. Organisation is not just a danger but an enabling condition: what gives each individual the possibility of expanding their limited capacity to act by pooling resources with others, constituting a collective capacity to act and extending its duration over time. To refuse organisation as such would be the same as rejecting that possibility, which makes no sense. Should it be circumscribed to a specific scale, however? Instead of posing this problem in the abstract, I subject it to the test of the most complex challenge facing political action today: the climate crisis. The prospect of global environmental catastrophe makes both building a single global collective force and hoping that the aggregate effects of countless local actions will eventually coalesce into a solution appear as equally far-fetched solutions. To tackle a problem of that magnitude and complexity, the most plausible alternative seems to be some kind of distributed action combining organisation at different levels and scales. To be sure, that alternative offers no absolute safeguards against the threat of potestas or guarantees of success; the question is whether we have any option but to run that sort of risk. If the idea that it would be possible to do away with the question of organisation arises from a misunderstanding of its double nature as pharmakon – at once poison and remedy, danger and enabling condition – the idea that it could be solved once and for all has a different mistake as its origin. That mistake is the supposition that the question concerns the search for an ideal organisational form that should be universally replicated or subsume all others. In the second chapter, I contest that assumption by arguing that organisation must be thought in terms of forces more than forms. Since the actual functioning of a form is determined by the balance of forces that act on it, the concrete object of the question of organisation lies in managing the tension among the different forces that constitute a collective subject, whatever its form may be: those that come from its 22

different components as well as those that come from the surrounding environment, the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies within it, the hardening of collective identity and its openness to the outside world, the inertia of habit and the receptiveness to novelty … Since those forces and the relations into which they enter change over time, managing them is the object of a continual effort. This is why no form in and of itself can be a guarantee of either effectiveness or safety from risks. If we conceive the question of organisation in these terms, it is not difficult to see why it should have become so difficult to pose for such a long time. For decades, debates on the left have tended to pitch conceptual pairs like horizontality and verticality, diversity and unity, centralisation and decentralisation, micropolitics and macropolitics as exclusive disjunctions: either one thing or the other. Since it is between qualities such as those that organisation is supposed to mediate, organisation as a concrete question cannot but disappear as soon as they are conceived as unmediatable. By way of an engagement with different uses of the concept of left melancholia, I suggest that the source of this paralysing dualism lies in the fact that, since the 1980s at the least, the left has been riven by two different melancholias stuck in their one-sided opposition to one another. That impasse, however, may finally be dissolving today. Chapter 3 travels further back in time in order to trace the main ways in which the idea of revolution has changed since the eighteenth century. The goal here is twofold. On the one hand, I wish to describe the circumstances in which some key aspects of that idea as it was known up until the mid twentieth century have become alien to us. It is hard to find today those who will uphold a robust historical determinism, the existence of a necessary correspondence between social structure and political subjectivation, or an unqualified faith in the demiurgic powers of a revolutionary subject. That is not a bad thing in itself, and the notions that have taken the place of those lost beliefs – tendency, composition, complexity – are vital orientations for political thought today. Yet it is also possible to see in contemporary responses to the crisis of revolution a systematic evasion of the organisational dimension: most accounts of social transformation today seem afflicted by an incapacity to affirm the 23

possibility of system-wide change and the question of its organisation at the same time. Thus, talk of ‘revolution’ disappears altogether, or the word is associated with small-scale modifications that in the past would have been seen at best as parts of a revolution. When thinkers or movements raise the prospect of systemic change again, on the other hand, that seems to come at the cost of rendering organisation unthinkable. The paradox, then, is that we seem to deny ourselves the means with which to think organised collective agency precisely at the moment when, having lost faith in historical necessity and embraced contingency, we should need it the most. Or, perhaps, we have not fully abandoned historical determinism, but only swapped its positivistic, nineteenth-century form for softer, conditional teleologies? This is what the fourth chapter suggests by looking into the two concepts that are usually mobilised against the question of organisation and any attempt to pose it: spontaneity and self-organisation. Evidently, it is possible to claim that certain events might take place ‘spontaneously’ regardless of and perhaps even despite any intentional effort to produce them. The question we must ask, however, is whether it is possible to guarantee that they will . This, I contend, neither ‘spontaneity’ nor ‘self-organisation’ can do without resorting to some kind of teleology that projects the observer’s own values onto the world. A closer investigation of different attempts to incorporate self-organisation into political thought, from Hayek to Hardt and Negri, indicates that this move serves to either disguise the political nature of one’s own activity (by presenting it as a natural necessity) or to eschew the problem of organising it (by portraying it as unnecessary). The point is not, however, to dismiss the notion of social self-organisation, but to reframe it in the only way in which we can experience it: from the inside. From this perspective, it cannot be separated from what we and others do, and therefore does not exclude but rather demands a politics that implicates itself subjectively; a politics in the first person plural or a politics with the subject in. In this light, efforts to make the question of organisation disappear by decree appear as an overreaction to the traumas of the twentieth century. The antidote to the fantasies of omnipotence that plagued the revolutionary tradition cannot be to simply renounce our power to influence the course 24

of events in the hope that history or nature will be on our side. Rather, it must consist in situating political subjects within a world inhabited by other perspectives and agents that are connected to one another by complex causal circuits that exceed the calculating capacities of any single one of them. In other words, it must consist of thinking political action ecologically. That is why chapter 5 opens with a discussion of the concept of organisational ecology. Among other things, it shows that we cannot apply to an ecology the same logic we apply to an organisational space with defined boundaries like a party or an assembly. It is in the impossibility of making that leap that the limits of horizontalism become evident. In order to explain the logic according to which an ecology operates, I introduce in chapters 5 and 6 the concepts of distributed leadership, vanguard-functions (not to be confused with their counterparts in Marxist theory), platforms and organising cores. I also discuss in what way an ecology can, in the absence of any mechanisms of formal accountability, exercise some degree of control over the elements that compose it. Finally, I apply this ecological approach to the question of parties (how ought they relate to an ecology and what role can they have in it?) and strategy (how can an ecology develop its own strategies and what would a ‘diversity of strategies’ entail?). Chapter 7 delves into the current debate on populism to make the case that what matters the most about it is not the question of populism as such, but a problem that it has helped put back on the agenda. I call this the problem of fitness ; it concerns the qualities that a political project must have in order to gather support and produce change within a determinate conjuncture, instead of merely demarcating a position that neither resonates widely nor has any immediate applicability. Even if one dislikes the ways in which left populism has proposed to solve it – and part of the problem is no doubt a tendency to present this solution as some sort of universal recipe – the question itself is one that must be asked. Borrowing from Simondon, Paulo Freire and Liberation Theology, I draw some of the implications of this problem and argue that it is not only central to understanding the role of leadership and pedagogy in politics, but also the only point from which one can assign a concrete meaning to the notion of radicality.

25

The idea for this project has been with me for some time – and for much of that time, friends have known it by the (half-)joking name of ‘networked Leninism’. I recall first using that quip at a session during the Immaterial Labour, Multitudes and New Social Subjects conference at the University of Cambridge in 2006. 14 It sparked immediate interest, even though no one knew quite what it was. I did not either, but the basic idea went more or less as follows. ‘Horizontalists’ had won the ontological argument against ‘verticalists’: networks were indeed everywhere, including within and around vanguard parties, and much of the metaphysics that justified the latter had come to seem clumsy and obsolete. And yet something was amiss. Networks were supposed to be this liberating space of abundance and endless productivity from whose spontaneous output one could expect solutions to problems of all kinds. However, in those dying days of the alterglobalisation movement, their output was visibly dwindling. It was increasingly clear that they were made of local nodes with an ever more limited capacity to take any sort of action apart from the big summit protests or Social Forum events when scarce resources could be pooled together for a show of strength. When one made it to those events, it became clear that there was little else to coordinate, because the capacity to execute anything was so low. Changing the quantity and the quality of the local input into those networks seemed to require engaging in modalities of political action (workplace and community organising, local base building, and so on) that many in the ‘horizontalist’ camp had pronounced outdated and rejected as ‘Leninist’. Yet those networks had also proven themselves zealously vigilant against deviations from a certain ‘horizontalist’ identity and were often hostile to initiative and new ideas. ‘Networked Leninism’ was my deliberately provocative way of naming the problem and what seemed at the time to be its obvious solution: only if our local inputs grew in organisation and capacity to produce effects could our networks begin to yield the bounty we expected. Even if I would eventually abandon the name ‘networked Leninism’, as I feared the provocation might turn off many of those with whom I wanted to have that conversation, the idea of an account of self-organisation as seen from the inside was already there in essence. So was the intention to escape 26

binary thinking in both form and content. Not only could one be critical of horizontalism without having to become a verticalist, but I wanted to show that it was possible, indeed necessary, to pose some of the questions raised by the latter tradition within the ontology supposed by the former. Even more: that it was possible to take (sometimes opposing) questions raised in both traditions seriously without having to choose between them, and to use them instead to construct richer problems in which either/or binaries were replaced by dyads of more-or-less. As these dyads concerned relations between actual forces, in turn, they suspended all promises of magical solutions, or the prospect of solving those problems once and for all, and offered instead the sobering realisation that it takes work to make things work . If there is anything beyond the choice between horizontalism and verticalism, it is that.

27

1

Towards Organisation

a

Theory

of

Political

________________________________________________

Ultimately, to refuse to act in fear that one will transform into a bureaucrat seems to me as absurd as refusing to think in fear of being wrong. Cornelius Castoriadis

The Meanings of Organisation

We can speak of ‘organisation’ in at least four different senses. One is inflexibly substantival: an organisation is some concrete assemblage of people, structures, practices, procedures, resources, roles, identities, analyses, directives and so on. An organisation might be a party, a trade union, a workers’ council, a more or less formally structured campaign or social movement; a collective, a network, an affinity group. Their contours and membership may be more or less defined, their internal workings more or less constant. Above a certain threshold of stability over time, which is itself dependent on the scale of analysis, all of these can be understood as constituting ‘organisations’. The other three uses of the word are generally interchangeable with the gerund ‘organising’. We can speak of ‘organisation’ to refer to concrete assemblages whose immediate aim is not ‘political’ in the Arendtian sense of appearance in the public space, but the collective management of the reproduction of life. This is the case of the self-managed clinics and community kitchens that have sprung up in Greece in the last decade, or indeed the networks of mutual aid that have always existed everywhere where people found their conditions of reproduction threatened and had to take their existence into their own hands. We can also talk about organisation/organising to refer to the way in which people, despite not 28

belonging to any clearly delimited organisations, come together in a space of appearance as a social force, be it through online campaigns, demonstrations, civil disobedience or riots. Finally, organisation/organising also refers to the work of the individuals or groups whose activity is instrumental to creating the conditions for that coming together, or to the setting up of organisations in the first two senses outlined. Thus, all of the first three senses of the word suppose the last one: for them to exist, it is necessary that some people take upon themselves the role of initiating and pursuing actions that create the conditions that others can participate in, add to and build upon. If we understand ‘organisation’ as something that can happen in the absence of organisations, anything involving more than a lone individual acting in isolation can count as ‘organised’ to the extent that it contains some degree – however small, informal and ad hoc – of common purpose and coordination. It becomes evident, then, that a critique of the confusion between organisation and party will inevitably involve a critique of simplistic notions of ‘spontaneity’. In fact, as I intend to show in chapter 4 , the latter usually reflect the confusion between organisation and the party rather than question it. For the time being, we can say that the problem is that ‘spontaneous’ cannot function as the opposite of ‘organised’ because even what we describe as spontaneous is organised in some way. We might go even farther and say that there is nothing we can speak of that is not in some way organised. Indeed, that was the claim that Aleksander Bogdanov, the visionary Bolshevik systems thinker, made in his treatise on the ‘universal organisational science’ that he called tektology : Complete disorganization is a concept without meaning. It is, in reality, the same as naked non-being … [T]o think absolute disconnectedness is possible only verbally: it is not possible to put into such words any real, living representation, because an absolutely incoherent representation is not representation at all – generally it is nothing. 1

Bogdanov’s point here is not that things exist only to the extent that they exist in relation to us, but that to think or to know is already a form of relation. The thought of something as entirely unrelated is therefore either a misunderstanding of our relation to a particular thing (it ignores that we are already in relation to it) or a thought that cannot be given any actual 29

content (it corresponds to the paradoxical formula, a relation to something that has no relations ). A thing with no connections to anything would effectively be ‘hidden’ from everything else, sentient or not, in the universe. Among other things, this means that it would have to be exempt from the laws of physics as well; it would exercise no gravitational pull, for example. While it is true that, for precisely those reasons, we would never be in a position to state with certainty that something like that does not exist, neither could we ever know that it does. Since to know is to relate, the concept of such a thing supposes that it could never be made into an object of knowledge. To go from ‘everything is connected’ to ‘everything is organised’, one of course needs a further premise that Bogdanov’s argument does not make explicit: that to be connected is already to be organised. This can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, in order to be identifiable as being in relation with something else, a thing must be sufficiently stable in itself to count as one thing. Differently put, unless there were a relatively constant relation among the elements that compose the thing x , we could not really say that it is x that is in relation to y . Instead, we would have to say that it is the elements a, b, c, etc., among which no stable relation obtains, that are in the process of relating to y . (Of course, if that relation itself became somehow stabilised, those elements would be describable as belonging to the organisation of y itself, or to z understood as a unit composed of y plus that relation.) On the other hand, the more constant the relations into which any one thing enters, the more these relations themselves can be described as constituting an organised entity. Organisation thus entails a nested structure of ever-expanding relations in which what counts as an organisation on one level can be taken as an element on a higher level: atoms organise as molecules, molecules as proteins, proteins as cells, cells as organisms, organisms in ecosystems, and so forth. An important consequence of this way of conceiving organisation is that the analysis that can be made of any particular reality is always dependent on scale. In fact, as Bogdanov points out, the concept of ‘elements’ is ‘completely relative and conditional’, corresponding simply to ‘those parts into which, in conformity with a problem under investigation, 30

it was necessary to decompose its object; they may be as large or as small as needed, they may be subdivided or not’. 2 And, given that the key criterion for speaking of organisation is stability of relations, scale relativity applies just as well to time: what counts as stable is contingent on the timeframe with which we are concerned, and, depending on the temporal scale, a mountain or a solar system is just as temporary as an organism or a cell. To say that everything is connected and organised is therefore not to say that everything is connected and organised in the same way all the time . Universal connectedness does not entail that each individual thing is but an internal moment of a large organic totality that predetermines its parts, nor does it exclude local disconnection and disorganisation. 3 As new relations appear and disappear, as new things fall in and out of them, every individual organised thing is bound to be more or less temporary, that is, subject to breaking down. Thus, while organisation is universal, each individual organised thing is both a potential threat to the organisation of others and constantly threatened from outside and inside by a disorganisation to which it is fated to return: full, ideal organization is non-existent in nature; disorganization is always admixed to it to some degree. Thus, even the best cooperation cannot be free from some, though minimal, inner hindrances and lack of agreement; the best machine is not free from internal frictions, etc. 4

This allows us to see why, from what Bogdanov calls ‘the organisational point of view’ – ‘the only monistic understanding of the universe’ – everything is organised , and the universe itself appears as ‘an infinitely unfolding fabric of all types of forms and levels of organization’, from the minutest scale to entire star systems which, ‘in their interlacement and mutual struggle, in their constant changes, create the universal organizational process, infinitely split in its parts, but continuous and unbroken in its whole’. 5 My goal here is much more modest than Bogdanov’s. I do not wish to build a universal theory of organisation, but merely to mobilise a broader perspective in order to think the question of political organisation specifically. So how is that question to be defined, if we are to put an end to

31

its automatic association with the party-form or with building organisations? The most general thing that one can say about it is that political organisation concerns the assembling and channelling of the collective capacity to act in such a way that produces political effects. Leaving aside the question of what might count as a ‘political effect’, it should be obvious why the collective capacity to act is an issue for politics. Apart from exceptional situations, the powerful always have what Baruch Spinoza called potestas to ensure that, when push comes to shove, people will do their bidding: the police, the army, the press, the wage relation, the accumulated fear and passive consent of the majority, all sorts of things that could be described as ‘power over’ or grouped under the vague expression the powers that be . The weak, on the other hand, have nothing but their capacity to act – their power to do things, to affect and be affected by each other, which Spinoza called potentia . Yet each individual’s potentia on its own is not much, and certainly not enough to face down potestas . It is therefore imperative that individuals come together, the capacity to act of each multiplying the capacity of all others. That is why the subject of politics is always collective. 6 The Maoist maxim that it is the masses that make history is sometimes made into a pious formula working as a kind of rhetorical compensation for the vicissitudes of history or the impotence people regularly experience: ‘despite everything, you are still in charge.’ Sometimes it is taken even further, to the point of becoming almost an article of metaphysical faith. It is thus, for example, that operaismo ’s well-known ‘Copernican inversion’ 7 of the dialectic between capital and labour might turn into dogmatic attempts to show that every single change in productive or state relations can be traced back to an initiative taken by the working class. 8 For the purposes of this book, the idea that ‘the masses make history’ indicates neither a general explanatory scheme nor an underlying subject of history, but something more ordinary and almost tautological. It simply points out that, in order to overcome the resistance of the powers that be, any major historical transformation will always require the confluence of a large number of individuals – a collective subject or agent, in other words. 32

Acting Together

To speak of a collective subject, however, is not necessarily to speak of a unified one. Although Spinoza talks of people acting ‘guided as if by one [single] mind’, 9 it is perfectly conceivable that they can do so without directly coordinating with, or even knowing, each other. It is useful, in fact, to distinguish three different ways in which people can act together. Important societal shifts might come about as a result of the accumulation of multiple uncoordinated individual actions and changes of behaviour over time, many at rather small scales (physical dispositions, ways of dressing, personal preferences and attitudes …). Thus, for instance, the sexual revolution, a good example of the type of process that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari described as ‘molecular revolutions’. 10 A far-reaching, ever-unfolding transformation of gender relations and social mores, it produced rapid and fundamental changes in a relatively short period of time between the late 1950s, when the contraceptive pill started becoming widely available, and the mid 1970s. The various modifications that make up this broader shift, happening at various scales at once, often required no collective deliberation, no planning or coming together. They rippled across different societies without anyone taking the time, let alone being able, to direct or oversee them. The sexual revolution can thus be described for the most part as the aggregate result of these manifold small changes, and therefore as an example of the aggregate action of large numbers of individuals. By contrast, collective action properly speaking would refer to those cases in which people not only perceive themselves as participating in a broader common identity – that is, as belonging to a collective subject – but also intentionally come together and engage in processes of deliberation, planning, assessing, intervening, and so forth. Yet the example of the sexual revolution immediately highlights the abstractness of the distinction between the two types of action, or the way in which it breaks down into opposing tendencies something that is always given in a mixed state. For, if it is true that much of it happened ‘below the radar’, by way of incremental molecular modifications, the sexual revolution also required the contribution of several more or less temporary groups, numberless 33

meetings, petitions, demonstrations, lawsuits, street confrontations, and so on. None of that would have happened if things were not moving at the infinitesimal level, to be sure. As Deleuze and Guattari remark, drawing from Gabriel Tarde, in order to follow the progress of the French Revolution with precision, one would need to know ‘which peasants, in which areas of the south of France, stopped greeting the local landowners’. 11

Still, these infinitesimal movements regularly ran against obstacles. Open, molar conflicts – and the effort that went into building the collective capacity to fight them – were essential for overcoming those obstacles and broadening the legal, political and cultural space available for further change, infinitesimal or otherwise. Even at the very basic level of enhancing the visibility and publicness of molecular transformations, thus increasing their power of contagion, collective action is indispensable. This demonstrates that it would be a mistake to speak of molecular revolution as the opposite of what we could by way of contrast call “molar” revolution. Every large-scale societal shift necessarily has a molar and a molecular aspect, and depends on the two complementing and reinforcing each other: ‘molecular escapes and movements would be nothing if they did not return to the molar organizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes, classes, and parties.’ 12 If it can be recognised as a revolution at all, a molecular revolution must inevitably involve the molar, macropolitical inscription of molecular, micropolitical transformations. By ‘inscription’ here, we should understand the changes that take place in the bodies of those who more or less consciously subjectivate themselves as its participants, but also the imitative contagion that spreads those changes across a wider population; initiatives of collective action; open struggle; and the abolition, creation and transformation of molar formations (identities, arrangements of power, laws, economic structures …). 13 What this means, then, is that a combination of aggregate and collective action is always required. The two necessarily go together, interpenetrate and feed back into one another. This point can be pushed further if we stay with our previous example. While many people still associate collective action with fully structured organisations complete with membership rules and a leadership structure, 34

the ‘movements’ often referred to in association with the sexual revolution (Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation) were something else entirely: a nebula of very diverse groups of different sizes, unaffiliated individuals, meeting spaces, and so on. Depending on time, place and connections, the experience any one person could have of what constituted ‘the movement’ would vary considerably. Some sectors were more structured and densely connected, others looser. Under the vague identity that their common names gestured towards lived countless different shades and hues, some occasionally or even permanently at odds with each other. This did not prevent them from interacting with one another, even if only indirectly: the fact that I disagree with someone does not make their actions any less capable of producing effects that I have no choice but to deal with. But even if it is unlikely that any two people would be in total agreement as to what the precise contours of ‘the movement’ were, participants and outsiders still had a sense of something that was sufficiently organised – whose relations were sufficiently constant – for it to be spoken of as a single thing. Collective action always has a cloud of aggregate action around it. But the converse is also true, and, if we examine in detail what, from a distance, looks like aggregate action, we will always find small clusters of collective activity in it. Thus, the individuals who did not directly participate in any of the more or less permanent organisations of Women’s or Gay Lib were not, for that reason, restricted to acting on their own. Not only could they still engage in collective action initiated by others (attending demonstrations, for example), they could occasionally initiate their own (getting together with friends to produce placards for marches, mobilising others to send letters to newspapers and politicians, setting up occasions in which acquaintances could be radicalised, starting a riot by throwing a rock …). To be clear, this is not a historical point about the nature of social movements after the 1960s, in opposition to which stands the solid, monolithic ‘workers’ movement’ that came before. The memory of this monolith is in part a product of the narratives told by those who succeeded in hegemonising it, in part a retroactive projection constructed after its loss. 35

That ‘movement’ was as much of a nebula as those that came in its wake, with the important difference that one would find, clustered around its centre, a relatively small number of organisations with a very large followership: parties, unions, people’s armies … The on-the-ground, initself reality that corresponded to the idea of a globe-spanning for-itself – the conscious, organised world proletariat – always looked quite different depending from where one looked, and included a plethora of smaller groupings, ad hoc coordination, networks of relatives, neighbours, colleagues and friends, as well as the local initiatives of countless individuals. Movements are always nebulae or networks; it is only the degree to which they are centralised that varies. What these examples prove is that, while it is possible to distinguish between aggregate and collective action, in actual fact we will always find them intertwined. We therefore need a third name to describe this intertwinement, which is the real composition of every struggle or process of social change. Let us call it distributed action : the common space in which collective and aggregate action combine, communicate, relate and establish positive and negative feedback loops with one another. While it might lean more towards the collective or the aggregate, any real existing political process is always a mixture of the two. ‘Distributed’ indicates that, while it has no single centre around which collective action coalesces, it is not entirely dispersed or decentralised either; it has many centres operating at various scales and in different durations, from the very fleeting and informal to the long-running and rigid. The distributed bypasses the binary opposition between collective and individual as well as that between centralised and decentralised; it is all of those at once. In this way, it also cuts across W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg’s opposition between collective and connective action, in which the latter would be ‘typically far more individualized and technologically organized … without the requirement of collective identity framing or the levels of organizational resources required to respond effectively to opportunities’. 14 In the terms that I am proposing here, what they call connective action is simply a kind of distributed action tending more towards the aggregate than the collective. 36

This is not meant to minimise the novelty of the connective logic or the objective conditions that make it to some extent unavoidable, responding as it does to both pervasive technological affordances and societal tendencies towards ‘structural fragmentation and individualization’ in which political engagement functions as ‘an expression of personal hopes, lifestyles, and grievances’. 15 On the contrary, the contrast allows me to clarify a central aspect of this book’s project and its broader political wager. If the insurrections of the last decade came and went, a key organisational reason for that may be that they combined aggregate and collective action in ways that tended too much towards the former rather than the latter; different outcomes could result from combining the two in a different way. At the same time, precisely because we are talking about different logics that combine in different ways and to different measures, there is no reason why trying to find another balance would mean choosing collective action to the exclusion of aggregate action, which in any case we have found to be impossible, let alone the specific kind of collective action defined by the centrality of a single party. The reader will notice how the shape of this argument recapitulates my earlier discussion on organisation. We cannot reduce the question of political organisation to building organisations because it is just not the case that whatever is outside an organisation is unorganised; a theory of organisation must therefore start from the ways in which unaffiliated individuals coordinate their actions outside of organisations, or coordinate with organisations, as well as from how organisations coordinate with one another. ‘Organisation’ must refer to this phenomenon first, and only then to individual organisations. The latter emerge against the background of the former, and things like parties are therefore part of a theory of organisation, not its primary object. Similarly, whereas aggregate action refers to the ways in which people act together outside of organisations, and collective action to how they do so with or without them, distributed action accounts for the ways in which these two modes of acting together relate to each other. It is distributed action, not organisations, that must therefore be the point of departure for a theory of political organisation.

37

It follows that, instead of concerning itself with the question of what kind of organisation one must have, which assumes that there is a single answer to that question and that it should apply indiscriminately, a theory of organisation must start from the irreducible fact of plurality. There is always more than just one organisation, not just because every organisation has an outside that it relates to, but because the organisation itself, upon closer inspection, is decomposable into different parts – a nebula of collective and aggregate action, a network, an ecology.

Think and Act Global and Local

Historically, debates on political organisation have tended to have a prescriptive orientation: they asked what kind of organisation one should have in order to achieve one’s aims, whatever those were. This also explains why those debates concerned themselves mostly with the question of organisational form: which one was the best (the party, the council, the network, and so on), what structures and procedures it should have, what kind of relations it should entertain with the masses … To start from distributed action is to break with this tradition in two ways. First, distributed action is not a model to be realised, but what already exists; it is what happens anyway. Thus, instead of beginning with the question ‘what ought to be?’, one starts from what is and constantly tests the question ‘what do we want?’ against the more basic problem: ‘given what is, what can be ?’ Second, to think in terms of distributed action avoids the hidden assumption in every reduction of the question of organisation to the problem of organisational form: the idea that there is a single form that should be shared by all organisations, or a single organisation to which everyone tendentially should belong. Instead, one takes ecological plurality as a point of departure, without supposing that it could or even should be homogenised or collapsed into a single entity at any point. The point of this shift, however, is not simply to affirm dispersion, diversity and plurality over concentration, homogeneity and unity. In fact, this book’s chief purpose is to find a way out of the sterile opposition between these two poles and the idea that one must necessarily make a choice between them. Since at least the 1960s, as the realisation of the inherent vice in really existing socialist regimes and their organisational 38

model became increasingly impossible to evade, there has been a strong tendency to respond to the evils associated with collective action on a large scale by asserting the virtues of the small, the multiple, the diffuse. Although the problem as it was originally posed was essentially about how to produce change at a systemic scale without building a collective subject at that scale, with time the valorisation of the ‘local’ over the ‘global’ would resemble more and more an abdication of the systemic dimension altogether. Whereas an answer to the original problem would necessarily have to hinge on a combination of collective and aggregate action, this shift led increasingly to a dichotomy between the two and a choice for the aggregate over the collective. If there is a certain solidarity between liberalism and post-1968 radical thought, it is above all on this point: the hope that the spontaneous play of aggregate action could allow one to bypass the dangers of large-scale collective action while still producing the same desired effects. As I argue in chapter 3 , this is one of the most important ways in which the meanings associated with the word ‘revolution’ have changed in the last half-century. If faith in this gamble is still strong in some quarters despite the fact that it is yet to show that it could pay off, there is one dimension of our present conjuncture that makes a reckoning with it impossible to delay. I refer, of course, to the climate crisis. The transformation of the planet’s climate and the modification of a number of key parameters of its biophysical system is predominantly an aggregate effect. It is the outcome of countless actions taking place every day over the last five centuries or so, many of them evidently coordinated, but the vast majority with no other element of coordination apart from the underlying systemic choice structures that made them more likely than alternative options. Nevertheless, climate change poses a conundrum that cannot be solved within a framework that opposes aggregate to collective action and places the former above the latter. That is because, on the one hand, the global scale of the problem makes any exclusively ‘local’ solutions implausible. This is an argument usually raised against attempts to dilute the question into a simple matter of consumer choices, as if the aggregate effect of market signals starting in individual behaviour were enough to produce the 39

desired result. But it can be pushed further, and turned against more radical, non-market-based solutions. Even if a million sustainable communes emerged in the next few years, even if scores of countries shifted their energy base to renewables, if nothing was done to permanently deactivate the fossil fuel industry globally, that would still not be enough to avert dramatic temperature increases in this century. True, one might argue that nothing guarantees that these changes would not be sufficient to cause the abandonment of oil, gas and coal in the longer run. But that rejoinder runs up against another key aspect of the climate conundrum: its finite temporal dimension. Though it may be that the most extreme consequences of climate change could be averted by the aggregate effect of several local initiatives, can we be sure that this could happen within the narrowing window of time for action that we have at our disposal? Can we afford to gamble on that? Are we willing to? The problem is then inevitably pitched at a collective level: what can we , as a species that is increasingly aware of how our everyday decisions undermine our own conditions of existence, do in order to avoid the worst? Yet no collective agent exists that could rise to the challenge on an adequate scale, and it is hard to imagine, at least in the near future, that any could. There is no imminent world revolution to put a simultaneous end to fossilfuel capitalism everywhere, no world government to legislate for all the globe, no agency or supercomputer to enact a planned global economy. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) process, nominally tasked with becoming precisely that global agent, has time and again demonstrated the powerlessness of political intentions in the face of market incentives, international competition and the pressures of domestic policy. Thus, the only credible alternative – and calling it that already demands some imaginative effort – appears to be a combination of collective and aggregate action across different scales. In fact, so ingrained is the devaluing of the collective vis-à-vis the aggregate in the opposition between ‘local’ and ‘global’ that people easily forget that local initiatives, if they are to be anything more than individual consumer choices, also require collective action. Starting a farmers’ co-op or an off-the-grid energy initiative demands a lot of collective action; it just 40

happens that, in relative terms, this is at a small scale. In chapter 4 , I will discuss at greater length how attempts to employ scientific discourses on self-organisation to think politics are often marred by the projection of desires and unconsidered assumptions. For now, however, I will just note that the general direction in which the appropriation of ideas such as ‘order through fluctuation’ 16 or ‘order from noise’ 17 has usually pointed is that of downplaying the effort and resources required to produce large-scale effects. On the one hand, this is, of course, a correct reading of the available scientific opinion. A physics of simple mechanical systems in which the effect is always directly proportional to the cause produced the idea that political organisation was essentially about matching the adversary’s force (a people’s army stronger than the regular army, a workers’ state stronger than the class enemy …). By contrast, the non-linear relations between cause and effect characteristic of complex systems offered the prospect that, in special circumstances, a relatively small cause could trigger a radical transformation of a system’s overarching patterns of organisation – global change out of locally circumscribed action. What political readings of non-linearity tended to neglect, however, was not only that we are not necessarily always in the vicinity of a critical threshold, but the two essential concepts of nucleation and critical size . Together, they indicate that, so as to be capable of propagating across a system and transforming it, a fluctuation must not only start from a certain point (it does not occur everywhere at once), but this starting point must be large enough to withstand the negative feedback mechanisms that will dampen fluctuations and inhibit change. For Ilya Prigogine, this factor was indeed essential to understanding why, despite displaying a very high number of fluctuations, extremely complex systems can avoid permanent disarray and remain stable over time. 18 According to him, ‘stabilization through communication and instability through fluctuations’ increase together as a system’s complexity grows, and it is therefore the fact that the threshold of nucleation (or critical size) rises over time that ensures a measure of stability. 19 While ‘nucleation’ and ‘critical size’ are terms taken from Prigogine, equivalent ways of expressing the idea that systemic change always starts from a point and that there are limits to its spreading capacity can be found in a broad range of self-organisation 41

models, from the way oscillators synchronise to how cascading behaviour occurs in networks, as well as in Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. 20 That the two were overlooked is symptomatic of the fact that the reception of scientific discourses on self-organisation in political thought happened at a moment when people were perhaps less concerned with resituating collective agency than with exorcising a certain conception of the revolutionary subject inherited from the Marxist tradition. 21 To redress this imbalance is to remind ourselves that, if the problem of organisation need not be one of absolute strength (how to build the most powerful force?), it never ceases to be one of relative strength (how to be powerful enough to produce effects at the required scale?). It is therefore not local initiatives of any kind that are needed in order to respond to climate change, but those that are sufficiently consistent so as to endure and scale up, whether by growing in size and being replicated elsewhere, or by creating mutually beneficial and reinforcing connections with one another. It always bears repeating that, if ‘local’ is opposed to ‘global’, that does not make it necessarily synonymous with ‘small’. In fact, the problem with ‘local’ is that it is a scale-relative concept – a cell and a planet are local in relation to an organism and the solar system, respectively – that people often treat as if it had an absolute sense. Thus, even if the frame of reference should change depending on whether we are talking about a neighbourhood struggle, changing national policy, defeating a global industry or changing the world system, it appears that, to most, the word will always conjure images of food co-ops and allotment gardens. Collective action is therefore necessary at two levels. At the lowest end of the scale, it is vital to the setting up of strong local initiatives. But it is also necessary at a level that, if it is not strictly ‘global’, is not ‘local’ in an absolute sense either, but only relative to some larger scale. That is the intermediary level at which the networking of local initiatives, the networking of their networks, national campaigns, global coalitions, and so on, takes place. Collective action is required on both levels, and only with a lot of it in place can we possibly expect aggregate effects at an appropriate scale. Yet that construction would be ultimately ineffective, and probably 42

also impracticable, if it did not stand alongside the work of unmaking the existing economic structures: incapacitating the fossil fuel industry, shortening (and in many cases eliminating) long supply chains, curtailing the reach of and eventually eradicating the profit motive. Once again, that can hardly be expected to spontaneously arise as an aggregate outcome of numberless small, local actions. These no doubt have an important role to play, as proven by the struggles of indigenous communities all over the world against the expansion of fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure. But while each of these flashpoints has the power to provoke political defeats and economic losses, only if coordinated at a higher level and combined with collective action of all kinds – blockades, direct actions, divestment campaigns, demonstrations, efforts to induce legislative change, fights over taxation and state funds – can they force lasting change rather than the mere rerouting of economic flows. In short, it is neither a matter of waiting for dispersed local initiatives to suddenly click into producing the expected results, nor of building a single powerful global collective force to take the appropriate action, both of which are extremely unlikely. The challenge instead is to have sufficiently strong and coordinated focuses of collective action at the local and intermediary scales so as to produce global aggregate effects.

The Traumas of Organisation

The threat posed by global warming helps focus the mind and render more palpable the problems that an unreflexive localism inevitably encounters when trying to think properly systemic change. It is patent that dispersion alone cannot be the answer to a challenge of that scale and complexity. However, the combination of strong local initiatives, different levels of coordination and collective action at larger scales does not apply exclusively to problems of that magnitude. After all, what we are describing when we use those terms is nothing other than a distributed ecology; and the strong claim that I am making here is that successful processes of social change are never wholly centralised or dispersed, they are always distributed , even if we may perceive them as being more centralised or dispersed compared to one another or to themselves at different points in time.

43

There is another broader point to be drawn here. Politics is about the power to act or, as we have seen, a matter of sufficient force: of having enough power to produce the effects that we wish to produce at whatever scale on which we expect to intervene. To commit oneself to dispersion alone , as the correct answer in every situation, would amount to giving up on that problem altogether, to entrust all collective capacity to the aggregate effects of small collective actions – in fact, if one is entirely consistent, to lone, uncoordinated individuals. Anyone who professes that commitment has either given up on collective action altogether or fundamentally misrecognises their own practice: they believe they are against concentration at all scales , when it is actually only concentration above a certain scale that they reject. For even belief in acting local is not the same as belief in dispersion as such , as one still believes in concentrating enough capacity to act that they can produce the desired effects at whatever level they have identified as being ‘local’. The Latin name should not mislead us into thinking of it as some ethereal substance: potentia is a material reality. Individuals’ power to act encompasses such resources as time, physical effort, attention and skills, as well as a number of mental and emotional capacities like empathy, patience, commitment, trust, determination, care for others, willingness to take risks, and so on. 22 While how much an individual has of any of those at any given time fluctuates, no individual at any given time has an unlimited stock of them; and because there is no unlimited stock of individuals either, they are in that sense finite resources. Both figuratively and literally, the capacity to act is energy : what can be transformed into the work of affecting other bodies and minds, producing effects on them. Depending on the work to be done, more or less energy is required. Individuals can expand their capacities through the use of non-human elements or through cooperation with other humans; ‘nothing is more useful to man than man’. 23

So any kind of cooperation can be described as a pooling of resources, a concentration of individual energies or the accumulation of collective energy. This is why, if politics is about the collective power to act, it is necessarily also about how that power is amassed, focused, reproduced and sustained (the problem of organisation), how it can be expediently deployed 44

(strategy and tactics) and how it can be put to the greatest effect given the goals, the circumstances and the resources available (leverage). If the energy of different elements is going to be put into an operation none of them could perform alone, those elements must now act as part of a larger unit, which implies limits to their freedom. Only if individuals are no longer acting entirely independently from one another, but are rather investing at least a small part of their individual energy into a common project, however loosely defined, can they be said to be pooling their resources, multiplying their individual capacities, accumulating a collective power to act. In broad physical terms: for a certain amount of work to be done, constraints must be in place. These might be as spontaneous (information sharing, ad hoc teams, emergent patterns of groupwork and division of labour) or formal (explicit rules, organisation charts, checks and balances) as one likes; the point still stands. This is not a matter of choice. Constraints are not something that one could opt out of, even though one can make conscious decisions about which ones to have or not to have; from the moment people start working with each other, constraints are in place, even if it is only the one that each individual will now dedicate part of their resources to the joint project. 24 Contrary to a rather elementary confusion, self-organisation is not the absence of constraints, but the emergence thereof. 25 The problem, however, is that more constraints does not necessarily translate into more collective power . As experience abundantly shows, beyond a certain point, accumulated potentia transmutes into potestas , which can then be turned against potentia . 26 Practices and patterns of organisation eventually solidify into institutions, protocols, figures of authority, networks of influence, means of enforcement that concentrate and channel so much power that it becomes increasingly hard for individuals or groups of individuals to challenge or bypass them. For those who are in a position to control them, on the other hand, they are formidable multipliers of their own potentia , effectively making them capable of ruling over others and minimising, to the point of almost eliminating, the need to find compromises or to make themselves accountable. This concentration of collective investment in certain 45

‘Archimedean points’ endows them with a ‘disproportion between efforts and effects: power [in the sense of potestas ] is the fact that a barely whispered word can start a war, bring millions of people to the streets, bring down a government’. 27 In that case, what was an instrument of emancipation becomes a force that can be used to arrest and divert rather than to amplify and channel the collective capacity to act – a straightjacket and a new source of oppression. Such is the quandary of organisation, what attracts us and repels us in it: it is both something we need and something we ought to fear, a means and an obstacle, what might help or hurt us. Too little and it may not be enough, too much and it might already be too late. At once necessity and threat, something to seek and to be wary of, it is a perfect example of what we could call, following Derrida, a pharmakon . Remedy and poison, and necessarily both things at once, it is impossible to pin down as either pole of a binary (good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, advantageous/harmful, and so on). 28 No wonder, then, that it should be a site of trauma. Of everyday trauma, in the sense that people everywhere constantly experience its ‘poison’ aspect. But, equally, of historical trauma, above all the one associated with twentieth-century totalitarian regimes and the tarnished legacy of actually existing socialism. The shadow of the latter has hung over anti-systemic movements long enough to instil a mistrust of structure, discipline and collectivity which, combined with the growing atomisation of social life and the ideological naturalisation thereof, has become permanently woven into the ambient mood of our time. 29 Activists coming of age in the last four decades were much more likely to see constraints only as hindrances and not conditions for action, and organisation exclusively as threat, not necessity. This is where a curious consensus between ‘verticalists’ and ‘horizontalists’ became consolidated. If organisation is associated only with ‘too much’, never with ‘too little’, the word comes to be identified with only those organisational forms that are supposed to result in ‘too much’. To reject the party thus becomes synonymous with rejecting organisation, and vice-versa. In the end, both ‘verticalists’ and ‘horizontalists’ assume this synonymy, which implicitly entails that whatever is not a party or on the 46

way to becoming one is somehow ‘unorganised’. Any talk of organisation can thus be identified with an inevitable slide towards domination, and people will push back against the party even when it is explicitly not the party that others are talking about. 30 Compared to its excess, the absence of potentia is less likely to be perceived as traumatic, since it is perfectly continuous with our everyday experiences of impotence: if we normally lack the means to do what we believe should be done, that lack can hardly register as a shock. The exception is precisely the kind of situation in which we find ourselves today, when the ebb of the great waves of mobilisation of the early 2010s has left a tangible sense of shrunken horizons; or the one in which we found ourselves immediately before, in 2008, when a crisis that opened enormous opportunities highlighted a pitiable paucity of means with which to exploit them. As I suggest in the next chapter, the discomfort arising from these two experiences, however elusively sensed it may be, is the main reason why debates on organisation have started to make a comeback. The habit of perceiving organisation only as danger and not also as enabling condition produces an instinctive reaction that is evident in activist contexts every time attempts at improving coordination are immediately assumed to have malicious motives, concrete action proposals are automatically dismissed as bids for control, ideas put forward outside of designated spaces are seen as inherently suspicious, and the establishment of structures of any kind is sensed as the start of a slippery slope towards the gulag. To some ears, ‘the “question of organization” is still and always [will be] the Leviathan’. 31 If any deliberate initiative requires organisation, and organisation is a danger, it is ultimately initiative itself that is suspect; better do nothing at all, one might conclude, than run the risk of things going wrong. The point of defining organisation both as pharmakon and as a reality encompassing much more than formal structures like the party should by now be clear. To believe in oneself as existing ‘outside’ of organisation is merely a misrecognition of all the work and conditions that one’s practice actually involves. If everything that happens is in some way organised, there is no opting out of organisation, and it literally makes no sense to be ‘against it’ as such. 47

True, one could object that, even granting that ‘spontaneous’ bursts are somehow organised, the way they are organised emerges naturally, without anyone needing to make it their concern. Even if one were to concede that point, 32 however, the question of organisation would come back as soon as we wanted to do more than passively wait for those unique occasions to repeat themselves and started to wonder what to do in order to trigger them, or how to prevent the collective power they amass from petering out before producing all the effects of which it is capable. To be ‘against organisation’, then, is either to misunderstand one’s own practice or to effectively neglect the problem of collective potentia . It is to be so fixated on the risk of its excess and perversion as to become desensitised to the tragedy of its lack and dissipation. The moment people begin to collaborate, they are inevitably faced with the double question of how to make the most out of a collective power to act and how to guard against that power being turned against itself – not just with the latter. Of course, they might be serious about neither of those things, or be serious about only one of them. The point, however, is that being committed to one is no excuse to disregard the other; to take the question of organisation seriously is to take both into consideration at the same time. Whoever does that will – regardless of whether they define themselves as ‘horizontals’ or ‘verticals’, ‘libertarians’ or ‘Marxists’, ‘movementists’ or ‘party-builders’ – recognise that the same questions and challenges apply to all. A sincere vertical may be willing to risk losing participation in order to safeguard the capacity to arrive at decisions quickly; an honest libertarian might think that a decrease in effectiveness is more acceptable a gamble than allowing an informal hierarchy to set. And yet it is the same constraints, the same limits, the same thresholds, the same dangers, the same trade-offs – above all the same trade-offs – that they are dealing with. One of the most important functions that a theory of political organisation can perform is precisely to clarify what these are. To say that the questions and challenges are the same is to say that they have to do with objective tendencies and mechanisms that are indifferent to personal predilection or political orientation. In fact, another illusion arising from the confusion between organisation and party is the idea that 48

properties like ‘horizontality’, ‘substitutionism’ or ‘bureaucratic tendencies’ adhere necessarily to some ways of organising and not to others, so that it would suffice to choose the ‘right’ ones in order to be free from them. Yet, as far back as the early twentieth century, Robert Michels warned that his ‘iron law of oligarchy’ applied not only to parties but to ‘every organization, be it socialist or even anarchist’. 33 Closer to our own time, Jo Freeman argued convincingly that informal groups are as prone to developing hierarchies as formal groups. 34 Statements like ‘democratic centralism is true democracy’, as if it were not also very obviously exposed to manipulation and power hoarding, or ‘numbers are only an issue for party builders’, as if absolutely no connection existed between quantity and the capacity to act, are not really statements about organisation, but mere reassertions of previously defined preferences. Such preferences do, of course, have a place in discussions on organisation. Since no organisational form or solution is ever free from risks and tradeoffs, it is the job of a theory of organisation to map those as well as it can and let people decide according to the circumstances and the parameters they are comfortable with. But inclinations and predilections must not be allowed to pass for theory or advertise themselves as miracle solutions. Naturally, even if the problems are the same for all, they do not always present themselves in the same way. They are never given in the abstract, but only in relation to concrete circumstances; whereas the equations remain essentially constant, the variables in them change all the time, and will often be the object of genuine disagreement. That is why it is mistaken to approach the problem of organisation as a prescriptive question concerning the ideal organisational form that should tendentially subsume all others or be replicated everywhere. It is of course true that different forms can do different things and lead to different results, and therefore the question of form is highly relevant. However, it is exactly because different forms serve different purposes that a choice of form is inseparable from such questions as ‘what for?’, ‘with what material?’ and ‘under what conditions?’ It therefore makes more sense to assume a plurality of forms, rather than a universal one, and to distribute them across a diverse

49

organisational ecology, rather than project all of our expectations on a single form or organisation.

The One and/or the Many

Ultimately, the problem with localism and dispersion is the same as with an exclusive focus on the state apparatus and on building strong mass organisations: not the idea itself but the one-sidedness of its affirmation. Treating dispersion as an unconditional value is to remain within the prescriptive logic that reduces the problem of organisation to the search for an ideal form. To replace a neurotic obsession with the One (unity, uniformity, identity) with a paranoid flight towards the Many (dispersion, incommunicability, differences as absolutes) is merely to invert the hierarchy of terms without questioning the assumption that there must be a single answer that applies in all cases and circumstances. The upshot is that a set of practical problems (what works? in what circumstances? to what end? at what cost?) is transformed into an abstract question with moralising overtones (what is right ?). The distributed cuts across any simplistic opposition between the One and Many by reminding us that unity is always a temporary arrangement of the manifold and that the multiple is never just an undifferentiated collection of atomised individuals, but contains areas of greater unity and its own local Ones (which can in turn be decomposed into Many, and so on). 35 Properly speaking, there is never just the One (a perfectly selfcontained whole, an interiority fully consistent with itself ) nor just the Many (a pure exteriority of entirely unconnected elements). There is only ever more or less integration or disconnection, more or less centralisation or dispersion, and totalities that tend more towards one or the other pole. To borrow Marisol de la Cadena’s formula for a different purpose, every totality is always more than one (because it can never be fully reduced to a unity) and less than two (because it is still sufficiently stable to be identified as a single thing). 36 One of the ways in which the badly posed problem of the One and the Many expresses itself is, of course, the opposition between verticality and horizontality. This is a question that has returned in recent years due to an upsurge of interest in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of 50

hegemony, which will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 7 . For some, that theory’s articulation of differences into a hegemonic identity highlights a necessarily vertical dimension of politics that recent movements have ignored at their own cost. For others, it marks the very instant in which the promise of horizontality is betrayed, opening the door to domination from above. As Toni Negri summarised the question after Laclau’s death: ‘Is it possible – and desirable – for heterogeneous social subjectivities to organise themselves spontaneously, or do they instead have to be organised?’ 37 Yet this way of phrasing the question already illustrates one of the main problems with this debate: the lack of a proper separation between the ontological and the normative, the descriptive and the prescriptive, which elides the necessary distinction between ‘the possible’ and ‘the desirable’, ‘what is’, ‘what one wants’ and ‘what can be’. Also implicit in this formulation is a binary logic that suggests that this is a decision to be made once and for all. That logic not only forecloses the possibility of thinking the opposition between the two choices in terms of degrees, it also suggests that a single answer applies to all situations without regard to circumstances. But is it always equally possible for heterogeneous subjectivities to organise themselves? Are all supposedly ‘non-spontaneous’ ways of doing so equivalent and equally undesirable? The problem with this approach becomes even more blatant because the question supposes a set of opposed terms (‘spontaneous’ and ‘non-spontaneous’, ‘from inside’ and ‘from outside’) that are a lot less self-evident than they might seem at first. 38

We are thus left with two absolute models of group formation – ‘Leviathan logic’ and ‘the non-fascist crowd’, to borrow Jeremy Gilbert’s handy epithets 39 – and the sharp choice as to whether both are possible, or only one. If the former, anyone who denies the possibility of the non-fascist crowd is suspect of a personal preference for vertical formations; if the latter, all groups are essentially Hobbesian, and to wish otherwise is not only utopian but as good as condemning oneself to a lifetime of political toothlessness. 40 It is true that the latter is Laclau’s position. He never really doubts Freud’s hypothesis that every collectivity requires an element of verticality in the relation between the members of the group and an object common 51

to them all. This is all the more curious since his close reading of ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ highlights the hesitations and unexplored alternatives in the text – not least Freud’s musings on the subject of ‘leaderless groups’, in which ‘an idea’ or ‘abstraction’ takes the place of the leader, and the question of ‘whether a leader is really indispensable to the essence of a group’. 41 Ultimately, Laclau imports that tension into his own thought. As I argue in chapter 7 , he fails to prove conclusively that the figure of the leader is always necessary. In the end, it is as if an argument about the symbolic necessity of leaders for the consolidation of collective ties, which is put forward but not exhaustively demonstrated, is made to pass for an argument about the organisational necessity of leadership positions, which is not made at all. As is well known, it is to Spinoza that Negri turns against Laclau’s Hobbesian assumptions. I would contend, however, that we find in Spinoza not the alternative to Laclau, but the means with which to reject the very alternative between Laclau and Negri. Spinoza’s difference to Hobbes does not rest exclusively on his account of the search for cooperation and mutual advantage as the rational foundation of society (in lieu of the all-pervading fear of the state of nature 42 ), or on his belief that civil society does not imply the cancellation of natural right. 43 Even more importantly, it lies in his notion of the imitation of affects as the affective ground of all forms of association. 44 To be sure, our capacity to feel what others feel (or we imagine they feel) throws us into the ambivalent game of emulation and ambition: we desire to live according to the loves and hates of others, but also make them live according to ours. But it also enables lateral relations of identification among large groups of individuals without the vertical mediation of an object common to all. People are drawn to each other through reciprocal imitation, which means not only that groups can coalesce without having a leader recognised by all, but also that relations are often more a two-way process of being imitated and imitating back than a vertical, unilateral affair. Within any collectivity, there will always be different imitative processes going on, making it always more than one, even if never quite two. This means that the collective is neither just an aggregate of self-contained individuals nor a whole that unilaterally 52

determines its parts. Instead of reifying either individuals or the collectivity, we can therefore see both terms as open and in process, as being in fact the same process as it expresses itself in two directions. At any given time, the collective is nothing but (a certain configuration of ) the individuals that compose it . But those individuals are constituted by the changing relations they have with one another, and so each change that each individual goes through is at the same time a change in the collective as a whole , however infinitesimal or large this might be. This is what Gilbert Simondon was referring to when he spoke of transindividuality : ‘The two individuations, psychic and collective, are reciprocal to each other; they allow us to pose the category of transindividual as a way to account for the systematic unity of inner (psychic) and outer (collective) individuation.’ 45 What this transindividual perspective does, however, is complicate the inside/outside, spontaneous/non-spontaneous, horizontal/vertical distinction implied in Negri’s question. For if individuals spontaneously imitate one another, how can adhesion to an idea or person be described as something ‘imposed from the outside’? Is following one another, in the sense of mimetic identification, not exactly what people do? Besides, ‘imitation’ supposes that whatever is imitated has started somewhere. A new trend does not appear all of a sudden across a large number of people; it grows and develops as people imitate each other, which means that there must have been a wave of early imitations and, underneath it, an act of invention that brought that trend into the world. (This is, again, the question of nucleation.) Given that individuals are constituted through their relations with others, it would of course be contradictory to search for this act in the solitary brain of some isolated visionary. Inventions themselves are the novel encounters of previously unrelated imitative trends, and individual brains are no more than ‘switches in a network of cerebral or psychic forces that either let currents pass (imitation) or make them bifurcate (invention)’. 46 Still, this means that ‘spontaneous’ processes also necessarily involve ‘leaders’ – not in the sense of objects of common love through which followers identify with one another, but of sources of modulations of collective behaviour that will be incorporated by others. In Simondon’s terms, a new collective individuation depends on a ‘structural 53

germ’ introduced somewhere. 47 It follows that every ‘self-organised’ process is the result of a criss-crossing of tendencies initiated at different points by means of which individuals ‘organise’ one another; this is literally all that ‘self-organisation’ is. 48 According to what criteria could we then draw a line allowing us to distinguish between tendencies coming from ‘inside’ (‘selforganised’) and those originating on the ‘outside’ (‘organised’, it is implied, by someone else )? Part of the problem here is a conflation of two different meanings of leadership. Laclau uses an argument about the symbolic function leaders play in group formation to uphold the need for a position of leadership at the head of popular movements. Wary of the risks such a position entails, Negri wishes to do away with leadership altogether, failing to recognise the function it performs within the multitude. 49 While Laclau assumes that position can be justified by the necessity of function, Negri appears to believe that, for position to be ruled out, function must be rejected as well. If we separate the two things properly, however, reconciliation between them is not hard to find. It is perfectly possible to acknowledge that there is in politics an ineliminable function that can be identified with leadership: the initiation of collective behaviour. In and of itself, this tells us nothing about whether that must necessarily translate into positions of leadership, what forms those might take in different situations, or what mechanisms must be put into place in order to control them. 50 Position can then appear as the consolidation and stabilisation of function, the progressive transformation of potentia into potestas ; but function, like potentia , cannot be done away with. Finally, this also allows us to see with greater clarity what the source of worry regarding leadership is. Presumably, no one could object to a kind of leadership essentially based on potentia and reciprocity, when one or more individuals in a group have the trust of others, the capacity to bring them together, to set an example, to orient, to empower, to imbue with a vision and a sense of common purpose. Clearly, the problem is rather with leadership founded mostly on potestas – through which, by coercion or deception, one or more individuals can have others do their bidding without making themselves accountable. And what is the problem with that? If one could believe in the possibility of a philosopher 54

king who would always know the common good and yield their potestas accordingly, perhaps none. Yet, can one or more individuals with the power to command others always be trusted to pursue what is best for all? Here, then, lies the perfectly reasonable source of worry about potestas : that those who have it will use it to pursue particular interests instead of common ones. So now we are in a position to answer Negri’s question. It is precisely because the transindividual is always more than one that we cannot treat it as a meta-individual capable of recognising itself and uniting spontaneously around a single common project. The multitude, if it is understood as transindividual, is not and cannot become a universal subject: it is and always will be inconsistent, in tension with itself, caught between the pull of the universal and the particular, the whole and its parts. 51 Its unification will always be partial; taken as a whole, it will never really be ‘guided as if by a single mind’. 52 Besides, if collective individuation is nothing but the modulations that individuals enact on one another, a common project cannot be something that people simply discover within themselves, as if spontaneously realising the destiny that had been theirs all along. It can only be constituted through a process of inventions and imitations, and the organisational effort required to facilitate the diffusion of both. In that sense, Laclau is right: ‘multitudes are never spontaneously multitudinarious; they can only become so through political action.’ 53 To say this, however, is not to say that ‘heterogeneous social subjectivities’ cannot organise themselves spontaneously, and have to be organised ‘from outside’ or ‘from above’. It is to reject the very inside/outside, above/below alternative. There is no self-organisation of the multitude without (hetero-)organisation of individuals by one another; there is no self-affection of the multitude without individuals acting ‘upon the actions of others’. 54 It therefore makes as little sense to force a choice between self- and hetero-organisation, ‘purely’ horizontal and ‘purely’ vertical relations, as it makes to choose between the Many and the One. 55 Both things are always necessarily intertwined; it is never a question of either/or, but of how much . How much are relations governed by the amplification of potentia , how much by the imposition of potestas ? How reciprocal are the ties connecting groups 55

and individuals? How much unity is an enhancement our capacity to act, and how much can threaten it? How much plurality is needed to safeguard us against abuses, how much simply dissipates and wastes our power? These, as we shall see in the next chapter, are questions that can be decided only in practice. What all of this shows, in any case, is that to start from an irreducible plurality – to think organisation ecologically – is absolutely not the same as affirming diversity and dispersion without qualifications, mechanically replying with a plural every time someone employs the singular, or instinctively denouncing any talk of unity, articulation, hegemony, and so on. It is simply to assume, first, that plurality is a given, which means that the question of organisation is never about the one organisational form or the one organisation. Rather, it concerns the composition of different things, making them compatible with one another, making them compossible . This entails, secondly, the belief that plurality does have a value in itself, to the extent that it can be both a source of novelty and a guarantee against the concentration of potestas . 56 In this light, the problem of organisation appears as essentially the same as the one posed by Leibniz in relation to the divine intellect: ‘obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest order possible’. 57 A young activist once told me, ‘What we need to do is disperse power.’ 58

He was stumped when I replied, ‘Whose power? Our own or our enemies’?’ For he was, of course, right in saying that it would be foolish to unmake the powers that be only to replace them with another rule so robust that we could not exercise any control over it; although we might call that rule ‘our own’ at first, it would be unlikely to stay that way for long. But he could see the point of my objection right away. Is a major part of the problem not precisely that our potentia is already quite dispersed? How effective can a strategy of dispersing it be in the face of large concentrations of potestas ? Is it plausible that we can disperse the latter without concentrating our own capacity to act at certain strategic points? Should we just put all our faith in the belief that the aggregate effect of countless individual actions will eventually be enough to bring the existing order down? Or should we rather work collectively to identify what those 56

strategic points might be and build our capacity to attack them – all the while taking care not to erect structures that might escape entirely from our control? If the latter, then we simply cannot afford to ignore the question of organisation.

57

2

One or Two Melancholias?

____________________________________

We come to love our Left passions and reasons, our analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be aligned with them … What emerges is a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of things. But perhaps even more troubling, it is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing. Wendy Brown The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Who Are the Melancholics?

In a well-known 1999 piece, Wendy Brown proposed Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘left melancholy’ as a means to shed light on the ‘crisis of the left’ that at the time had already been going on for two decades (or longer, depending on whom you asked). The term was supposed to describe ‘not only a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present’, but a ‘narcissism with regard to one’s past political attachments and identity that exceeds any contemporary investment in political mobilisation, alliance, or transformation’. 1 Committed ‘more to a particular political analysis or ideal – even to the failure of that ideal – than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present’, 2 left melancholics shield themselves from facing failure by displacing the narcissistic identification with the lost object onto the hate of a substitute. In the 58

particular conjuncture analysed by Brown, it was cultural politics, identity politics and ‘postmodernism’ that normally played the role of villains, scapegoated as the vectors of dispersion that had sundered a left project that was no longer viable. 3 More recently, Jodi Dean has revisited Brown’s argument in order to suggest a different diagnosis. While praising the 1999 essay for providing ‘an account of a particularly left structure of desire’, 4 and seeing it as part of the process of elaboration of the defeats of the twentieth century, Dean suggests that it failed to correctly identify ‘what was lost and what is retained, what is displaced and what is disavowed’. 5 Apart from the almost fifteen years that separate the two pieces, what is central to the difference between them is Dean’s emphasis on the drive aspect of Freud’s understanding of melancholia, on the one hand, and her interpretation of ‘left melancholy’ itself, on the other. For Dean, rather than ‘Benjamin’s unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack’ 6 who cannot overcome his former attachments even in the face of failure, the term should be read as a description of more or less the opposite. Accordingly, her conclusion ends up being almost symmetrically opposed to Brown’s: Instead of a left attached to an unacknowledged orthodoxy, we have one that has given way on the desire for communism, betrayed its historical commitment to the proletariat, and sublimated revolutionary energies into restorationist practices that strengthen the hold of capitalism. 7

The left melancholia diagnosed by Dean is one in which the experience of defeat and subsequent abandonment of revolutionary desire have been channelled into a drive whose ‘incessant activity’ – ‘criticism and interpretation, small projects and local actions, particular issues and legislative victories, art, technology, procedures, and process’, ‘the branching, fragmented practices of micro-politics, self-care, and issue awareness’ 8 – has failure, not success, as its goal. For the melancholic left, enjoyment comes precisely from its incapacity to win, its ‘withdrawal from responsibility, its sublimation of goals and responsibilities’. 9 That is what ultimately explains why it cannot break out of the repetitive patterns that ensure its continued impotence: it wills that impotence and derives pleasure from it. 59

Who is right, then? Which diagnosis is correct? Or should we consider Brown’s, as Dean suggests, an earlier moment in the elaboration of left melancholia, one to be completed in the present day? 10 The first thing to note is that neither reading is entirely faithful to Benjamin’s original use of the concept, even if that is of course not a problem per se. 11 Although Dean is certainly closer to the original, both she and Brown creatively extrapolate from the term first introduced in a 1931 review of Erich Kästner’s poetry. For starters, whereas Brown and Dean understand ‘melancholia’ as qualifying ‘left’ – as a particular ‘structure of desire’ proper to the left wing of the political spectrum, however defined – the relation in Benjamin works the other way around, and it is ‘left’ that qualifies ‘melancholia’. Kästner is not criticised for being an old party hack stuck in the same politics of yore, nor for being a journalistic hack who has turned his old revolutionary leanings into trendy commodities, but for finding a market niche in catering for a widespread melancholia that is just the latest stage of the malaise eating bourgeois society from the inside. 12 It is the audience, not the poet, who is melancholy; or rather, it is the bourgeoisie. 13 New Objectivists like Kästner raise the mirror of a ‘yawning emptiness’ to a bourgeois public in whom the hollowness of commodified life might even stir some ‘revolutionary reflexes’. 14 Yet this simply displaces the repulsion that reacts to an all-pervasive spiritual impoverishment onto ‘objects of distraction, of amusement, which can be supplied for consumption’. 15 This, in turn, cancels any political significance that these feelings or the artworks that respond to them might possess. This art does nothing to suggest that things could be different, or how; what it offers to both public and artist is ultimately only the self-indulgent contemplation of one’s own vacuity. This is why Benjamin concludes that ‘this left-wing radicalism is … to the left not of this or that tendency; but simply to the left of what is in general possible. For from the beginning all it has in mind is to enjoy itself in a negativistic quiet’. 16 It is, in short, the outwardly radical expression of bourgeois nihilism – but ultimately no more than the left-wing variant thereof. None of this, however, gets us any closer to understanding our own time. The second thing to look for in Brown’s and Dean’s texts, then, is 60

what observable behaviours each of them holds as evidence of melancholia, and what sector of ‘the left’ is supposed to embody them. It is clear, when examined in this way, that the two texts somewhat mirror one another. It is relatively easy to see that what Brown had in mind was a tendency to blame the defeats of the last decades not on an incapacity to respond to a changing environment, but on the ‘wrong turns’ allegedly taken by the advocates of a type of politics that emerged in the 1960s. Her melancholic is the ‘old-school’ leftist who would rather rejoice in the failure of younger generations of activists than question his own deep-seated analyses and prescriptions. Dean’s reference to the abandonment of ‘antagonism, class, and revolutionary commitment’, on the other hand, initially suggests a broader argument. After all, sublimating revolutionary desire into ‘repetitious practices offered up as democracy (whether representative, deliberative or radical)’ 17 is an accusation that could be levelled at anything from the Third Way to contemporary anarchism. Yet this papers over rather important distinctions, such as whether we consider that move to be conscious or unconscious (deliberately giving up on the revolution as opposed to choosing self-defeating methods to pursue it), strategic or tactical (rejecting the very idea as opposed to the short-term viability of revolutionary action), due to the acceptance of ‘an inevitable capitalism’ or to an elaboration of past ‘practical failures’. 18 What the blanket reference to ‘real existing compromises and betrayals’ 19 ends up doing is striking an equivalence between those cases in which betrayal can be asserted with relatively little controversy (say, New Labour) and those in which a more or less unconscious compromise is precisely what must be demonstrated (abandonment of revolutionary desire as the source of melancholia and drive). It soon transpires that the latter, not the former, are the target. What Dean really has in mind are not ostensibly conscious ‘traitors’, but the de facto betrayal of those who engage ‘in activities that feel productive, important, radical’ but ultimately seek only to reproduce ‘an inefficacy sure to guarantee [them] the nuggets of satisfaction drive provides’. 20 As Dean’s choice of examples makes clear – an emphasis on the personal, the local and the small-scale, single-issue campaigns, micropolitics … – such melancholics can be recognised by their attachment to precisely the kinds of 61

practices that one would associate not with the ‘old school’ but with a post1960s left. Should we take this to mean that Dean’s diagnosis is no more than a confirmation of the actuality of Brown’s? Or should we accept the historical perspective in which Dean places both and see her own position as signalling a swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction: the moment when the new left’s critique of the old left has itself come under critique, perhaps by a third perspective that is neither one nor the other? A third option would be that, rather than choose between them, we decide that both are correct. This would mean that we are in fact dealing not with one, but two melancholias – and thus also, in a way, with two lefts. 21

The Two Lefts

The main feature separating mourning from melancholia that Freud seeks to explain is the fact that the melancholic ‘represents his ego … as worthless, incapable of any achievement … reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished’. 22 In melancholia, he ventures, the incapacity to let go of the lost object results in an identification with it, so that ‘an object-loss [is] transformed into an egoloss’, opening a ‘cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification’. 23 Hate towards the object, which was always present as ambivalence but loss allows to come to the fore, is thus directed towards the self. The ‘self-tormenting in melancholia, which is no doubt enjoyable, signifies … a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and which have been turned around upon the subject’s own self ’. 24 At the same time, Freud observes that, ‘if one listens patiently to a melancholic’s many and various self-accusations, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them … fit someone else, someone whom the patient loves or has loved or should love.’ 25 What is curious in Brown’s and Dean’s diagnoses of the left – and, I would wager, in the direct experience most people have of it – is that such attentive exegesis seems for the most part unnecessary. While they both identify a tendency for the left to derive pleasure from its own ‘impossibility … 62

marginality and failure’, 26 they also detect a tendency for the responsibility for that paralysis to be shifted onto someone else’s shoulders. One may more or less consciously choose to remain ineffective; but that is always in response to the damage wrought by an other (‘antiracists, feminists, queer activists, postmodernists, unreconstructed Marxists’ 27 ) or to the threat of the other’s politics (‘moralism, dogmatism, authoritarianism, utopianism’ 28 ). Thus, whereas Freud’s melancholic is really recriminating the other when he ostensibly blames himself, the left melancholic ostensibly blames the other . This is what makes Brown’s and Dean’s analyses mirror each other. To the extent that both see one sector of the left as tending to react to shared defeat by holding another sector responsible, each could include the other as evidence of precisely the kind of behaviour they criticise: shifting the blame onto an other or, in this case, onto the other who blames others . This specular structure suggests that, while historical defeat and feelings of impossibility and failure are shared by a whole spectrum that we can call ‘the left’, that predicament is experienced from at least two different perspectives. That there are two different perspectives means that, even if the ‘unavowed loss’ is, in both cases, formally the same – ‘the promise that [one’s analysis and commitment] would supply its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right and the true’ 29 – the content is different. In other words, the concrete commitments whose promise of virtue and correctness was lost were different for each perspective. And, if the actual losses being mourned are different, that is because the difference between these two perspectives was already established or in the process of establishing itself by the time the rise of neoliberal hegemony ushered in the ‘winter years’ of the 1980s and 1990s. Brown’s and Dean’s accounts imply a chronological structure: although the two lefts coexist in the present, they have not always done so, and one of them is clearly more recent than the other. This suggests both that the divide is not reducible to older oppositions (like the one between Marxists and anarchists) and that the rupture could be traced back to some period or specific event. Even if neither Brown nor Dean are explicit in this respect, the textual clues point in the direction of a break situated at some point between the 1960s and 1970s; we could therefore indicate it, no doubt only 63

approximately, by the name ‘1968’. And if we can point to 1968 as a formative moment for a new left that arose by contesting an older one, no better candidate presents itself for the role of the event that shaped that older left than 1917. Drawing the distinction chronologically has the advantage of highlighting the extent to which one position emerges in reaction to the other, attempting to draw its lessons and explore its blind spots. After 1917 ‘gave world capitalism the worst fright it ever had’, 30 it must indeed have seemed, for a few decades at least, that the enigma of revolution had essentially been solved. Even if the Russian Revolution was not quite as theory had predicted, the Bolsheviks had been the first to weld theory and practice in the form of a victorious party, demonstrating that it was indeed possible for communists to take power and successfully retain it. 31 By the late 1960s, however, many saw the experience of actually existing socialism as drifting ever farther from its own ends, while most of its epigones outside the Soviet bloc had given up on the idea of revolutionary change altogether. To activists coming of age at the time, it looked as though the model had turned out bad where it had not worked and even worse where it had. That sense of impasse led many to seek new models elsewhere or try to create them themselves. The time had come for a ‘revolution in the revolution’ – a phrase that was ‘key to the political 1960s’, 32 in Chris Marker’s words. At the same time, much of what we associate today with 1968 is heavily infused with retrospective projections about the period. While invariably very critical of existing socialist and communist parties, many in and around 1968 were in fact not that far from either their imaginary or their practices. It was only with the passing of time that the meaning of 1968 would come to be more unmistakeably defined by what was new about the period: the so-called ‘new social movements’, an attention to issues outside the sphere of production, an emphasis on questions of individual autonomy and self-expression, a sharp eye for the risks of hierarchical organisations and the limits of institutional interventions. In that sense, the split between these two ways of experiencing the epochal defeat of emancipatory politics that began in the late 1970s is to a good extent a product of that defeat itself. As the realisation of defeat sunk in and people drew disparate lessons 64

from it, the legacies of what were arguably the two revolutionary events of the twentieth century with the greatest impact on left-wing imagination gradually became defined by the ways in which they diverged rather than how they intersected. 33 The growing rift thus pitted a left that emphasised political action as the driver of social transformation and had a strong investment in the state apparatus against a left that placed greater stress on the initiative of social actors themselves and tended to side with social movements and civil society; and a left committed to such values as unity, leadership, hegemony, as well as a very restrictive conception of the working class and the party as an organisational form, against a left that favoured plurality, autonomy and bottom-up organisation. Yet tracing this split back to its origin allows us to bring to mind something that the subsequent story of ‘compromises and betrayals’ might make us forget. While the 1980s saw its fair share of soixantehuitards turned capitalist apologists use the denunciation of Soviet socialism as a way to rationalise biographical continuity into their change of political allegiance, the opposition between a 1917 and a 1968 left did not emerge as a simplistic totalitarianism-versus-freedom or revolution-versus-reform dichotomy. At its source, it was a dispute on how to do revolutionary politics – which is another way of saying that it concerned the nature of revolution. In any case, the fact that the two identities defined themselves over time through their mutual opposition explains the reluctance to accept or even acknowledge the loss of certainties. When we understand the other as the negation of who we are, questioning our convictions is too much like giving in to them, and giving in to them is too much like negating ourselves. Shifting the blame thus allows each side to claim revenge for the other’s failings at the same time as it exorcises its own doubts. 34 What each attacks in the other – by attacking exactly the kind of ideas one would have to consider if questioning were to really take place – is also its own vacillations: the fear of being wrong, the suspicion that they might perhaps be responsible for their own failure after all. Mutual recrimination generally tends to develop into a positive feedback loop; the more each side blames the other, the more likely both are to defend themselves by shifting the blame. The same goes for the 65

commitments that define one’s identity: the more they come under attack, the more one tends to reassert them unilaterally. The upshot is that both sides end up constantly demarcating their mutual difference through the reiteration of terms that function as the negation of one another: unity, centralisation, concentration, identity, closure, the party-form; multiplicity, connection, dispersion, difference, openness, the network-form (or no form at all). That, of course, only makes self-criticism less likely. The process can carry on even as Brown’s and Dean’s analyses render it reflexive: each side can read their diagnoses and agree that ‘yes, the problem is the other who always shifts the blame to others’ – without realising that, from the perspective of the other whom I blame, the other who shifts the blame to others is me. We are, therefore, not dealing with one ‘orthodoxy’ whose limits are ‘safeguarded from … recognition’ 35 by its adherents, but with two . The 1968 left can be just as prone to shielding itself from hard questions by displacing them onto its 1917 counterpart as the other way around. 36 If the trauma associated with the Soviet bloc no doubt played a huge part in making organisation into an object of aversion and dread, this pattern of evading and shifting responsibility, of entrenching identity and shunning the work of mourning has contributed to locking in place the incapacity to discuss it. The 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, a period of intense organisational experimentation: the consciousness-raising groups of the feminists, the ecclesial base communities of Liberation Theology, groups of prisoners and mental patients, the welfare programmes of the Black Panthers, the combination of ‘organised’ and ‘diffuse’ elements in Italy’s Autonomia. As that age drew to a close, however, and forms both old and new ran up against their limits, debates on the left have tended more and more to be expressed in terms of exclusive disjunctions like hegemony or autonomy, macropolitics or micropolitics, unity or diversity … True, it is unlikely that many people would, if asked, argue that it is indeed possible, or even desirable, to have only one of those things at any time. ‘Of course’, they would say, ‘some balance is necessary’. Yet this only makes it more curious that so much of what passes for debate in the left should be expressed in 66

such abstract terms, as if it really were a matter of choosing one thing or the other. That begins to make sense, however, once we view it in the context of a specular relation that tends to erase the common ground on which a real discussion could take place (‘some balance’) even while each side might separately acknowledge that concrete problems can be posed only on this ground. This is how, instead of arguing over differences that are clearly laid out in relation to shared frames of reference, such as concrete analyses of the situation at hand and hypotheses on how to act on it, we wind up endlessly relitigating old conceptual oppositions that are unlikely to produce any new conclusions, let alone actions. The more each side identifies with one of only two possible answers to a set of equally abstract questions posed in moral terms (‘what is the right thing to do?’ rather than ‘what is the best thing to do in this situation ?’), the less visible becomes the fact that concrete problems always raise issues pertinent to both. How, here and now, can we balance a maximum of autonomy with the capacity to act in a coordinated way? How, in this situation, can expedient decision-making capacity be reconciled with the broadest democracy and participation? The less each side recognises the other as dealing with the same set of problems, the easier it is to construe it as a caricature: Stalinist control freaks, outof-touch bureaucrats, woolly liberal do-gooders, ham-fisted anarchists … Likewise, the easier it is to see one’s own practice not as it actually is, with its limitations and challenges, but as the embodiment of the ideals it is supposed to enact or enable: efficiency, leadership, horizontality, openness … Whatever limits are encountered can thus always be discounted or disavowed as contingent, accidental, temporary, someone else’s fault . Our core beliefs, questioning which would force us to rediscover some common ground with the other, can thus remain intact. Two ‘left-wing melancholias’, then, marking out two distinct lefts. One proper to the 1917 left, another pertaining to its 1968 counterpart, each responding at once to a shared experience of defeat (the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and its continuing hegemony) and to their own particular losses (the ignominies of the Soviet bloc and the dissipation of the alterglobalist movement, for example). Between the two, a relationship 67

of mutual reinforcement that corresponds quite precisely to what Gregory Bateson called symmetrical schismogenesis : a ‘cumulative interaction’ 37 in which the members of two groups react to each other with an identical pattern of behaviour, with equal intensity but in opposite directions, so that each group will drive the other into excessive emphasis of the pattern, a process which if not restrained can only lead to more and more extreme rivalry and ultimately to hostility and the breakdown of the whole system. 38

It is more appropriate in this case to speak of ‘perspectives’ rather than ‘groups’, as the point is not so much that there are two clearly delimited, denumerable camps that we could identify with ‘1917’ and ‘1968’, even if it is often not difficult to situate individuals or organisations on one side or the other. The two perspectives pre-exist the camps that they bring together, in that they are the principle of cohesion around which those camps coalesce and reproduce themselves. They subsist regardless of who might be counted on what side at any one time, and might coexist within the same collectivity or even the same individual. 39 Unlike Bateson’s examples, however, this opposition does not appear to lead to a full-blown rupture (‘the breakdown of the whole system’), arguably for three reasons. 40 First, because the two perspectives not only share a common defeat, they also identify themselves before others as part of a single camp (‘the left’); like an unhappy couple, they continue to live under the same roof even as they lead mostly separate lives. Second, because the fight over their common identity (the mantle of ‘the true left’) keeps them tied to each other, even if around an antagonism; if they continue to live under the same roof, it is because they are permanently fighting over who should keep the house. Third, they effectively need each other, not only because their identities depend on their mutual opposition, but because the presence of the other offers them exemption from responsibility for their own mistakes. After all, the one comfort to be had in marital grief is not having to take charge of one’s own happiness (or otherwise). In the system that is formed by the relation of these two melancholias to each other, finally, we discern the structure of drive that Dean describes. To carry on doing the same thing in order to obtain the same results, to always opt for paths whose limits have been exposed in the past, all of this 68

is a way of punishing oneself for defeat and a disavowed loss of conviction without ceasing to extract some enjoyment from failure at the same time. Yet this is all done while ostensibly attributing responsibility for this failure to an other, so that it never becomes necessary to question oneself. By choosing to keep on encountering the same impasses instead of revising our certainties – which would naturally entail acknowledging the ground shared with the other – we remain free to carry on failing, often without even managing to fail better .

To Finally Return to the Question of Organisation

If the hypothesis linking the eclipse of the question of organisation to the consolidation of this schismogenic mechanism is correct, a return to the former necessarily involves overcoming the latter. That might help explain why this ‘return’ has thus far sounded more like an injunction to take up the question again than an effort to actually propose answers. It also suggests a limit that any attempt to rekindle the question solely by restating one of its previous answers will eventually encounter: any intervention that stays within the territory charted by symmetrical schismogenesis will tend to reinforce it rather than break with it. Yet this also gives us a clue regarding where to look for signs that the organisation debate might indeed be stirring anew: in clear-eyed appraisals of the limits of actual processes, and in attempts to think beyond the simplism of either/or choices. Fortunately, such signs can indeed be found. For example, in how a new generation of militants trained in the horizontal practices of the 2011 protests have engaged in electoral campaigns without portraying what they were doing as a simple ‘return’ to the party-form or a recantation of earlier ‘mistakes’, but as a veritable political experiment that put convictions and tactics learnt elsewhere to the test on a new terrain. We can also see them in several analyses of this decade’s protest cycle that openly acknowledge its limitations without abandoning some of its more fundamental commitments. 41 We can find them, in short, in good-faith attempts to incorporate practices and questions previously not recognised as one’s own without supposing that this would automatically mean changing sides. Wherever there are people who do not feel constrained to be either this or that, and who adopt tactics and practices not for the sake of sustaining an 69

identity but because they look like they might work , there is hope of escaping the pull of the left’s double melancholia. It is obviously not the case that the 1917/1968 rift ever really exhausted the range of possible positions, nor that communication and crosspollination between the two perspectives ever ceased to exist. The point here is, in fact, precisely the opposite: a practice that tried to be purely one thing or another could never get very far, because the capacity to adapt is a prerequisite for viability. There is no purity except as a misrecognition of what one really does and a certain blindness as to where one really stands. (I will return to this in chapter 5 .) Still, there are reasons to imagine that the effort to pose problems in concrete ways, outside of a sterile opposition between ossified identities, could grow in the near future. First of all, there is the very dissemination of diagnoses of melancholia, including those that identify it as a potentially positive condition. 42 Then there is the widely shared sense of urgency (but also possibility) that comes from inhabiting a conjuncture crisscrossed by overlapping crises. Though urgency is not always the best counsel, it helps focus the mind on what really matters – namely, getting things done. Finally, there might be something about the ebb of the 2011 cycle itself that stimulates responses which are at once more critical and more open. It is interesting to note that Wendy Brown’s ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’ came out in 1999, the year when the ‘Battle of Seattle’ at once relativised the fragility that she described and somewhat revised the very content of the word ‘left’. The ‘alterglobalism’ of the following years would, in a way, be the revenge of 1968 against the reactive ‘traditionalism’ 43 that Brown’s article criticised. Not only had a new generation of activists come to claim that libertarian legacy, they presented themselves as finally capable of actualising potentials that had seemed until then to be condemned to failure and betrayal. In the heady cocktail of 1960s radical theory and technological determinism of the turn of the century, the internet figured as the prospect of surmounting the material obstacles that had previously prevented horizontal, bottom-up ways of organising from scaling up. As such, it seemed to make older forms of organisation obsolete at the same

70

time as it brought the dream of a decentralised, self-organised global community closer within reach. Much of that sensibility and imaginary would resurface in 2011, despite there being little organisational continuity or even memory to connect the two moments. 44 And yet, at least to those who have lived through both, the reckoning occasioned by the latest seems at once more heartfelt and more profound. We could conjecture that this stems from two dissimilarities between them. The first dissimilarity concerns historical circumstances. Whereas the alterglobalist moment arrived unexpectedly at a time of capitalist expansion, the 2011 protests were the long-delayed response to an event, the 2008 crisis, that had created great expectations for radical politics. But while the former moment petered out over half a decade, squeezed out of the global agenda by the War on Terror and the movement’s inability to go beyond a characteristic form of action (the summit protest), the latter ebbed even faster, incapable of building on its initial successes and defenceless against a repressive backlash. As I suggested in the previous chapter, the sensation of shrinking horizons and missed opportunities is a powerful intensifier for the experience of collective powerlessness. The second difference has to do with political composition. The alterglobalist moment was always more of a patchwork of fixed political quantities, in which parties and trade unions still played a significant part even if younger autonomous activists were the main protagonists. Always an unsteady alliance of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ elements, it still allowed both sides to deal with impasses by blaming each other. In 2011, however, the ‘vertical’ element was barely present, and the direction of the protests much more clearly in the hands of ‘horizontals’. The limits that those struggles ran up against were not necessarily new, and many of them had already been encountered in 1968 and the early 2000s. But the combination of big stakes, high hopes and a steep fall – plus the lack of anyone else to blame – made them much harder to ignore. We could force a parallel here. It was also the case that nothing that was ‘revealed’ when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 had not been known for a long time. And yet, even though the collapse of the Soviet bloc may have been 71

only ‘the death-event of the already dead’, 45 it still meant to many that it was finally impossible to carry on as before. If the analogy holds, perhaps we could see the depth of self-scrutiny we find nowadays as a sign that 2011 was in many ways the 1989 of 1968. 46 If there is a return to the question of organisation today, or at the very least growing talk about the need for it, it is of course primarily because recent experiences have left many people feeling that organisation is something they could use more of. As I hope to show next, however, organisation is also ideally suited to play the role of an object that can help us escape the circuit of drive in which our double melancholia detains us – provided we are also willing to change how we conceive it.

Organisation as Mediation

In the heyday of the Organisationsfrage , which we could roughly situate between the ‘revisionism debate’ of the late nineteenth century and the Third International’s Fifth Congress in 1924, 47 organisation appears as a figure of mediation . Following Georg Lukács’s formula, organisation is ‘the form of mediation between theory and practice’, and ‘as in every dialectical relationship, the terms of the relation only acquire concreteness and reality in and by this mediation’. 48 Yet theory and practice were not the only terms between which organisation was supposed to mediate. Lukács himself saw in the party the ‘concrete mediation of man and history’ 49 and, in conscious subordination to party discipline, the mediation between individual and collective will. Even a cursory read of the classic Leninist statement on the subject, What Is to Be Done? , will show that its chapters are already from their titles governed by a number of dualisms (spontaneity and purposefulness, economic and political struggles, ‘artisanal’ organisation and ‘revolutionaries by trade’) that branch out into yet more oppositions (masses and leaders, ‘from within’ and ‘from without’, and so on). In all these oppositions, it is evident that Lenin is making the case for one of the terms against the other. It is equally evident, however, that this case is never unilateral or disjunctive, but supposes precisely some mediation between the two. After all, Lenin would have otherwise found himself in the awkward position of having to argue against proletarian 72

practice or against the masses . 50 Even if Lenin’s goal was to reinforce one of the sides of each equation at the other’s expense, it was never a matter of choosing one at the exclusion of the other, but of instituting a mediation between them – a task that fell upon organisation, no less, to perform. As we shall see, the act of stressing one term over the other should be read not as the negation of mediation, but as part of the work of mediation itself: to emphasise one pole of a dualism against the other is a way to propose a certain balance between them. Even over emphasis, as is often the case with Lenin, is justified if it is meant to compensate for what one perceives – rightly or wrongly, as the case may be – as a balance unduly tilted in the opposite direction. 51 As we have seen, one of the mechanisms keeping the ‘two lefts’ locked in their specular relation is the transformation of a series of conceptual pairs into exclusive disjunctions: micropolitics or macropolitics, diversity or unity, horizontality or verticality, hegemony or autonomy, and so on. Now, exclusive disjunctions are nothing but unmediated oppositions, or oppositions between which no mediation is admitted. What we have here then is a circular causality: if these terms can appear as mutually exclusive, it is because what should mediate between them has disappeared; as a mediating element, organisation cannot but disappear, given that what it is supposed to mediate presents itself as unmediatable. That disappearance, it should be noted, is at once theoretical and practical, and the relationship between those two aspects is also mutually reinforcing: excessive abstraction inhibits practice, the absence of practice stimulates abstraction. Yet it is precisely because of this circularity that organisation might go from lost object to transitional object and thus become the means for recovering itself. To think organisation concretely is to think in terms of specific problems rather than merely conceptual relations. The more we do so, the more apparent it becomes that the challenges involved in assembling and channelling the collective capacity to act are the same for all, regardless of theoretical allegiances or political preferences. It is always the same kind of difficulties, constraints, thresholds, dangers. Conversely, acknowledging that common ground is a condition for responding to actual situations 73

instead of just reiterating abstract principles or reproaching reality for being unlike our model. It is on that common ground that a partisan of autonomy might accept that the circumstances call for stronger coordination, or a ‘verticalist’ admit that attempting to enforce unity will only create unnecessary divisions under given conditions. Rather than each being capable of playing only their characteristic type (the Stalinist, the autonomist, the insurrectionist …) and droning on about their one characteristic idea (centralisation, autonomy, direct action …), those who acknowledge their interpellation by the same set of problems and recognise each other as collaborating towards a common goal can explore a range of solutions tailored to the occasion at hand, at once more complex and more precise than any general model. It is a matter of inverting the usual procedure: instead of starting from the big differences and acknowledging commonalities only as an afterthought (‘of course, some balance is necessary …’), we start from what is common and situate differences in relation to a shared problem. This makes them appear not as absolutes, but as relative to one another: different shades in a range of possible responses to a shared condition. Doing that, however, hinges decisively on what we mean when we speak of organisation as a mediating element – and ultimately on how we understand mediation itself.

Force over Form

There are basically two ways of thinking mediation. The first conceives the relation between the terms to be mediated as a logical opposition: they negate each other, and hence cannot be predicated of the same subject at the same time without contradiction. What mediation must do in this case is bring the two predicates together in a third term that would be their synthesis. Given that we are dealing with a logical contradiction, the problem (the contradiction) is in principle solved as soon as the solution (the synthesis) appears. By means of a third term that at once cancels and conserves them in a higher unity, it will be possible, from that moment on, to predicate the two previously incompatible terms from the same subject. That is why Lukács does not say that organisation mediates between theory and practice, but that it is the form of this mediation. For him, a 74

communist party in the Bolshevik mould, in open rupture with social democratic organisations mired in reformist ‘opportunism’, was the ‘form at last discovered’ within which the logical contradictions between theory and practice, mass and leaders, history and existence, individual and collective will, economic and political struggles could all be eventually resolved in an age of imminent revolution. Understanding mediation in terms of logical contradiction thus subtly directs us to consider the problem of organisation as concerning the form that would solve it: a determinate type of organisational form in which the solution would, at least in principle, already be contained. 52 This helps explain why, to this day, talk of ‘organisation’ so easily slips into, or is effectively treated as shorthand for, a discussion of ‘the party’. 53 To be sure, nothing can prevent practical ‘deviations’ from corrupting this form, precluding it from acting as the mediation that by right it is. However, as the very talk of ‘deviations’ suggests, these are no more than accidental modifications of what in essence is supposed to be the fully realised answer to the problem. We arrive at a different idea of mediation if we change how we conceive opposition. Kant gave the name real opposition to this other kind of relation, in which the two terms are opposed but not logically contradictory. Rather than a predicate being the negation of the other (A and not-A), here both are affirmative in their own right, and even if they cancel each other out, that does not stop them from being predicable of the same subject at the same time. They might cancel each other out completely, in fact, and the resulting ‘nothing’ will still be a positive existence. For example, if two mechanical forces of equal intensity act in opposing directions on the same body at the same time, the body remains at rest. Yet that rest is not a non-being or the negation of movement, it is still something : a real physical state produced by the interaction of two real forces. Since the consequences of the two [predicates A and B], each construed as existing on its own, would be a and b, it follows that, if the two are construed as existing together, neither consequence a nor consequence b is to be found in the subject; the consequence of the two predicates A and B, construed as existing together, is therefore zero. 54

75

From which it also follows that, if A or B increases, the outcome will be other than zero: the predominance of the consequence a mitigated by the presence of b , or vice-versa. Under these conditions, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s challenge poses hardly any difficulty. It is perfectly possible to maintain two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time; all it takes is for us to consider them as being in real opposition to one another. In short, real opposition is not an opposition between concepts, but between real forces or tendencies. And whereas two concepts that logically negate each other produce no reality, but only impossible entities like ‘square circle’, opposed forces can come into all sorts of mixtures bearing all sorts of proportions. Alternatively, we could say that real opposition is not an opposition between determinate qualities, but between quantities: vectorial quantities, endowed with both magnitude and direction (as in Kant’s example of the two forces acting on a body); or intensive quantities, that is, those that are non-additive (not composed of smaller quantities of the same kind). 55 When we call an object ‘hot’ or ‘cold’, we are registering the physical sensation of a change of state in our body occasioned by coming in contact with that object. Yet the fact that the verbal resources we have to do so make us ascribe a determinate quality to it (‘hot’, ‘cold’) should not blind us to the fact that what we are doing is describe an intensive difference between the object and our body: it is hotter or colder than we are. Many of the qualities that we regularly ascribe to things (‘heavy’, ‘light’, ‘wet’, ‘dry’) function in this way: what they name is a quantum of some property (weight, temperature, humidity) resulting from an intensive or vectorial relation. They correspond to definite quantities produced by a real opposition. For example, the quality of ‘heavy’ that we predicate of an object names the excess of the downward pull of gravity on its mass over the upward traction that we exert on it. That such differential relations differ from determinate states, and that the former are the origin of the latter, is an idea that we can trace as far back as the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander. Thus, for instance, Plato: Wherever they apply, [real oppositions/differential relations] prevent everything from adopting a definite quantity; by imposing on all actions the

76

qualification ‘stronger’ relative to ‘gentler’ or the reverse, they procure a ‘more or less’ while doing away with all definite quantity … [But] once they take on a definite quantity, they [are] no longer hotter and colder. The hotter and equally the colder are always in flux and never remain, while definite quantity means standstill and the end of all progression. The upshot of this argument is that the hotter, together with its opposite, turn out to be unlimited. 56

What Plato is pointing out here is a fundamental asymmetry between two regimes. Particular bodies might be called hot or cold, the quality of coldness or hotness that we attribute to them corresponding to the determinate quantum of temperature established by the real opposition between their temperature and ours. Yet the relation ‘hotter and colder’ is not the relation between this or that particular body, this or that determinate quantity, but the intensive difference considered in itself. Once it is expressed in particular bodies, that difference is of course the condition for any determinate quantity; in that regard, it is a principle of change, preventing everything ‘from adopting a definite quantity’ permanently. In itself, however, it is not the relation between two things or quanta , but ‘unlimited’ in the sense that it is a pure relation of ‘more and less’ – an intensive dyad extending indefinitely in two directions. In Gilbert Simondon’s words: as Plato remarked, every realised quality appears as though inserted, according to a measure, in an indefinite dyad of contrary and absolute qualities; qualities go by pairs of opposites, and this bipolarity is given to every existing being as a permanent possibility of orientation … 57

The distinction between logical and real opposition, contradiction and indefinite dyad, explains why I said earlier that thinking oppositions as exclusive disjunctions was doing so ‘abstractly’. Specifically, the abstraction lies in treating ‘absolute qualities’, which only indicate the two opposing directions in which an indefinite dyad stretches (‘more or less’), as if they were actual entities between which one could, and in fact should, decide. Opting for ‘horizontality’ or ‘verticality’ in absolute terms is like choosing ‘the cold in itself ’ or ‘the hot in itself ’ – when ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ exist only as definite quantities arising from differences in vectors or intensities, and the qualities that describe any single thing at any given time are only the balance of the differential relations acting on it. What exists is ‘never this or

77

that isolated element [or quality], but only mixtures; … the individual being is no longer an absolute unity, but the stability of a relation’. 58 What does mediation mean in this case? Whereas logical opposition demands a logical solution – the construction of a third term as the synthesis in which the first two are somehow made compatible – what we have here is something else. If every ‘realised quality’ (our sensation of hot or cold, light or heavy) is a definite quantity individuated from an indefinite dyad (hotter and colder, lighter and heavier) by the interaction of really existing forces, mediation is not a problem that can be solved, not even in principle, once and for all. If forms are but the temporary, more or less fragile stability of the relations that compose them, the balance between forces is the more fundamental problem. And, since that balance changes over time, under the action of internal tendencies as well as outside factors, the object of mediation ought to be the forces themselves, not form. No form could, in and of itself, be a one-size-fits-all solution, even if some forms are preferable to others owing to the balances they afford. Each situation demands an answer appropriate to that situation , to the balance verified at that moment . Neither a choice for this or that quality in absolute nor a form ‘discovered at last’, an answer is a definite quantum of force that tilts the existing balance in the desired direction. It is not just that every organisational form is only ever good for a determinate end, in determinate circumstances , there being none that would be good absolutely. 59 In its existence over time, as the forces that act on it change, every form necessarily faces questions of the ‘how much?’ type: how much autonomy? how much coordination? how much planning? how much spontaneity? This should make it clear why, even though mediation is said here to take place between ‘absolute qualities’, this is in no way a doctrine of the golden mean. The ‘balance’ that each intervention seeks is defined according to goals that vary from case to case and situation to situation. (Thus, for example, the Marxist idea of revolution stressed centralisation at first and decentralisation afterwards.) As the desired effect and the balance of forces on which one acts are both subject to change, there can be no absolute golden mean. 60 In some conditions, even excess might be the right measure. 61 That is in fact the idea behind Lenin’s image of ‘bending 78

the stick’, just as it also is the insight with which Machiavelli effectively broke with the Ancients’ conception of politics. 62 If he taught that the Prince must learn not to be good, it was not just because he was ‘the first to visualise the rise of a purely secular realm whose laws and principles of action were independent of the teachings of the Church … and of moral standards’. 63 This realm, as the examples that Machiavelli borrows from Antiquity show, had always been present, even if disavowed. It was above all because he understood that asking oneself about the ‘right conduct’ in absolute terms is not only a moral (or theological) question, rather than a political one, but a potentially disastrous way of approaching practice. Because it is about relations of forces, politics has no room for the always right or the absolutely correct ; if circumstances change and the methods remain the same, the most likely result is ruin. 64 It is for that reason that virtù , for Machiavelli, was not on the same plane as virtues (mercifulness, generosity), but rather like the faculty tasked with moderating their use: the capacity to determine when, how and in what proportion to employ them. ‘The moment, the measure and the means’ are crucial. 65 For ‘it is enough to take one little step farther — a step that might seem to be in the same direction — and truth turns into error.’ 66 Thus understood, mediation can in no way be reduced to a form; it exists as activity, constant exercise, dynamic equilibrium of forces . Since it mediates between absolute qualities that negate one another, it also necessarily presents itself in the form of trade-offs. An increase in autonomy of the parts entails a loss in coordination for the whole, centralisation might accelerate decision-making but weaken democratic control, emphasis on a group identity boosts cohesion but turns potential allies away, and so forth. We can say that these qualities, all of which are to some extent desirable, are mutually exclusive. Yet they are so precisely not as logical contradictions, which would force us to find their synthesis or to opt for one over its opposite, but as real oppositions, which means that they must be balanced or dosed. To say that they cancel each other, in this case, is to say that they always coexist to some degree , in mixtures that contain one and the other in greater or lesser proportion. And if it is impossible to have everything at once (maximum identity and maximum openness, maximum centralisation 79

and maximum democracy, maximum autonomy and maximum coordination …), it is necessary to have them in different measures at different points, balanced according to the needs of the occasion. We have thus moved from organisation as form to organising as mediating . Yet ‘mediating’, like ‘organising’, has something of a bad reputation. To many, it suggests the image of moderate negotiators pressing a radicalised base to accept compromises instead of pursuing their goals to the end. More generally, it tends to be associated with a vertical relation: the thing that leaders do to manage divisions within their base or between their base and other forces. It therefore tends to bring to mind a combination of authoritarianism and reformist pragmatism, something like the top-down art of reconciling ultimately contradictory interests. This, however, is to revert to the same kind of associative thinking that, as in the confusion between organisation and the party, takes one particular form a thing can take and makes it synonymous with the thing itself. The concept of mediation has a much broader extension than the cases listed above. If organising supposes mediating, in fact, the field of application of the latter must be as a broad as the former’s: there is mediation everywhere there is ‘an organisational process, proceeding through the struggle of opposing forces’. 67 It is not only that an organised order is the mediation of determinism and indeterminism, openness and closure, (total) chaos and (absolute) necessity. Each existing thing mediates between opposing forces, it is that mediation for as long as it lasts. All things organise themselves by continuously mediating between outside (the forces that impinge on it) and inside (the complex of elements that combine in a certain organisation). To be and remain organised is a matter of the ‘relationship between the activities which are being organized and the resistances they are directed against’. 68 To the extent that each thing is the bearer of forces, interactions among things can push them into striking new mediations between inside and outside; if each thing is a relation of forces, each relation between things is ‘a relation between two relations’, 69 and it is on that account that things can modify one another. In that sense, we could say that things ‘mediate’ one another all the time: by causing some other thing to change, they mediate between two different states of that thing while undergoing 80

some change of their own in turn. ‘Vertical’ mediation is therefore the exception more than the rule. It is simply not the case that people only change and adapt when made to do so ‘from above’. Consciously and unconsciously, they are constantly adjusting, finding common ground, learning how to deal with differences or to see things from one another’s perspectives. Such lateral mediations are, in fact, a prerequisite for any successful process of political composition. The latter are only possible on condition that some degree of vulnerability and openness to change exists on all sides – even if, like the porcupines in Schopenhauer’s parable, people have to keep ‘moving together and apart … until they [discover] just the right distance to preserve them’ from the twin evils of losing one’s autonomy to others and failing to expand one’s potentia by cooperating with them. 70 The rejection of mediation on the grounds of its misconception as an exclusively vertical relation is at the heart of a striking paradox in much contemporary radical thought: the fact that a wish to affirm the primacy of relations (the idea that ‘everything is connected’ and constituted by its connections) exists side by side with a powerful demand for immediacy (the idea that all mediation should be eliminated and differences should express themselves as they exist ‘in themselves’). I hope it will be clear, by now, that these two desires are in contradiction. As we saw in the previous chapter, it would be senseless (and self-defeating) to expect people not to act on one another at however large or small a scale, and it is impossible ever to ensure that everybody will have the same power of influence as everybody else. What one can do, on the other hand, is strive to ensure that relations remain as reciprocal as possible – to reconcile autonomy and composition, variety and order, the potentia of the whole and that of its parts. Finally, to say that organisation supposes mediation is not to say it that it requires every mediation. Logically contradictory interests do exist, and although that does not mean that contradictions cannot be managed over time, to do so with real intent implies pushing in the long term towards the victory of one side at the expense of the other. This is why learning how to draw a boundary – defining what interests and desires can or cannot be made compatible, who is to be treated as a comrade or an adversary, what 81

the absolute limits of one’s compositional efforts are – is a central question for movements, even when conceived ecologically.

82

3

Revolution in Crisis

__________________________

Today, everything is supposed to be practice

and at the same time, there is no concept of practice.

Time for Revolution

Theodor Adorno

The question of revolutionary organisation, Lukács once said, ‘can only be developed organically from a theory of revolution itself ’. 1 Yet it may well be the case, as Alain Badiou has suggested, that the very idea of revolution has been in crisis for some time. 2 Not that it was ever a simple idea whose content could be made entirely explicit. Rather, ‘revolution’ has always been a constellation of historically accumulated assumptions, beliefs, lived experiences, images and affective associations, some in tension with one another, within which certain elements came to be dominant over time. This chapter outlines a history of this constellation from the early modernity to the present in order to argue that the crisis of revolution in our times follows from the abandonment of at least three of those elements: a teleological, deterministic conception of history; the projection of a transitive relation between social objectivity and political subjectivity; and the hope for a clean breakthrough which the revolutionary subject remodels the world according to an idea. It is hard to find those today who would expect revolution to happen out of historical necessity, a revolutionary subjectivity to develop naturally among this or that social group, or a single political actor to be able to unilaterally impose a form on the matter of the world. Yet it is also true that, without the assurances that these three beliefs offered, the prospect of revolution has become more doubtful, even as the word became perhaps ever more ubiquitous rhetorically. 83

The idea of revolution as we know it is fairly recent. It started to coalesce in the eighteenth century as the very word ‘revolution’ was wrested from its original meaning and placed at the heart of a conception of time that was opposed to the two temporal models that had been dominant in European Antiquity and the Middle Ages: the physical (cyclical temporality) and the theological (eschatological temporality). Christian eschatology was the background against which time was lived throughout the Middle Ages, and the expectation of an imminent end of times cast a shadow that at once dwarfed earthly politics and made it into the stage on which a drama of a much higher order unfolded with lumbering inevitability. Cyclical temporality, on the other hand, was the background for the original sense of revolutio , which does not figure in Classical Latin but was already in circulation from the fifth century onwards. Like its synonym conversio , the term referred to rotation, circular motion, movement around an axis – as in the stars, the seasons, the Wheel of Fortune or the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis). The notion that matters of politics are thinkable in terms of cycles of development and degeneration can be traced back to Ancient Greece, but it made a powerful comeback in the Renaissance with the discovery, translation and publication of chapter 6 of Polybius’ Histories . 3 In that long-lost text, the Greek historian discussed the doctrine of anakyklosis politeion , according to which every political community is destined to go through a circular sequence of political systems in alternating virtuous and perverted forms: monarchy followed by tyranny followed by aristocracy followed by oligarchy, and so on. While sources for that idea can be found in Plato and Aristotle, Polybius elevated it to the rank of a natural law. At the same time, he singled out the Roman Republic as a state that had managed to arrest the turning wheel by combining in a mixed constitution the three uncorrupted forms of monarchy (the consuls), aristocracy (the senate) and democracy (the assemblies). These two temporal models were at once the framework through which people organised and interpreted their ordinary experience of time and something sustained and reinforced by that experience itself. To borrow Reinhart Koselleck’s terms, the horizon of expectation of the medieval world 84

never promised anything exceeding the space of experience of present and past generations. Change, though it of course still happened, took place so slowly that nobody could ever anticipate any major upheavals or surprises. Cyclical and eschatological temporality were thus ultimately compatible to the extent that they had different domains of application (the worldly and the otherworldly) and shared the same attitude towards the future. Regardless of whether it brought the looming end times or only repetition, what was to come bore no novelty or deviation from the already known. That began to change at the dawn of modernity, when a sequence of precipitating transformations and unforeseeable events – the Reformation, the conquest of the Americas, the scientific revolution, the emergence of capitalism and the breakdown of the feudal system, the rise of cities and the bourgeoisie – conspired to tear a gap between experience and expectation. As Koselleck observes, it is exactly this shift in the relation to time that gives rise to the very idea of modernity as a new period that humankind had entered. ‘ Neuzeit [modernity] is first understood as a neue Zeit [a new age] from the time that expectations have distanced themselves evermore from all previous experience.’ 4 The future was no longer contained in the past; it could no longer be foretold by previous knowledge. From then on it would be the bearer not only of the new, but of a newness potentially beyond anything that the present could reasonably anticipate. It is in this context that ‘revolution’ started to acquire a new meaning. Early modern uses of the term are doubly ambiguous in that it is often unclear whether the events referred to are understood as a new development or a return to an earlier state, and whether their causes are strictly human or involve some higher power or law. 5 In the course of the eighteenth century, however, the idea of revolution as a sudden change in political regime became increasingly independent from the old, astronomical sense of the word, even as the two still coexisted. By the end of the century, their separation was complete, and it was without cyclical associations that ‘revolution’ became the name of political events (the American Revolution, the French Revolution) and of a certain attitude (being a revolutionary). By then, the word had been definitively incorporated into the idea of an open historical time with an ‘irreversible direction’ 6 – one that moves forward 85

not only by means of gradual steps, but also through radical breaks with the past that inaugurate a new age. This change indicates that a new temporal scheme had already supplanted the previously dominant ones. In the making since the beginning of modernity, this was a break at once with the physical model’s circular motion and with an eschatology whose linear temporality resolved itself in a heavenly afterworld. Circularity was now subordinated to the straight line, but a straight line that unfolded in this world rather than the next. The modern idea of Progress was thus born. The objective of possible completeness, previously attainable only in the Hereafter, henceforth served the idea of improvement on earth and made it possible for the doctrine of the Final Days to be superseded by the hazards of an open future … Henceforth history could be regarded as a long-term process of growing fulfilment which, despite setbacks and deviations, was ultimately planned and carried out by men themselves. The objectives were then transferred from one generation to the next, and the effects anticipated by plan or prognosis became the titles of legitimation of political action. 7

Revolutions, and the French Revolution in particular, had a major role to play both within this model and in establishing its dominance. For those who did so in the mid to late eighteenth century, siding with the revolution meant understanding human history as a single narrative unified and animated by a common underlying project, and revolution as the way it moved forward. This provided the idea of revolution not only with a prognostic and programmatic value, but also shed light on past events like the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England and the scientific revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 8 On the other hand, the new conception of revolution and the temporal model of which it was a part could not have gained traction if the political upheavals of the late eighteenth century had not provided what looked like firm evidence of their actuality. By lending ‘epic unity to the whole’ 9 of hitherto existing history, the French Revolution retrospectively created the history of which it was the provisional culmination, while also showing the forward march of Progress to be punctuated by moments of rupture like itself. Koselleck draws attention to the fact that, as social and political differences were condensed into a binary opposition against the Ancien 86

Régime, a parallel movement of lexical ‘singularization and simplification’ took place: the infinite plurality of historical events was fused into a single History, ‘Freedom took the place of freedoms, Justice that of rights and servitudes, Progress that of progressions ( les progrès , the plural) and from the diversity of revolutions, “The Revolution” emerged’. 10 Singular and plural at the same time, ‘the Revolution’ thus named at once the kind of rupture with the past of which the French Revolution was the paradigmatic case and the broader world-historical process that encompassed all such moments. In this way, the fate of particular events in the present or the future could be tied immediately to the fate of humankind as a whole; the Revolution was at stake in, and therefore also a source of legitimation for, every revolutionary act. While this characterisation of modern temporality and the role of revolution is correct in its broad outlines, a few refinements are necessary. A number of nuances would develop from the end of the eighteenth century onwards regarding the general direction of the march of Progress, the place of revolutionary change in it, and the temporal structure that this relation supposed. They would help define some of the most important lines of fracture of the nineteenth and twentieth century. The revolution that had been anticipated by eighteenth century Enlighteners had a precise content: it denoted a break with absolutism and aristocratic privileges, constitutionalism, the separation of powers and a system of checks and balances, the enshrinement of individual liberties and political participation (for some). ‘Revolution’ was thus essentially a concept of political change, in line with the meaning of the older expressions that the word had come to replace ( mutatio res publicae, mutazione di stato ). ‘The Revolution’, in turn, was the process through which that change, repeating itself across different nations, would spread across the world. That means, however, that once the American and the French Revolutions had confirmed those expectations, revolution was in a certain sense something that already belonged to the past. Rather than any major breakthroughs or political innovations, what could be projected from that point on was the dissemination of essentially the same political form: the modern constitutional state. As far as the political sphere was 87

concerned, the radical excess of expectation over experience no longer applied; the shape of the politics to come was for the most part contained in the experience of the recent past. Of course, the relative stability of these political forms ‘at last discovered’ did not preclude their indefinite perfectibility, or that of the society they sustained: its material welfare, the individual freedom and fulfilment of its citizens, and so on. Humankind still advanced towards a plenitude forever asymptotically approached; it was just that the institutional tracks of its progress were supposed to have already been laid once and for all. As a result, the expectation of radical novelty was gradually displaced from the field of politics onto areas like commerce, industry and technology; only from these could the novel and unforeseen be expected. Future revolutions would be technological, economic, financial, cultural, but only ever produce the same kind of institutions – anything else coming to be seen with suspicion as a potential deviation or backward relapse from the path of the Revolution. 11 In this response to the events of the late eighteenth century we find a liberal vision of history that is still familiar, indeed dominant, to this day. The idea of ‘social revolution’ emerged in opposition to this reduction of revolution to the political arena. It presented itself as continuous with the age of political change initiated by the events in France, but it sought to extend the revolutionary impetus into the reorganisation of the economy and of social life as a whole. Only in this way could one bring to completion a process which those revolutions whose ideas ‘were of politics only’ 12 could not but leave unfinished. Thus, when the members of the Conspiracy of the Equals spread placards across the streets of Paris with an ‘Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf, Tribune of the People’ on 11 April 1796, these read: X. The goal of the revolution is to destroy inequality and to re-establish the well-being of all. XI. The revolution is not over, because the rich absorb all the wealth and rule alone while the poor labour like veritable slaves, languish in poverty and count as nothing in the state. 13

The characterisation of social revolution as a secularisation of religious eschatology is something of a commonplace. 14 While that is an undeniable component of the revolutionary tradition, the picture is a little more 88

complex, and perhaps less dissimilar from the ‘open historicity’ and ‘indefinite governmentality’ of liberalism. 15 True, that tradition tends to imagine the post-revolutionary world as politically stable and unchanging, with contradictions losing their antagonist edge and any risk of a relapse into pre-revolutionary ways ceasing to exist after a while. That, however, is not incompatible with faith in continuous Progress. Thus, for example, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward associated the socialist future with a time of fabulous technological developments that the social revolution was the only means to unlock. The same confidence could be turned to the human material itself, as in Trotsky’s famous remark that under communism man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical … The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise. 16

Of course, some visions of the world after the social revolution – from Charles Fourier’s and William Morris’s to, more darkly, the Khmer Rouge’s – were indeed closer to prelapsarian agrarian idylls than to mechanised utopias. However, what we find in most of the revolutionary tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is not a capitulation to medieval eschatology but the thoroughly modern commitment to an open historicity in which politics, but not other areas, attained a steady state after the revolution. The need for political change, and politics itself in a sense, might disappear as ‘people become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse’ 17 and ‘the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production’. 18 But the irrepressible forces of Progress would continue their work elsewhere, in culture, technology and so forth – just as in the liberal position outlined above, therefore, except for one important distinction. Whereas for the latter the revolution that inaugurated an age of unforeseeable wonders in a sense already lay in the past, for the social revolutionary tradition the revolution was something yet to come. 19 After the separation between political and social revolution, two further issues would divide the tradition that took up the banner of the latter. The 89

first was whether the social revolution could be achieved by gradual, evolutionary means, or whether it required a revolutionary break in order to be produced. This alternative would oppose ‘utopians’ like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and Étienne Cabet both to insurrectionist socialists like Louis Auguste Blanqui and to Marxists and anarchists. 20 The second division, which generally accounts for the rift between Marxists and anarchists, was whether a revolutionary break necessarily involved a political revolution, hence some kind of passage through the state apparatus, or whether that apparatus ought to be abolished right away so as to exorcise any possibility of a relapse into domination. When spelled out, several elements of the idea of (social and political) revolution as it evolved from the eighteenth to the twentieth century are a source of estrangement today. Put under the scrutiny of the dashed hopes and destructive consequences they inspired, criticised both theoretically and at the practical level, they have become alien to us: unpersuasive, implausible, improbable. In the next sections, I focus on those I believe are the three most important among these elements. If we can find them in their clearest, purest form in the Marxist–Leninist theory of revolution, which would become the most influential one in the twentieth century, they are nonetheless present to some extent in most theories that have the modern idea of revolution as a common matrix – or have failed to reflexively examine what they draw from it.

From Necessity to Contingency

Perhaps no one had a more intense relationship to the modern horizon of expectations than the revolutionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To be a revolutionary in that period was to almost constantly perceive oneself as ‘living on the eve of great events’, 21 and though that confidence no doubt saw its share of ups and downs, it was probably only from the mid-1970s on that it would fade away for good. Faith in the irreversible march of human Progress, as we have seen, was integral to how modernity lived and grasped historical time, and as such also to the revolutionary tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Marxism, with its claims to a predictive power based on a knowledge of the 90

laws of historical development – grounding eighteenth-century Providence in nineteenth-century Science, as it were – was in many ways the culmination of that lineage. Given that political discourse is always a hybrid, unstable fusion of analysis and persuasion, it is impossible to say how much of that trust was genuine and how much of it was a self-induced fervour designed to sustain the commitment of militant life. 22 (In itself, that distinction would of course be senseless to a true believer.) Still, it is hard not to feel today that people once believed more than we do. 23 A strong notion of historical necessity has become so foreign to most people as to be nearly incomprehensible. Georges Canguilhem ventured in 1987 that the idea of Progress had begun to fade when the second law of thermodynamics, by identifying the tendency for the total entropy of an isolated system to increase over time, suggested instead the idea of a spontaneous, universal movement towards decay and disorganisation. 24 Thinkers from Condorcet and Kant to Hegel and Comte had based their forecasts of humankind’s uninterrupted advancement on the everlasting stability of the Newtonian cosmos, conceiving progress as the development of eternal order itself. Any retrograde movement was thus, in principle, explainable as a temporary blip or a cunning detour allowing Reason to leap even farther forward. With Carnot, Clausius and Kelvin, however, the nineteenth century discovered in the very source of its technical dynamism – the steam engine – an irreversible propension for loss, decline, stasis, death. Still, it would be some time until that idea seeped into the culture as a whole. Even thinkers well-read in the science of their time, like Marx, Herbert Spencer and Henri Bergson, would fail to realise its implications. Despite the short-lived euphoria that (for very different reasons) animated capitalists and socialists in the 1920s, the first half of the twentieth century definitely saw things take a more pessimistic turn. Different as they are from each other, the works of Spengler, Heidegger and Freud – who certainly also had the mounting social tensions, revolutionary stirrings and military traumas of their time in mind – are indicative of this inflection. By bringing home the violence whose displacement to the colonies had been a condition for the flourishing of Europe, the rise of fascism, the Second 91

World War and the Holocaust offered forceful evidence that history could go backwards as much as forwards, and that it was perfectly possible to lose what one thought had been definitively gained. This realisation, combined with the conviction that the opening for world revolution had been missed forever, would be central to the thought of someone like Adorno. 25 In the post-war years, a slow but steady divorce between Progress and Revolution began to take shape. Despite the nuclear standoff between the two global superpowers, the 1950s and 1960s were generally an upbeat period, buoyed by economic growth, modernising social changes, technological advances and the spread of mass consumption. Not coincidentally, it was the heyday of futurology, when the likes of Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan enjoyed a mass audience. Faith in the revolution, on the other hand, survived mostly by being geographically displaced from the capitalist core. As the Soviet bloc became a growing source of disillusionment, especially after the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and Communist parties in the West became increasingly timid, revolutionary or radical reformist hopes found a new home in the periphery: in African and Asian independence movements, Cuba and Vietnam, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Chile, and even ‘the Third World within’, as with the Black Panthers in the United States. It was not only the futurologists predicting technological, managerial and postindustrial revolutions who believed that social conflict had become a thing of the past in the global North: many on the left thought the same. The wave of militant mobilisation that spanned the globe from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s offered a glimpse of different possibilities for a short, breathless moment. Its ebb and defeat, however, followed by the triumphant rise of neoliberalism and, finally, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, all contributed not only to take revolution off the agenda, but to make the idea of its historical inevitability almost impossible to seriously sustain. By contrast, the idea of indefinite Progress staggered on, zombie-like. Even today, it still enjoys some kind of residual existence regardless of the evidence stacked against it, not least the prospect of ecological collapse and the limits that imposes on economic growth as we know it. Wheeled out by politicians and ideologues from time to time, it increasingly feels like 92

something that people convince themselves they believe in for sheer lack of anything – not least a revolution – to put in its place. Not that the historical necessity of revolution ever went entirely unchallenged, even within the Marxist camp. As early as the 1890s, observing that some of Marx’s key predictions had not come to pass, Eduard Bernstein argued that a theory aspiring to the status of science could not legitimately sustain, in light of the available evidence, that capitalistic collapse and revolution were inevitable and imminent. The elements that Bernstein decried as unscientific in Marxism were no less than a pillar of historical materialism (the dialectic) and one of the bases for its scientific pretensions (determinism). He regarded both as external, a prioristic simplifications of empirical complexity that could not but result in ‘arbitrary constructions’ and ‘improbable deductions’. 26 If ‘an effect which results from the operation of diverse forces can only be counted on with certainty if all the forces are exactly known and are given their full weight’, 27 a truly scientific outlook must recognise that so-called ‘laws’ of economic development are in reality only tendencies subject to the action of countervailing forces. They may be the most important, but are not the only forces to determine the course of history. This rejection of the unilateral determination of history and superstructure by the economic base would of course go on to be one of the prominent features of so-called ‘Western Marxism’, finding in Althusser one of its clearest proponents: ‘the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state … From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the “last instance” never comes.’ 28 What stands out in Bernstein’s critique, however, is how much he is still operating within modern historicity. His antideterminism flounders against the tension between denying the necessity of collapse and affirming the necessity of progress. Belief in the possibility of a gradual, peaceful transition to socialism ultimately hardens into a faith as immune to empirical falsification as the ‘theory of catastrophe’ he criticised. The direction of the process is ‘unmistakable’, 29 even if ‘the general course of development does not rule out periodic setbacks’ 30 and ‘temporary reactionary convulsions’. 31 In the end, what Bernstein does when he abandons Marxist teleology is to fall back on liberal teleology: emancipation 93

results from the infinite perfectibility of state and economy within the framework set by the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. No wonder, then, that he should proclaim socialism as the ‘legitimate heir of liberalism’. 32 By the mid twentieth century, however, it was the tenability of teleology in general that had come into question. More than the historical reasons listed above, or the second law of thermodynamics, two major scientific developments of the nineteenth century were decisive in this process. The revolution initiated by Ludwig Boltzmann in the 1870s with the creation of statistical mechanics replaced the deterministic cosmos of Newton and Laplace, in which the future would be perfectly calculable to an intellect aware of the present position of every particle, with the image of a probabilistic universe that left a large margin for contingency. In turn, Charles Darwin dealt a deadly blow to the last refuge of teleology (the argument from design) by specifying a principle (natural selection) that explained how increasingly complex and variously adapted forms could develop out of simpler ones without the intervention of an intelligent creator. As if that were not enough, the twentieth century would see a growing chorus of anthropologists and voices from the post-colonial world criticise the unilineal notion of Progress that relegated some living, breathing humans to the past of humankind while making others into a universal standard. 33 Claude Lévi-Strauss was already speaking from within a space constituted by these transformations when he wrote in 1962 that the so-called men of the Left still cling to a period of contemporary history which bestowed the blessing of a congruence between practical imperatives and schemes of interpretation. Perhaps this golden age of historical consciousness has already passed; and that this eventuality can at any rate be envisaged proves that what we have here is only a contingent context … 34

Historical ‘facts’, he would argue, are not self-evident, but the result of selection and constitution. ‘History’ is always ‘history-for’, 35 history as seen from a certain perspective. It follows that the historical consciousness of Humankind , from which the whole of history could be totalised, can never be more than one situated perspective elevating itself to the condition of a 94

God’s eye view – passing its own partial self-consciousness for the selfconsciousness of the Whole. Each of the tens or hundreds of thousands of societies which have existed side by side in the world or succeeded one another … has claimed that it contains the essence of all the meaning and dignity of which human society is capable … But whether in their case or our own, a good deal of egocentricity and naïvety is necessary to believe that man has taken refuge in a single one of the historical or geographical modes of his existence. 36

More than fifteen years later, while defending the irreducibility of revolt vis-à-vis history, law and rational choice, Foucault would also speak in the past tense of an ‘age of “revolution”’: ‘for two hundred years this idea overshadowed history, organized our perception of time, and polarized people’s hopes’. 37 His defence of the irreducibility of revolt, however, suggested that this age was already over. By then, the crisis of Marxism had ‘exploded’ for good; as Althusser recalled hearing from a group of workers from a former autonomist stronghold in Italy, ‘something [had] “snapped” in the history of the labour movement’, making it impossible to integrate past and present, and rendering the future unsure. 38 To many, as with Bernstein earlier, losing that formidable promise meant reverting to the hope of indefinite perfectibility offered by liberal humanism, which would find in Francis Fukuyama its most articulate post–Cold War publicist. Others drew bolder consequences, realising that the problem lay not with this or that teleological account, but with a conception of history that made such accounts possible. Few were as blunt as Alain Badiou when he wrote in 1982: ‘history does not exist’. 39 As Bernstein before him, Badiou thus discarded two tenets of Marxism in one fell swoop: history understood as a totality that can be grasped by reason, and the idea of totality itself. To say that any collection of historical ‘facts’ has no meaning outside of the symbolic operation that organises it in this or that way, Badiou would later make clear, was a way to ‘combat’ the confusion between the symbolic and the real that had allowed Marxists to anticipate a real fusion between the idea of communism and historical truth: a future moment of completion that could justify any excess or retreat here and now. 40 To abandon the idea of a History whose full arc we could know and master was therefore to immunise political 95

thought and practice against the dangers of aspiring to the omniscient perspective of a ‘Tribunal of History’. 41 Of course, to say that we cannot affirm the inevitability of revolution is not to say it cannot happen. (It is not even to say that it is not inevitable: even if it were, it would be impossible for us to know.) Nonetheless, to assume the contingency of history and the limits of our capacity to predict the future is certainly the more consistent option in the light of both contemporary science and the experiences of the last two centuries. What is more, the present threat of climate change suggests the possibility that, even if world revolution were inevitable, humankind might simply run out of time before its hour arrives. 42

From Transitivity to Composition

Most people would agree that there is some transitive relation between the positions people occupy within social structure (class, age, race, gender, etc.) and the ideas that they have: the former implies the latter in some way. We could construe this relation in probabilistic terms and say that, since social position entails material circumstances that make some experiences more likely than others, it raises the probability that individuals will have the beliefs, dispositions and values that those experiences tend to elicit and reinforce. What I am calling ‘transitivity’ here, however, is a stronger thesis than that; unsurprisingly, it predates the probabilistic revolution introduced by statistical mechanics. It refers to the idea that there is a deterministic connection between social structure and revolutionary subjectivity in the sense that some social groups, by virtue of their structural position, are both endowed with a unique capacity to transform that structure and determined to become politically conscious and active . Obviously, socialists always sought a social base for their ideas. Some, like Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon, addressed themselves to businessmen and political leaders, identifying those with greater access to the levers of power as the ones who could help materialise their schemes. SaintSimonism in particular had a strong middle-class following at one point. On the other hand, as artisans and highly skilled labourers were among the first to find themselves threatened by industrial capitalism, it was among them that Owen, Fourier, Proudhon, Étienne Cabet, Wilhelm Weitling, 96

Mikhail Bakunin and Marx found their first enthusiastic audiences. Transitivity, however, turns a question of immediate political expediency (‘where can our ideas find a constituency to mobilise?’) into a problem of a different order. Whereas expediency might fluctuate, transitivity is a matter of identifying a historical necessity: not ‘who should one try to organise?’ but ‘which class, by its very nature, is the revolutionary class? Who are the people that we can know will make the revolution?’ Marx arrived at the conclusion that the industrial proletariat would be the agent of universal emancipation by way of three deductions. The earliest, logico-conceptual one, dates back to 1844’s ‘Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, when he first discovered the proletariat. This was Marx still arguing as a Young Hegelian, even as he started to settle his philosophical accounts with idealism: what guides the argument is the logical movement of the concepts themselves rather than reference to empirical reality. It is the proletariat’s very destitution that makes it universal, since, deprived of all property and reduced to the bare capacity to work, it has no particularity to defend against the interests of other classes. A revolution led by the proletariat is therefore not a revolution to replace one class power with another, but to abolish all classes, and to emancipate not a particular group but all humankind. Only those who have no property can put an end to private property; only those who have no part in the existing world can erase its partitioning. This, however, only tells us that the proletariat is by right the only force that could produce universal emancipation; it does not guarantee it has the power to do so. This is the job of a second, historico-materialist deduction, which follows from the immanent tendencies of capitalism itself: with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more … Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. 43

Yet it is still not enough to know that the proletariat can make the revolution; it is necessary to know that it will . It was this final task that transitivity was called to fulfil. Making the development of the proletariat’s 97

revolutionary consciousness a part of the necessary unfolding of things themselves ensured that workers would gradually become aware of their historical role and be ready for it when the hour of capitalism’s final collapse came. Transitivity provided assurance that the proletariat’s collective consciousness not only would accumulate and develop over time, but would do so in a necessary direction. These three steps – a position of universality determined by social structure, a capacity determined by historical development, a consciousness determined by accumulated collective experience – give us the full breadth of transitivity. It is true that, as with historical determinism, this was not necessarily the final word for Marxism. As we shall see in the next section, there was an ambivalence surrounding both beliefs that came from a tension at the very heart of Marx’s doctrine. Nonetheless, as I argue in the next chapter, even to this day, and even as it is consciously criticised, transitivity is often still found to be operative as a source of political analysis and leverage, not just within the Marxist tradition but beyond. It was inevitable that, as teleology came into question, so would transitivity. That process took place in two steps. The first, starting in the 1960s, was based on empirical evidence. Many had begun to identify a growing conservatism among the traditional working class, its trade unions and parties. At the same time, new social actors had come to the fore with their own challenges to the existing order: students, women, Black people, the counterculture … Should these be seen as at best auxiliary, and at worst detrimental, to the industrial proletariat’s revolutionary mission, even when the latter appeared to shun it? Should the proletariat still be accorded the central role in revolutionary politics? Should one still expect it to fulfil its historical mission? Herbert Marcuse, for example, would echo objections raised by Bakunin against Marx and Engels a century earlier: underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not. 44

98

Around the same time, Frantz Fanon was bringing the post-colonial experience to bear on the same kind of problem. 45 The explosion of 1968 and its ramifications across the world reinforced this questioning. In 1972, Michel Foucault still envisaged a division of labour where all of those who fought power ‘on their own terrain’, according to their own methods and objectives – ‘women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals’ – were natural allies in the struggle against exploitation led by the proletariat, ‘because power is exercised the way it is in order to maintain capitalist exploitation’. 46 Eight years later, however, Deleuze and Guattari would announce: ‘Ours is becoming the age of minorities.’ 47 Whereas the shrinking industrial proletariat corresponded to a standard – ‘the national Worker, qualified, male and over thirty-five’ 48 –, it was from the unclassifiable excesses produced by capitalism even as it tried to incorporate everything into its axiomatic that one could expect a force capable of upsetting existing power structures, perhaps even geopolitical equilibrium. 49

In the same year, André Gorz spoke of a ‘non-class of non-workers’ as the ‘stratum that experiences its work as an externally imposed obligation in which “you waste your life to earn your living” ’. 50 Their goal was the abolition of work rather than its appropriation, and as such they ‘prefigure[d] the future world’. 51 Similar themes had been developing within Italian operaismo , which used the tools of Marxism to interpret the fact that, even in militant 1970s Italy, protagonism seemed to be moving away from the industrial ‘mass worker’. The operaisti had since the early 1960s used the term ‘social factory’ to indicate that the subsumption of all areas of life by capital increasingly meant that ‘the whole of society becomes an articulation of production’. 52 Yet that promise of a conception of capitalist valorisation and the proletariat going beyond the immediate process of production was counteracted by a narrow focus on factory work, and advanced industry more specifically. 53 In the mid-1970s, however, Toni Negri would start claiming that capitalist restructuring, in its attempt to diminish the power of an increasingly militant working class, had only managed to increase the socialisation of labour outside the factory, building a corps of ‘socialised 99

workers’ that enveloped the mass worker in a broader, more diverse proletariat. While this formulation was almost immediately criticised for assuming a common identity yet to be constructed, and flattening out the differences among the motley sectors it lumped together (workers in big and small factories, in the circulation and service sectors, in blue and white collar jobs; the unemployed, youth, feminists), some would nonetheless see it as partially confirmed by Italy’s ‘Movement of 1977’. The soberer assessments of that period, like Sergio Bologna’s, also recognised that the shifting ground of class composition had produced new political actors and behaviours, even if they lamented the disappearance of the kinds of collective organisation characteristic of the mass worker in favour of everything from absenteeism to the liberation of personal desires, from the worker who comes out as gay, to the worker who sits down and smokes dope. What has happened is that the organised forms of the rejection of work have been fragmented, and that rejection of work has now been taken up at an individual level … but these individuals no longer have the factory as the organisational base of their political practice and their ‘cultural’ existence: rather, they operate inside the Movement (or the sum of movements) of proletarian youth, of women, of homosexuals etc. 54

Nevertheless, such decentrings of the industrial proletariat might even to this day sometimes display a residual (or not so residual) attachment to the assurances of transitivity – easily switching into, or at least mimicking the form of, a search for ‘the new revolutionary subject’. The problem, to be clear, lies not in the attempt to identify the politically most sensitive spots of the social structure, nor in the effort to understand how political behaviours and demands are conditioned by actors’ position in it, both of which are fundamental tools of political analysis. They are so, however, precisely because they are indicators of where organising work is likely to produce the most results; that is, of a probability calculus. It is mistaking potential for necessity, or using an idea of who the revolutionary subject ought to be as a yardstick with which to dismiss existing processes of political subjectivation, that is problematic. It was not until the 1980s that the critique of transitivity as such began explicitly. A systematic, wide-ranging attack arrived in 1985 with Ernesto

100

Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , which opened with a forthright diagnosis: What is now in crisis is a whole conception of socialism which rests upon the ontological centrality of the working class, upon the role of Revolution … as the founding moment in the transition from one type of society to another, and upon the illusory prospect of a perfectly unitary and homogeneous collective will that will render pointless the moment of politics. The plural and multifarious character of contemporary social struggles has finally dissolved the last foundation for that political imaginary. Peopled with ‘universal’ subjects and conceptually built around History in the singular, it has postulated ‘society’ as an intelligible structure that could be intellectually mastered on the basis of certain class positions and reconstituted, as a rational, transparent order, through a founding act of a political character. Today, the Left is witnessing the final act of the dissolution of that Jacobin imaginary. 55

Laclau and Mouffe’s key category of ‘hegemonic articulation’ was meant precisely to occupy the space left vacant by the disappearance of transitivity: ‘there is no logical and necessary relation between socialist objectives and the positions of social agents in the relations of production; … the articulation between them is external and does not proceed from any natural movement’. 56 Having lost the guarantees offered by teleological necessity, politics was to fully become a matter of contingency. No social group was destined to constitute itself as a political subject, no objective determination was inherently more political than any other. Political subjects could not be expected to emerge out of ‘natural necessity’ from their position in the social structure, they had to be constructed. 57 This was what, in Laclau and Mouffe’s scheme, hegemonic articulation was called upon to do through the use of ‘empty signifiers’. Badiou was elaborating the same loss around the same time; it is from him, in fact, that I have borrowed the designation of ‘transitivity’ for the idea criticised here. 58 As Alberto Toscano has noted, the concept of ‘event’ that he began developing then had a very precise role in this elaboration: ‘allowing us to think the dysfunction of representation, the interruption of domination, without the compulsion of postulating the antecedence of the (political) subject to itself ’. 59 Political subjectivity, Badiou would now say, is not the conscious, for-itself working out of a content already given in or underneath the social structure in a latent fashion. Nothing determines 101

where it should occur, or if should occur at all. Its eruption is not a telos inscribed in things themselves, nor does it reveal anything about human fate except the arbitrariness and fundamental inconsistency behind every order. Whether the subject is the result of a hegemonic articulation or of a militant response to an unforeseeable event, what matters in both these examples is how they foreclose the possibility of an automatic passage from the objective to the subjective. In doing so, they offer a good illustration of what a politics without the assumption of transitivity might be. Political subjectivation, and the concrete forms that it can take, do not follow necessarily from a position in the structure. They are contingent and must be composed; they must be organised . Likewise, no group possesses, by virtue of its position alone, the capacity to overturn the existing order. Which is not necessarily to say that it could not develop it; but again, this is not given, it must be constructed. This entails, finally, that no group or individual is more ‘legitimate’ than any other to take political action, and there is no specific social composition that a process must have in order to be radical or revolutionary. Not, of course, that questions about that process’s reach, the content of its demands or its non-particularistic commitments cannot be asked. The point is, rather, that these cannot be deduced from mere historical forecast or sociological analysis, since what is at stake in political subjectivation is precisely a contingent excess over historical and sociological determinations.

From Hylemorphism to Complexity

Apart from the charge of reverting to eschatological thinking, the most common criticism of the idea of revolution in its dominant nineteenth-and twentieth-century guises concerns the aspiration for radical novelty. ‘The modern concept of revolution’, Hannah Arendt remarked, is ‘inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story … is about to unfold’. 60 That belief, if it will not just rely on the idea that people will spontaneously know what to do when the time comes, supposes in turn the constitution of a revolutionary subject capable of enacting rupture and initiating a new order. This, then, can easily turn into the assumption that a collective subject with an adequate 102

knowledge of what to do and the power to do it must not shirk from imposing a new form on existing social relations and the ‘human material’ that they constitute, as if they were an infinitely malleable matter. It is this latter idea, finally, that can be described as participating in a hylemorphic imaginary that pits a purely inert matter ( hyle , in Greek) against a form ( morphē ) bestowed on it unilaterally from the outside. That accusation is no doubt as old as revolutions themselves. Edmund Burke already chastised the French in 1790 for the pretension ‘to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew’. 61 It was Marxism, however, that was destined to become its main culprit, starting from as early as the 1860s, when Bakunin began denouncing what he saw as its intrinsic authoritarianism. Bakunin’s main objection was the idea, which Marx and Engels had taken from Blanqui, of a revolutionary dictatorship in which the proletariat, having taken hold of the state apparatus, used it to fight counter-revolution and implement the necessary steps towards socialism. His first argument against it concerned the mismatch between the complexity of the task and the instrument supposed to execute it: ‘where are the intellects powerful enough to embrace the infinite multiplicity and diversity of real interests, aspirations, wishes, and needs which sum up the collective will of the people?’ 62 In the end, he appeared to suggest, Marx and Engels were not too far from the SaintSimonians in their intention ‘theoretically, a priori, to construct a social paradise where all future humanity would come to rest’. 63 Like their forerunners, they failed to realise that, ‘while we might enunciate the great principles of humanity’s future development, we should leave it to the experience of the future to work out the practical realization of such principles’. 64 The second argument concerned what he saw as the inevitable result of such an attempt. The ambition ‘to invent a social organization’ like that – to ‘perform the task of chief engineer of the world revolution’ 65 – can only lead to the new order becoming ‘a Procrustean bed upon which the violence of the State will more or less overtly force unhappy society to stretch out’. 66 Finally, he related these two arguments back to a common condition: idealism. It was ‘the position … that thought precedes life, that abstract theory precedes social practice’ that led Marxists to believe that 103

‘since thought, theory, and science are, at least for the present, the property of a very few individuals, those few must be the directors of social life’ – a ‘learned minority which supposedly expresses the will of all the people’. 67 Let us leave aside the question of how fair Bakunin’s attack was. What is remarkable about it is how much it echoes the criticism that Marx and Engels themselves had made of earlier socialists. In the likes of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Proudhon, Marx and Engels rejected the idea that the social revolution could develop gradually out of the proliferation of communities established according to a visionary’s abstract scheme. Instead, they advocated for a political revolution in order to put the social revolution into effect. 68 However, they also differentiated themselves from those, like Buonarroti and Blanqui, whose model of political action was that of secret societies like the Jacobins. The emancipation of workers could not come from a putsch installing the dictatorship of a revolutionary elite; it had to be the work of proletarians themselves. Moreover, they believed that their materialist conception of history allowed them to place the idealistic misconceptions of those earlier socialists in context. The latter, writing at a time when industrial capitalism was still in its infancy, could not clearly discern the laws of its development or the direction in which it was headed, and toyed with regressive fantasies and extravagant pipedreams. As the proletariat remained ‘a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement’, 69 they could not but substitute themselves for the workers, replacing the latter’s ‘gradual, spontaneous’ 70 organisation with fanciful plans for the wholesale restructuring of society or conspiratorial schemes for taking power. From a vantage point where they could observe the expansion of industry and the labour movement’s first steps, Marx and Engels saw what their predecessors could not: that capitalism’s expansion would only heighten its internal contradictions, and that the proletariat was constituting itself as a mighty historical force capable of its own emancipation. In time, the reflexive development of proletarian consciousness would, through its very ‘practical-critical activity’, work out the need for a revolutionary dictatorship and the programme for it. In that sense, then, the latter could not be a unilateral imposition by an

104

enlightened elite: it was the conscious working out of what was latent in history itself. Bakunin’s accusation of idealism, however, was not just an external critique from someone who failed to understand or accept Marx and Engels’s premises; it played on a tension internal to Marxist thought. For, if historical materialism was supposed to be a product of proletarian experience , it was, at the same time, supposed to be a scientific knowledge of history capable of anticipating – dictating, even – that experience’s future direction. 71

With it, consciousness, which until then had trailed behind practice, could jump over its own shadow and become the guide. It was in this move, and the aspirations following from it, that Bakunin identified an idealistic relapse with fateful political consequences. The history of Marxism would forever bear the imprint of this tension between communism as ‘the real movement that abolishes the present state of things’ 72 and the recourse to scientificity as a way of legitimating concrete decisions; in other words, between reflexive consciousness and science. When Bernstein dismissed orthodox ideas of how to achieve socialism with the claim that ‘the movement is everything’, he could point to the respectable Marxian pedigree of that idea. The claim that ‘preconceived theories … will always be forced into utopianism and … stand in the way of the real theoretical and practical progress of the movement, obstructing and constricting it’ is perfectly defensible from the point of view of reflexive consciousness. 73 The same is true of Rosa Luxemburg’s chiding of Lenin and Trotsky for believing that ‘the socialist transformation is something for which a ready-made formula lies completed in the pocket of the revolutionary party, which needs only to be carried out energetically in practice’. 74 The irony, of course, is that the Bolsheviks neither had much of a formula when they came to power, nor would at first have much of an opportunity to implement it. Under extreme conditions from the start, their suppression of other political forces stemmed from survival instinct more than from the wish to push through a pre-determined agenda, and much of their policy was defined out of expediency and necessity more than conviction. 75 After the introduction of the New Economic Policy, Lenin 105

himself decried the ‘exaggerated revolutionism’ of those who ignored ‘the limits and conditions in which revolutionary methods are appropriate and can be successfully employed’, 76 and warned that anyone who ‘imagines he can solve all his problems by issuing communist decrees is guilty of communist conceit’. 77 Instead, he believed the new situation required a ‘reformist approach’ that ‘cautiously, slowly and gradually remodels [the existing order], taking care to break as little as possible’. 78 Nikolai Bukharin would take this position even farther, defending an ‘evolutionary path’ of ‘growing into socialism’ in which class struggle would be waged not in open confrontation, but through ‘peaceful market competition between socialist economies and private economies, and on the ideological and cultural fronts’. 79 It was only with forced collectivisation and the rise of Stalin in the late 1920s that the Russian Revolution would fully and willingly come to fit the hylemorphic bill. 80 It was then that the ‘revolutionary-heroic’ tradition within Bolshevism definitively carried the day against the cautious, gradualist strain that had grown out of the NEP and Lenin’s late texts. 81 Drawing legitimacy from the party’s success in the October insurrection and the Civil War, it naturalised the militarisation of ever more spheres of life and the regime’s growing closure by transfiguring what had been a matter of necessity into high revolutionary virtue. ‘Being a revolutionary’ was made synonymous with a martial heroism that glorified the capacity to impose one’s will on the world and replaced dialogue and persuasion with unconditional demands for sacrifice made on party cadre and the population. Thus, ‘what had originated as temporary, “extraordinary measures” acquired … a legitimate, permanent status’; there were, according to Stalin, ‘no fortresses that the working class, the Bolsheviks, cannot capture’. 82 As negotiating objective or subjective conditions became tainted with the suspicion of reformism, the unilateral affirmation of party command was equated with commitment, and revolution from above became for all purposes synonymous with revolution itself. That, rather than the other alternatives that had also been possible up to that point, was the model that the Soviet Union would radiate to the rest of the world; hence also how the contingent trajectory taken by one particular 106

revolutionary process was reified into a blueprint to be applied anywhere and everywhere. In part, a questioning of hylemorphism was inevitable from the moment that transitivity came under scrutiny. The more difficult it became to sustain the centrality of the industrial proletariat as political agent and yardstick with which to measure the universality of all other demands, the more politics had to appear as a negotiation of interests and identities, and its subject as composite, internally differentiated, impossible to homogenise. The harder it was, therefore, to conceive of revolution as a process that could feasibly or justifiably be carried out in a one-sided way. On top of that, a more thorough understanding of the different overlapping temporalities (and inertia) of social relations had raised serious doubts as to the state apparatus’s real capacity to ‘put politics in command’. 83 More importantly, historical experience demonstrated that even if one had the power to act unilaterally, as the Bolsheviks proved they did, the result could only be a perversion of the original goal. One might produce rapid industrialisation in that way, but never emancipation. The indiscriminate use of force, even if it was meant as a way to accelerate the pace of development of revolutionary consciousness, could not help but produce the opposite: the hardening and normalisation of potestas , the flourishing of opportunism and subservience to authority, the development of a bureaucratic class intent on securing its privileges and reproducing its power. Eventually, as actually existing socialism showed, despite its impressive feats in rapidly improving the well-being of large populations, not even the economic basis of what was thus built was safe. Finally, the growing interdependence brought about by capitalist globalisation made the hylemorphic notion of revolution even less plausible. Despite the fact that revolution was always ultimately conceived as world revolution, making the nation-state into the horizon for political action had been a handy way of cutting the sweeping vistas of strategy down to more manageable size. Although ‘socialism in one country’ was only ever a theoretical stopgap with which the Bolsheviks tried to rationalise their predicament when revolution failed to materialise elsewhere, ‘world revolution’ was essentially conceived as a succession of 107

national revolutions. Today, the way in which capitalism has made the world into an ever more complex web of entanglements – at the level of finance, trade, infrastructure, environment, logistics, governance, identities, political actors – severely undermines the possibility of treating the national level in isolation. Even if there were a revolutionary force strong enough to remake a whole country in its image, it would still have to negotiate its course with various international powers and interests; the fate of even a moderate reformist attempt like Syriza’s in Greece is instructive in this regard.

After the Revolution

What is left of the idea of revolution that nourished the dreams of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries once we abandon historical necessity, transitivity and hylemorphism? On the one hand, it is not difficult to fill the gap left by those beliefs with other notions that could help make revolution a more credible idea today. Instead of historical necessity, we might talk about identifying longer- and shorter-term tendencies that are, at any given moment, amplified or reinforced by forces acting in other directions, upon which we can intervene in order to raise or lower the probability of certain effects. In lieu of transitivity, we might speak of the composition of political subjects, of the fact that they are only thinkable as composite, which is also to say: actively composed. Finally, the place formerly occupied by hylemorphic confidence might be taken by complexity understood as an ineliminable feature of social life, and therefore also of political action. This leads us to conceiving a political subject that does not stand outside of what it acts upon, but acts within an environment that acts back on it in turn. On the other hand, the direction in which those changes point is unequivocally one of less certainty; and here the crisis of the idea of revolution converges with the crisis of revolutionary prospects. It is not only that it ceased to be a given that revolution would happen, since it became contingent on a number of factors. As those factors themselves receded, it became harder to believe that revolutions were possible at all, let alone those of a new, indeterminate kind for which no historical precedent existed. 84 This is all the more so because the crisis of revolution is also a 108

crisis of the subject of revolution: not only of what had been held as its subject by right (the proletariat), but of the very idea of a subject by right (transitivity), of its de facto, organised subject (the party), and of the thought that such a thing as an organised collective subject was desirable. Did the historical record not show that the organisation needed to make the revolution was ultimately the same thing that prevented it from achieving its goals? That is where the trauma of organisation comes in. This predicament helps us understand the way in which practical and theoretical responses to the crisis of revolution have tended to handle two variables. Regarding the scope of revolution (its reach, depth and durability) and the part that organised collective agency plays in it, contemporary thought seems to find it genuinely difficult to give both their full extension at the same time. Sometimes they will both be restricted; sometimes collective agency will be given its due, but the possibility of political transformation will be spatially and temporally circumscribed. On the other hand, every time one tries to give revolution the full systemic extension that the concept once possessed, that seems to come at the cost of an erasure of organised collective agency, whose role will be minimised, elided or obfuscated. It is as if we can only continue to uphold the old idea of revolution in all its ambition if we suspend the question of who could make it, and how; and whenever we pose it, the effects of organised agency must be clearly delineated and limited from the start. Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) is an example of both variables being controlled at once. Popular in radical circles in the 1990s, the author later admitted that it was an experiment in thinking ‘how we could have a taste of revolutionary life without the revolution, since it was apparently not going to happen’. 85 By virtue of its restricted, if not necessarily small, temporal and spatial scale, the TAZ could afford to pay little mind to questions of organisation and sustainability over time. That double restriction can also be seen in Jacques Rancière’s conception of political action. The idea that politics is rare, which he shares with Badiou, allows both of them to reinscribe, within a horizon of more modest expectations, the opposition between historical continuity and radical rupture that is intrinsic to the modern idea of revolution. This appears as 109

the radical heterogeneity between politics as administration (what Rancière calls ‘police’ and Badiou calls ‘state’) and the ‘real’ politics of an event or the irruption of ‘the part of those that have no part’. That move renders even very small, punctual experiences thinkable as formally analogous to a revolutionary rupture; at the same time, that purely formal similarity is about as close as one can come to revolution today. In their singularity, in their very circumscription to a moment or to a group of militants that are always finite even if potentially infinite in number, these rare processes offer the only experience of universality and equality that can be had. 86 They most definitely cannot promise to inscribe equality and universality in a new order, for order necessarily supposes exclusion, and neither police nor state can be done away with. Yet even if we accept that absolute equality or a perfect social order are impossible goals, Badiou’s and Rancière emphasis on an all-or-nothing heterogeneity between ‘real’ politics and police/the state makes it hard to distinguish between more and less equality, better or worse orders. 87 The circumscribed nature of ‘real’ politics offers some compensation for the impossibility of revolution, but it also impairs the capacity to differentiate radical and cosmetic, useful and counterproductive reforms; the risk is that it sets a standard of politics that is radical to the exact extent that it is inoperative. Essentially in agreement about the limited scope of revolutionary hopes in spite of their rhetorical differences, Badiou and Rancière part ways precisely on the question of organised collective agency. For the former, ‘Rancière fails to say that every political process … manifests itself as an organised process. He has a tendency to pit phantom masses against an unnamed State.’ 88 Widely regarded as advocates of reformism, Laclau and Mouffe appear to grant greater latitude to revolutionary change than contemporaries with more radical reputations. 89 They do not even object to retaining the name ‘revolution’, provided one understands it not as a foundational act capable of instituting a fully reconciled society but ‘the overdetermination of a set of struggles in a point of political rupture, from which there follow a variety of effects spread across the whole … fabric of society’. 90 Despite focusing on the contingent, artificial, ‘fabricated’ dimension of politics, however, they 110

have surprisingly little to say on how that fabrication is organisationally produced. Even granting their expanded concept of ‘discourse’, their almost exclusive attention to the linguistic construction of political identities leaves little room for the practices and structures that can be the bearers and support of empty signifiers. 91 The same equation – the greater the scope, the less discernible the agent – figures even more clearly in Derrida’s notion of the ‘messianic without messianism’. A ‘waiting without horizon of expectation’ for the promise of justice that the idea of revolution once contained, it renounces all hope of reading the fulfilment of that promise off existing conditions, strategising or organising it: ‘if one could count on what is coming, hope would be but the calculation of a program.’ 92 Deleuze and Guattari, in turn, never ceased to speak of revolution, but displaced the coordinates of the term: rather than a question of being, it turned into a matter of becoming. As such, it can never come to rest in a final state of affairs, a society that would be free from conflict and exempt from change; but the fact that revolutions eventually ‘go badly’ does not stop people from ‘becoming-revolutionary’ or encountering situations that will trigger new revolutionary becomings. 93 These becomings are not, in principle, limited in size, and so the prospect of wide-ranging systemic change is never off the table. In a sense comparable to Badiou’s and Rancière’s formulations, however, the ‘real’ revolution is that which happens in the movement that interrupts the reproduction of things as they are. It is the line of flight that deterritorialises existing strata, and is thus opposed to whatever new territory is eventually produced, just as becoming is opposed to history. In what may be the most thorough critique of the humanist, hylemorphic conception of revolution, these movements are opened up to non-human agencies, technical innovations, unexpected encounters of all kinds; they carry individuals with them more than any collective subject can deliberate or organise them. Again, then, the fact that the idea of revolution preserves much of its global scope is counter-balanced by the relative erasure of the subject that enacts it: it might happen , but it is less clear how (if at all) it can be made . After Anti-Oedipus , which still displays the influence of Sartre’s distinction between subject and subjected groups, Deleuze and Guattari increasingly 111

seem to think of agency in terms of aggregate rather than collective action, and accord less and less attention to the latter. 94 John Holloway’s and Hardt and Negri’s interventions around the turn of century broke with the dominant theoretical climate by refusing to either abandon revolution or give it a new meaning. The return to a global scope, however, came coupled with a strong reticence regarding collective action above a certain scale and (especially in Holloway’s case) the desire to rule out in advance certain types of political intervention. This made it especially difficult for them to think the intermediary level at which local struggles and commons were supposed to combine to produce both systemic alternatives and flashpoints of antagonism. 95 To fill that gap, it was necessary to resort to an extreme simplification of the terrain of struggle, 96 which, in turn, made a weak teleological faith in the aggregate effect of local initiatives and their capacity to combine spontaneously easier to sustain. Less than a full-blooded affirmation, however, this teleology had a more tentative, circumspect tone: it may be that the proliferation of local initiatives will at some point be enough to produce qualitative change. If revolutionary hope is to be sustained conjointly with a devaluing of organised collective agency, in fact, some appeal to objective necessity seems to be inevitable. We can find the same tendency in certain strands of communisation theory, except, in that case, it is couched in a much more orthodox Marxist narrative about the imminence of capitalist collapse and revolutionary upheaval – which, as at least some will readily admit, may or may not turn our way. 97 Finally, we can use the same key to read the responses elicited by arguably the two most significant experiments in social transformation since the 1990s: the autonomous Zapatista territory in Chiapas and the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria in Rojava. The importance of organised collective forces in creating the conditions for these experiments is beyond doubt. What were initially fairly traditional party and military apparatuses had and still have a major role in literally and figuratively defending the borders within which they can develop, but they do not stir the same discomfort in activists watching from afar that similar structures would cause if they were closer to home. The reasons for that seem to be, 112

first, the extreme circumstances in which they operate (poverty, reduced infrastructure, distance from functioning state institutions, armed conflict); and, second, their success in resisting verticalising tendencies until now. That success is at least partially explained by their lack of an expansionist perspective, their focus on a contained territory and on staying (relatively) small. Their intensive radicality, so to speak – the comprehensiveness of their aspiration to change social relations within a given territory – is offset by a limited extensive ambition – their locally circumscribed character. This has certainly contributed to both their internal achievements and outside appeal. The point of this (far from exhaustive) survey is not to bemoan the political faintheartedness of contemporary thought and practice, nor to propose a return to historical determinism, the proletariat as the subject of history, or the vanguard party. It would be meaningless to say that, unless we believe these ideas, we lose the capacity to think radical change – as if beliefs were things that we can or ought to choose as we see fit, rather than something arising from and sustained against the test of reality. One cannot expect to recover lost faith by decree, especially when the broader reasons for that loss cannot just be wished away. Thinking political action today must take tendency, composition and complexity as inescapable starting points. What that more disenchanted perspective might lose in assurance, it certainly gains in sobriety and awareness of challenges and risks; and to be a materialist, as Althusser once put it, is above all to avoid telling oneself any stories. 98 That being said, it is important that we consider the implications of this tendency to reduce the scope of revolution and minimise the role of organised collective agency, as well as the seeming impossibility to affirm both at the same time. Regarding scope, we have seen that, for a long time, ‘the Revolution’ was an all-encompassing horizon. What was at stake was never just a change of regime, an uprising, a revolt, a radical reform or a locally and temporally restricted experience, but a thorough, lasting transformation of social relations that ultimately extended to the whole of humankind. Although uprisings, revolts, reforms, and so forth could certainly be parts of that transformation, the very possibility of distinguishing between them and 113

revolution lay in the non-local, systemic dimension of the latter. Revolution was not a partial adjustment, a temporary modification or a change occurring in one place while everything else remained the same. Through however protracted a process, it was the wholesale replacement of a system of social relations with another. And whereas the name of the replacement has varied over time (socialism, communism, communalism, anarchy …), the most common name for the system to be replaced has always been ‘capitalism’. To have a systemic range was thus to be anticapitalist; and since capitalism was understood as a global system, the final horizon of systemic change was the world. It is worth drawing attention to this for two reasons. The first is terminological. Ever since the crisis of the modern idea of revolution began, there have been attempts to re-signify the word in ways that could still sound credible under present circumstances. From the perspective of scope, however, these new uses more often than not appear as metaphorical extensions of the original meaning. They apply to things that might in the past have been considered as necessary parts of a revolution, but never a revolution in their own right. Thus, we might hear that today’s revolutions take place in the everyday, in sensibility, in individual lives; or that they can only be thought as local, as the momentary experimentation of a new sociability; that they are the moment of insurrection or the lived experience of communes; or that they are micro-political, affective, aesthetic. To insist on the broad systemic sweep that the concept originally implied is not to oppose these kinds of change to system change, as if the latter did not necessarily suppose them, nor to defend a ‘true’ concept of revolution against false claimants. The point is rather to indicate that this metaphorisation of revolution robs us of the language with which to distinguish more change from less , partial modification from widescale transformation, or, to borrow physical terms, bigger and smaller fluctuations from phase shifts . If anything can be a ‘revolution’, then revolution is no longer anything, and there is no way of talking about systemic change. If, on the other hand, ‘revolution’ is predicated of all these phenomena because they are supposed to lead to that kind of change, then it seems reasonable

114

to ask by what mechanism they are to do so, and how one can know that they will. The second reason for insisting on this is to argue that, even if we decide that systemic change is no longer possible, the capacity to distinguish it from partial, local and temporary change is one we still need. If not for anything else, at least because of the problems posed to us by climate change. After all, thousands of local ‘revolutions’ that still left in place a global system that continues to pump carbon into the atmosphere might generate strong communities to face an increasingly hostile environment, but they would do nothing to control the size and rate of environmental transformation. It is precisely because we are potentially facing a deadly phase shift of the world’s climate that we need to be able to think beyond localised fluctuations and ask what – if any – fluctuations of the global social system could move it towards a radically different state. The tendency to minimise the part that organised collective action plays in social change is also worth highlighting for two reasons. The first concerns the extent to which this is a response to the trauma of organisation and the double melancholia of 1917 and 1968. The second is its patent contradiction with an understanding of political action increasingly premised on contingency. If there is no historical necessity, if there is no automatic passage from objective conditions to political subjectivation, if there are no reasons to suppose that either collective agency or aggregate results will occur by themselves, if political subjects therefore ought to be composed and the capacity to act must be organised – should we not be focusing more, rather than less, on the question of organisation? Is not the condition for underplaying it either relinquishing all hope of systemic change or falling back on a covert, even if only hypothetical, reliance on teleology? If the default conception of how that kind of change could happen today is a proliferation of local struggles that somehow manage to connect in strategically decisive ways, does that not delineate at least two levels in which organisation needs to be thought – the production of local struggles and their strategic connection?

115

4

Critique of Self-Organisation

______________________________________

I think one should still be a Leninist, at least in the specific sense that we cannot really look to the spontaneity and creativity of the masses to establish analytical groups in any lasting way – though ‘Leninist’ is perhaps an odd word to use when one remembers that the object at this moment is to foster not a highly centralized party, but some means whereby the masses can gain control of their own lives. Félix Guattari To us power is, first of all, the ability to define phenomena, and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner. Huey P. Newton

‘There Are No Such Things as Self-Organising Systems’

It could still be objected that the conclusions at which the last chapter arrives assume what must be proved: that political action demands the intervention of organised collective subjects. It would be necessary, after all, to demonstrate that self-organisation cannot produce the same effects spontaneously. My first response would be to point back to the notion of organisation that I am supposing here. By ‘organised collective subject’, I do not necessarily mean a formally structured mass organisation or a party, but socio-technical assemblages, operating at whatever scale, that take on the role of coordinating collective effort and orienting it in determinate directions. These could be people who open a community centre or start a unionising drive, set up an action camp or issue a call for action against a certain target (a bad employer, a government or multilateral agency, a piece of infrastructure); at the limit, it could even be a single individual on social 116

media. Thus, all I am saying is, first, that nothing happens without such structures being in place, however informal they may be. However improvised and spur-of-the-moment a demonstration or a riot is, it never truly corresponds to the myth of a multitude of unconnected individuals joining together all at once, like a crowd in a musical magically breaking into song. Furthermore, I am saying that unless such structures have a capacity to act that is proportional to the effects that are expected from them, the likelihood of those effects is greatly diminished. Those are two things with which I believe most people could in principle agree. Yet the grammar supposed by such an objection is itself worth a closer look. It opposes ‘organisation’ to ‘self-organisation’ and calls ‘spontaneous’ whatever is not ‘organised’; in so doing, it implicitly supposes that ‘organisation’ is always imposed ‘from outside’ and fails to acknowledge that what is spontaneous is also organised in its own way. In this chapter, I propose a critique of the idea of self-organisation in order to question the foundations on which this grammar is based: a choice between a problematic notion of autonomy and a strong determinism, a transformation of value judgements into statements of fact, an attempt to ‘naturalise’ certain political ideals by projecting them onto the world. What I wish to show is that, in order to argue that intentional organisation is superfluous and redundant, it would be necessary to demonstrate that selforganisation and spontaneity not only can fulfil its function, but that they necessarily do or will . This, in turn, is impossible unless we suppose either a transitive theory of consciousness or a providentialism of some sort. The point here is not to reject the notion of self-organisation, but to make the case that, instead of being incompatible with a politics built on subjective initiative and organisation, it in fact entails it. It is also to identify a choice: if we renounce teleology truly and completely, instead of holding on to it in weaker, covert forms, we must embrace the necessity of organisation. It would seem that arguing for the need to actively give ourselves the means to achieve what we believe in would be perfectly redundant – something with which nobody could disagree. Yet talk of organisation is often met with the suspicion of being just a façade for a stealthy will to power or an elitist condescension towards others: a lack of faith in their 117

capacity for self-determination coupled with the pretension of being qualified to educate and lead them. In the grammar that underlies this way of thinking, what is ‘spontaneous’ and ‘self-organised’ develops organically, from itself, without hierarchy or manipulation, and truly expresses people’s interests and desires. ‘To organise’, on the other hand, is to introduce something from outside, and thus also to place oneself above what is organised. It is to act like an expert, an enlightened vanguard, someone immune to the ‘indignity of speaking for others’, 1 who distorts or falsifies what others think and want. It is not difficult to see how damaging this association appears from a perspective according to which everything is organised: it taints ‘organising’ and ‘organisation’ with unequivocally negative overtones and, even worse, it obscures the ways in which what is called self-organised is itself organised . In so doing, it perpetuates the illusion that such a thing as organisationlessness could exist and that it would be something to strive for. This way of speaking makes ‘organisation’ effectively synonymous with hetero -organisation: organisation imposed by an other, from outside . The possibility of distinguishing organisation from self-organisation thus hinges on the possibility of drawing a boundary separating ‘inside’ (what a circumscribed collection of people spontaneously think and want) from ‘outside’ (the external influence of those who do not belong to the same group). To that, one adds an implicit value judgement: whatever comes from within the boundary is preferable to what comes from without. Evidently, then, isolating a system from its environment is essential to identifying it as self-organising. The irony is that the impossibility of doing so in absolute terms was what led early thinkers of self-organisation to warn that, in a certain sense, such systems do not exist at all. ‘There are no such things as self-organizing systems!’ was how the physicist and cybernetician Heinz von Foerster chose to open the Interdisciplinary Symposium on SelfOrganizing Systems that took place on 5 May 1959 in Chicago – the first academic event of its kind. 2 At a follow-up event a few years later, the psychiatrist and cybernetician W. Ross Ashby equally concluded that since ‘no system can correctly be said to be self-organizing, and since use of the phrase “self-organizing” tends to perpetuate a fundamentally confused and 118

inconsistent way of looking at the subject, the phrase is probably better allowed to die out’. 3 Although they were coming at it from different angles, energy and information, von Foerster and Ashby had the same problem in mind. In von Foerster’s case, it was entropy that was at stake. A system is said to be self-organising because its organisation increases over time, which is also to say that its internal entropy goes down. In light of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy in an isolated always tends to increase, this can only mean two things. First, that the system is not isolated; second, that its organisation can only come from consuming energy from the environment – whose entropy, in turn, will increase. In other words, a system’s self-organisation is only possible if it is coupled with an environment with available energy and order, which the self-organising system feeds off and disorganises over time. For all finite systems that we encounter in the world, therefore, the phrase ‘self-organising system’ makes sense not in an absolute sense, but only as referring to ‘that part of a system that eats energy and order from its environment’ so as to create its own order internally. 4 For Ashby, on the other hand, the issue was this: if we understand a self-organising system as one that is capable of changing its internal state according to information received from the environment , by definition such a system is only a subsystem of that environment, and not self-organising in a literal sense. Its self-organisation is a modulation of, and thus dependent on, the hetero-organisation that outside causes impose on it. What both Ashby and von Foerster missed here was the opportunity to draw a further conclusion from the same premises. If to be wholly selforganising entails having no input whatsoever from the environment, only a total system with nothing outside it could fit the description. Speaking in absolute terms, there can be only one self-organising system: the universe in its entirety. That was, in fact, what Spinoza had deduced back in the seventeenth century through an inference similar to von Foerster’s and Ashby’s, except its starting point was the Cartesian concept of substance. Descartes had defined substance primarily in terms of self-subsistence: ‘a thing which so exists that it needs no other thing in order to exist’. 5 In a 119

way, all that Spinoza did was follow the implications; the result was perfectly logical, if outlandish. Instead of accepting Descartes’ makeshift solution of distinguishing between one substance properly speaking (God) and a plurality of lesser, created substances interacting with one another, Spinoza bit the bullet and concluded that there could only be a single substance, which interacts with nothing because nothing is outside of it. Each and every existing thing must therefore be an affection or modification of this one substance, which Spinoza called Deus sive Natura , ‘God or Nature’. 6 These singular things – ‘finite modes’, in Spinoza’s terminology – exist, in turn, in several scales and various levels of vertical integration. Individuals in one level are components of higher-level individuals, so that if ‘we thus continue to infinity, we shall readily conceive the whole of Nature as one individual whose parts – that is, all the constituent bodies – vary in infinite ways without any change in the individual as a whole’. 7 The notion of a hierarchical structure is in fact central to the idea of nature as self-organising. 8 Not, of course, in the sense of command, as if the higher levels controlled the behaviour of the lower ones unilaterally. On the contrary, what we encounter here is once again the logic of transindividuality introduced in chapter 1 . On the one hand, to say that a system displays emergent behaviour is to say that it constrains the behaviour of its elements in order to maintain a certain functional pattern (‘a constant proportion of motion and rest’, in Spinoza’s terms). On the other hand, the system is nothing but those elements and their interactions, and is therefore permanently open to modification or even destruction if their behaviours change beyond certain parameters. ‘Hierarchy’ refers rather to the fact that systems are contained within systems: an organism is part of a population that is part of an ecosystem, but it is also a niche for bacteria, and so on. 9 As we saw in the first chapter, isolating a system within such a vertical hierarchy depends on a choice regarding the scale of phenomena under examination. In this way, something that can be described as selforganising on one level (a system) can also be shown to be hetero-organised at a higher level (an element), while also composed of parts that organise one another at a lower level. But questions about how to individuate a 120

system also arise if we take a horizontal perspective. First, as we have seen, a finite system exists only in relation to an environment. Second, depending on the degree of autonomy that its components have, they might enter into relations with other systems that are relatively independent from the system to which they belong. For instance, when members of two different organisations start cooperating autonomously, we can describe the situation as containing two systems or three, depending on whether we wish to consider the zone of indiscernibility between the two larger systems as just an interface or as a system in its own right. Drawing a boundary is thus always relative to a point of view, to certain criteria as to what is and is not relevant to the analysis. It is a decision made by an observer. That does not mean that distinctions are only in the eye of the beholder; it is not arbitrary to identify connections that actually exist. But the way in which we cut these relations into individuated units depends on a selection of scale (what is too minute or too broad to be of interest), time frame (what interactions are too high- or low-frequency, which dynamics too short- or long-term to be relevant), and salience (what is too singular or too general to be of use). 10 Most people would probably not claim that someone’s actions were less ‘spontaneous’ if they attended a meeting at the behest of someone else, if they wrote a slogan on a placard that they had heard another person say, or if they felt encouraged by a third party’s bravery to throw a rock at the police. Maybe some would do so, however, if the invitation to the meeting came from a hired organiser, if they had first heard the slogan from a politician, or if it transpired that the first rocks were thrown by people from outside the community where the riot took place. If it turns out that the outside instigators had planned to have a confrontation with the police all along, does that mean that the riot is no longer spontaneous (even if lots of local people joined in)? What if the instigators were activists who had confronted the same issues in their own area? Let us also consider the temporal scale: if the hired organiser who arranged the meeting had been living in that community for ten years, would they still be an outsider? We can imagine several variations of these scenarios in which our judgements of ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ would shift; in every situation there will always be several different boundaries to be drawn 121

according to different criteria. 11 The inside/outside distinction is far from self-evident; we choose how we demarcate it depending on the point we want to make. And since ‘outside’ normally has a negative connotation, the act of drawing itself already supposes a value judgement. 12 In actual fact, if those boundaries are relative to an observer, we could say that our evaluation precedes the distinction. We oppose inside and outside, self- and hetero-organisation, because we are critical of an existing relationship, we are not critical of that relationship because the opposition exists. 13 Again, this is not simply arbitrary. Just because self-organisation can always be redescribed as involving hetero-organisation, it does not mean that some relations are not more hetero-organised than others. The key indicator is a lack of reciprocity: one side has a much greater capacity to put constraints on the other, to limit its field of possible actions. We see examples of this when a party regularly subordinates the demands expressed by its social base to electoral tactics, when a trade union puts its organisational survival above the interests of its members, when an NGO makes deals behind the backs of the constituency it claims to represent, when a social media node uses false information to whip up outrage among its followers – even when otherwise well-meaning organisers systematically act to foster dependency instead of autonomy and constantly place themselves as brokers and protagonists. It is, of course, perfectly conceivable that this kind of power could be used in the best interest of those who are represented. As we saw in chapter 1 , however, the reason why reciprocity matters is that it is the only way to minimise the risk that it will be used for the worst. Yet every organising initiative starts out highly dependent on reciprocity: it can only work if it is able to garner voluntary support, and is therefore limited by the input of whoever participates in it. To reject organisation in this case seems absurd. For who can fault a group or individual for advancing an initiative that others embrace as theirs? Why would anyone be to blame for proposing a course of action that others find worth pursuing? It is, of course, perfectly reasonable and healthy to worry about the risks of allowing power to concentrate. To do so in situations of borderline powerlessness, however, or to do so to the point that one would 122

sooner do nothing and let nothing be done, makes little sense. The reasonable response to concerns about potestas is creating internal and external mechanisms that can keep it in check, not to forfeit the possibility of expanding collective potentia , nor to refuse any kind of organisation on the grounds that it could become too powerful – which is a little like refusing to do something because you are afraid you might be too good at it. The negative associations surrounding organisation constrain not just our initiative, but our imagination. To many, ‘organisation’ automatically evokes the drab picture of forlorn party members standing in the rain robotically pushing newspapers. Likewise, all that ‘organising’ brings to mind is outright manipulation or some form of ‘we know what is best for you’ paternalism, while ‘base building’ is derided as synonymous with earnest young socialists ‘bringing consciousness’ to the nonplussed masses. This renders invisible the Black Panthers’ community welfare programmes in the United States, the ecclesial base communities of Liberation Theology across Latin America, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) in Spain, gay and women’s liberation all over the world, and several other examples of organising of a different kind. It also leaves unchallenged the habit of conceiving organisation only as threat and not as enabling condition – as a problem of ‘too much’, never ‘too little’. Reciprocity thus becomes a value to be pursued at the expense of the capacity to effect change, and lacking the potentia to do so comes to be seen as a virtue: being powerless proves that at least we do not want any power for ourselves. Yet it would be much harder to actively choose powerlessness if it entailed giving up all hope that things could change in the direction we desire. In order to minimise the cost of that choice, we need the supplement of faith: the belief that change can happen even if we deliberately refrain from doing all we can to create the conditions for it. This, I suggest, is one of the primary functions that the appeal to scientific discourses on self-organisation has fulfilled since the 1960s. The reasons why self-organisation as an idea and field of study grew steadily throughout the twentieth century are obviously manifold and cannot be reduced to politics. 14 It is no coincidence, however, that the rise of political 123

appropriations of self-organisation coincides with the threefold decline of historical determinism, the revolutionary subject and revolution itself. What the turn to self-organisation offered, I hope to show, was something like a teleology without a revolutionary subject . Not openly proclaimed as such, and ultimately perhaps only conditionally presumed, but nevertheless affirmed enough that it could offer hope in the face of defeat, retreat and self-willed paralysis.

Spontaneity: Interiority or Exteriority?

We have seen that the grammar that opposes organisation to selforganisation supposes a distinction between inside (what people think and want spontaneously) and outside (what others wish to make them think and want). It is evident, however, that it also contains an implicit assertion about the observer who draws that distinction: that they know what people on the inside think and want. Leaving aside the fact that this belief, if not substantiated by empirical evidence, is no less paternalistic than the idea that one knows what other people should think or want, the question that needs asking is: is there such a thing as what people ‘spontaneously’ think or want? Alternatively: what must we assume in order to believe that there is? One option is to make spontaneity hinge on interiority. Aristotle used two different words to talk about spontaneous behaviour, depending on whether he was referring to the ethical ( hekousion ) or the natural realm ( automatos , literally ‘self-moving’). 15 According to him, an action is ‘spontaneous’ if it finds ‘its first principle’ in the agent instead of having ‘an external first principle, such that the agent or the person acted upon contributes nothing to it – if a wind, for example, or people with power over him carry him somewhere’. 16 Hekousion thus covers both those actions that arise from rational deliberation ( prohairesis ) and those that do not involve choice or calculation, and we might equally describe as instinctive or automatic. Whether it arises from rational choice or automatism, will or instinct, an action is spontaneous to the extent that the agent acts without being coerced or deceived. A dog barking at a stranger and a person throwing a rock are both examples of spontaneous behaviour, even if only the latter has the added element of ponderation. 124

Yet things get complicated when we consider those spontaneous behaviours that are not deliberately chosen, such as a reflex – an involuntary response to a stimulus that does not require conscious thought. The body is indeed self-caused, or self-moving, as this is a response inscribed in its ‘nature’. To the extent that it is ‘programmed’ to respond in that way whenever the appropriate stimulus is received, it has the ‘first principle’ of the action in itself. Yet it is evident that the organism is selfcaused only in what regards the nature of the response, not the response taking place ; it would be the same action with any other stimulus of the same kind, but no action would occur without an external stimulus in the first place. Furthermore, involuntary movement shows that what is in a sense the most intimate – the body and what it does without conscious thought or decision – is by and large outside the individual’s control. It presents itself not as a part of our subjectivity, but as a kind of foreign objectivity within; to borrow Jacques Lacan’s inspired coinage, it is extimate , at once intimate and external. The question becomes even more tangled when we consider that involuntary behaviours are not necessarily innate in the literal sense, but may also be acquired. In that case, the ‘nature’ inscribed in the body is in fact ‘second nature’, constructed or assimilated, so that what is most spontaneous and unthinking is itself the product of external causes operating on a longer timescale. 17 We might then wish to restrict spontaneity to actions that involve conscious, deliberate choice; but that move too proves dubious. Deliberation itself is not free from external causes: rational criteria and values are learnt through socialisation; the information at our disposal is acquired ‘in the world’; not only are the circumstances in which we are called to make decisions not created by us, they are never exempt from the pressure exerted by affects like fear, hope, shame, pride, love or hatred. These, in turn, are triggered by external causes in our immediate environment, and what counts as a trigger may be something conditioned into us by past experience or environmental influences that can therefore be wilfully manipulated, as in the way terror scares feed Islamophobia, for example.

125

All of this is to show that even when we restrict the field of analysis to what would intuitively seem the most elementary candidate for a ‘self ’ – the (human) individual – it is still very difficult to isolate a nugget of interiority in it that would be sheltered from outside influence. If we are willing to mobilise a critique of the self against notions such as the ‘self-made man’, the ‘entrepreneur of oneself ’ and ‘individual responsibility’, we should be wary of reproducing that illusion elsewhere. We cannot have it both ways: if we want a relational ontology, we cannot leave interiority unproblematised. Yet there is another option, which is to make spontaneity depend on external causes. By identifying a causal complex that acts on an individual or group of individuals in a constant way, one can claim that they are ‘spontaneously’ led by those causes to certain beliefs, desires and actions. Of course, this is what any theory that recognises the social dimension of knowledge, thought and behaviour must do to some extent. For it to function as a definitive argument against organisation, however, it would have to be based on more than probability. If I claim that people may (or may not) develop certain beliefs and actions on their own, that seems in fact to be a case for organisation (as a way of trying to ensure that they do) rather than the opposite. A strong determinism is required in order to say that people will necessarily arrive at those beliefs and actions. This, as we have seen, is what the transitive theory of consciousness provides in its strongest form. That spontaneity in the Marxist sense supposes not freedom but determinism is made clear in Gramsci’s remark that ‘ “pure” spontaneity does not exist in history: it would be the same thing as “pure” mechanicity’. 18

This means that an action that did not involve however small an amount of reflection and deliberation, hence contingency, would be indistinguishable from the conduct of a billiard ball driven by external impact. ‘Purely’ spontaneous workers would be like automata, blindly acting out the same response to some external cause. In this light, we can see that Rosa Luxemburg’s defence of spontaneity was entirely premised on historical determinism and the transitive theory of consciousness: the spontaneous awakening of proletarian consciousness was made necessary by the proletariat’s position in the social structure and the movement of 126

history itself. Rather than break with the theoretical space defined by those two presuppositions, what Luxemburg did was add to it an element of nonlinearity. The Russian Revolution of 1905 had been an uprising very much like those we saw at the start of the last decade: an abrupt, snowballing outbreak of mass radicalisation that developed its own tactics of struggle, forms of organisation and decision-making mechanisms with little or no intervention from pre-established political ‘leaders’. It had left social democrats trailing behind events, debunking in the most spectacular fashion their self-important ideas about their historical role. The lesson that Luxemburg drew from this was that, if the path to revolution was not linear and continuous, but subject to changes of pace and sometimes progressing in leaps and bounds, the same went for proletarian consciousness. Luxemburg did not doubt that, in non-exceptional periods, the party and trade unions played an essential part in providing all the political education and training that fragmentary labour struggles and electoral campaigns can offer. In the absence of opportunities to exercise itself in mass action, however, ‘the class consciousness implanted by the social democrats’ remained ‘theoretical and latent’ . 19 On the other hand, the experience of ‘direct revolutionary mass action’ provided by the extraordinary conditions of the mass strike made class consciousness ‘practical and active’, and that was how the Russian proletariat acquired more ‘training’ in one year than German workers had had in thirty. 20 For Luxemburg, people do not always know what they ought to know; but some occasions deliver such an ‘awakening of class feeling’ 21 that they can learn vertiginously fast without needing ‘anyone to play the schoolmaster with them’. 22 In the 1905 Revolution, Luxemburg found proof of the claim she had raised against Bernstein a few years earlier: not only was the prospect of revolution not receding in the horizon but, as in the eschatological prophecies of the Middle Ages, time was accelerating towards it. It was entirely pointless for parties and trade unions to wish to call or plan a mass strike, as such explosions were not ‘an artificial product of premeditated tactics on the part of the social democrats’ 23 and could not be ‘artificially “made” … “decided” at random’ [or] “propagated”’. 24 But that did not 127

matter: they were the outcome of ‘social conditions with historical inevitability’, 25 ‘a natural historical phenomenon on the basis of the present revolution’. 26 By force of necessity, the age of mass strikes was coming – and with that, the quickening development of proletarian consciousness. Her critique of the ‘rigid, mechanical-bureaucratic conception’ of organisation that ‘cannot conceive of the struggle save as the product of organization at a certain stage of its strength’ was therefore not simply a moral cri de coeur against social democratic arrogance, although it was also that. 27 It was entirely within the context of a prediction about the imminent acceleration of history, and it was on this premise that she enjoined social democrats to embrace ‘the living, dialectical explanation’ that ‘makes the organization arise as a product of the struggle’. 28 In the dispute between Luxemburg and Lenin, it is in fact the former, not the latter, who is the most deterministic of the two. 29 Lenin justified his misgivings about the possibility of an automatic ‘awakening of class feeling’ with the argument that ‘bourgeois ideology originated much longer ago than socialist ideology … it has been worked out in a more allencompassing manner, and … it disposes of immeasurably greater means of dissemination’. 30 In contemporary terms, we could say he was more aware of class as a molar phenomenon encompassing different molecular processes (nationalist sentiment, ‘different economic shadings’ like ‘the growth of a labour aristocracy’ 31 ), and had a more materialistic (hence less optimistic) understanding of how ideology worked. That is, at least if we discount the much-quoted statement that would tarnish his reputation forever: ‘the history of all countries bears witness that exclusively with its own forces the worker class is in a condition to work out only a tred-iunionist awareness’, in other words, one exclusively focused on economic struggles and actively opposed to independent political organising. 32 To the extent that it seems to suggest a universal law, this passage no doubt amounts to ‘bending the stick’ too far against someone like Luxemburg. In both cases, the problem lies in going from the possible (socialist consciousness may or may not develop among workers depending on external conditions) to the necessary (it never will, it always will). 128

Posing the question as a choice between possibility and necessity allows us to avoid a common trap. As we saw in chapter 1 , it is very easy in debates on organisation for the normative and descriptive registers to become entangled. If I believe that consciousness always can (and, given the opportunity, will) emerge spontaneously, someone who fails to share my belief will strike me as suspect. Do they really think that it is not possible , or do they rather feel that it is not desirable ? Are they expressing a legitimate doubt or a mistrust of people’s capacities – or worse, a personal preference for top-down organisation and a malicious will to power? Once the argument is moved to the cognitive level, however, the problem changes. For now the issue is not whether consciousness does or does not always develop spontaneously, but whether it is even possible to know the answer to that question. Can we be certain that consciousness will always develop spontaneously? Can we know for sure that spontaneous development is, more than possible, necessary ? If we can agree that it is in fact impossible to have such knowledge without resorting to either historical determinism or a problematic notion of interiority, and those are two things we wish to avoid, the question then becomes: given that we cannot know that spontaneity is necessary, what is the best thing to do? To act as if it were, and run the risk that it is not? Or to act as if it were not, and be willing and ready to help nurture and develop it? Evidently, one of the consequences that it is possible to draw from choosing the second option is that top-down, non-reciprocal relations are always justified and indeed necessary. Nevertheless, I hope it will be clear from the foregoing discussion that it is not the only one, and that one need not believe in either interiority or determinism in order not to be an authoritarian.

‘Atheist Providentialism’

Belief in spontaneity was obviously even more important to anarchists than to Marxists, since what they rejected in the latter was precisely the notion of seizing and employing state (‘political’) power instead of fostering ‘the development and organization of the non-political or antipolitical social power of the working classes in city and country’. 33 The refusal to use the state as a means through which to enforce changes in social relations, inculcate the values of the new society or repress counter-revolutionary 129

stirrings left anarchists no option but to trust that, given free rein, people would instinctively strive in the right direction and eventually arrive at their destination. Responding to the criticism that the communards in Paris had been undone by their political timidity, Bakunin claimed that, unlike critics such as Marx, they had understood that in the Social Revolution, diametrically opposite to a political revolution in this as in other ways, individual action [of leaders] was to be almost nil, while the spontaneous action of the masses had to be everything . All that individuals can do is formulate, clarify, and propagate ideas expressing the instinctive desires of the people , and contribute their constant efforts to the revolutionary organization of the natural powers of the masses. This and nothing more; all the rest can be accomplished only by the people themselves. Otherwise we would end up with a political dictatorship [and by] a devious but inevitable path we would come to reestablish the political, social, and economic slavery of the masses. 34

Along similar lines, Kropotkin describes the social revolution ‘not at all as a Jacobinist dictatorship’, but as ‘a widespread popular movement’ in which in every town and village within the region of the revolt, the masses will have to take upon themselves the task of rebuilding society … upon communistic bases, without awaiting any orders and directions from above. That is, first of all they will have to organize, one way or another, the means of supplying food to everyone and of providing dwellings for all, and then produce whatever will be found necessary for feeding, clothing, and sheltering everybody. 35

The problem is that, without recourse to the transitive theory of consciousness, anarchists seem to have nothing else to offer as a guarantee that people will be able to reorganise all spheres of life relatively promptly (rather than face societal collapse, famine, and so on), that they will do so on communistic bases (rather than through authoritarian means or by the reintroduction of private property) and that they will muster the forces required to fight counter-revolution (rather than be defeated as the Paris Commune was). There is nothing to back faith but faith itself: a covert ‘atheist providentialism’ 36 sustains the hope that, given the right conditions (social upheaval, the suspension of oppressive structures, etc.), the masses will do what is best because they ‘are always ready for such sacrifices’. 37 Of course, there are no guarantees that a dictatorship of the proletariat can ensure any of those things either. 38 Nor could there be, given that what 130

is at stake is a matter of relative force rather than form: are revolutionaries and the population at large capable of establishing a functioning new order faster than the old one can reassert itself or the disruption of social life becomes unbearable? Yet it is hard not to suspect that the anarchists and Marx were talking at cross-purposes. It is not just that one was more concerned with how to harness potentia while the others worried about the dangers of potestas ; they were effectively answering two different questions. While Bakunin and Kropotkin are explaining the ideal scenario for a revolution, Marx is trying to work out what revolutionaries can do to make sure they have the best shot at winning. He did not wonder whether the dictatorship of the proletariat was desirable , but whether it got the job done . Whereas one side approached the problem from a descriptive, contemplative standpoint (‘how it should happen’), the other implicated itself as an agent: ‘how can it be done?’ means ‘how can we do it?’. We might disagree with the content of Marx’s answer and still think that it is more reasonable to cultivate this attitude, rather than just trusting that things will turn out as they have to: even as you take a leap in the dark, try to leave as little as possible to luck; even as you deal with variables way beyond your control, make sure you use all the potentia available to tilt the odds your way. As a seasoned revolutionist, Bakunin was aware of this gap. His (in) famous notion of an ‘invisible collective dictatorship’, sometimes decried as an inconsistency or evidence of hidden authoritarian tendencies, should be seen instead as the logical conclusion that follows when someone starting from his premises poses the problem ‘how can we do it?’ For he believed that a peaceful revolution – the ‘slow and systematic but at the same time radical transformation of … economic life’ – had been ‘categorically’ proven to be impossible under then-existing conditions. 39 This left the option of a ‘purely revolutionary’ path ‘leading directly to the organization of a universal uprising’ – but not in such a way that it would lead to enthroning a new ruling elite and the survival of state power. 40 The alternative, he concluded, was to have revolutionary cadre, ‘prepared and organized in advance’, to ‘awaken and foment all the dynamic passions of the people’ while remaining ‘the invisible pilots guiding the Revolution, not by any 131

kind of overt power’, but by their prestige and capacity to contribute technical and political clout to a ‘tremendous awakening of spontaneous life everywhere’. 41 Except for the (certainly not minor) issue of proletarian dictatorship, Bakunin’s vision of the role of organised cadre in the revolution was thus not so distant from Lenin’s conception of the Russian Social Democratic Party under the Tsarist regime: an underground, deeplying structure that provided guidance, training and political cohesion to the growing movement against the autocracy and acted as a sort of ‘scaffolding’ around which popular potentia could build. 42 Curiously, Bakunin employs the conditional to say that, whereas ‘authoritarian communists’ would like to ‘impose science by force’, anarchists ‘ would try to propagate it so that human groups, once convinced, would organize and federalize spontaneously , freely, from the bottom up, of their own accord and true to their own interests’. 43 It is as though pondering the contingencies of concrete political work inflected his language towards a less triumphant, more tentative tone. It may be the case that he would sooner see the revolution defeated from the outside than betrayed from the inside by a self-appointed elite. Yet even if Bakunin was willing to leave more to chance than Marx ever would, that did not stop him thinking that not all could be left to chance, and some degree of deliberate organisation and forward planning was inevitable. There is plenty of evidence that people can become radicalised and be moved to action very quickly under the right circumstances. The belief that they will , however, and that we can predict the content of the ideas they will have and the actions they will take, is untenable unless supplemented by strong determinism or an essentialist notion of human nature. Naturally, such predictions are by definition not susceptible to definitive verification or falsification: the fact that they might seem confirmed today does not prove that they will be tomorrow, and we cannot conclude that they will not be tomorrow from the fact that they are not today. Here then, we have mapped a choice that is philosophical, not moral: is it better to bank on them than act as if they were not true? Should we limit our imagination and field of action according to hypotheses that cannot be proved? 44

132

Malatesta once lamented that ‘a kind of natural providentialism’ had made anarchists believe that things could ‘happen automatically, naturally, without preparation, without organization, without preconceived plans’; and that just as the revolution would ‘come by itself, when the time is ripe, by the spontaneous action of the masses’, so also ‘after the revolution the popular spontaneity will suffice for everything’. 45 Indeed, as we saw in the previous chapter, a certain ‘spontaneous’ faith in progress was integral to modern historicity, and the first anarchists were certainly not immune to that. Yet it is also true that subjective initiative and objective necessity are two ends of a dyad; the more we have of one, the less we need the other. There can be few more powerful intensifiers of subjective commitment than belief in the inevitability of one’s own goal, and yet those who are living through a moment of intense mobilisation probably need it the least. What is at stake for them is not vague hope, but getting on with the tasks at hand. In times of defeat, on the other hand, or of powerlessness and paralysis caused by legitimate but badly calibrated fears, narratives reassuring us that our desires will come to pass despite our lacking the conditions to make them real fulfil an obvious compensatory need.

Teleology: With and/or Without the Subject

Both Marxism and anarchism still shared an idea of revolution as a matter of collective action on a massive scale. For Marxists, all the collective action in the world could ultimately be subsumed under a single historical subject whose position within existing social relations made it the privileged point of view from which to grasp their totality and the necessary protagonist of their transformation. While resistant to either conceptual or political unification, anarchists like Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta did not doubt that the revolution was an affair for large masses acting around common purposes. What to do, however, when large-scale collective action itself comes into question, whether because of its ever-diminishing future prospects or the traumatic memories that weigh on its past? What to do if antagonism, instead of being ‘the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one’, comes to be seen as part of the problem? 46 The crisis of the modern idea of revolution imposed a whole new set of parameters on how to envision wide-scale social change: without major ruptures and with 133

little use for force or conflict, with only punctual and ‘spontaneous’, preferably peaceful, mass collective action, with as little strategy or conscious organisation as possible. A social transformation brought about by the aggregate action of individuals and small local initiatives whose spontaneous synergy made any attempts at directing, organising or even thinking the process as a whole both dangerous and superfluous. It was because they offered ways to think within these parameters that scientific discourses on self-organisation became the object of different political appropriations from the mid twentieth century onwards. What they promised was the possibility of a revolution which, while ‘without revolution’ in the modern sense, still delivered the goods. What counts as ‘the goods’ – the state of affairs resulting from change – evidently depends on who is talking in each case. As a consequence, political positions of all kinds are entitled to claim self-organisation for themselves, and the idea has indeed been put to use across the political spectrum. Its most influential deployment, in fact, is a theory concerned not with changing government or social relations but with defending an ideal model of the market. One of its canonical formulations is found in the writings of Friedrich von Hayek, whose renewal of eighteenth-century notions of spontaneous order in the light of contemporary information and complexity theory has shaped not only the dominant strain of neoliberal economics but the thinking of policymakers, market agents and media pundits around the world. In terms of impact, the only other current that comes close is that element of 1960s counter-cultural thought that Fred Turner has labelled ‘New Communalism’ – which went from combining intentional communities and cybernetics to becoming a key ingredient in the ‘Californian Ideology’ that has animated Silicon Valley from the dotcom bubble years to the present day. 47 Self-organisation was, of course, an important theme also for the ‘1968 left’. At first, this mostly took the form of a narrower interest in selfmanagement , that is, workers’ direct control over their productive and political activity. That was visible, for example, in the rediscovery of 1920s council communism by groups like Socialism or Barbarism and the Situationist International. The association between ‘self-organisation’ and 134

‘self-management’ is in fact a source of confusion to this day, as it leads to the false conclusion that social self-organisation (in the broad scientific sense) could only be instantiated by specific social forms (self-management in the strict sense). Parallel to the rediscovery of self-management, in any case, the boom in fields like molecular biology, information theory and cybernetics sparked efforts to think society according to such notions as feedback, information and code. A first sign of this in the humanities was the structuralist wave of the 1950s and 1960s. 48 It would not take long for that to percolate into politics, inspiring efforts to think self-organisation beyond self-management such as attempts to combine anarchism and cybernetics, and Chile’s ill-fated Project Cybersyn. 49 As the crisis of Marxism deepened, the growing authority of poststructuralist thought from the 1970s onwards prepared the terrain for the reception of ideas drawn from various scientific fields in which self-organisation was a central question (non-equilibrium thermodynamics, embryology, dynamic systems theory, artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences, among others). That, coupled with the rise of the internet and ‘new, new’ 50 or ‘newest’ 51 social movements in the late 1990s, would lead to the project of synthesising scientific, philosophical and political discourses on selforganisation into something that could serve as a theory of revolution for new times. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire , published at the turn of the century, was the most eminent example of that trend, if by no means the only one. 52 The point here is not to play a juvenile ‘guilty by association’ game and conclude that, if self-organisation shapes the worldview and rhetoric of bankers and tech tycoons, it must be a bad thing. What this briefest of surveys demonstrates is rather the concept’s fundamental axiological neutrality, which allows it to be associated with wildly disparate political positions. To say that a system is self-organised is only to claim that over time it displays patterns of organisation arising from the interaction of its elements, as well as some capacity for self-regulation, perhaps even adaptive evolution (the development of new patterns of systemic behaviour). In other words, that it is more than a collection of random loose parts and sustains internal coherence in the face of both internal tendencies towards 135

disorganisation and fluctuations in the environment. Self-organisation is value-neutral in that, for a system, the value that counts is ultimately its own stability: the purpose ‘to keep an assigned set of variables … within assigned limits’ even as it goes through different states and develops. 53 As far as the system is concerned, ‘good’ is whatever organisational pattern works, for as long as it does. ‘To itself, its own organization will always , by definition, be good’; but from that follows ‘no implication that the organization developed will be “good” in any absolute sense, or according to the criterion of any outside body such as ourselves’. 54 This is also to say that the system’s behaviour is not driven by the question of whether its present organisation is optimal (the most efficient or functional according to some set of criteria). On the contrary, it is perfectly possible for a system to chance upon stable patterns of organisation that are nonetheless highly dysfunctional in other senses, as Bateson showed with great ingenuity in regard to alcoholism and familial pathologies. 55 Likewise, there are no reasons to suppose that a self-organised system can guarantee justice or equality, however defined, for the elements that compose it or its environment. The fact that ant colonies are self-organised does not mean that many of us would find living in one satisfying, and capitalism has evolved without ever having a single driving centre in command, but it does not look like evolving into an egalitarian system any time soon. 56 This means that identifying a specific form of social organisation as the telos towards which society naturally tends is an operation involving three equally invalid steps. First, we suppose criteria of fairness to be part of what counts as optimal behaviour for a system. We then define our own ideas of fairness as corresponding to an optimal organisation of society, and we arrive at the conclusion that, if a system seeks optimality, it must perforce arrive at whatever notion of ideal organisation we hold. Self-organisation is thus made to double as a theory of justice. That, however, is merely a projection of our desires onto things. Ultimately, the evolutionary path of a system, even one composed of conscious beings, is determined by its own internal state at any given moment, which may include a memory of previous states; random input from the environment; and the contingent exploration of potential 136

responses triggered by the encounter of the two. Questions of justice and optimality occur only to an ‘outside’ observer, that is, one whose purpose and point of view cannot be confused with the system’s own – even if that observer happens to be within the system, as is the case with us and capitalism. We can find this tendency to project values and goals onto a system said to be self-organising – whereby its purpose is said to be not just its own persistence in time but the realisation of some ideal of justice held by the observer – in most political appropriations of scientific discourses on selforganisation. 57 This projection generally takes one of two forms: the spontaneous social order that is deemed better (fairer, more efficient, sustainable, robust) is presented either as an underlying reality to be protected from what perverts the natural tendency towards it, or as an immanently unfolding evolutionary tendency. In other words, the telos can be placed either at the origin (a possibility hidden underneath existing distortions) or at the end (a perfected form that emerges by gradually overcoming obstacles). In the first camp is neoliberalism, in the second we find Silicon Valley utopianism, cybernetic anarchism, and Hardt and Negri; countercultural communalism oscillates between the two. In all of these, the analogy with the self-organising powers of nature is used to legitimise the political ideals in question, be they the emancipation of the multitude, boundless technological progress, the self-generating order produced by economic interactions or even nature itself. Much in the same way as the recourse to history did between the eighteenth and the mid twentieth century, the analogy lends these ideals the authority of necessity, raises them to a plane distinct from the mere competition among particular interests and partial perspectives, and makes other alternatives appear as deviations from the correct path. The difference is that, in all of these cases – bar one, as we shall see – we are not talking about the development of a collective subject that organises itself to produce revolutionary rupture, but an evolutionary process arising from the aggregate effect of individual action or relatively small pockets of local collective initiative. For the New Communalists, ‘political activism was at best beside the point and at worst part of the problem’; the point was rather to change 137

individual consciousness and behaviour. 58 Harking back to the utopian socialists’ evolutionary schemes, they trusted the power of intentional communities to set an example for the world: ‘when they succeeded first in changing their minds and then in building new communities around those new minds, the technocratic machine would finally be brought to a halt’.59 Because this logic was inseparable from a vision of nature as harmonious and tending towards equilibrium, the role of agents could be construed as either historical or natural, in the sense that they were the conscious vehicles through which nature reasserted a balance previously upset by destabilising human activity. What few of them doubted, in any case, was that ‘an era of tribal endeavor and cosmic consciousness’ was imminent. 60 Anarchists like Sam Dolgoff and Colin Ward, in turn, envisioned local initiatives linking ‘in a network with no centre and no directing agency, hiving off new cells as the original ones grow’, 61 and trusted technological development and the growing complexity of contemporary society to make anarchism both more necessary and easier to implement. 62 In both cases, self-organisation served to theorise away the need for certain kinds or levels of agency: one acted local and let the global take care of itself. 63 That also meant, of course, that if the global failed to take care of itself, all that was left was ‘a kind of revolutionary politics without the need to make the revolution, valorising and prescribing what [would] come to be called prefigurative strategies … small-scale alternative projects embedded in everyday life’. 64 But self-organisation can also be used to disavow one’s own agency, covering it up in the colours of plain necessity: one is only an instrument for what needs to happen anyway. 65 That is what neoliberals constantly do regarding the radical mismatch between the active role they reserve for themselves and the limits that their theory prescribes to agents in general. 66 Likewise, when former New Communalists became New Economy soothsayers in the 1990s, the pioneering role once ascribed to communes was transferred to entrepreneurial visionaries whose capacity to harness the collective potentia of information and cooperation allowed them to present themselves as vehicles for systemic change, and their private interests ‘as 138

those of a revolution’. 67 Naturally, this only made sense as a notion of systemic change if one believed the tall tales of human emancipation that the New Economy told about itself. Hardt and Negri’s case is remarkable because of the way in which they try to bridge (or straddle) the divide between teleology with and without a subject. This opens them to accusations of both denying the role of agency and disavowing their own. On the one hand, and to a great extent against their post-structuralist interlocutors, they propose a ‘humanism after the death of Man’ 68 that makes clear ‘who or what drives the system’: living labour, that is, the multitude. 69 Rather than the contingent drift of a system in which elements enter into new combinations and co-evolve by responding to each other, history is for them the development of the multitude’s constituent power, which constantly forces constituted power to establish mechanisms of containment that ultimately cannot but create new conditions for the multitude to affirm its autonomy. In this regard, the multitude is a universal subject very much like the proletariat or, perhaps even more, Hegelian Spirit. 70 On the other hand, the multitude’s growing autonomy expresses itself as a power of self-organised cooperation resembling those of nature. This is a process that, perhaps unsurprisingly, they see as culminating now: ‘The conditions are emerging today that give the multitude the capacity of democratic decision-making and that thus make sovereignty [constituted power] unnecessary.’ 71 It is to a biological model, the brain, that Hardt and Negri first turn in order to explain how this capacity could work. 72 ‘From the perspective of neurobiologists’, they write, ‘the one [the sovereign] never decides.’ 73 It is certainly true that ‘there is no [sovereign] that makes a decision in the brain’, 74 if by that we understand that there is no permanent centre of control. Cerebral activity is characterised by what Warren McCulloch called ‘redundancy of potential command’, meaning that different clusters of neurons take on the task of responding to stimulus and coordinating the actions of one another at different times. 75 However, if we take the example at the scale that Hardt and Negri intend – the multitude as a planetary phenomenon, or humankind – is this more than a description of 139

what has always been the case? At that scale, sovereignty has only ever been a local phenomenon anyway; there has never been a centre of command for humankind as a whole, and human history in its entirety can be described as nothing but a process of different local centres interacting with and succeeding each other over time. In this case, to say that a decision was taken ‘by the multitude’ would simply amount to a metonymical substitution of the part that actually performs an action (this or that society, group or individual) for the larger whole to which it belongs. While it is perfectly possible to claim that every decision is taken by the multitude in this sense, that would be the same as a Spinozist explaining that some event took place because it was so determined by God’s essence: technically not false, but informationally poor, as it tells us nothing of the causes immediately involved in producing it. 76 Hardt and Negri clearly expect their explanation to have a more than trivial meaning. Under what condition would that be possible? Evidently, that a decision taken by a group or individual did not pertain to the multitude merely in the sense that those taking it are part of the multitude, but that it belonged to the multitude as such . In other words, that it expressed the multitude’s concrete goals and interests as a totality or subject. But here the brain analogy breaks down. The brain has no interests aside from responding to external stimulus in a timely and appropriate fashion, nor do the cells that compose it have anything like interests or an ideal of justice towards which they strive. The idea that, because the multitude can be ‘like the brain’, it could not produce decisions leading to the privatisation of the commons, the strengthening of sovereignty or the depletion of resources, makes sense only if we mistake self-organisation for a theory of justice. Ultimately, it seems that Hardt and Negri’s model could only be nontrivial on one of two conditions. Either individuals and groups make decentralised decisions whose aggregate effect is always the best possible result for all, in a sort of ‘invisible hand’ providentialism; or they correctly identify and intentionally choose the universal good even when that conflicts with their particular interests, which supposes that their particularity is sublated through conscious participation in a universal 140

subject. In short: Hayek or Hegel. 77 Unwilling to openly endorse either, Hardt and Negri covertly hold on to both, and thus also to the different kinds of teleology they offer. While they have bemusedly noted that critics accuse them of both anarchism and vanguardism, those two seemingly contradictory charges actually capture quite well this oscillation at the heart of their thought. 78 To the extent that they uphold a teleology with a universal subject, Hardt and Negri will appear to be vanguardist. Like Marx and Engels in the Manifesto , they find themselves suspended between ‘always-already and not-yet’: ‘If the multitude were not already latent and implicit in our social being, we could not even imagine it as a political project; and, similarly, we can only hope to realize it today because it already exists as a real potential.’ 79

The actualisation of that potential thus depends on people becoming conscious of its latency, but that in turn requires a ‘political project to bring it into being on the basis of … emerging conditions’. 80 This, finally, can only come from the initiative of those who are already conscious of this historical opportunity: ‘the opportune moment … has to be grasped by a political subject’. 81 The transition that ‘develops the multitude’s capacities for democratic decision making’ is therefore ‘not spontaneous’, but must be ‘governed’. 82 Hardt and Negri themselves recognise that these conclusions ‘throw us back into the dilemmas of vanguards, leadership, and representation’, 83 whose less-than-glorious record the authors of Empire have never failed to criticise. To their credit, they try in broad strokes to sketch a new kind of institution – open-ended, based on conflict, consolidating new forms of life – that could ensure that the process would develop unequivocally in the direction of the common good, without particularistic or authoritarian relapses. But can anything really guarantee that this time it will be different, and that the vanguard of the multitude will not go down the same path as that of the proletariat? Hardt and Negri’s solution to the impasse in which a teleology with the subject throws them is to fall back on their alternative, ‘anarchistic’ teleology without a subject: what ensures that history will not repeat itself is the (presumably unstoppable) progress of the multitude’s selforganising powers. ‘In the common fabric of the biopolitical diagram rest 141

latent, potential, chrysalis-like the capacities for the multitude to determine autonomously the political diagonal of the transition.’ 84 Thus, the very thing whose underdevelopment made the government of transition necessary is what can ensure that, for once, the process will not be led astray. Things like ‘vanguards, leadership, and representation’ are needed because the ‘formation of the multitude’ has not been ‘achieved’; 85 and yet the ‘strategic power of the multitude is the only guarantee’ that ‘leaders don’t outstay their welcome’. 86 In a sense, of course, this is all that anyone could say; if history is contingent, there can be no ultimate guarantees, and all that one can do is work with the available potentials. The problem is that Hardt and Negri often seem to suggest a much stronger claim: that both processes are indeed unstoppable, and that the multitude cannot but win in the end. ‘We can already recognize that time today is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living … In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future.’ 87 Sadly, it is only possible to do so if we rely on either a normatively loaded providentialism or the transitive theory of consciousness. In the end, the issue with Hardt and Negri’s plane of immanence is that it is not immanent enough: rather than a system constituted by the contingent interplay of the elements that compose it, it is a totality that precedes these elements and their interactions, determining the direction in which they unfold. 88 But what if the multitude, like Nature, ‘has no fixed goal and … all final causes are but figments of the human imagination’? 89 And what if every totality ‘is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them’, ‘a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them’, and is rather ‘added to them as a new part fabricated separately’, an effect of the interaction of its parts rather than the cause that drives them? 90

As we saw at the start of this chapter, the properly Spinozist position is not to say that everything ought to be self-organised – even less, given Spinoza’s critique of final causes, that it will – but to recognise that everything already is . This thought has the immediate, sobering consequence of showing that self-organisation, like Nature, is not ‘on our side’: neither good nor bad, it simply is. Yet that also means that there is 142

room for us to act within it. If the world is self-organised, we exist inside it and possess causal efficacy over other things; and while its powers vastly exceed ours, it is possible to induce changes in it if we have sufficient force and know where and when to apply it.

Politics with the Subject in

It is evident why, after the experiences of the twentieth century, opposing ‘self-organisation’ to ‘organisation’ would be appealing: it essentially provides the assurance that organisation can take care of itself without us actively worrying about it. Sadly, as we have seen, this is only possible if we transfer the responsibility for making things happen to an objective process that marches on regardless of our contribution; that is, to some kind of teleology. Even if it is only conditional – ‘ it may be that we will get there eventually’ – that still frees us from posing ourselves questions in the first person plural: What do we need to do? Do we need to step up what we are already doing? How else and where else can we intervene? What resources do we need for that? This offers the further compensatory advantages of making our powerlessness easier to bear, reassuring us when we contrast the paucity of our means with the vastness of our ends, and exempting us from running risks and taking responsibility for initiatives that might turn out bad. Teleology need not be consciously assumed. We rely on it implicitly every time we pose concrete initiatives or proposals as a threat to a ‘spontaneous’ process that would somehow be denatured or derailed if any deliberate attempts were made to inflect its course. What we do in those cases is effectively posit the process as something other than the actions of the people that compose it. We are transforming the (true) ideas that the whole is more than the sum of its parts and that ultimately no one can control all the effects of their actions into the (false) conclusion that, left to their own devices, things will ‘just happen’ – and that trying to influence their course can only prevent them from happening as we believe they should. To be sure, much of that is a response to the belated recognition that the modern, anthropocentric faith in humankind’s demiurgic powers has produced endless unintended monsters, the environmental crisis being only the hardest to ignore. But responding to the illusion of a 143

transcendence of the agent over the processes on which it intervenes by instituting a transcendence of processes over the agents that compose them, as if processes were something other than what is produced by agents interacting, is to overreact. The same goes for responding to a mechanistic, hylemorphic notion of agency with a complexity as inscrutable as a divine plan. Again, it is a matter of calibration: the appropriate answer to a conception of action lacking in complexity is not quietism and inaction, but more complexity. In a contingent, probabilistic universe, you have to take responsibility for what you want to happen; or, to be precise, for ensuring that you have raised the probability of it happening as high as you could. Between the two equally bad extremes of fatalism and voluntarism, the answer is always the same: increasing our capacity to act , which necessarily involves increasing our capacity to process and learn from the complexity around us. Among the left, the reception of scientific discourses on complexity and self-organisation mostly took place under the shadow of what I earlier called ‘trauma of organisation’. This resulted in a somewhat selective reception, with such omissions as those pointed out in chapter 1 . If one neglects concepts like nucleation and critical size and just assumes that whatever systems one wishes to influence are permanently close to a critical threshold, it is possible to build a theory of change in which magnitude, intensity, durability and consistency of action are practically irrelevant. One might then conclude that, if the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas, one need not – perhaps should not – try to act at a scale much bigger than that. This is how self-organisation was instrumentalised by a legitimate fear of things we need (initiative, assembling and channelling potentia ) and what they might entail (vanguards, representation, institutions, potestas ) into an argument as to why we do not need those things at all. A critique of this misguided interpretation of self-organisation brings us back to some points made earlier in this book. If it is possible to claim that ‘everything is (already) self-organised’, it is because the difference between ‘organisation’ and ‘self-organisation’ is ultimately a matter of scale. ‘Organisation’ and ‘self-organisation’ designate the same process as seen 144

from different perspectives: it is one thing if you look at it from the outside, like a scientist examining the brain, and another if you see it from the inside, as a neuron. But this also means that, for finite beings like ourselves who exist within the processes we describe as self-organised, ‘selforganisation’ is not something that we could survey from start to finish as if from above, and treat it as separate from what we and other finite beings do. When we talk about organising things, we are talking about the very same reality that can be otherwise described as self-organised; the difference is only that we are doing so from a first-person perspective. To confuse this with opportunism, authoritarianism, paternalism or a lack of reciprocity is not only unnecessary: it deprives us of a language we need in order to expand our collective capacity to act. In the same way, if ‘organisation’ and ‘spontaneity’ cannot be opposed, it is ultimately because they are two sides of a single coin, each but a moment or aspect of the other. It is only by organising itself in however makeshift a way that any kind of spontaneous initiative can produce effects; yet it is only because an inclination to do something already exists that there is anything to organise. Despite all their other differences, Luxemburg and Lenin were always on the same side when it came to castigating their contemporaries who acted as if, since the revolution was inevitable, history did not still have to be made . What they attacked as a fatalistic, mechanistic, non-dialectical interpretation of Marx treated his words as an objective prophecy that would come true by itself, a process at once independent from the decisions of individual and collective agents and driving their actions from above. The enthusiastic belief that both of them devoted to the inexorable movement of history and the ‘spontaneous’ awakening of the proletarian masses was premised on the idea that the revolution would happen precisely because people would take deliberate steps to ensure it . 91 There was no contradiction between the immanent unfolding of the process and agents deciding to act; that immanent unfolding was nothing but the conjunction of existing tendencies plus the actions of agents, not a transcendent fate governing all things like automata. There was no ‘natural’ historical development that would somehow be spoiled by people acting according to their desires and beliefs, though rash, voluntaristic acts could certainly 145

provoke setbacks. Historical development was both the cause of those beliefs and desires and the outcome of the actions that followed from them; that is why it was necessary not only to act upon those desires and beliefs, but to do so in the most effective, consequential way. This they called ‘dialectics’, and whoever failed to understand it was, they thought, not only misinterpreting historical materialism but – whether in good or bad faith – abjuring their historical responsibility. 92 The ‘living, dialectical explanation’ that conceives organisation ‘as a product of the struggle’ tells us that, even during a revolutionary process, things do not simply ‘fall from heaven’. They still have to be done; they still must be organised. What Luxemburg calls ‘dialectical’ we could just as well call ‘immanent’; where she says ‘living’, we could say ‘self-organising’. Either way, one arrives at the same conclusion. If it is not made into a transcendent teleology, self-organisation does not exclude, but rather requires a politics that implicates itself subjectively at each moment. That is, a politics that replaces every non-committal ‘what should happen?’ with a ‘what do we need to do?’, turns every ‘there should be’ into a ‘ we must ’. One that does not dissolve itself into a higher unity, be that an ethereal ‘process’ or a universal subject-to-come, but assumes the limitedness and partiality of its own perspective as a necessary condition, while striving to overcome it not in thought but in practice. A politics in the first person plural or, in short, a politics with the subject in. 93

146

5

Elements for a Theory of Organisation I:

Ecology, Distributed Leadership,

Organising Cores, Vanguard-

Function, Diffuse Control _________________________________

How does one construct a force that is not an organisation? The Invisible Committee Of course, even during the revolution, mass strikes do not exactly fall from heaven. They must be brought about in some way or another by the workers. Rosa Luxemburg

From Networks to Organisation as Ecology

Widely hailed by many as the greatest innovation of the 2011 uprisings, the idea of horizontality has a longer history than that; it was, in fact, the most obvious connection between the struggles of the last decade and the alterglobalist cycle of the decade before. Three things had converged in the mid to late 1990s to constitute this idea: an increased awareness of the interconnectedness brought about by capitalist globalisation; the discovery of the organising and mobilising affordances provided by the internet; and the inspiration coming from autonomous movements in the Global South, especially the Zapatistas in Mexico and those that emerged in Argentina in the wake of the 2001 crisis. While the first of these elements pointed to the undermining of national sovereignty and democratic control by transnational agencies and corporate power, which had severely undermined traditional left organisations in the process, the last spoke of democracy being built from the bottom up. The middle element was what promised a mediation between the two: if the world was increasingly 147

networked, and political resistance increasingly took the form of the network, it was from movements networked on- and offline that one could expect both a new kind of democracy and ‘another world’ distinct from that of capitalist globalisation. From the start, then, horizontality was tied to something we could call the network paradigm : the generalisation of networks as an explanatory and organisational model not only to politics but, as Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello were among the first to observe, to work and social life as a whole. 1 For many in the early 2000s, this went one step further, and networks were seen as ‘the form at last discovered’ of political organisation: intrinsically democratic, indefinitely expansive and, by virtue of their flexibility and isomorphism with post-Fordist capitalism, the most adequate to the struggles of a new era. 2 Although 2011 represented to some extent a return to the national level – not necessarily as a privileged locus of power, but as a space in which movements found it possible to build leverage – that combination between the network paradigm and horizontality, as well as the optimism it inspired, remained central to it. Writing about her experience among Argentinean movements, Marina Sitrin defined horizontality as a ‘break with vertical ways of organizing and relating’, implying ‘democratic communication on a level plane [that] involves – or at least intentionally strives towards – non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian creation rather than reaction’. 3 Generalising from such local experiences to how they related to each other and other movement actors, Marianne Maeckelbergh rendered explicit the connection between networks and horizontality: At its core, horizontality refers to a decentralized network structure that produces non-hierarchical relationships between the various nodes … The word ‘network’ is an abstract term devoid of particular content … but the term ‘horizontality’ … provides the meaningful content for the movement’s decentralized structure, indicating that it facilitates the shift from hierarchical power to non-hierarchical power. A horizontal network rejects representation and delegation of command, allowing actors to reclaim ‘control’. 4

From the start, an ostensible difficulty of the discourse on horizontality was integrating two conflicting ideas. On the one hand, the ubiquity and centrality of networks to nature and society, which made it possible to draw 148

intellectual and political validation from contemporary science: networks were not only everywhere, they were by that very token demonstrably viable forms of organisation. On the other, a stark division of the political world into two, separating the networked realm of horizontal organisation from the vertical, hierarchical world of parties, unions and the state. Doing so both contradicted the claim that networks were all-pervasive and instituted a questionable separation between the natural and the social: networks were the ‘natural’ way to organise as opposed to the ‘artifice’ of vertical organisation. Some derived from this a teleology of sorts: being ‘natural’ made networks more resilient, hence destined to win in the long run. 5 The source of confusion lay in a failure to distinguish between two senses of ‘network’. If, on the one hand, the word designates a specific organisational form in the same class as ‘party’, ‘trade union’ or ‘collective’, ‘network’ is also the most general way of describing any collection of interrelated elements. In the latter sense, it makes no sense to speak as if there were a world of networked organising to which the property of horizontality automatically belonged, set against a world of uniformly vertical organisations: there are only networks, of different shapes, sizes and kinds. It is not only that parties, trade unions, corporations, states and ‘traditional’ organisations in general are all describable as networks, even if their network-structure is obviously conditioned by the formal structures they possess. Formal organisations, self-described networks and unaffiliated individuals are all embedded in a web of relations that is also best described in network terms. To be is to be in a network, to be organised in/as a network – which is why there cannot be, at a deeper level, an opposition between networks and non-networks, nor such a thing as organisationlessness. To be without (formal) organisation is already to be organised in (or as) a network of some kind. The problem, in short, was that the network paradigm had not been generalised enough . Focusing on networks as an organisational form that one could (or should) opt into prevented people from drawing all the implications of networks as something nobody can opt out of : the underlying topology common to all organisational forms. 6 Once that generalisation is made, however, a number of things become clear. 149

The first and most important is that, if hierarchical organisations are themselves made of networks and part of larger networks, they cannot be conceived as the last bastion standing between us and the perfectly horizontal world that will exist once they are gone. What they prove is that there is nothing about networks in themselves that makes them necessarily flat or egalitarian. A vertical concentration of power is not the opposite of a network but a kind of network in its own right (namely, centralised). Furthermore, if we are to take to its ultimate consequences the claim of networked organisation to being continuous with the natural world, what science has observed is not only that networks are not intrinsically egalitarian, their spontaneous tendencies point in the opposite direction. Natural and social networks display clustered connectedness (separation into densely connected clusters that are linked to each other by a small number of nodes) and heterogeneous connectedness (the number of ties each node has, or ‘degree’, varies quite dramatically). 7 According to a broadly accepted model of network formation, this is an inevitable consequence of the way they expand, which follows a mechanism of preferential attachment: the more connected a node is, the more likely it is that new nodes will connect to it. This phenomenon produces a degree distribution in which a relatively small number of highly connected nodes (‘hubs’) is followed by a long tail of nodes with decreasing degrees. This is, of course, only the bare bones of it. But, if we take number of connections (centrality), number of connections to highly connected nodes (eigenvector centrality) and serving as connection between clusters (betweenness centrality) as indicative of a node’s capacity to act on the actions of others, it becomes clear that there is no scientific evidence of an inbuilt tendency towards an even distribution of this capacity in networks. From this, we might conclude not that it is impossible but that, if it is to exist, it must be fabricated actively and constantly. Generalising the network paradigm also highlights the insufficiency of approaching the question of organisation as if it concerned nothing but individual organisations or the ‘correct’ organisational form. Beyond each individual organisation, there is everything else that it is in relation to – the broader field in which one finds all the other organisations, individuals, 150

diffuse trends of aggregate behaviour, permanent or temporary concentrations of collective action, and so on. A theory of organisation must not only be capable of taking these relations into account, it must always presuppose them, and thus also a plurality of centres and organisational forms, from the most one-off to the most established, which emerge in diverse conditions and perform different functions. Once again, there is no cogent reason to think that this plurality should be homogenised by the adoption of a single organisational form, nor that the whole field should be brought under the aegis of a single organisation. On the contrary, it is hard to see how either of these things could happen. The point, in short, is to shift from thinking organisation in terms of individual organisations to conceiving it ecologically: as a distributed ecology of relations traversing and bringing together different forms of action (aggregate, collective), disparate organisational forms (affinity groups, informal networks, unions, parties), the individuals that compose or collaborate with them, unaffiliated individuals who attend protests, share material online or even just sympathetically follow developments on the news, webpages and social media profiles, physical spaces, and so on. Whatever we totalise as ‘the movement’ is in fact a non-totalisable network made of several different networks, an evolving network ecology that is in turn nested in broader ecologies that overlap in various ways (the city, the nation, global capitalism, members of a certain class, speakers of a certain language). The idea of thinking political organisation ecologically has been gaining traction in recent years. 8 The very nature of the uprisings of the last decade certainly helped: mass protests with little or no input from mass organisations, full of moving parts with variable connections to one another and no general coordination. Even if not directly named as such, however, the idea has been around for some time. It was implied, for example, in the way in which Foucault and Deleuze posed the problem of organisation as one of setting up ‘lateral affiliations and an entire system of networks and popular bases’, establishing ‘transversal links between … active and discontinuous points from one country to another or within a single country’. 9 Under the name of ‘area’, it was theorised in Italy in the 1970s as 151

the fundamental reality of what would become known as ‘Autonomia’ or the ‘1977 movement’. In the words of the editorial collective behind the Milanese journal Rosso : The group Workers’ Autonomy [Autonomia Operaia] , however, does not exist . There are individual groups, rooted in the reality of the struggle in the factory, at school, in the neighbourhood; each of these calls itself by whatever name it wishes and believes in, and participates in ‘autonomy’ – the important one, with a small ‘a’ – insofar as it is really within the masses and is capable inside them to develop agitation, to produce organisation and counterpower … In this sense, ‘workers’ autonomy’ is well and truly an organisational model rather than a new groupuscule or a little party: ‘workers’ autonomy’ is the capacity to bring together and concentrate proletarian insubordination in the form of a power that is unleashed on the enemy. 10

Organisational ecology was implied in the practice of the women’s and gay liberation movements, both of which tended to treat their internal plurality as a given rather than a temporary condition to be overcome. Increased global and regional interconnectedness probably did as much to naturalise this way of thinking as the stasis, decline and fall of the nationlevel organisations that had hegemonised the left for a long time. The larger the known universe of different initiatives became, the harder it was to imagine a situation in which multiplicity would not be the default. By the time the alterglobalist ‘movement of movements’ coalesced, its very diversity and global span made an ecological way of approaching it inevitable. So much so, in fact, that the question of whether it was even possible to describe it as a movement at all, or whether spaces like the World Social Forum ought to become organisations in their own right, were the object of endless debate. 11 At least one important tactical innovation resulted from this, the principle of ‘diversity of tactics’: the practice, at protests against global summits like 1999’s ‘Battle of Seattle’, to organise in separate blocs that were free to pursue their preferred methods of action. Personally, I remember first becoming conscious of the idea’s implications several years ago upon reading Ward Churchill’s account of a conversation in which former Martin Luther King associate William Jackson told him: 152

There are a lot of reasons why I can’t get behind fomenting violent actions like riots, and none of ’em are religious. It’s all pragmatic politics. But I’ll tell you what: I never let a riot slide by. I’m always the first one down at city hall and testifying before Congress, tellin’ ’em, ‘See? If you guys’d been dealing with us all along, this never would have happened’. It gets results, man. Like nothin’ else, y’know? … Rap Brown and the Black Panthers are just about the best things that ever happened to the Civil Rights Movement. 12

Of all the lessons to be drawn from this story, the most obvious – moderates often have a parasitical relation to what radicals do – is also the most superficial. Not, of course, that it is not true; but there are at least six broader points about thinking organisation ecologically here that it would be a shame to miss. The first and most elementary is that there need be no kind of coordination or even direct contact among the different components of an ecology for them to interact with one another: by acting on their shared environment, they can indirectly shape each other’s fields of possibilities. 13 This is a fact more usually acknowledged when that impact is negative, such as when some protesters are accused of ‘ruining a peaceful demonstration for everyone’, or those making the accusation are attacked for contributing to the movement’s criminalisation. 14 It is obvious, however, that agents also create enabling conditions and opportunities for one another, and that their actions can become mutually reinforcing rather than detrimental. It is not just moderates that feed off ruptures created by radicals, consolidating gains while simultaneously foreclosing greater possibilities. Processes of political radicalisation normally rely on rights and resources, such as public services and organisational infrastructure, negotiated by moderates in previous struggles. An obvious example here would be the way in which social democratic parties in the Global North channelled upper-class fear of the Russian Revolution into the construction of the welfare state, and the welfare state then set the conditions for a flourishing of radical workingclass culture and politics in the 1960s and 1970s. 15 Besides, unless they think imminent revolution is on the cards, radicals will know that recognition from the state is often the only way to consolidate a victory once the mobilisation that made it possible starts to peter out. 16

153

A simple opposition between ‘radicals’ and ‘moderates’ is, however, still too rudimentary a recognition of the second lesson we can draw: that functional differentiation is one of the key features – and strengths – of an ecology. We can understand this in at least two ways. First, there is the differentiation in terms of general attitudes, of which the radical/moderate opposition offers a very simplified sketch, and Bill Moyer and George Lakey’s idea of the ‘four roles of social activism’ (advocates, helpers, organisers and rebels) gives a more complex picture. 17 To be sure, there is still a problem with treating these as if they were personality types instead of roles that different people can occupy at different times. To truly think of one’s actions ecologically is to be less invested in one’s own self-image than on the need to play, or at least recognise as valid, whatever part a situation might require. Nonetheless, Moyer and Lakey’s scheme has the advantage of distinguishing individuals and groups according to the specific contributions that they make instead of defining them according to the terms in which they define themselves, or turning into a fixed boundary what is generally only determinable as positions relative to one another (‘x is more radical than y on this subject’, ‘y was less moderate than z on that occasion’). We can also understand functional differentiation as denoting the different kinds of intervention that groups and individuals specialise in. Some will define themselves primarily by engaging in direct action; others will do community or labour organising among a certain group, in a certain area or industry; some will build cooperatives or mutual aid initiatives; others will collect information and analysis around a particular issue; some will have specific knowledges and skills, like computer programming or corporate research; others will focus on raising awareness among certain demographics, lobbying policymakers, producing and distributing news and commentary, and so on. Some of those functions will be turned towards the environment, like the ones I have just listed, others towards the ecology itself (providing training, resources, legal support). Each group or organisation will no doubt do more than one of those, but none of them will do them all, or none of them will do them all well . They do not need to, in any case, if they have an ecology they can tap into when the occasion 154

requires skills, capacities, contacts, resources, and so on that they do not possess. In this light, the idea of the party as an organisational umbrella that seeks to control all stages and operations of the political process appears as homologous to the vertically integrated company – which perhaps should not surprise us, given that the two things developed roughly around the same time. 18 The reasons to be sceptical of one, we might add, apply just as well to the other. The logic behind them is essentially competitive, ‘winnertakes-all’; while the form may work very well for an organisation looking to dominate a market, it is highly doubtful that having a single actor concentrate that degree of power, whether economic or political, is advantageous to everyone else. If we abandon the goal of vertical integration, on the other hand, no organisation or group needs to perform every function. What an ecology needs is a sufficient number of nodes that can do each of them well and are adept at visualising their work within a larger whole, eliciting contributions from others and offering theirs in return. To push the corporate metaphor a little further: instead of a single agent that controls the entire supply chain, a healthy ecology needs several actors that combine the ability to intervene at certain key points of the chain with the capacity to think the chain as a whole. A third point that follows from the first two is that the ‘wealth’ produced by each node or cluster never belongs exclusively to them, but is also to some extent the ecology’s. This will be all the more the case if nodes focus less on the ways in which they can be said to be compete and more on how they directly or indirectly cooperate with one another. The more they take a non-competitive perspective, the more wealth is produced and held in common. Conversely, nothing breeds competitiveness like competitiveness: the more agents behave as if they were in a zero-sum game, the less there is an incentive to cooperate, and less value in the ecology for all. It is a sad irony that people who constantly protest that the world cannot be reduced to the struggle of all against all often see politics through the prism of predation and parasitism, overlooking possibilities for symbioses of a commensal or mutualist kind. It is not difficult to see the link that connects this to an approach that treats the question of 155

organisation as if it hinged on building a single organisation or organisational type. If one supposes that there is only one answer, it is natural to view politics as a process of weeding out false alternatives. The fourth point, then, is that thinking organisation ecologically necessarily implies a shift away from conceiving it solely as a zero-sum contest. In fact, the fifth lesson we can draw from the anecdote above is that no one wins on their own. This is a case that Churchill makes quite effectively in relation to pacifists: violence is not excluded from their calculations but, on the contrary, it is integral to their survival and success. The violence perpetrated by others against the common adversary creates political openings; the violence perpetrated against the movement can undermine the adversary’s moral authority. But, of course, we could just as easily invert the argument: the moral authority granted to nonviolent leaders or pacifist organisations like churches is often required in order to justify confrontations in the eyes of public opinion, protect non-pacifists from repression, or generally move things forward after a major outburst. Again, however, this is still posing the question in schematic, identitarian terms. The question is rather that, precisely because an ecology is composed of several agents directly and indirectly cooperating and competing with one another, it is impossible to trace any particular outcome back to a single one of them, to a single strategy or tactic. It is the interplay and tension between them that gets the results. Of course, some causes – people, slogans, ideas, actions, programmes – will have more influence on the final product than others. Yet that effect is never simply the faithful realisation of the idea that someone had in their head, the imposition of a mental form on the inert matter of the world. It is overdetermined by objective tendencies and the interference of convergent, divergent and contrary forces. Successful struggles have always depended on the distributed action of agents with varying degrees of agreement with one another in regards to interests, goals, strategy, tactics, modes of action, and so forth. Even people who distrust each other and have serious political differences are capable of entering into mutually beneficial relations. It is not just that the best way to win anything is to come at it from several angles at the same time. Any account that presents a political fact as 156

the work of a single person or organisation is necessarily a simplification leaving out the contribution of several others. As I stressed in chapter 1 , my portrayal of an ecology is not meant as a blueprint for a future movement but as a description of what is always already the case to a greater or lesser extent, regardless of whether people agree with or are even aware of each other. If there is a normative dimension here, it does not lie in the imperative to create an ecology, as there always is one anyway, but in thinking about what exists in ecological terms. This entails, among other things, privileging cooperation over competition, nurturing common resources and mutually beneficial relations, and strategising with a broad field of other agents in mind. Doing the latter, for example, means applying the principle of diversity of tactics not to simple problems like temporarily disrupting an international summit, but to complex problems like permanently shutting down an entire industry, which are even more likely to demand not a single tactic repeated a great many times but a combination of efforts from blockades to lawsuits, industrial action to corporate campaigns, mutual aid to changing legislation. Naturally, a synergy among several different actors pursuing different tactics is something that can very well happen without planning or coordination. However, a critical mass of people thinking about strategy ecologically makes it more likely that it could happen more often, in more targeted and effective ways. This is not to suggest that competition or tension ceases to exist the moment people shift to an ecological lens. Substantial differences in interests, goals, beliefs and political approaches continue to exist; what changes is how people relate to them. Are they predominantly irreconcilable logical contradictions that cannot exist in the same world? Or are they mostly divergent perspectives with a grain of truth in them, real oppositions that could well be made compatible, genuine differences that may well be compossible? If the former, every encounter carries the weight of a struggle to the death, every undergraduate recruited or union branch motion approved a mark on the scoreboard of who will get to lead the revolution. If the latter, much of the competitive tension becomes tension in the sense outlined in chapter 2 : ineliminable, variable, to be adjusted and balanced 157

over time. One moves from fighting over scarce resources or imposing resistance to the activities of others to partaking from common resources and joining forces to overcome resistances that could not be overcome alone; from disorganising and decomposing to composing and organising. 19

Even direct competition can then be pursued in ways that maximise mutual benefit. When Malcolm X visited Alabama in 1965 while Martin Luther King was in jail, he used the occasion to publicly emphasise his differences with the Baptist leader, but he also deliberately leveraged that distance in the latter’s favour. Later, King would recount a conversation that X had with his wife, Coretta, at the time: ‘He thought he could help me more by attacking me than praising me. He thought it would make it easier for me in the long run. He said, “If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King”’. 20 Because no single agent has full control over any outcome in an ecology, the opportunities that agents create for one another are often ambivalent: they raise the probability of a desired result but potentially diminish the control one can have over it. This is the seventh point we can take from the anecdote above. If we view competition as a conflict between forces instead of as an irreconcilable contradiction, that tension becomes a matter of relative strength rather than an absolute opposition. Any push in the direction of a common goal is in principle welcome, and we can support the process that leads to it even if we do not control it nor quite agree with its exact direction. If we want to make sure it is not led astray, we must ensure that we have the power to affect its course while taking the utmost care not to put it in danger. In fact, it is often the lack of this power that makes people revert to a competitive attitude in which they would sooner withdraw support from a valid initiative than see it succeed according to the vision of others. As Lenin noted, ‘The only ones who fear temporary alliances, even with unreliable people, are those with no confidence in themselves’, that is, in their own strength. 21 Yet this means that the solution should not be political isolation but instead increasing one’s own capacity to act. Those who oppose mass action and civil disobedience are often (and rightly) subjected to the criticism of Frederick Douglass’s well-known 158

maxim: they ‘want crops without plowing up the ground’. 22 That aphorism’s central insight can, however, be generalised to several other situations. The problem, as Ward Churchill’s critique of dogmatic pacifism makes clear, is that a one-sided affirmation of one’s own position can only be based on a disavowal of that on which it depends. It takes the work of others for granted, failing to acknowledge the ways in which they create conditions and opportunities for us, and for that reason finds itself exempt from any duty of reciprocity towards them. Yet even those who claim a position of radical autonomy are never really outside these relations of interdependence – nor, for that matter, are they outside the circuits of social and capitalist reproduction, however ‘marginal’ their location within them may be. Wilful blindness to one’s own conditions of possibility bears more than a passing similarity to the everyday invisibilisation of reproductive labour or capital’s blithe appropriation of ‘positive externalities’. In all these cases, the fantasy of an impossible independence is created by erasing the ties that connect us to others. The point here is not to demand that people live up to their own self-image but, on the contrary, that rhetoric and self-image be brought down to earth. ‘There is no true life, if not in the false one’, as Franco Fortini put it, inverting Adorno’s aphorism – even if some lives can no doubt be falser than others. The idea laid out in chapter 2 that purism can only ever be a misrecognition of one’s own reality can be given an ecological interpretation here: a political identity, tactic, form of intervention, and so on asserted in absolute terms implicitly relies on others compensating for its one-sidedness by supplying it with the necessary mediations.

How Does an Ecology Decide?

An ‘ecology’ is less than an organism and more than an organisation. ‘Less than an organism’ means that the emergence and functioning of its components is not determined in advance by a unifying organising principle, nor are their interactions governed by an intrinsic purpose of systemic survival. Unlike in an organism, there are in principle no limits to the ways in which components might recombine, and the breakdown of the system does not necessarily imply the death of the parts. An organisational 159

ecosystem is ‘holistic without being a real whole’, if we take ‘real whole’ to be synonymous with organic totality. 23 Components co-evolve contingently, rather than being exhaustively and necessarily determined by their mutual constitution, and they retain a fair degree of autonomy; their interactions, in turn, produce larger patterns of systemic behaviour. If we can speak of individuals or organisations performing different ‘functions’, this is only in the sense that they differentiate themselves through specialisation, and contains no functionalist implications. ‘More than an organisation’ means that an ecology is not intentional: it does not have agreed-upon boundaries, it is not constituted by an act of will, and one does not have to be aware of it in order to be a part. It is not some kind of meta-organisation that smaller organisations come together to constitute, in the same way that an ecosystem is not a meta-organism composed of smaller ones. (It was precisely to get away from Frederic Clements and John Phillips’ notion of the biological community as a ‘complex organism’ that Arthur George Tansley proposed the concept of ecosystem in 1935.) In Hayek’s distinction between spontaneous ( kosmos ) and deliberately made orders ( taxis ), it belongs to the first camp, in which the second is contained. 24 Unlike in Hayek, however, there is no suggestion here that spontaneous equals optimal behaviour; as we saw in the previous chapter, there are no reasons to assume an innate tendency towards the best possible result. Saying that an ecology is not an organisation does not preclude attempts at federating different groups into larger wholes, but it hopefully discourages any fantasies that all problems would be solved once a federation of all groups and organisations existed. One does not organise a totality, one organises within it . If an ecology is a spontaneous order that envelops deliberately made ones, be they formal organisations or informally adopted patterns, there is no agreed global protocol, let alone an overarching decision-making mechanism, according to which its components interact. Procedures are always local, valid for some parts and not for others, and so is deliberation. Yet if this is true, and the uprisings of the last decade can be described as ecologies, their widely accepted characterisation as horizontal movements organised through general assemblies is at best incomplete. For, while it can 160

explain how each place with a general assembly functioned, it cannot explain how different places interacted. Neither can it explain those cases in which assemblies were absent or mostly secondary (the gilets jaunes in France, the 2013 protests in Brazil), nor how ‘the movement of the squares’ was capable of making decisions before and after the brief interlude in which large general assemblies existed, not least the decisions that led to the occupation of those squares and the creation of those assemblies. But, to be fair, it was always an open secret that this description was at most an approximation – a metonymy that made a couple of more prominent aspects stand for the whole. The absence of globally accepted procedures also means that horizontality, if taken to mean a perfectly level field of participation such as that supposedly instantiated by assemblies and consensus decision-making, does not hold as a description of those movements either. Take the problem of how different assemblies at different locations interacted with one another, or even different assemblies in the same place on different days. 25 Participants in one place or time had no say over what was decided in another, while being potentially affected by decisions in which they did not participate. Besides, some assemblies, owing to their greater visibility, inevitably had a greater impact on outside perceptions of the movement than others. Last but not least, the relationship between the movement as a whole and the rest of the population was itself not horizontal. A movement always emerges with no prior authorisation, and no matter how inclusive it might aspire to be, it always implies a division: it is never the whole of society. However big an uprising, ‘it is always a tiny minority’, 26 even if a ‘ massive minority ’ behind which ‘the conservative “heartlands” disappear’. 27 As Jodi Dean sharply put it, ‘Occupy Wall Street is not actually the movement of the 99 percent of the population of the United States (or the world) against the top 1 percent. It is a movement mobilizing itself around an occupied Wall Street in the name of the 99 percent.’ 28 Again, the point here is not to lament that these movements could not live up to their principles, but to expose the mismatch between those principles and what actually happens in practice. By reflecting a warped image back to movements, the imaginary of horizontalism – which is not 161

the actual practices that people engage in, but the hypostatisation of those into an abstract ideal – both falsifies the reality of horizontality and sets standards that are impossible to fulfil. The problem emerges when people confuse self-organisation (which is the emergent effect of different actions and organising efforts) and selfmanagement (which designates an autonomous deliberative process), and try to think the former (which refers to an ecology’s global order) in terms of the latter (which is only possible locally). In a bounded local order like an assembly, it is in principle possible to have a decision ratified ‘by everyone’, as it is possible to both agree on a procedure for producing it and to give a countable content to ‘everyone’, even if that is just ‘whoever happens to be present at the time’. In an open, spontaneous order, this is by definition impossible. ‘Everyone’ is an uncountable, potentially infinite set, and so no procedure exists, nor could any be established by consultation with ‘everyone’ either. The sovereign that could ratify that or any other decision is simply never given. This means that, if we judge the whole ecology by the same criteria that we use to decide whether one if its local components can be called ‘horizontal’ – for example, that everyone has the opportunity of an equal say – we will find that the answer is no. There is no way that interacting local orders or the decisions that lead to the creation of those could meet those criteria. The upshot is that either we accept that notions like ‘horizontality’ and ‘legitimacy’ mean something else in a situation of self-organisation (as opposed to self-management), or we must conclude that the very conditions of possibility of horizontal spaces are themselves not horizontal. The irony is that, for all its critiques of sovereignty, horizontalism thinks legitimacy in sovereign terms, as something that depends on the existence of a bounded reality – that is, on borders. It is just that the sovereign is collective, and the borders are imagined as infinitely expansive. This becomes clear in two seemingly contradictory but in fact perfectly complementary behaviours. The first is a hankering for indefinite inclusiveness that leads to endlessly deferring decisions because no decisionmaking space ever feels legitimate. As there are always more people who should be consulted, and to make decisions inevitably closes some 162

possibilities down, it is never yet the time to decide. This is often where horizontalist initiatives flounder before they are even born: the inaugural moment of decision-making is postponed for so long that people lose interest (nothing is ever decided), or the initial premise on which the space was created is blocked by newcomers and no common new premise can be found. If a certain ‘critical mass’ is attained, however, as in the square occupations of 2011, this attitude can easily flip into its opposite. Indefinite inclusiveness then becomes a fetish of presence that makes the visible, countable ‘everyone’ of the assembly into an absolute sovereign before which decisions taken elsewhere – even by individuals at home, on the internet, in their own groups, and so on – appear suspect or illegitimate. 29 In the first case, horizontality is impossible as decision-making power because it would be impossible to grant it that power without creating exclusion. In the second, it becomes possible, but only at the cost of excluding all other sources of initiative in order to assert its sovereignty. It is to the extent that it produces such intractable paradoxes that the absolutisation of horizontality by horizontalism sets standards that are literally impossible to live up to. This is the source of the combination of anxiety, paralysis and disavowal one often finds in self-described horizontal spaces. Disavowal, for starters, of their very condition of existence, the act of foundation that shapes them in ways that become effectively unquestionable – not least, as non-horizontalists like to complain, the choice for consensus over majority rule. But disavowal also of the fact that the groups and informal networks that pre-exist that space or emerge around it continue to operate as arenas for opinion forming or decisionmaking. The embarrassment subsists even if they exist strictly for reasons of mutual trust and expediency and have no malicious intent whatsoever. 30 Finally, disavowal in the sense that the limits encountered in practice are either hidden behind an uncritical, imaginary representation of what actually goes on, or treated as contingent and temporary rather than necessary and constitutive. Anxiety, in turn, comes from both the feeling of permanently falling short of one’s impossible ideal and the fear of being called out for betraying it. The worst effect of horizontalism may in fact very well be that it 163

cultivates a mistrust of initiative, turned inwards as self-policing and outwards as paranoia, that ultimately leads to paralysis. If to start anything is to create divisions, to exclude some possibilities, to exercise influence in favour of one’s ideas; and if to do so without mandate or precedent is to act illegitimately, usurping the authority of a sovereign that does not (yet) exist; initiative must then become an inherently suspect thing, regardless of how relevant or useful it might be. 31 The collective, in this case, rather than a space in which individuals enhance their capacity to act through cooperation, is made into an entity apart from those individuals: an absolute authority that always knows better than those who compose it, an indivisible unity constantly threatened by its very participants. It becomes at once a subject supposed to know (the other who we imagine has all the answers) and a watchful big Other (the panoptic surveillance that scrutinises each action for an unavowable will to power). But since what the collective thinks and does is inseparable from what the individuals that constitute it think or do, if the latter are afraid to act, or afraid of the actions of one another, the collective cannot move either. The tendency is that it will restrict itself to an increasingly narrow comfort zone, or come to an end because it cannot make decisions, or fall apart acrimoniously as soon as any initiative is taken. Although it opposes the expropriation of the potentia of the many by the few who purport to act on their behalf, horizontalism can easily develop into an expropriation of a different type: one that inhibits the parts in the name of a whole that is never present, a consensus that is never given, a totality always to come.

Horizontality Without Horizontalism

What would horizontality look like if conceived not in sovereign terms but ecologically? An ecology is neither an assembly where everyone deliberates together, nor a mass that follows a recognised leader; it is the absence of either a recognised leader or a global procedure for collective decision-making. We are much closer to finding a model for it in the characteristics that Deleuze and Guattari attributed to the pack : ‘dispersion, nondecomposable variable distances … impossibility of a fixed totalization or hierarchization, a Brownian variability in direction.’ 32 Like ‘schools, bands, herds, populations’, packs are not ‘inferior social forms’ 33 164

but ‘groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the arborescent type that centers around organs of power’. 34 That is, they are not indicative of an absence of organisation, but of the presence of a form of organisation in its own right, albeit one that lasts only for as long as it manages to inhibit ‘the installation of stable powers in favor of a fabric of immanent relations’. 35 Though packs lack a fixed structure and a leader, ‘there is no more equality or any less hierarchy in packs than in masses, but they are of a different kind’. 36 The leadership function is never fully stabilised in the hands of any individual, concentrated in a position or formalised into a selection procedure. At the limit, it is indistinguishable from the role played by the member on the edge of the pack (its ‘cutting edge of deterritorialization’ 37 ) when it is capable of steering the group’s course at a given moment, pulling it in a new direction, changing its shape and structure as it goes. This does not mean that the leadership function has ceased to exist but rather that, instead of being fixed, it circulates. This is an image of self-organisation and what exists in the absence of formal structures that is quite different from the usual talk of ‘horizontality’ and ‘leaderlessness’. In the same way that the opposite of formal organisation is not the absence of organisation, the opposite of concentrated leadership is not the absence of leadership, but a condition in which the leadership function is open to being occupied by different agents at different times. The pack is not leaderless, but leaderful. We can call this distributed leadership , and it not only pre-exists general assemblies (it is what can explain their creation), but exists alongside them (in the decisions made outside each assembly, including by other assemblies) as much as it traverses and outlasts them. This supposes, of course, that we understand ‘leadership’ as something quite different from occupying a position in a hierarchy, let alone domination or abuse of power. The minimal concept of leadership implied here supposes that it is an event ; at its most fundamental, to lead means nothing more than to be followed . That is, to orient attention and action in a certain direction; to introduce a polarisation in the environment that was not there before; to produce a modulation of collective behaviour that propagates across a group, a network or an ecology as it is adopted and/or 165

adapted by others, triggering other transformations as it moves along. In network parlance, it amounts to initiating a process of diffusion. As such, it is a function that will always require fulfilling, whether on a small or a large scale: without it, there never would be any change, and nothing would happen at all. We could go back here to Gramsci’s point about spontaneity in the previous chapter. If individuals are not automata responding uniformly and en bloc to a change in their environment, a change in collective behaviour never takes place all at once, but must start from one or more points. It is precisely because individuals are singular, each with their own dispositions and external relations rather than identically conditioned, that ‘the formation of each [process] by propagation starting from a point is not in doubt’. 38 Where there are no previously existing decision-making procedures or structures to coordinate action, let alone formally appointed or recognised leaders, the only way a new collective conduct can emerge is through the action of one or more initiating nodes (nucleation). If anything deserves to be called ‘spontaneous’, it is this. Instead, what people usually have in mind when they talk about ‘spontaneity’ effectively names a gap in their knowledge that arises from being unable to reconstruct the diffusion of a collective behaviour: the first person to throw a rock at the police, the first person to down tools and fold their arms, the first person to say ‘we need to have a meeting’ … 39 It is our ignorance of the actual process that generates the mirage of an instantaneous transformation. 40 Of course, it is often irrelevant who started what. The problem is that, taken at face value, the illusory picture produced by this approximative notion of spontaneity feeds into mistrust of initiative, thus undermining the very condition for anything happening at all. We must therefore return to a distinction introduced in chapter 1 . A leadership position might derive from publicly manifested personal qualities, adherence to tradition, or explicit, formally binding procedures – which roughly map onto Max Weber’s tripartite scheme of charismatic, traditional and legal authority, allowing (as he does) for some measure of combination between the three. 41 The less such consolidated positions exist, however, the more the leadership function is free to circulate. That is the reality of the 166

pack, in which each individual is responding to modifications in a common environment rather than deliberating collectively or following a single leader. It is also what happens in an organisational ecology in which no centre of power dominates all the rest; even when several people come together to make a decision, it is still not the ecology as a whole that decides. One could object that so minimal a definition of leadership as networkevent could apply indistinguishably to a meme going viral or the initiation of a complex collaborative effort like occupying a square, starting a campaign or founding an organisation. That, however, is part of the point. This definition allows us to see that leadership is a ubiquitous phenomenon of diffusion happening at different scales, with a variable reach and different degrees of complexity. The difference between the meme and the occupation is in degree, not in kind. A multitudinous occupation, a successful campaign, a solid organisation are invariably the result of large diffusion cascades: the individuals who have the original idea, the people at the meeting in which the idea is discussed and transformed, the larger group that starts forming around that initial nucleus, the first dozens who write about it on social media, the hundreds who join in next, the thousands who turn out on the day … The process could have stopped at any step along the way and there would still have been something we could call leadership, only less successful. But of course, depending on the scale of the objective (say, a small neighbourhood protest), a few dozen people might well count as a success. Networks shape individual choice by providing the affective and informational context in which decisions are made, so that a new modulation can significantly alter the probability that any number of individuals will adopt a practice suggested by or compatible with it. While it is possible to influence the behaviour of others even accidently simply by routing information, it is obvious that more precise and elaborate effects depend on the work of honing a message, building alliances, setting up basic infrastructure, producing and circulating material, creating strategically targeted channels and platforms (face-to-face meetings, websites, online forums, social media profiles), and so on. The more 167

complex a task, the more its success is likely to depend on complex preparatory work, and therefore on a backbone of committed activists. The kind of organisation provided by mass organisations has not disappeared; like most other things, it has just been downsized. 42 The uprisings of the last decade invariably owed their initiation (and much of their early success) to the action of relatively small organising cores. 43 As the element of surprise wears off, repression and manipulation tactics evolve, and movements go from largely consensual oppositional targets to looking for a positive agenda, so grows the need for more organising cores endowed with strategic sophistication, diverse aptitudes, the capacity to plan and execute more complex tasks, and therefore also greater internal consistency. A network-event is all the more successful in occupying the leadership function the more it manages to transform collective and aggregate behaviour. It is not simply a matter of reach, but of the complexity of the change; not just how many of a system’s components are touched, but how much their interactions are modified. The propagation of an idea does not necessarily translate into its actualisation, or the actualisation of changes connected to it. Or, rather, while changes may become actualised, they might not be sufficiently extensive or intense to register at a larger scale. A meme may travel very widely, and transform the way those who see it think, but otherwise lead to little difference in their lives. A call to join a demonstration demands greater involvement, but for many it might also exhaust itself once the date is past. For others, however, it will be extended into a number of other actualisations that are like so many logical consequences drawn from that original impulse and the contingent encounters that it produced. This may then lead to a substantial transformation of one’s own life and relations, thus extending the original impulse, modulated in turn by countless other events, into the lives of others, by means of individual acts, participation in collective action, or both. Each event, however large or small, ramifies across the network, modifying it: creating and destroying ties, strengthening or weakening hubs, connecting or disconnecting clusters, producing consequences, crossing paths with the consequences of other events, hence eventually producing new events large and small, and so on. 44 168

Exerting the leadership function, however, does not automatically entail coming to occupy a position of leadership. It is not necessarily the case that the people who first have the idea for a campaign or who start an action will go on to be their most influential protagonists or public faces, let alone become established as ‘opinion leaders’ or ‘celebrities’. Whether that happens depends on factors that come into play during the process of diffusion and practical execution of the original idea, from network dynamics like centrality and preferential attachment to personal qualities like charisma and skills, via any number of contingent circumstances. Punctual actions like sharing a popular meme normally lead to growth in social media followership, which in turn implies an increase in the capacity to influence the behaviour of others, but does not guarantee that this potential will be actualised in the future. As social media users know, it usually takes several successful such incidents to establish oneself as an authority or a hub. 45 Even then, it is much more likely that digital clout can produce aggregate effects than that it can be translated into collective action. On the other hand, the more complex and durable an initiative is, the more likely that one or more relatively stable organising cores will begin to form, which may or may not include the original initiators. Organising cores emerge naturally out of collective processes by responding to their increasingly complex demands. Their formation and stabilisation depend on a combination of such factors as resource availability (free time, experience, social capital), aptitudes (interpersonal skills, tactical nous, capacity to reconcile different perspectives), external recognition (prestige, respect, being a ‘contact person’), functional diversification (specialisation), network and group formation dynamics (preferential attachment, betweenness, personal ties, political affinity, trust, common interests). These forces no doubt create exclusions, even unintentionally. At the same time, these active cores are essential to keeping a process running between the big visible moments like assemblies and demonstrations, and will often take on the work that others do not even realise needs to be done, especially when there is a constant influx of new participants or engagement fluctuates wildly. They also tend to be the ones who are left behind once a large mobilisation fizzes out and the large 169

numbers move on, or who branch out in projects that will enrich the broader ecology. It would be disingenuous to suggest that these dynamics only ever play out with the best intentions, or to deny that even at the best of cases common and private interests might not become mixed up. People will often act deliberately to reinforce tendencies that increase their influence individually or as a group, for example, by withholding information and contacts. Yet it is equally disingenuous, or just plainly naïve, to speak as if movements could simply choose to do without these organising cores, or as if it was only evil intent that brought them into existence. 46 It is at this point that the confusions surrounding the notion of self-organisation – its conflation with self-management, its transformation into a teleology opposed to what people do, the illusory picture of spontaneity – become the clearest. For to simply decry the incipient formation of organising cores as the moment in which a self-appointed elite expropriates a self-organising process is at once to forget the role that organising cores play in shaping those processes and to ignore the fact that their crystallisation is an emergent product of self-organisation itself. This is, in fact, the most important point. Regardless of whether they result in the anti-democratic corruption of a collective process or, on the contrary, in the development of the minimal structure necessary to keep it open and thriving, the objective tendencies that lead to the consolidation of organising cores are essentially the same. Collective processes are not and do not remain perfectly flat and homogeneous. Their internal dynamics lead them to differentiate themselves in several ways, including the formation of core–periphery distinctions at various scales, which amounts to a progressive transformation of eventual leadership into leadership positions. We can therefore conceive of leadership phenomena as covering a continuum that stretches from punctual incidents in which information or affects routed by a node produce changes in the behaviours of others to targeted, increasingly purposeful efforts at producing that same effect. Next comes the progressive stabilisation of ‘influentials’ or ‘leaders’, which might be collectives, informal groups, individuals, webpages, and so on, online as well as offline. 47 Finally, there are the appointed leaders of formal 170

organisations. The polyvocity of Gramsci’s terminology, and of Latin languages in general, is very appropriate here. Leaders ( dirigenti, direzione ) are, at the most elementary level, those who indicate a direction for collective action. It is only secondarily that they are – and may or may not become – directors recognised by others. It is, of course, never a given that one thing will evolve into the other. If we speak of a continuum of progressively stabilised forms, it is exactly because there is no natural developmental path that every singular case must go through. The process of stabilisation can, for a number of different reasons, be suspended at different points, yielding a wide range of leadership types somewhere between the one-off event and full-fledged institutional authority. Only a minority of cases crosses the threshold that separates leadership based on potentia (the capacity to offer leadership that others find valuable) from leadership based on potestas (an institutional apparatus that formalises an unequal distribution of powers and holds the means of enforcing compliance). This means that the vast majority of ‘leaders’ continue to be leaders only insofar as they are followed, that is, that they can garner voluntary adhesion to the initiatives they promote. As a consequence, their relationship to the ‘area’ or ‘base’ that they seek to mobilise can never be simply unilateral; it must involve a delicate balance between leading and listening. Even if defined by resoluteness and exemplarity, a good leader is always someone who can hear several voices in their head. 48 One might agree with everything I have just said and still think of distributed leadership as only a temporary, imperfect stage to be eventually superseded by full-fledged horizontality. That, however, would be missing the point. What distributed leadership suggests is precisely that this final state of perfection is impossible. If by ‘real’ horizontality one understands a condition in which there are no power differentials and each person has exactly the same capacity as every other to influence the actions of others, this is simply not something that self-organising networks can provide. Not only are these not the perfectly flat and egalitarian media they are sometimes imagined to be, their dynamics are intrinsically tied to asymmetry-producing mechanisms like preferential attachment. Though it is 171

certainly possible to put work into controlling these mechanisms, it is not possible to do away with them altogether. The very initiatives through which an ecology moves forward both exploit the differences among nodes (successful diffusion relies on hubs, which are what bridges a large network together) and inevitably produce them anew (diffusion establishes new ties, bridges clusters, creates, strengthens or weakens hubs, and so on). Perfect flatness would entail a network in which no large-scale effects could occur; absolute leaderlessness would only be possible in a situation in which nodes had no effect on one another. Total horizontality would thus be akin to a state of maximal entropy, in which only small, statistically irrelevant fluctuations could occur. The tendencies that threaten horizontality are enabling conditions at the same time; again, the logic of the pharmakon . The very way that networks function perturbs and destabilises them, creates dangers and possibilities, produces effects that one will be obliged to manage. Putting horizontality to work inevitably involves controlled risks, ‘in the sense’, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro put it, ‘in which walking may be said to be a controlled way of falling’. 49 The best that networks can aspire to is not absolute horizontality but a certain balance that prevents power from becoming too concentrated, thus making it possible for the leadership function to circulate, and for leadership positions to remain relatively under control. (Control and circulation, as we shall see, are two sides of the same mechanism.) In other words, the democratic potential of networks lies not in the fact that they are or can be perfectly flat or level, but in that their uneven distribution of power is dynamic rather than static – once again, force before form. Instead of ‘no leaders’, potentially many leaders, at different times and on different scales, and the effort to prevent any one of them from becoming too powerful, to stop power differentials from becoming too rigidly stabilised. Believing that a final equilibrium can be achieved creates both the unrealistic expectation that it will and the unsustainable demand that it be. It turns an imagined future horizontality into the standard against which present practice must be measured. Inevitably, reality falls short. The constant awareness of a mismatch between the ideal and the imperfect 172

practices supposed to embody it generates the oscillation between disavowal and anxiety, endless deferral and the fetish of presence. And since it is the very functioning of distributed leadership that produces the imbalances that pull practice away from the ideal, initiative itself becomes suspicious, as if it were an attempt at hijacking what would otherwise be a perfectly horizontal process. Often, this will end up in a stark choice, either action or horizontality, the result of which is paralysis. This dilemma, in turn, explains the radical backlash against horizontalism that many people go through after a few too many frustrating experiences. It is an overcompensation that replaces the impossible demand of absolute horizontality with a yearning for the kind of unmediated, unilateral power that means one does not ever have to listen or compromise. 50 Abandoning horizontalism need not mean abandoning horizontality altogether. Giving up on the fantasy of living up to the model means understanding the limits of horizontality as intrinsic rather than accidental and temporary. Understanding it, that is, as something that ‘only works by breaking down’, to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s turn of phrase: ‘breaking down constitutes an essential part of [its] functioning.’ 51 Instead of a transcendent model for practice, the principle of horizontality imposes demands that have to be balanced against those of the struggle itself, and thus creates tensions that cannot ever be met once and for all, but must be negotiated anew every time. Embracing imperfection as necessary rather than contingent can no doubt serve as an excuse for cynical fatalism or shiftless pragmatism. It is, however, an essential prerequisite for both a sober appraisal of one’s practice and clarity regarding one’s goals.

Vanguards Versus Vanguardism

Distributed leadership gives us what we have been searching for since the start of this book: an account of self-organisation as seen from the inside rather than from above, self-organisation with the subject in . Like selforganisation, it has always been around, not only in human societies but, as the model of the pack suggests, in the natural world at large. At the same time, there are good reasons why it has become more visible in recent years. Today’s revolts emerge from a conjuncture marked by the convergence of four historical trends that, at least for now, appear to be irreversible. The 173

first is the increasing mediatisation of social life, and specifically the use of digital platforms that generate an enormous potential for what Manuel Castells dubbed ‘mass self-communication’. 52 The second is the vertiginous drop in organising costs resulting from that, which enables complex collective coordination on a scale that in the past could only have been achieved through mass organisations. The third is the crisis of the ‘postpolitical’ centrist consensus dominant in most countries since the end of the Cold War, which has intensified a long-running loss of confidence in liberal democratic institutions across the world. The fourth is the decline, in membership as well as political relevance, of most mass organisations that played a central role in convoking and organising popular struggles in the twentieth century. These last two trends have created a vacuum that the first two have helped fill. By radically amplifying the potential for cascading behaviour in social networks, greater connectivity has made it possible for compact groups, even lone individuals sometimes, to mobilise a long tail of less active nodes into actions that scale up much faster and to greater dimensions than even large rank-and-file structures would have managed in the past. Even a tiny organising core with no previous history is thus capable of exercising influence well beyond the size of its membership or reputation; small causes can produce radically disproportionate effects. This potential is in principle open to anyone provided the change they introduce into the ecology can reach an audience large or well-connected enough to spread it widely. In fact, it is perhaps open especially to those who are ‘no one’. Given the mood of generalised mistrust of institutions, representatives and leaders, heavily branded calls and demonstrations tend to attract less enthusiasm than those that appear to belong to no one and be open to all, in the same way that voters flock towards politicians seen as outsiders. Ironically, the historical moment that should have seen the ‘twilight of vanguardism’ 53 – the final decline of a certain type of organisation and politics – happens to also be the moment when the potential for occupying the role of vanguard has become most widely diffused. Speaking of ‘vanguard’ today is likely to be off-putting to most. Outside of a few, fairly self-contained circles, the very thought of it tends to be 174

perceived as an especially odious part of a legacy from which not much can or should be salvaged. Its hubristic overtones lend it the unique distinction of sounding at once ominous and risible. Risible, in that vanguards are defined by a heightened sense of their own importance, combining blind faith in their own ideas with the conviction that they are destined to major historical roles. This makes them by and large immune to feedback, including the one proffered by reality itself, and normally incapable of selfcritique, even when their position changes drastically over time. For as long as their size and influence remain small, that self-belief can be treated as a mostly harmless idiosyncrasy. It becomes dangerous as soon as they have the means to manipulate or wreck collective processes in the name of their own organisational interests. Worse still, as history shows, is what can happen when that vanguard mentality is armed with an apparatus capable of imposing the correct line on others. Given all the baggage with which it is associated, it is easy to forget that ‘vanguard’ is essentially a relational concept. In the military context from which the metaphor originates, a vanguard is a vanguard only if there is something else that follows and eventually fuses with it. It is an ‘advanced detachment’, but only temporarily ; unlike an elite, which seeks to remain in place, a vanguard should by definition exist in order to abolish itself. 54 Through a twist of irony that Marx himself might have called dialectical, the notion of vanguard is in fact a logical consequence of the very principle that emancipation must be the work of proletarians themselves. Marx’s contention that the workers’ consciousness was the reflexive product of their action on the world meant that proletarians did not have to wait for a revolutionary elite of enlighteners to take power and educate them; they educated themselves for their historical task in and through their very struggle. But if this consciousness developed step by step, rather than actualising itself all at once across the entire proletariat, this meant it had to start from somewhere, spreading and unfolding from there. It then fell upon those in whom it developed earlier to facilitate the collective learning process by shedding light on the path ahead and bringing the ones who lagged behind up to speed. It was this reasoning, rather than some amoral thirst for power, that led Marx and Engels to deduce the need for a ‘most 175

advanced and resolute section’ that ‘pushes forward all others’ and has over them ‘the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’. 55

Since a necessary part of that march was that this advanced detachment should eventually organise itself as a party, the latter would ultimately be entrusted with the ‘sublime role’ of being ‘ the bearer of the class consciousness of the proletariat and the conscience of its historical vocation ’, or simply ‘the form taken by historical consciousness’ itself. 56 Acknowledging the concept’s intrinsic relationality cannot, however, blind us to the fact that the problems that would become associated with it are already presaged in the connection thus established between historical necessity, the knowledge of that necessity, and the vanguard as the point in which that knowledge is most concentrated. This logical sequence entails that the distance between the vanguard and the rest (the masses, other would-be vanguards) is not measured horizontally, as a number of different perspectives that are all equally subject to error, but vertically, as different stages of development along an evolutionary line. By definition, the most advanced stage is the one that the vanguard occupies. Thus, when Marx and Engels wrote that communists ‘do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties’, 57 this was not because they did not organise separately, which they did, but because the communists’ position was not a fanciful utopian scheme among others, but the necessary knowledge at which all other parties must eventually arrive. It is clear then how this logic could be used to justify steamrollering dissent in the name of a future moment in which present decisions will be vindicated. It also provided the grounds for identifying the fate of the revolution with that of a particular group, making the future of the first depend on the second, and the interests of the second coincide with those of the first. Finally, the association between vanguard and necessity authorises a perfectly circular logic. If it is possible, according to an objective knowledge of the historical process, to distinguish between its ‘backward’ and ‘forward’ elements, and if by definition it is among the most advanced elements that this knowledge will be found, a vanguard is ultimately a group in possession of the

176

knowledge that it is the vanguard. This is how many a fringe groupuscule have managed to convince themselves that they had lofty destinies in store. What happens, however, if we sever the idea of the vanguard from its association with historical necessity and the knowledge thereof? In this case, a vanguard initiative will not be conceived as the action supposed to establish the correct connection between the present moment and the future after which one strives. Instead, it appears as an effort to explore the ‘adjacent possible’ 58 of a situation – the virtual paths that it makes available – with a view to finding those that are both viable and could lead farthest in the desired direction. It does not try to discover an underlying necessity, but to bring into being something that was not there before: to open a direction. Viewed in this way, initiative is both experimental and contingent. Experimental, in that it tests a hypothesis that may or may not work, and could potentially lead to other, unintended results; contingent, in that not even the fact that it works could prove that it was the right hypothesis, only that it was viable. The well-worn formula that says that ‘practice is the criterion of truth’ is stripped here from any reference to a final verdict from the tribunal of history and takes on a more modest, fallibilistic sense: verification is never absolute, nor is there a pre-established developmental path against which it must be measured. The image of an unilinear evolution towards a point known in advance is replaced with something closer to an open-ended ‘natural drift’. 59 If we see it in this way, the vanguard’s bond with its other (‘the masses’) is not defined by a property (being ‘the bearer of class consciousness’), but by an external, circumstantial relation (opening a path that others follow). There is no such thing as a vanguard position , like a locomotive permanently at the forefront of progress. But we can speak of vanguard- functions , which might more adequately be compared to the pseudopods of an amoeba as it feels its way around. This implies a very different way of posing the question of legitimacy. Centuries of political philosophy and nation-states have trained us to think legitimacy in sovereign terms, as an exclusive title to political authority on which decisions are grounded. Understood in this way, legitimacy is a matter of origin: to be legitimate, a decision must be made either by the 177

sovereign or a body delegated by the sovereign. As we saw earlier, this is where horizontalism falls prey to a debilitating paradox: if the sovereign is a community that is never given, how can any decision be legitimate? The alternative is to think legitimacy as something given not at the origin, but at the end. That is what historical materialism’s teleological scheme appears to do by making the future – the classless society – into the ultimate source of validation for the present. But that appearance is false: teleology is nothing but the unfolding until completion of something already given at the origin. The vanguard is legitimate because it acts on behalf of the proletariat, and the proletariat is legitimate because it acts on behalf of humankind, whose history it crowns and whose emancipation coincides with its own. The vanguard’s authority is thus a title effectively granted at the dawn of time. A notion of legitimacy compatible with the vanguard-function, on the other hand, cannot be thought as a title (be it individual or attached to an office), a procedure (the constitution, consensus), a space (parliament, assembly) or a subject (proletariat, ‘common people’, humankind). Legitimacy is in this case a contingent outcome of the action itself, and therefore something the agent does not have from the start, but is rather constrained to seek . An initiative will have been legitimate if others accept it as such – for as long as they do . This entails that, although groundless in the sense that it is not authorised by any previous right, it cannot be entirely arbitrary. Its success is dependent on its capacity to attract support, which is to say that it must necessarily be conceived with others in mind. Despite the absence of formal accountability of any kind, vanguard-functions are in this way subject to some measure of external control. Unlike sovereignty, this kind of legitimacy is non-exclusive (it can coexist with the legitimacy of other agents and initiatives), non-universal (it does not have to be acknowledged by all), and easily rescinded. Unlike a right, it is temporary and liable to expire. 60

Ecology against the State

We find a model to think this modality of legitimacy in the Amerindian collectivities that Pierre Clastres described as ‘societies against the state’. 61 In these, the separation between power and prestige, military and political 178

authority, the exercise of leadership and the monopoly of force, expose the chief to the ‘permanent fragility of a power unceasingly contested’, or at least permanently contestable. 62 Prestige, the chief ’s only capital, is far more volatile and precarious than the power of a consolidated separate political authority; his stock is entirely dependent on continually proving himself as ‘the effective instrument of his society’. 63 This depends, in turn, on the good exercise of his functions, in which success ‘is never guaranteed, for the chief ’s word carries no force of law ’, and failure means that his prestige ‘may very well be a casualty, since he will have proved his inability to do what was expected of him’. 64 He can lead only insofar as others are willing to follow, and in that respect is no different from anyone else who might try to orient the group towards some common task or activity. ‘Never certain that his “orders” will be carried out’, the chief has no option but to depend ‘on the good will of the group’. 65 Limited at one end by the need to demonstrate his usefulness, he is limited at the other by ‘the obligation to exhibit at every moment the innocence of his office’. 66 He is ‘under surveillance; society watches to make sure the taste for prestige does not become the desire for power’. 67 Occasionally a chief may try to transgress ‘the strict limits allotted to his office’ and, ‘reversing the normal relationship that determines the leader as a means in the service of a socially defined end, he tries to make society into the means for achieving a purely private end’. 68 However, if his ‘desire for power becomes too obvious, the procedure put into effect is simple: [his people] abandon him, indeed, even kill him’. 69 One of the interesting things about Clastres’s model is that it moves in the opposite direction to the one we are accustomed to. Our modern imaginary, derived not from the emergence of the state but from the passage from absolutism to the rule of law, tends to associate freedom and democratic control with institutionalisation: in order to increase the former, it is necessary to expand the latter. What ‘societies against the state’ suggest is that a lack of institutionalisation, to the extent that it leaves the leader without the instruments with which to enforce his decisions, constrains him to seek the group’s support. It would clearly be impossible to generalise 179

this insight to much larger and more complex societies in which huge power differentials already exist. But it offers us a way of thinking how democratic control from below might exist in an unbounded order like an ecology, in which no universally recognised protocols or decision-making mechanisms exist. The revolutionary tradition, its anarchist and councilist tendencies in particular, has, over the years, conceived several mechanisms through which bases could exercise some degree of control over their representatives: fixed mandates, rotation of functions, permanent recallability, a limit to the amount of times an official might serve. The seven principles put forward by Jo Freeman are also valuable guidelines: delegation of specific authority by democratic procedure, accountability, distribution of authority among as many people as possible, rotation of tasks and allocation according to rational criteria, equal access to information and resources. 70 All of these, however, apply to bounded orders in which it is possible to agree on procedures and implement them. Today, the potentials afforded by digital networks mean that organising cores can choose to remain relatively small without relinquishing the prospect of producing large-scale effects. Not being driven by the imperative to recruit makes it possible for them to grow selectively, minimising the risk of incapacitating internal dissensus, keeping relations relatively informal, inhibiting some of the tendencies that lead to the creation of hierarchies. This makes them more supple when it comes to decision-making, capable of working out action plans faster and to greater detail than most general assemblies or large mass organisations ever could. But it also means that they are formally accountable to only a small membership, not the much larger zone of influence they might be capable of mobilising. How can control from below be exerted in this case? The first thing that Clastres helps us see is, of course, that they are not completely unaccountable either. Being compact and lacking a fixed membership makes these groups more dependent on the ‘good will’ of others to get their initiatives off the ground. Like Clastres’s indigenous chiefs, their prestige depends on remaining capable of originating, sustaining and supporting initiatives that are perceived as valuable for the ecology as a whole. 71 Likewise, they are constantly assessed on their 180

‘innocence’: their network ethic, cooperative ethos and whether their actions are governed by common interests or private goals. Naturally, this makes them overexposed, for example, to the notoriously fickle and hyperexcited humours of social media, which are not always the most judicious arbiters. Yet they can to a certain degree be kept in check by the risk of losing support and, at the limit, the threat of suspension of cooperation and exclusion from networks – both those things being, as Boltanski and Chiapello observed, tantamount to death in a networked world. 72 The absence of formal accountability is in that way compensated for by a form of diffuse control. Once again, force over form. This would seem to be the best of both worlds, combining a greater potential for producing rapid responses and creative solutions with some measure of democratic oversight. It is obvious, however, that it is not a magic solution. It depends on some fairly delicate balances of power that keep the ecology somewhere between a proliferation of small hubs with little mobilising capacity (too little coordination) and a single hegemonic decision-making centre (too much centralisation). In other words, a situation in which there are several organising cores that possess large zones of influence without crossing the threshold beyond which they become ‘too big to fail’. A certain equilibrium among hubs means they can neutralise each other to some extent, making it harder for a ‘winner-takes-it-all’ dynamic to set in; this not only keeps any single centre of power from becoming too autonomous, but leaves space open for new vanguardfunctions to emerge. Yet the preservation of this equilibrium is itself constantly balanced against the imperative to act, and every action can both create new power differentials and strengthen those that already exist. Once more, it is the ecology’s very functioning, and the extent to which initiatives are successful, that destabilises the system and potentially undermines diffuse democratic control. Evidently, distributed leadership is a fertile soil for opportunisms of all kinds. But in a sense, being opportunistic is exactly what one should expect from vanguard-functions, if by that we understand the ability to read the situation, interpret its tendencies and potentials, and introduce modulations that are capable of triggering broader effects. In one word: 181

virtù . The best one can hope for is that most participants of an ecology embody an ethos of acting ecologically, non-competitively, without a narcissistic investment in their own protagonism, placing the health and the interests of the ecology as a whole above their own or their organisation’s; and that the ecology retain a capacity for diffuse control that can ensure that ‘evil’ opportunists (those who exploit opportunities for their own ends) will also be ‘bad’ ones (quickly found out and isolated). It may be disappointing to hear at this point that there are no stronger safeguards than these, and no a priori, absolute guarantee that particular interests will not impose themselves on the common good. Here it should be noted that such a guarantee was exactly what the old conception of the vanguard provided: the promise of an agent immune from particularistic corruption because it was the vehicle through which the universal necessarily expressed itself. As we saw in the previous chapter in relation to Hardt and Negri, this conception is impossible to uphold without resorting to teleology. Besides, it was precisely the confidence which this promise inspired that justified the blindness of really existing vanguards to their own partiality, their hubristic closure to feedback, their authoritarianism – all of which facilitated and sped up their capitulation to the particular interests of an internal elite. There is a choice to be made here: a world in which there are no privileged conduits for the universal is also a world in which the threat of particularistic capture is always present. As the experience of historical vanguards shows, it is also the only world we happen to have.

182

6

Elements for a Theory of Organisation II: Platforms, Diversity of Strategies, Parties ___________________________________________________

Requisite variety for running the world does not exist in any man’s headful of ten thousand million badly programmed neurons. Requisite variety for running things properly exists with the people who generate the world’s variety in the first place, and that means everyone … The requisite variety for being messianic belongs only to the genuine Messiah. Stafford Beer NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us

shoving at the thing from all sides to

bring it down. Diane di Prima

Platform Logic

Ours is the age of mass movements without mass organisations, both because the large, influential organisations of the twentieth century have for some time been in decline, and simply because it is possible . While the first of these conditions could conceivably change, the second looks set to stay. In fact, it is one of the factors that conspires against the revival of the old rank-and-file model, alongside the changes in class composition that dismantled its social base, an increasingly atomised labouring and social experience, and the weakening of collective identities and ‘mistrust of collectivity’ 1 resulting from both those processes and our various traumas of organisation. The fact that it is possible today to satisfy functions that previously only mass organisations could perform while also minimising risks like bureaucratisation and top-down control creates negative incentives for a return to traditional forms. Even parties, whose formal variability is limited by the main function they perform (participation in elections and 183

affairs of state), have started experimenting with formats that move beyond the template laid down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is less clear, on the other hand, is whether solutions for other functions those organisations used to perform, such as designing strategies and sustaining struggles through downturns in mobilisation, have already been found. The evanescent nature of recent uprisings, flaring up and dissipating just as easily, suggests that the facilities offered by contemporary technology can equally act as hindrances. 2 For example, while networked movements are in principle capable of innovating faster, much of that innovation might become stuck in the short term, proliferating quick responses that do not cohere into a strategy or fail to scale up to the size that would make them effective. Besides, because much of their fragile collective identity is constituted around a set of initial tactics and practices (counter-summits, square occupations, general assemblies …), it is harder for them to agree on new tactics once police and state responses evolve. 3 It is likely that longer-term thinking requires a degree of continuity over time that is only possible once organising cores have crossed a certain threshold of stabilisation. My intention is not to make an epochal argument as to why some organisational forms have ceased to be possible and others have become inevitable, nor to denounce what exists now as a trap that we must just will away. One need not deny the limitations of distributed leadership in order to argue in its favour. If distributed leadership describes a situation that is neither undifferentiated flatness (very weak organising cores, a predominance of aggregate action) nor ‘winner-takes-all’ (when collective action becomes predominantly mediated by one hegemonic organisation), that still covers a very broad spectrum of different possible arrangements, ranging from situations of fragile hegemony (several organising cores, one slightly more influential than others) to what is most common nowadays (weak, transient organising cores). The point, then, is not to dogmatically assert that distributed leadership as it presently exists can do all that is expected of it, but to ask what would be necessary for it to do so, and how the capacities it would need for that can be developed out of the potentials it already has. 184

It seems clear that most of the answers in that regard will have to come from the actions of organising cores. Not that these necessarily possess all the necessary capacities in themselves, but it takes complex, targeted initiative to draw those capacities out from the ecology at large. Once again, ‘organising core’ should be understood as both function and position, and not be confused with just another name for ‘organisation’. All organisations are organising cores, however small their influence may be, but not all organising cores are organisations. Besides, while talk of an ‘organisational ecology’ might suggest that we are dealing only with a static chart of organisations and their relations to each other, the picture is more complex than that. The Italian metaphor of the ‘area’ is useful here, encompassing as it does both regular organisations of various kinds (workplace committees, collectives, editorial groups), more informal, ad hoc groupings, and the individuals in their overlapping zones of influence. 4 ‘Organising core’ is thus a generic name for the nodes or groups of nodes that animate an area or network, performing the function of concentrating and orienting the collective capacity to act in certain directions, continuously or only occasionally. The label may thus be used indistinctly to talk about things occurring at different temporal and spatial scales, as well as different degrees of stability and institutionalisation. 5 These may have a one-off, momentary existence, like the impromptu collective that organises a demonstration; become stabilised over time, like an informal but recurrent affinity group or the team behind a social media account; or take an institutional form, like a campaign, an NGO or a party. The longer they continue to act, the more stabilised they tend to become, both internally and in the perceptions of others. But this process might lead to any number of different organisational forms, and even no fixed form at all, such as when a relatively stable group of people intervenes in several different projects without ever presenting itself as a collective. If the Spanish case is probably the closest that the 2011 cycle came to a ‘success story’, it is undoubtedly also because the ecology created by the explosion of the 15M movement developed in the direction of greater differentiation and specialisation of organising cores than elsewhere. 6 Not even the turn towards electoral politics, despite introducing new centripetal 185

dynamics around party organising cores, has managed to change that entirely. Sadly, this is not the only proof of concept that we could find for the model I am describing here. If we want to find other examples of thriving ecologies driven by relatively compact hubs, we should probably turn to the far right in countries like the United States or Brazil (where, for a number of reasons, they were far more effective in taking advantage of the 2013 protests than the left). Be that as it may, the advantages of finding a balance of that kind should be obvious. On the one hand, the ecology is less at risk of becoming a dependent variable of a single organisation’s power dynamics, particularistic interests and political fluctuations. Since a highly centralised network is more susceptible to targeted attacks, whether repression or co-optation, less centralisation also means more robustness. On the other hand, the ecology possesses organising cores that are capable of inducing relatively large, complex and sustained effects, and yet are subject to some degree of diffuse control to the extent that their initiatives depend on voluntary adhesion and mobilising the ecology’s resources. The activity of organising cores thus comes to resemble, figuratively and literally, that of contemporary capitalism’s most paradigmatic form of enterprise, the platform. 7 Literally, in that, like such corporate behemoths as Google and Amazon, offering online resources or smartphone apps to facilitate coordination among individuals is often a major component of what they do. Figuratively, in that much else of what they do, such as organising protests, is governed by the same logic of setting up spaces for collaboration that condition but do not determine results. 8 In fact, although ‘platform politics’ has only become a talking point in the last couple of years, it is retrospectively possible to see it in the uprisings of the 2010s, in which the events themselves, and the spaces and moments that composed them, tended to be designed as platforms; as well as in initiatives that took off afterwards, such as UK Uncut, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages and, more recently, Extinction Rebellion. In platform politics, organising cores initiate collective action by inviting participation around a pre-established object (a target, goals, a narrative of where that fits in a broader picture), a set of protocols (type of action, levels of risk and commitment for participation, overall messaging 186

and profile, ‘red lines’, hashtags) and some resources (visual identity, guidelines, downloadable materials, online forums, geo-localised maps, protest infrastructure, legal aid, press packs …). There is, of course, a fair deal of variation as to what resources are provided and how vaguely or restrictively the objects and protocols are defined. Some, for example, might emphasise a more militant identity, seeking to attract support mostly from individuals who already self-describe as activists, and demand a narrower agreement with the overall proposal. Others may take a more inclusive approach, appealing to a broader constituency, expecting more minimal agreements and providing opportunities for less demanding participation. Others still will combine these approaches, offering different entry levels. Naturally, there is no right or wrong when it comes to these choices; historically, victorious movements have at different points combined all of these alternatives. Ultimately, what matters is, first, that the decisions are made with reference to the object and the available points of leverage, rather than with an identity that the group would like to project; one should never let the desire to look ‘reasonable’ or ‘radical’ get in the way of an achievable goal. Second, that the platform is proportional to the objective: the more complex the initiative, the more preparatory work it will demand from organising cores. What is constant in each case is the logic of combining openness and closure, determinacy and indeterminacy, to variable degrees. The initial idea (a target, a demand, a theory of change, a tactic) establishes a basic framework that is widely replicable, while setting some limits to the range of deviation that it can admit. At the same time, this elementary structure is left sufficiently open for people to fill in the details, adapting it to their needs, profile and immediate reality, tracing their own paths out of the original proposal, making independent decisions. The play between a basic code and the different ways in which it can express itself is what leads people to adopt the biological vocabulary of ‘DNA’, ‘mutations’, and so on to talk about this logic. 9 The point is not to fully produce but to induce effects by framing collective effort in such a way that establishes a space for collaboration that is open without being totally indeterminate, focused without being exhaustively defined. The platform limits but does not 187

control, and the emphasis is more on the outcomes than on who the agent of that outcome is. The object of imitation is not so much the original organising core, which might even stay hidden, but the initiative itself, whose identity as a whole can be transformed by what others make of it. Although the degree of openness may vary, platform logic supposes and exploits the possibility of overflow . It gambles on the excess of novelty over pre-existing identities (the modulation introduced into the ecology can implicate disparate individuals and create the conditions for a shared identity between them) and of effects over causes (its consequences cannot be fully predicted or controlled). In that sense, it is clearly not just a response to available technological affordances, but also to a situation in which there is little pre-existing organisation to count on and the first imperative is simply to bring people together. Not that this relative openness prevents questions of internal democracy or core-and-periphery dynamics from arising. If it is successful, the first great test a platform will encounter will in fact be the moment when the role of local groups and the protocols for their interaction have to be defined. The main source of tension will always be the relationship between the original organising core and those who joined at the replication stage. The fundamental choices to be made will concern the degree of coordination among local groups, the formalisation or informality of procedures, and the structure adopted for decision-making purposes: oneperson-one-vote consultations carried out by a steering committee? A delegate system in which local groups select representatives to a general assembly? Some combination of those? As these questions necessarily involve trade-offs, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ here. What matters is, first, that the choices are weighed according to variables such as the scope and complexity of the tasks expected from the platform, the size and level of involvement it requires to be effective, how permanent it is supposed to become, and so forth. Second, given that these moments of crisis are inevitable, those who start a platform should prepare for them from the start and be upfront when they come. Understandably, initiators might fear that giving a say to newcomers could dilute their original vision or expose the platform to hostile 188

infiltration. However, and especially at the early stages of group formation, participation and openness are not, contrary to what both critics and advocates might say, only about ‘prefiguring a new society’ or ‘being the change one wants to see’. Giving participants a stake in the future of an initiative is also a way to strengthen their bonds to one another, and makes it more likely that, even in disagreement, they will ‘recognize the legitimacy of other people’s reasoning’, trust their dedication to the common cause, and ‘actually act to further the group’s goals’. 10 To hold on to power may come at the expense of the quantity or quality of involvement in the platform, and so also its viability. Likewise, loose coordination and relative informality may seem like a way of eluding difficult debates, but they can also restrict the capacity to learn from experience and make strategic decisions, making it hard to find support for anything that is not repeating the idea that originally brought people together. This could be enough for a platform built around a very circumscribed tactic or target, but a problem for anything more ambitious. Besides, low coordination is no guarantee that issues like access to databases, website administration and media representation, all of which will tend to be in the hands of initiators, will not become contested. Greater coordination and formalisation can, in turn, develop either in the direction of expanding participation or in that of consolidating the position of the original organising core as ‘first among equals’. As we shall see below, the latter is the more common option, at least among today’s ‘platform parties’. It can be a more or less traumatic process depending on how it is done, but it is often the case that, acknowledging the leadership shown by initiators, many participants will perceive it as normal to grant them a more prominent role. The question may ultimately hinge less on whether decision-making is suddenly made open to the equal input of all than on whether a culture of collective construction develops over time. If that happens, existing leaders can be held to account, new ones can come forward, and democratisation advances alongside maturity, commitment and trust. If not, the tendency is for more active participants to grow alienated and disaffected, and for others to take an increasingly passive, consumer-like stance, treating the platform less as a political space than as a 189

service provider. The latter may suffice for certain goals, but it is not enough to build a strong movement with. Be that as it may, platform logic offers a new angle with which to approach some of the questions regarding leadership and initiative that we have been grappling with throughout this book. It is often assumed that, in order to be legitimate, the relationship between leaders and masses must be one of unilateral representation: a will of the masses exists, the job of leaders is to represent it faithfully. What voluntary adhesion to a platform established by an organising core suggests is another possibility: that a common will can be clarified and constituted in the process of responding to an initiative put forward without any prior mandate or authorisation . The alternative between leadership as faithful representation and leadership as initiative thus supposes an underlying philosophical choice: do people always know what they want? Or is their will not to some extent the product of the process itself – in which case leadership acquires a coconstitutive role? In their latest work, while apparently making concessions to the second alternative, Hardt and Negri push the first one to its limits in an instructive way. Recognising that, at least for now, it is never the multitude as such who acts, but only different parts of it taking initiative at different times, they acknowledge a need for leaders who exercise ‘an entrepreneurial function, not dictating to others or acting in their name or even claiming to represent them but [acting] as a simple operator of assembly’. 11 Not only is this notion of leadership quite close to what I have called ‘vanguard-function’, including that it is said to be ‘constantly subordinated to the multitude’, 12 what they call ‘acting as an operator of assembly’ could be understood as a way of describing platform logic. No sooner is that idea introduced, however, than it starts being retracted. The recognition of an ineliminable role for leadership is countered with ‘a reversal of the polarity that links horizontal movements and vertical leadership’. 13 Whereas the usual division of labour would make strategy the preserve of leaders, for Hardt and Negri it is the multitude that is in charge of strategy, whereas leaders are reduced to taking care of tactics, and ‘deployed and dismissed as occasion dictates’. 14 Sadly, all this seems to do is kick the problem down 190

the road. If we previously asked ‘how does the multitude decide?’, we now have a model for how it makes tactical decisions – through leaders – but still no idea how it makes strategic ones. It could be objected that such decisions do not pertain to the multitude as such, but to a third, intermediate term: ‘horizontal movements’. But not only do Hardt and Negri fail to specify any mechanisms through which movements can arrive at strategic decisions (not least the one to ‘deploy and dismiss’ leaders), all that the interposition of ‘movements’ does here is transfer the issue from the relationship between leaders and multitude to the relationship between multitude and movements. For how does the multitude choose this or that movement to define its strategy on its behalf? The answer, I believe, is clear: it does not. Or rather: to the extent that it can be said to do so, it is simply by lending support and participation to actions that this or that movement, this or that organising core initiates. The multitude does not delegate to them the execution of an idea that it already has in itself fully formed; it forms that idea in response to proposals that they put on the table. Once again, we must bring the logic of transindividuality to bear on the problem. ‘The multitude’ is active in every act of its every part, good or bad. This means that the strategy of the multitude does not exist as something apart from whatever the multitude is doing at any given moment. 15 The multitude’s strategising is no more (or less) than the strategising done by those who compose it, or rather, it is the emergent effect of the different strategising efforts that exist within it. The ‘democratic entrepreneurship of the multitude’ only exists and manifests itself in the ‘entrepreneurial function’ that individuals and groups perform, and the way in which others respond to them. 16 In short, the strategy of the multitude does not pre-exist but is effectively constituted by the initiatives that are put forward within it. To say that collective will is partially constituted through the relation to an initiative is evidently not the same as saying that it simply follows the will of a leader. The former expresses a two-way relation; the latter is just the inversion of a one-way street. The vanguard-function’s role is not to explain to people what their desire is, let alone what it ought to be, but to listen to the stirrings of that desire, to incite it, to bring it out into the 191

open; to help give it shape, to help people draw consequences from it. As Guattari put it, the job of the ‘militant group’ should not be ‘to provide ready-made rational answers to the questions they think the people should be asking, but on the contrary, to deepen the level of their questioning’. 17 An initiative is not a directive, but rather like a question that forces people to take on a subjective stance in relation to their desire and to work out how it can be put into practice: ‘Is it this? If not, then what?’ In order to pose questions that catch people’s imagination and prompt strong responses, however, one must first have been paying attention. No proposal, no initiative is good in itself, in abstraction from a situation with objective potentials and subjective dispositions. As we will see in the next chapter, the question is never ‘what is the radical position?’, but ‘what is the most radical position that can win support and produce the most effects in this concrete situation?’ To be a good leader, therefore, one must first of all be a good listener.

Everything Has Failed: Just Think of the Possibilities

That strategising is like asking questions should not be taken literally, of course. An impromptu action, a well-planned campaign, even a widely shared meme or a work of art are likelier to provoke a political response than an interrogation casually flung at the world. Again, what matters is that the complexity of the initiative be proportional to the depth of questioning intended. The greater the scope of an initiative, the more developed its theory of change ought to be, the richer in hypotheses to be tested and predicted means of testing them. Only then can it offer potential collaborators a ‘plausible promise’ 18 that their participation can yield tangible results. ‘Theory of change’ must be understood here not as a general notion of how social transformation happens, but quite the opposite. For a long time, the left has seemed to mistake identity for tactics, tactics for strategy, and strategy for an abstract theory of change: a purely theoretical domain concerned with the ideal form of social transformation. This is, no doubt, a consequence of the melancholia described in chapter 2 ; as it drifted ever farther from the likelihood of being put into practice, strategic thinking was allowed to become increasingly abstract. Instead of the careful and honest 192

weighing of the risks and potentials inherent in concrete projects, debates about strategy would often devolve into the reiteration of entrenched positions and absolute principles taken outside any context of application. Strategies could then be discussed as if they were pre-existing possibilities to be rolled out onto the world, without resistance or glitches, at the push of a button. This often made strategic debates sound as if they took place in front of a control board, and the question was simply deciding which button to push: is the revolution to be achieved through direct action, or is ‘the long march through the institutions’ the only way to attain lasting change? Is the local the only place where to act? Is the state to be confronted at every available opportunity? Is the network, the party, the federation the right way to organise? What is the one tactic that gets the goods? That only works, of course, at the cost of drastically simplifying the complexity of both world and political action: assuming a collective subject with a unified will, a world that is ready to bend to it, and a way of doing things that would be right for every occasion. To hear the way many of these conversations go, one would think that it was a matter of deciding whether one needs a hammer or a handsaw to build a table, when it should be obvious that both are necessary – and that the job in question is beyond any individual carpenter. It does not help that melancholia makes honest conversations about the limits encountered by each theory of change harder to come by. The operation through which people hide these limits from themselves is usually the same. The hidden premise behind it is the idea that the vocabulary of failure does not rightfully apply to whatever is curtailed by external causes: only what fails on its own terms actually counts as a failure . This means that, for as long as one can separate the strategy ‘in itself ’ from the historical misfortunes of its execution, it is possible to argue that it never really failed because it was never really tried. This is how one ends up with arguments on how the Soviet Union was never really socialist, as if its failure of socialism did not consist precisely in the fact that people who set out to create it produced something completely different instead. But this selfdeception is not exclusive to the 1917 left. The same operation is at work in the suggestion that, whereas socialist and social democratic strategies have 193

been found wanting, alternatives outside or at a distance from the state have never been tested, at least not at the appropriate scale. The problem here is not just assuming that the implementation of state-centred strategies was not always also imperfect and externally constrained, plagued with compromises and workarounds. More importantly, it is supposing that, because they were always suppressed, neutralised or co-opted before they had a chance to develop, other alternatives were never tried. That conclusion only makes sense if we choose not to consider that floundering under external pressure is also the sign of an internal weakness: a lack of resistance before the world or, which amounts to the same, an incapacity to overcome the world’s resistance. 19 Doing so is, after all, something a process of systemic change should be expected to do. 20 If the condition for a strategy’s viability is that opposing forces allow it all the room it needs in order to flourish, how viable can we really say it is? Rather than endlessly relitigating the question of whether this or that experience can be considered a failure, maybe the time has come to take the opposite approach. Perhaps we should start from the assumption that everything has failed , and the very fact that we continue to have these arguments proves it. This need not be as disheartening as it sounds. As Badiou observed, it is impossible to deduce from any particular failure the universal impossibility of what that failure tried to accomplish. From the fact that one cannot prove a hypothesis today, it does not follow that it might not be proven tomorrow – nor, for that matter, that it might not be disproven again the day after, unless we are talking about a mathematical hypothesis. If failure delivers no universal conclusions, it nonetheless offers plenty of generalisable lessons. Yet those can only be found if we deny ourselves the simplification of artificially separating strategy and world, abstracting from the former the resistance imposed by the latter. For doing so not only stops us from recognising when our theory of change fails, it makes us see the failures of others not as the outcome of specific mistakes or constraints, but as the eternal return of the flaws in their logic playing themselves out with fatalistic precision. In that case, there is strictly speaking nothing to learn. Insight arises from the examination of concrete trajectories and the effort to identify the constraints, balances of forces, 194

thresholds and choices that were decisive in them. 21 Nothing has been proved either possible or impossible in absolute terms, but there is much to be gained from understanding what did not work, and why. We can go further and turn the negative conclusion that everything has failed into a positive argument about the need for differentiation and complementarity. This is the reversal at which Erik Olin Wright arrived after a thorough appraisal of the limits inherent to the broad strategic orientations that he classified as ruptural (taking and/or smashing the state), interstitial (building alternatives outside of the market and the state) and symbiotic (using the market and/or the state). From the fact that ‘no one of these strategic logics of transformation is likely to be adequate for the task of enhancing social power’, we can either conclude that there is no hope, or that ‘any plausible long-term trajectory of transformation needs to draw elements from all three … Flexible strategic pluralism is the best we can do’. 22

To some extent, this is a logical consequence of the way the idea of revolution has changed since the last century. It is much easier to imagine today that whatever comes after capitalism, for better or worse, should come about in the same fashion as capitalism did: as the contingent outcome of different agents pursuing different strategies, sometimes convergent, sometimes divergent, competing with and/or reinforcing one another. If no single strategy is likely to work on its own, if no single agent is capable of doing everything, if different agents will make different kinds of intervention, and if different interventions demand different kinds of organisation and tactics, diversity of strategies and an ecological approach to organisation seem to be inevitable conclusions. ‘Diversity of strategies’, however, is about more than rendering ruptural, interstitial and symbiotic approaches compatible as tactical moments in a broader process. These three ‘logics of transformation’ are still theories of change in the abstract sense: general ideas of how societies are transformed. Every so often, one will hear that the cause of the left’s disarray is that it is no longer capable of imagining an end goal. But what if the problem lies elsewhere – that, since it lost its organised social base, the left has become unable to envisage the first steps that would need to be taken in order to move in any desired direction? Even in the case of those ideas identified 195

today as potential ‘directional demands’ 23 – the Green New Deal, full automation, a universal basic income, freedom of movement, the right to appropriation – the discussion tends to focus much more on their intrinsic merits (or otherwise) than on what it would take to make them happen and go as far as they can. Addressing this question is the job of a theory of change in the concrete sense. That is, an effort to establish the causal mechanisms through which a certain transformation could be produced; to break that larger goal down into intermediary targets; to identify points of leverage and the means to act upon them; to detect pitfalls and opportunities, negative and positive feedback loops, potential enemies and allies, points of divergence and convergence with others, and the ways to neutralise or make the most of them. In short, an attempt to answer the question: our resources being what they are and the conjuncture being what it is, how do we get from where we are to where we want to be? Absent this, strategy becomes unmoored from clearly defined problems and is left to wander idly, hardening into dogma. ‘Diversity of strategies’ is thus not simply a matter of theoretical pluralism, but of a plurality of concrete strategic wagers active at the same time. Where would such wagers come from? As we saw above, it is organising cores that induce strategies by advancing frames of action that people can adopt and adapt. As we also saw, however, the scale and scope of what they can induce and orient is limited by their own potentia . Expanding the ecology’s strategic capacity thus supposes expanding the capacities of organising cores: the depth of their analysis, the complexity of their planning, their knowledge of the ecology and ability to use its resources, their organisational consistency and the size of their zones of influence. The last point is especially important, as strategic imagination grows more ambitious in direct proportion to the force that one can expect to yield. There is no better incentive to broadening one’s hypotheses than possessing the collective means to test them. This means more than swelling the ranks of activists, although that is of course also important. An ecology, we have seen, is more than just a constellation of organisations and the people active in those. It comprises formal and informal organising cores, layers of committed organisers and 196

activists at different scales, infrastructure, resources, and a ‘long tail’ of diminishingly active supporters that, although more rarely mobilised into large-scale collective action, play critical roles at the local and aggregate levels. 24 The extension and capillarity of that long tail, as well as the intensity of connection with it, offers us a measure of how rooted an ecology is in most people’s everyday lives. The lack of that rootedness is what can best explain the speed with which the movements of the last decade flared up and then appeared to die out. Not, of course, that they disappeared entirely: when Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, for example, it was the networks formed around Occupy Wall Street the year before that organised the most efficient disaster relief response. In places like Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, those networks have also been key to several subsequent developments, not least the turn to electoral politics. The problem, however, is precisely that these large mobilisations formed scores of new organisers and activists, but little by way of a constant presence in the lives of non-activists. While large network events create opportunities for extending long tails, communicating and occasionally establishing relations with people it would normally be difficult to reach, those ties remain weak and discontinuous, and are easily absorbed by the pull of business as usual when things quieten down. An ecology consisting exclusively of activists is like a fire that is mostly kindling: it ignites but lacks the material to keep on burning. ‘Base building’ is a phrase that probably still sets alarms ringing in some quarters, suggesting images of dour militants trying to ‘bring consciousness from without’ to the nonplussed masses. Yet not only is that to dismiss the idea on the basis of a very poor interpretation of what it means, it is also to forget what the alternative to not building a social base is: a movement made up of nothing but activists. A powerful strategic wager must start from issues that are both structurally significant and have base-building potential. One should be careful, however, not to try to deduce the former from the latter. It is always possible to construct a case as to why our pet issue is the red thread connecting all of society’s ills, and the one link that ‘can best guarantee that he who controls the link controls the whole chain’. 25 That argument might 197

even be right; it will mean nothing if most people do not see it as such. It follows that the largest base-building potential is to be found in issues that people already recognise, or which involve aspects that are a source of concern for them. 26 It obviously happens that questions previously regarded as marginal can turn into flashpoints with surprisingly broad repercussions. Those are, however, practically impossible to predict much in advance. If the goal is not to wait for such moments of overdetermination but to actually produce them, the best place to start is people’s lives: what already matters, what is an ongoing cause of anxiety or discomfort, the points at which social structure translates into acutely lived experience. That will usually mean starting from bottlenecks in social reproduction. This was one of the great strengths of two of the most interesting initiatives to come out of the 2011 cycle, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages in Spain and the Debt Collective in the United States. By focusing on the suffering produced by indebtedness at a time when millions of people had suddenly gone insolvent and lost their homes, they were able to turn it into a site of politicisation. Yet to build a base from critical points in social reproduction, as the Black Panthers realised with their social programmes, means more than gathering support for a long-term political project. It requires the capacity to offer some kind of immediate response to the challenges people face. Aid without organisation is depoliticising, but politicisation without the organised means to meet urgent needs is destined to either peter out or foster exploitative, clientelist relations. Like the Panthers with their welfare programmes, PAH and the Debt Collective responded to this problem by providing legal support, debt relief, protection from evictions and house occupations. The need for a strategic wager to work at this level is double. First, responding to reproductive needs is essential for maintaining and expanding the conditions of struggle itself: ‘building autonomous circuits of self-reproduction’ is the best way to ‘ensure the collective power needed to sustain a fight for change’ and potentially sow the seeds for forms of organisation to come. 27 Second, meeting those needs is crucial for sustaining commitment. The problem of modelling commitment after the figure of the militant is that we can end up with an idealised notion of it as 198

pure Kantian disinterestedness: if someone thinks they have something to gain from supporting something, they cannot count as truly committed. Yet what we understand as ‘disinterestedness’ is in fact not the absence of interest but a bundle of interests strong enough to override others: the satisfaction of seeing an ideal realised (for to commit to an idea is to acquire an interest in its realisation); the pleasure we derive from seeing the gains made by others for whom we care; a number of other benefits that we value above whatever losses we might incur. This explains why people can support even causes that they ostensibly stand to lose from; this does not deny the ‘inner radiance’ 28 of political commitment, but situates it in context. 29 However, being able to always privilege ‘non-material’ or altruistic interests over the satisfaction of immediate needs supposes a degree of freedom from material constraints that is very poorly distributed under capitalism. 30 Most people commit to the pursuit of a different world not just because they have an affective investment in that idea, but because they can either see themselves living better in it, or can no longer see themselves surviving in this one. For that commitment to hold, it cannot prove incompatible with their well-being in the medium term, and must therefore offer material as well as ‘non-material’ returns. 31 Emancipatory politics demands sacrifices not for their own sake but for the sake of a future in which less (and less harsh) sacrifices are demanded of all. As Erik Olin Wright pointed out, the length and potential costs of the transition between two different states of affairs, be it system change or a local struggle, are far from trivial questions. On the contrary, they impose a major restriction on any project’s capacity to draw ‘broad, sustainable popular support’ in anything but the most extreme circumstances. 32 If structural analysis does not suffice to define base-building potential, it is nevertheless essential to working out where different issues can go and what one can do with them. Worthy as it may be, a campaign to solve an issue at the scale in which it was originally encountered – say, housing shortage in a particular area – is not a strategy for systemic change. Structural significance is a function of the role an issue plays in the economic, political and ideological reproduction of society, hence the probability that, if disturbed, it could destabilise that reproduction as a 199

whole. For that to happen, however, it must be dealt with at a sufficiently large scale. Again, the example of debt comes to mind here, given the centrality of individual indebtedness to social reproduction in a global context of stagnant wages and precaritisation, as well as the potential of debt strikes to disrupt the flows of finance capital. What would it mean to organise a nationwide debt strike? What would it take? Barring exceptional occasions, building the capacity to act at the appropriate scale is obviously something that demands time and can only start from local points, however large they may be. Another quality that a strategic wager requires is therefore something we could call directionality : the ability to break a broad systemic objective down into steps and sequences conducive to generating both the internal and external conditions one needs to achieve it. Directionality connects local targets and global goals, reforms and rupture, by integrating the former into the latter as moments that expand collective potentia and create opportunities that did not exist before. This is not a linear conception of time as the serial accumulation of small victories, but rather the opposite. Small victories and partial reforms are certainly important when they meet immediate needs and demands, act as proof of concept for activists and supporters, intensify collective enthusiasm and create stepping stones towards higher objectives. Rather than oppose them to long-term goals and points of rupture, one must make sure that they are connected to one another by ‘ organic ties ’, and that a ‘will to profit’ from the perturbations they produce guides ‘the rhythm and modalities of their initiation’ in the direction of ‘new disruptive action’. 33 Yet directionality also supposes the variable rhythms of struggle and the need to both dictate phases of acceleration (escalation, confrontation, tactical use of media and actions) and be prepared for external shocks when they happen (for example, by having instruments like off-the-shelf training workshops and newsletters that can begin to establish more regular relations with people suddenly drawn into a struggle). The point is not to choose the ‘small mornings’ over the ‘great nights’, but to make sure the latter serve the former as much as the other way around: that they are not just grand gestures that make unredeemable promises and burn

200

more resources than they generate, but effectively feed back into a longterm process by raising it to a new level. In order to keep on pushing beyond the short term, it is necessary to insist on posing problems that can be solved within existing conditions alongside problems that cannot. We can take the example of Movimento Passe Livre (MPL), the movement for free public transport that lit the fuse for the 2013 protests in Brazil. 34 MPL combined a largely consensual immediate objective (fare reduction) with a broader discussion about private involvement in the transport sector, signalling towards mediumterm targets (audits and contract renegotiations, free transport for some social sectors) while continuing to make ‘utopian’ demands (universal free transport financed by cutting profit margins and taxing big business, and ultimately handing transport over to some kind of public-common partnership 35 ). Attaining that goal would no doubt require a shift in the balance of forces between capital and labour that could not come overnight. But the idea was to contribute to that shift, not only in relation to transport but in general, by campaigning for that goal while organising around more immediate, deliverable ones. 36 Would transport alone be capable of producing that shift? The question is beside the point. The wager was not that transport as an issue could single-handedly lead to systemic change, but that it had sufficient structural relevance and social appeal to function as a leverage point for broader transformation. The idea was not that MPL could promote systemic change on its own, but that it could help create conditions for other anti-systemic forces to exploit as much as it could take advantage of their actions. Theirs was a strategy that started from a position of partiality – no issue, no agent, no strategy or tactic is ever likely to be enough, and, in any case, there will always be other players in the field – and accordingly presupposed a plurality of other strategies. Yet diversity of strategies is not just about everyone ‘doing their part’. The point is rather to incorporate what others do in one’s own strategic thinking: the overlaps in objectives, social base, targets, calendar; the resources that can be shared and the organising work that need not be duplicated; the complementarity of skills, tactics, roles and functions; the 201

feedback loops, synchronies and asynchronies through which different wagers can check or reinforce one another; the extent to which two or more strategies may in fact, for at least some part of the way, converge onto a single path. 37 Conversely, in the face of the strategies advanced by others, it is not a matter of arguing whether they are sufficient on their own, but of identifying the openings they offer to initiatives that can supplement them and steer them in different directions, the points at which it is possible to modulate and inflect them. 38 What matters is not finding a single strategy that works for the ecology as a whole but coming up with strategies that work within it. What emerges from that is not a single unified strategy run by a central command, but a sort of meta strategy playing out at the ecological scale, the overall direction of which is permanently at stake. It could be objected that diversity of strategies remains within a logic of dispersion that has thus far failed to yield either coherent strategies or systemic change. But that is once again to mistake a dyad for a binary choice. Between so much decentralisation that an ecology is practically reduced to aggregate action and so much centralisation that all collective action is mediated by a single organising core, a distributed system can go through several different configurations. Ultimately, what an ecology needs is both sufficient concentration of strategic power on certain points (so that it will not become a cacophony) and that the capacity for strategic thinking be as widespread as possible (so that everyone can see and project their actions within a larger context). The Leibnizian problem: the greatest diversity with the most (functional, transformative) order. But that means strategical thinking not as abstraction or dogma, but as complementarity, flexibility, attentiveness to the whole ecology and the willingness to deploy a diverse toolset. In any collective sport – let us assume that changing the world is one – collective positional intelligence is key to a successful strategy. A good team is neither one in which one player organises the whole game nor one in which each player does their own thing. Rather, it is that in which all players are equally aware of the movements on the pitch and capable of occupying whatever spaces need occupying – even when that means staying put.

The Afterlife of the Party

202

Parties, we hear, are back. If we are right in describing the protests cycle begun in 2011 as having been 1968’s 1989 moment for many people, this should come as no surprise. The recent turn to electoral politics can be understood as a perfectly logical response to the realisation that economic and political elites could carry on despite gigantic displays of ‘people power’. If there was one suggestion left hanging by the ebbing of last decade’s mass movements, it was that, when elites are not too worried about political legitimacy, the amount of force it would take to move them takes on almost impossible proportions. This has led to two diametrically opposed conclusions, both of which have a grain of truth that is lost through overstatement: that ‘power no longer resides in the institutions ’, 39 on one side, and that one must fight for the control of those institutions, on the other. It is true, as the experience of Syriza made tragically clear, that state power is increasingly limited by international bodies and transnational economic forces, as well as exceeded by infrastructure and logistical chains. 40

On the other hand, it is also true that, however limited the good they can do, institutions still have the capacity for great harm, and expecting them to merely vanish once they are ‘deserted’ is to mistake subjective ‘rejection’ for the ‘actual destruction’ of their very material existence. 41 The Invisible Committee’s callous reading of the Egyptian Revolution is revealing in this regard. It takes a serious analytical blind spot to suggest, in the face of the indiscriminate violence that brought that process to a halt, that protesters were guilty of believing in power instead of forcing it ‘to recognize its arbitrariness, reveal its contingent dimension’, ‘lower itself to the level of the insurgents’ and ‘be nothing more … than a gang’. 42 From an ecological perspective on organisation, the return of the party poses no problem in itself; the question is rather how it is to be understood. To assume that it means that movements have started once again to run the full course from infancy (loose networks and social protest) to maturity (party-building and institutional change) would be to endorse a teleological conception of organisation wholly at odds with the account I have proposed throughout this book. According to the latter, after all, there is no necessary developmental path, organisation is irreducibly plural, and this is why it must be conceived in ecological terms. But even worse is the 203

conclusion that the teleological narrative implies: that maturity amounts to putting all our eggs in the basket of the one and only party. This is to forget that a degree of plurality is a necessary safeguard against domination, be it in the guise of one-party rule or of the ‘they have nowhere else to go’ logic that has allowed many a formerly working-class party to sell its social base short again and again. The question regarding parties is not whether they have a place in a movement ecology – they exist anyway, so they do – but what kind of relation they have or ought to have with it. Should they aspire to be an ecology’s ultimate boundary, the umbrella under which everything tendentially must come? Are they just a part among parts, similar to all others in having their own niche? Or do they have some sort of regulative function, acting as a kind of incipient self-consciousness of the system of which they are a part? Is a party an organising core like any other, performing certain functions that other organisational forms cannot do, or does it have a different status, operating one level above, as it were? A debate on the party-form must necessarily address these questions and attempt to define what functions, if any, are exclusive to the party, and whether they are indispensable. Among those engaged in renewing the idea of the party in recent years, Mimmo Porcaro has been the most consistent in thinking it within an ecology. His narrative follows the traditional mass party of the Fordist age, ‘presented as the sole owner of the political action of organised masses’, through to the collapse of that claim to exclusivity after the end of the Keynesian compact. The latter, which brought the weakening of organised labour, increasing social complexity, and a growing gulf between skilled and unskilled workers, made it possible to infer not only the impossibility of reproducing the mass party, but also … that the ‘classic’ functions of the Workers’ Party (transformation of the popular classes into ruling classes, cultural and programmatic development, political management) had not become useless and superfluous but on the contrary were even more necessary … [Except that] these functions could no longer be performed by a single political entity (or by associations subject to it), but were spread across several ‘institutions’: movement organisations, trade unions, civil society associations, independent media, computer networks and, finally, also generally traditional parties. 43

204

This state of affairs led Porcaro to conceive of a ‘mass connective party’ whose primary role would be not organised centralisation but political connection among ‘several structurally autonomous “institutions of movement”, each capable of assuming, from time to time, the direction of the overall subject, and each empowered to continue, as well as with the common action as “party”, their own specific activity’. 44 Yet he would soon identify three flaws in that proposal. The first had been assuming that the ‘movement institutions’ the party connected were up to the task of ‘reaching the masses’, when in fact they were predominantly the preserve of skilled intellectual workers and incapable of bridging the gap with their unskilled counterparts. The latter in fact belonged in their majority to a third element, alongside self-organised society and the party, that he had failed to consider until then: ‘a “people” that consists of isolated individuals … with a tendency not to associate through self-organization but in relation to a political goal or – still worse – in relation to a political leader’. 45

The second flaw had consisted in underestimating the role of the state, further strengthened after the 2008 crisis, and thus overvaluing the strategic potential of a ‘linear growth of social autonomy’. 46 The third, finally, had been excessive faith that clear strategies would naturally emerge out of pluralistic debate. His revised notion of the connective party tried to find responses on all three fronts. So as to bridge the gap with unskilled workers, ‘movement institutions’ would have to work directly at the reproductive level: buyers cooperatives, self-managed nurseries and clinics, time banks, skill-sharing spaces. Rather than waiting for strategy to spontaneously arise, plans and programmes should be ‘the result of the conscious action of specific political and intellectual groups ’ that would take it upon themselves to rework the movement’s plural debate into concrete proposals. 47 Finally, in relation to the ‘people’ who cannot be reached through ‘mutualistic associations [and] the provision of “services” for the popular strata’, 48 rather than ‘[abandon them] to right populism’, the party would ‘probably have to take over some essential features of the old mass party or, with all due caution, incorporate some aspects of a politics based on personal charisma’. 49 205

There is plenty here with which I can agree, such as the emphasis on base building through interventions at the level of everyday life and the recognition that the ‘spontaneous’ emergence of strategy, rather than some magic happening indifferently to our will, depends on concrete efforts to develop and implement strategic wagers. Above all, there is the fact that what Porcaro describes is in fact an ecology, vanguard-functions and all. 50 Yet it is also clear that, from the first version of his argument to the second, the way the party-ecology relation is conceived changes significantly. The first image of the connective party is that of a part of an ecology whose specific function is connecting different, autonomously existing initiatives. In the second, the party is at least tendentially synonymous with the ecology as a whole, subsuming a number of different functions (mutual aid, base building, strategy, addressing ‘the people’ …) and losing all specificity as a separate structure (what, if anything, is the party considered apart from all the initiatives it is supposed to encompass?). The problem is, whereas the first image identifies a function to be performed within conditions existing now, the second supposes that one has already solved precisely the two difficulties that the connective party was meant to address: the absence of a mass organisation and the lack of a common vision. In the end, it is as if, faced with the difficulties of evolving a party out of an ecology, Porcaro had decided that an ecology could only be developed and integrated by a party. This has the appearance of a solution, since it names the subject that would be in charge of everything that needs doing; but it is a solution only in thought for as long as that subject does not exist. Porcaro is certainly correct in believing that movement ecologies can profit from further integration, but he lacks convincing reasons to make that integration synonymous with the party. After all, it is more likely that such an internally diverse party as he imagines would be the result of efforts to integrate initiatives already in existence than the cause of that diversity; and it is at least conceivable that a highly integrated ecology would render superfluous an independent structure whose function would be to provide connection. Jodi Dean’s plea for the party is equally not so much the defence of an organisational structure than of a set of functions. For her, the party is necessary as the ‘carrier’ 51 of a politically disruptive event that enables a 206

part (the crowd) ‘to see itself (and be seen)’ 52 as the imaginary, ever-absent totality at the centre of politics (the people). Although that is a necessary condition for the constitution of a collective political subject, this does not mean that the party is either synonymous with that subject or ‘represents’ it. Rather, it ‘responds to this subject’ 53 and, in so doing, provides it with a perspective from which its political will can be formed. Its primary function is transferential: it acts as the analyst that helps the analysand come into contact with their unconscious and interpret their desire. Ironically, this is essentially how Guattari conceived the ‘analytical groups’ that he saw as potential replacements for parties in the wake of 1968. 54 In Dean’s case, this function is further detailed as the concentration and organisation of an emergent sociality into a symbolic space whose basic structures (ideal ego, ego ideal, superego, subject supposed to believe, subject supposed to know) lend the collective the reflexivity its political subjectivation requires. 55 This symbolic position is buttressed by the party’s ‘affective infrastructure’: the ‘dynamics of feeling it generates and mobilizes’ through constant participation in its initiatives, campaigns, meetings, even social spaces. 56 Like the redemptive promise that animated early socialists, it is this infrastructure that infuses members with will, enthusiasm and hope, giving them access to a force ‘capable of enlarging the world’, ‘strong enough to go against the law and win’. 57 Many people will have had a similar experience with a neighbourhood association, a youth group, a trade union or a campaign, not to mention the church. Central to Dean’s argument, however, is the idea that, while those organisational forms can indeed produce the same effects, they do so from a partial perspective on the political process. Only a party can weave these partial perspectives into a single vision of the whole. Yet the nebulous but powerful designation ‘the movement’ and the affective infrastructure generated through participation in movement spaces can occasionally also play the role of ensuring ‘multiple activities [are] not a differentiated pluralism of possibilities but a single communist politics, envisioned as and from the perspective of the enduring struggle of the masses’. 58 They certainly did so for many in the ‘new social movements’ of the 1960s and 1970s, in the alterglobalist moment at the turn of the century and, however 207

fleetingly, in the 2011 cycle. Are these functions that only parties can fulfil, then, or could they be performed by a highly integrated ecology that may or may not include a party? Dean perhaps might counter that a party can do it with greater coherence and consistency – which would show that issues of ‘ideology, program, leadership, or organizational structure’ are not as secondary to her vision as she implies. 59 Although the last four decades have certainly been strongly partyphobic in most quarters, there has been no shortage of minuscule sects on offer, the misplaced zeal of their members often a good reminder of why people shunned the party-form in the first place. What Dean has in mind is clearly something else: an affective infrastructure capable of sustaining a broad, bustling collective subject. What the continuing proliferation of groupuscules demonstrates, however, is that the existence of parties, or of people who believe in them, is not a sufficient condition for accomplishing that task. Again, the notion of ‘party’ and ‘integrated ecology’ tendentially converge: what is lacking in the present is not so much a change in subjective disposition in favour of the former as a concerted effort to build the latter. A party could only be a guaranteed solution to this problem if it already existed and had the requisite qualities for the job. Since that is not the case, whether the party is a necessary condition, a consequence or something that integration would make superfluous is an open question. It is therefore possible to agree with Dean that what is needed is ‘an organized struggle against capitalism capable of operating along multiple issues in diverse locations’ without being persuaded that the work of ‘coordinating, consolidating, and linking [our] efforts so they can amplify each other’ can only be done by a party – and not, for example, by a certain number of organising cores behind a few highly developed strategic wagers. 60 Of all the functions listed by Dean and Porcaro in their defence of the party, only one definitely stands out as unlikely to be satisfied by anything else: addressing the atomised ‘people’ who are not politically active or involved in organisations of any kind. This is a correlate of the function of political unification usually ascribed to the party – it weaves together disparate perspectives on the totality – which in turn is a correlate of that which the party ultimately stands in relation to: the state. For Marxism, the 208

party is indispensable because class struggle must eventually turn into a political struggle over the control and nature of the state, and there must be something that mediates between different parts of the working class in the same way that the state mediates among competing capitals. Yet the need for mediation does not stop there, and in the same way as the state must also mediate between capital and the rest of society in order to produce consent and consolidate hegemony, the party must play that role between workers and the classes or class fractions that can and must be won over for the revolutionary cause. Translated into electoral politics, one of the main things this entails is seeking to represent and gather support from social sectors that are generally unorganised and politically unaffiliated (which covers a broader spectrum than Porcaro’s ‘unskilled workers’). It is interesting that Dean’s defence of the party is primarily concerned with the effect that it has on activists, since it is clearly in the role it plays in the relation to non-activists that the party, at least for as long as the state and elections exist, seems the hardest to replace. It is this calculation, more than anything else, that has been central to the electoral turn in places like Spain, Britain and the United States in recent years. It implies a very different relationship between party and ecology. Here, the party is not expected to be what unifies an ecology, let alone to eventually become the ecology as a whole. Rather, it is that part of the ecology that performs a function no other organisation does: devising electoral strategies, fielding candidates, occupying parliament, eventually running government. To do so, it must, as Dean says, ‘respond’ to the ecology – which it does by attempting to translate its diffuse desires and demands into policy, seeking to attract other social sectors to its sphere of influence, and maintaining some degree of accountability towards it. That does not, however, appear to involve the aspiration to promote organisational integration under a single umbrella. Members and nonmembers alike seem to perceive the party not so much as the telos of the ecology, what at once crowns it and makes it a whole, but as an organisation providing a unique kind of service. In this case, rather than tending towards a merger, party and ecology retain their separation, trying to maintain instead a two-way, mutually beneficial relationship. Whereas 209

the party offers the ecology the possibility of intervening at the level of the state, the ecology offers the votes and engagement that can give the party a core base from which to build electoral coalitions. Rather than taking the forms envisioned by Porcaro and Dean, this rebirth of the party-form has tended to assume the guise of the ‘digital party’. This is for reasons of practical expediency (the ‘organisational affordances and mass outreach potential of social media’), political calculation (widespread distrust towards traditional parties) and, to varying degrees, a belief in the power of digital technology to ‘extend and deepen political participation’ by facilitating ‘a more direct and meaningful intervention in the political process’. 61 Yet the formal similarities between structures like Cinque Stelle (Italy), Podemos (Spain) and Momentum (United Kingdom) should not blind us to the ways in which they differ from one another. If organisation is not a matter of form but of forces, the nature of a party cannot be gleaned solely from its formal characteristics, not even from its internal balance of forces, but must be ultimately sought on its relation to a broader social base that includes members and nonmembers. Here, I think, a significant distinction presents itself. It opposes those organisations that seek to address only the atomised ‘people’ (Cinque Stelle) or a specific section of it (the various Pirate parties), and those that wish to be an electoral outlet for both the unaffiliated and an already mobilised, politically active social base (Podemos, Labour/Momentum, Democratic Socialists of America). Both types may share the tendency to minimise internal bureaucracy, replacing the territorial structure of local and regional branches in an ascending hierarchy of representation with ‘a more fluid or evanescent structure, based on informal groupings, deprived of that degree of integration in and control over the central party that was proper to traditional political organisations’. 62 The loss of this kind of participation is compensated for by granting a lot of autonomy to local groups and giving members direct individual participation in major party decisions via the web. In both cases, this tends to produce a reactive relationship between the base and the leadership, in which the former mostly confirms the line pursued by the latter and acts as an amplifier of the messaging coming from 210

the top. This produces a split between what Gerbaudo describes as ‘hyperleaders’ and a ‘super-base’. Yet there is a visible difference in how a politically active, often already organised base responds to this. Whereas Cinque Stelle soared after clipping the wings of the local groups that sprung up in its early days, Podemos seemed to stall as an electoral force once it limited the role of the local ‘circles’ that were a major pull when it started. Even if the party leadership has built a ‘superbase’ of its own, the enthusiasm of its more activist members has tended to cool down as decision-making became increasingly centralised in the hands of a small clique of founders. 63 As its shock troops lost some of their vim, the party’s electoral prospects, which had initially seemed to rise irresistibly, stabilised and even regressed somewhat. In the municipal elections, the push to force it into confluencias (shared platforms) with other groups signalled an attempt to control it from the outside, by making it coexist with other organising cores, once controlling it from the inside had become too difficult. 64 In the end, it would take a coalition with a rejuvenated Socialist Party (PSOE) to bring ‘the party of the indignados ’ to power. The explanation for this difference lies, I believe, in the distinction between weak and strong leadership, which the notion of the ‘hyper-leader’, by lumping together mediatic visibility and organisational power, fails to take into account. The difference between Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jeremy Corbyn, on the one hand, and Cinque Stelle’s Luigi di Maio or France Insoumise’s Jean-Luc Mélénchon, on the other, is that whereas the latter have (or had) full control over the parties they created, the internal authority of the former is (or was) fiercely contested at best. This lack of bureaucratic clout can only be counterweighed by the support of a highly engaged base; but this means the ‘leader’ needs the ‘followers’ as much as the other way around. The appeal of this kind of leader is thus rather different for the atomised ‘people’ than it is for the organised base: while the former might be looking at qualities like charisma, authenticity and outsiderdom, the latter see someone that they can influence and shape. For them, relative institutional weakness can be a major quality, as it binds the leader to supporters in a more reciprocal way.

211

Thus, if the transition from institutional weakness to top-down control did not hurt Cinque Stelle, it was because its target audience was mostly an undifferentiated base that could not constitute itself politically otherwise. In the case of Podemos, the party’s initial dependence on members – it was only viable if they joined – was a crucial part of the deal. It sparked a process of ‘mass entryism’ among thousands of people who, even when they were not members of any organisations, were neither atomised nor politically inactive. Their enthusiasm for the party came not from an unconditional support for its founders but from pragmatic calculation: it was an electoral vehicle they had the chance to mould from the start. A similar thing would happen to the Labour Party with Corbyn’s leadership campaign and the DSA during Sanders’s first primary run. In these cases, to mistake support for a carte blanche is to risk punishment from the active base – which is what happened to the Podemos leadership to some extent. While, in true Laclauian fashion, they had nucleated previously dispersed forces around them, they did not realise that, once the party’s original promise of participation from below was withdrawn, many who had joined it for that reason would start to withhold cooperation. This difference in the party-base relation delineates two distinct senses in which the notion of the party as ‘service provider’ can be understood. In both cases the party is not merely a medium, and part of its ‘service’ is playing an active role in the constitution of a collective will in the electoral sphere. The difference lies in how preponderant that role is, and how subject the party is to control from below. In those parties whose primary audience is the atomised ‘people’, the relationship tends towards passive engagement and what Michels described as ‘the gratitude felt by the crowd for those who speak and write on their behalf ’. 65 The base acts as consumer more than as co-producer of policy and strategy, an arrangement that is naturally conducive to less accountability and more dependency on leaders. On the other hand, when a party combines an appeal to the disaffected with an active, organisationally differentiated social base, the existence of other centres of power offers more opportunities for participation and better chances of ensuring the structure remains responsive and accountable. At the limit, the party would operate as something like the 212

electoral wing of a diverse, flourishing movement: at once valued for the unique function it performs and kept under watch so as not to become too autonomous. Some experiences have managed to approximate that ideal scenario, but their subsequent fate suggests that the balance of forces required is one that is very hard to sustain in the long run. 66 Clastres suggested that the emergence of unaccountable and coercive forms of power should be explained less by themselves than by the incapacity of the social field to exorcise them. For representatives to remain fragile, what matters at the end of the day is how strong the rest of the ecology is. At the source of every gradual process of oligarchisation is a relation in which some take over because others fail to stop them – or effectively consent that they do. It is undeniable, then, that electoral politics and the state involve a number of risks in that regard. At the most elementary level, both are effectively premised on the idea of letting others take charge, which means that victories in this arena can be even more demobilising than defeats. Besides, winning elections often entails losing important ecology players to the state apparatus, and so a loss of potentia and autonomy vis-à-vis institutions. This adds to the fact that, due to financial and other incentives, parties tend to renew their cadre at a faster rate than social movements. Finally, whereas movements can afford to be complementary, parties are by definition competitive, and the more exclusive the investment in an electoral alternative becomes, the less an ecology is capable of exercising diffuse control over it. Regardless of anyone’s intentions, the balance of forces generally leans in favour of parties in the long term. Michels’s ‘iron law of oligarchy’ could be understood as describing a tendency analogous to the second law of thermodynamics: oligarchy, like entropy, is the statistically most likely state in a system that ceases to receive new inputs of energy, that is, of collective potentia . (The important difference, of course, is that potestas can effectively suppress new inputs.) If that is so, we should remember that the second law of thermodynamics applies equally to all physical systems, and Michels himself believed that ‘the formation of oligarchies within the various forms of democracy is the outcome of organic necessity, and consequently affects every organization, 213

be it socialist or even anarchist’. 67 Throughout this book, we have seen many reasons why that would be the case. First, there is the fact that it is never the totality (of a society, a class or even a group) that wills or acts, but only ever a part, however big or small – something that applies to differences in participation within a collective as much as it does to the separation between a mass movement and the rest of the population. Second, there is leadership as an ineliminable function of politics, which can and often does become consolidated into informal or formal positions. Third, there is organisation itself, as a means of augmenting collective potentia which, by making it coagulate around certain points, can transmute it into potestas . Then there are the asymmetries of power in networks of all kinds, which are essential to their capacity to produce largescale effects, and generally the fact that core–periphery dynamics are not just artificial products of malevolent intentions, but natural tendencies in collective processes that will generally become entrenched if not rectified. In short, one does not do away with danger by doing away with the party; one of the problems of the tendency to confuse organisation and party is precisely that it misleads people into believing that is case. That does not automatically make any party good, of course, but it does mean that the possibility of using parties should be judged not according to a single criterion (its tendency to become too autonomous vis-à-vis the base) but three (the risks, the external capacity to control them, and whether the gains that can be obtained in a concrete situation justify the gamble). At the same time, it reminds us that it does not necessarily take the appearance of a party for movements to become ossified. They are perfectly capable of arriving at that point by themselves; all it takes is for them to stop receiving inputs of collective potentia . Alternatively, if they are unable to produce the effects that were expected of them, the energy invested in them might dissipate and die out. Given enough time and not enough work, everything will unravel. The narrative that portrays the emergence of parties as what causes the demise of vigorous and dynamic movements often forgets that nothing retains the same levels of dynamism forever, and that parties usually flourish not when movements are at their height but when they have started to flag. It is naïve, for example, to impute naivety to people 214

running self-managed clinics and kitchens in Greece who were supposedly ‘duped’ into supporting Syriza. For many facing the strain of sustaining those projects through a crisis with no end in sight, it was rather a matter of seeing in electoral politics the possibility of a respite and a change in the terrain of struggle. In fact, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, another reason for the electoral turn of recent years was clearly the hope that it could function as a shortcut in the process of political recomposition that the 2011 cycle began but could not bring to term. Recomposition – the process through which disparate individuals and groups develop a shared political outlook and come to perceive themselves as being on the same side in a struggle – can take many forms. The one that the Italian operaisti who popularised the term had in mind was, at least originally, centred on the workplace and tied to the organisational possibilities afforded by the concentration of workers on the factory floor. Since then, with smaller production units and an increasingly atomised labouring experience becoming the dominant trend, the workplace has become a much harder space in which to organise, and labour a less likely site of political recomposition. Territory, on the other hand, while it is a powerful basis on which to bring people together, is inherently constrained in its capacity to become generalised in space or – when the territory is temporary, like a square occupation – time. The great novelty of the 2011 cycle was to show that events can be formidable principles of recomposition by establishing a space of politicisation, creating new relations and sowing the seeds for common identities. Finally, what many people saw in Bernie Sanders’s and Jeremy Corbyn’s campaigns was the possibility of using the enthusiasm they generated and the energies habitually invested in the electoral cycle (attention, hope, anger) as wedges in the effort to penetrate public discourse, connect to a broader public and build ground-level organisation. It was recomposition ‘from above’, not in the sense that it was top-down, but in that it tried to make representative figures function as vehicles for expanding and consolidating the very base that they were supposed to represent. As a clear-eyed first-hand witness remarked, this was ‘a game of reverse Jenga’ in which the players were constantly ‘trying to 215

back-fill … a structurally-unsound base’. 68 Unfortunately, the same thing that gave them an opportunity to do so prevented them from doing it fully, as electoral targets demanded priority when it came to the use of time and other resources. Ironically, this meant that they would eventually come up against exactly the problem they wished to address: a gap that was not political but organisational. It was not the support for their proposals that was lacking, but the means to turn that support into commitment, activity, participation, identity. Strategic wagers along the lines that I suggested above point to yet another possibility for political recomposition. This would be grounding it not on the workplace and the figure of the worker, nor on territorial identity, an event or an electoral campaign, but on issues around social reproduction that cut across society and constitute transversal identities: debt (the indebted), public transport and health (users), housing (renters, the homeless, the foreclosed) … Taken individually, each of these issues can function as a pole of recomposition: a space of politicisation in which different organising cores are at work to provide different entry points and complementary possibilities of intervention, helping shape a social base that shares a broad analysis, an understanding of itself as part of a single struggle, ties of solidarity and the willingness to take different kinds of action. Given that no organisation is focused on hegemonising the whole ecology, organisational requirements can be conceived in relation to concrete needs instead of an absolute imperative to grow, and the focus be put more on wagers themselves than on group identity. This reduces the constraint to act competitively; the point is less to strengthen individual organisations than to cultivate an ‘area’. 69 Finally, the same collaborative effort to constitute those common sites of politicisation can be invested in connecting them. The more they are thought in relation to one another, and the more their structural interdependences and feedback loops are worked out, the more they will tend to resonate with one another and converge into a space of mutual recognition and common struggle that is always more than one but less than two.

216

7

Radically Relational:

The Problem of Fitness

_______________________________

What can we do now in order to do tomorrow what we are unable to do today? Paulo Freire

The Spectre of Populism

If there is a spectre presently haunting world politics, it is the spectre of populism. Yet given the notorious slipperiness of the term, which it seems mandatory to begin every analysis by pointing out, 1 this can make for the kind of conversation in which everyone assumes they are talking about the same thing when in fact they are not. When Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe began to rehabilitate the word, they were trying to reclaim one of the key terms customarily used to place anything that challenged the neoliberal consensus of the 1990s and 2000s beyond the pale of rationality. For them, the neoliberal push to put ever more areas outside social control and under the jurisdiction of the market was inseparable from the refusal to even conceive that people might question (supposedly) value-free ‘administration’ and demand to have a say in how, to what ends and for whose benefit society was run. The ‘dismissal of populism’ was thus ‘the dismissal of politics tout court ’. 2 It was with that essentially positive connotation that the term gained currency again on the left in the last decade, as some of those who had been through the ‘movement of the squares’ turned to Laclau and Mouffe for inspiration for their next steps. In mainstream discourse, however, ‘populism’ continues for the most part to function in the same way as before, as a catch-all term to describe any politics that contests some or all aspects of a beleaguered pre217

2008 consensus. As such, it allows increasingly dislocated centrists to produce increasingly desperate false symmetries between a struggling left and a resurgent far right. Not that the conversation within the left is any less muddled, of course. The reason for much of that confusion is that, even if one heeds Laclau’s suggestion that populism is better understood not as a particular content but as a logic that can be attached to different contents, people will still project their own associations and preconceptions onto it. This is something that Laclau and Mouffe themselves have been guilty of doing, which further complicates matters by making some of the contents smuggled into their account appear as intrinsic to the pure form of populist logic. That is compounded by the fact that they and their followers have sometimes spoken of what was originally a descriptive effort to single out the mechanism through which collective identities were formed as if it were a prescriptive theory that could work almost as a recipe for ‘taking the institutions by storm’. 3 The upshot is that many people, assuming that populism and that recipe are one and the same, will spurn any discussion of the former because they have misgivings about the latter. That is regrettable for at least two reasons. The first is that, despite Laclau and Mouffe themselves at times, it is possible to extricate the questions posed by populism from those elements of the recipe that attract the most suspicion: a fondness for larger-than-life leaders, a soft spot for ‘progressive nationalism’, a tendency to reduce politics to discourse management. The second, and more important, is that the resonance that the debate on populism has found probably speaks less of populism as such than of a problem that it has helped put back on the agenda – and it would be a shame if discussion of the latter were made impossible by resistance to the former. There are in fact several questions that had gone missing from a left-ofmainstream agenda which the debate on populism has helped bring back into play, not least the certainly not trifling matter of building parties, fielding candidates and contesting elections. Yet even among those who have remained wary of the electoral game, practices long tarnished by their association with a certain style of politics have once again come under 218

consideration: fighting for influence over public opinion, including by occupying spaces in mainstream debate; constituting alliances beyond activist circles and across social groups; concerning oneself with unity of action more than with narrow ideological affinity. 4 One way of describing this change would be to say that we are witnessing the return of hegemony. That would indeed be a return of the repressed, seeing how intensely the very concept had until not long ago been rejected in favour of direct action, prefiguration, affinity-based communities, the multitude, and so on. 5 But hegemony, like populism, is a concept so loaded with assumptions that starting from it is equally likely to end up generating more heat than light. My suggestion is that both ‘populism’ and ‘hegemony’ have often functioned in recent debates as stand-ins for a third, broader problem for which there was no name. It is therefore important that we try to name that problem, not only to cut through the layers of potential misunderstanding, but to make it amenable to being discussed independently.

Not-Red-Enough Herring? The Matter with Populism

Let us call it the problem of fitness . Behind an ill-defined ‘populism’, what many have rediscovered in the last few years is really a preoccupation with thinking the qualities that a political project must possess in order to get a grip on an existing conjuncture rather than merely staking out an abstract position of principle. In other words, its capacity to address widely shared concerns, to speak to existing interests and desires, to persuade people of its own feasibility, to gather support and build a broad social base, to target weak spots and concrete points of pressure and leverage efficiently, to set in motion processes endowed with their own transformative momentum, to effectively pose itself as a mediation, or series of mediations, between some future state and the present. In short, to meet people and the world halfway . Fitness was always central to, if not the central problem in Laclau and Mouffe’s rehabilitation of populism, even when it still went by the name of ‘radical democracy’. 6 Alongside the likes of Stuart Hall, they were among the first to warn that the shifting terrain produced by the breakup of the Keynesian compact was being rapidly reconfigured by a radical right adept at ‘addressing real problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions’ 219

while also representing them ‘within a logic of discourse which pulls them systematically into line with policies and class strategies of the Right’. 7 This then-new political force had shown a much greater capacity to identify the tensions produced by the crisis of the welfare state and connect their own project to people’s anxieties, aspirations, fears and hopes. It worked ‘on the ground of already constituted social practices and lived ideologies’, conquering terrain ‘by constantly drawing on these elements which have secured over time a traditional resonance and left their traces in popular inventories’. 8 But it did not simply adapt to the new conditions or translate its ideas into the language of a pre-existing repertoire. ‘At the same time, it change[d] the field of struggle by changing the place, the position, the relative weight of the condensations within any one discourse and constructing them according to an alternative logic.’ 9 Once in office, it would complete this epochal shift by implementing policies that generalised that logic to ever more areas of life. Through these, the pioneers of the neoliberal revolution would lock in place a number of mechanisms capable of reproducing the values and the subjectivity that they at once promoted and relied on, presupposed and sought to create. 10 The conclusions were clear: the reality to which socialists and social democrats addressed themselves was in the process of disappearing, and to carry on as before was to condemn oneself to isolation and political irrelevance. Putting fitness at the centre of the discussion makes the problem of reducing it to populism, and populism to a narrowly conceived recipe, immediately apparent: if the question is finding solutions that fit different circumstances, turning any set of solutions into a one-size-fits-all formula is self-defeating. This is all the more so if we consider that, as a theory that foregrounds the need to adapt to one’s own circumstances, Laclau and Mouffe’s approach to populism could be expected to bear some imprint of the period when it was originally developed, generalising conjunctural calculations into theoretical principles. This, I believe, effectively accounts for some of the aspects of Laclau and Mouffe’s thought that have met with the most resistance. Showing that these aspects bear a contingent rather than necessary connection to populism (and, more importantly, to the question of fitness) can therefore help us reframe both debates. 220

The first of these aspects concerns the importance of national identity. It is true that populism has often appealed to the idea of the nation. Does that make the nation a necessary part of any populist politics, however, including a left one? Or is the choice to mobilise nationalism and nationhood contingent on situated calculations? Often the conversation takes place as if the former were the case, but the arguments appear to support the latter. On the one hand, Mouffe writes that the ‘hegemonic struggle to recover democracy needs to start at the level of the nation state’, which ‘is still one of the crucial spaces for the exercise of democracy and popular sovereignty’. 11 On the other, she states that ‘a left populist strategy cannot ignore the strong libidinal investment at work in national – or regional – forms of identification and it would be very risky to abandon this terrain to right-wing populism’. 12 Both of these are, of course, perfectly defensible claims. Yet not only is there no necessary connection between the two, the second of them neither proves that national identity must always be mobilised (there could be other ways of producing the same effects) nor predetermines any particular way of doing so. 13 In the end, as Laclau himself recognises, ‘whether nationalism … is going to become a central signifier in the constitution of popular identities depends on a contingent history impossible to determine through a priori means’. 14 To the extent that it is concerned with the problem of fitness, the theory of populism must necessarily also concern itself with identifying in existing discourses and practices those ‘elements which have secured over time a traditional resonance and left their traces in popular inventories’ – what philosopher and literary theorist Yves Citton calls ‘attractors’. These ‘hooks’ ( accroches ) and ‘scripts’ are widely recognisable blocks of information and syntax whose familiarity makes them the ideal support for political narratives that organise them in new ways. 15 As Stuart Hall pointed out, following Gramsci, ‘ideological shifts take place, not by substituting one whole new conception of the world for another, but by presenting a novel combination of old and new elements’. 16 Some of the most powerful attractors will be themes and values around which there is a deeply entrenched crystallisation of social desire – pliable but powerful ideas like ‘family’, ‘work’, ‘duty’. In Hall’s analysis, for instance, the hooks 221

of ‘nation’ and ‘people’ were key to Thatcherism’s strategy of building a discourse that pitted them against ‘class’ and ‘unions’ to construct ‘an assault, not on this or that piece of “irresponsible bargaining” … but on the very foundation and raison d’être of organized labour’. 17 Yet, while we should heed Mouffe’s warning that one must seek at least to neutralise the exploitation of such themes by the far right, there is no reason to believe that every effort at building broad consensus must necessarily refer to the nation in order to be successful, nor that it would not be possible to arrive at the same result starting from other hooks. Furthermore, hooks are not all equally pliable, and some are undoubtedly more easily made compatible with reactionary than transformative projects. A second point of contention regards the role of leaders, and charismatic leadership in particular, in left populism. It is true that this has been a recurrent trait in historical populist movements. It is equally true that leadership is so fundamental a feature of the political for Laclau as to be nearly synonymous with it. Thus, for example, he writes that the ‘various myths of the totally reconciled society … invariably presuppose the absence of leaders, that is, the withering away of the political ’, which is something he deems impossible. 18 This position also stems equally from the rejection of what I have called transitivity, and what Laclau and Mouffe subsume under the broader category of ‘essentialism’. Society is composed of ‘elements whose own nature does not predetermine them to enter into one type of arrangement rather than another’, 19 but rather ‘the open and incomplete character of every social identity permits its articulation to different historico-discursive formations’. 20 If political identity does not follow from one’s objective place in the social structure with ‘natural necessity’, as someone like Kautsky would say, then it must somehow be contrived , produced as ‘as a result of an external or articulating practice’. 21 There must, therefore, be some contingent factor that sparks processes of political subjectivation and the constitution of identities. That is where leadership comes in. That much is something I can agree with. It is, however, an argument only for leadership as function , not as position. Do Mouffe and Laclau have an argument for the necessity of the latter? Laclau reasons that, if an 222

‘assemblage of heterogeneous elements kept together only by a name’ is ‘necessarily a singularity ’, and ‘the extreme form of singularity is an individuality’, then the ‘equivalential logic leads to singularity, and singularity to identification of the unity of the group with the name of the leader’. 22 Yet that deduction fails to demonstrate that the passage from singularity to the ‘extreme form’ of an individual must always happen. Several movements in the last ten years suggest the opposite, having managed, if only for a relatively short time, to establish a boundary between a ‘we’ and a ‘they’ around singular names taken from places (Tahrir Square, Gezi Park), punctual events (15M, Occupy, Nuit Debout), hashtags (#YoSoy132, #BlackLivesMatter), or even accessories (umbrellas, yellow vests). None of these had a recognisable leading figure, thus showing that the relation between collective identity and leadership position is not essential but accidental: one can have the former without the latter. Mouffe recognises as much when she claims that the ‘articulating principle will vary according to the different conjunctures and it can be provided either by a specific demand that becomes the symbol of the common struggle … or by the figure of a leader.’ 23 One could of course object that what hampered those movements was precisely their lack of decision-making mechanisms and executive bodies, and that ‘it is only when they have been followed by structured political movements, ready to engage with political institutions, that significant results have been achieved’. 24 One could also argue that, if the meaning of a popular identity is not to fluctuate indefinitely, there must be one or a few individuals who have the final word on it. Though both are cases that can be made, they are not made by Laclau’s deduction of the centrality of leaders, which is in fact a demonstration only of the necessity for the leader’s name – that is, its symbolic function in consolidating group identity rather than any organisational, strategic or decision-making role. Laclau himself warns against confusing those two things, contrasting himself with Hobbes on the grounds that, whereas the latter talks about ‘actual ruling … we are talking about constituting a signifying totality, and the latter does not lead automatically to the former’. 25

223

In short, Laclau and Mouffe’s defence of the properly organisational need for leaders belongs to a separate, a posteriori argument, which is then conflated with an a priori argument about the metonymic structure of hegemony (the fact that it always requires an element to stand in for the whole). This defence cannot be drawn from the logic of populism itself except by a process of metaphorical extension: the need for a name becoming the need for the name of a person , which then turns into the need for that person to perform certain duties , and finally seems to turn into a specific set of assumptions about leadership styles. That no a priori connection exists is further suggested by the fact that the words ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ are practically absent from Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , figuring only in its historical opening section. What changed between then and On Populist Reason ? One answer is that Laclau and Mouffe felt compelled to ‘bend the stick’ against the horizontalist discourses that had prospered in the meantime. But it is also the case that, if in the 1980s they were addressing a left that could still count on declining but still sizeable mass parties, trade unions and social movements, that organisational infrastructure had been decimated by the 2000s, creating a situation more akin to the one in which historical populism thrived. This made the social heterogeneity that precedes unification into a ‘people’ easier to imagine as an organisationally undifferentiated matter passively awaiting a form-giving gesture from above. Granted, a populist ‘chain of equivalence’ is not ‘a simple coalition of existing political subjects’, but the outcome of a hegemonic articulation that produces a common identity above and beyond preexisting ones. 26 It nonetheless makes a huge difference, not least to the kind of relation that obtains between leaders and base, whether the matter that constitutes ‘the people’ is at least in part already structured, mobilised and endowed with strategic powers. The more an ecology is differentiated into relatively autonomous clusters, equipped with strong organising cores, already active and engaged, the less likely the hypertrophy of a single leader tends to be; the more likely, in fact, that it will be resisted. (Conversely, of course, the harder it will be for it to coalesce into full equivalence.) Combined with the left’s trauma of hierarchical organisation, this may help explain why more 224

authoritarian modes of charismatic leadership have worked better for rightwing populisms than left-wing ones in recent years. 27 Thinking leadership by analogy with the empty signifier infuses Laclau and Mouffe’s thought with a welcome dyadic bent, enabling them to contemplate a range of possibilities between the two limit-cases of absolute horizontality and a purely vertical relation. 28 This makes leadership appear as limited in a way that resembles what we found earlier in our analyses of Clastres and the vanguard-function. The constitution of the ‘people’ depends on a certain particularity (a demand, a name, a leader) assuming ‘the role of an impossible universality’; 29 but that means that a chain of equivalences can survive only for as long as the tension between particularity and universality is maintained. If the part that stands for the whole becomes too autonomous, relegating all else to a subordinate role, the chain is put under strain and may break down. If the empty signifier ‘becomes entirely empty’, on the other hand, ‘the links in the equivalential chain do not need to cohere with each other at all’, ‘the most contradictory contents can be assembled’ and ‘the unity of a “people” constituted this way is extremely fragile’. 30 In one case, the leader loses legitimacy because they are seen as favouring their own particularity over the universal. In the other, as their name is the only thing holding popular identity together, they cannot act without pitting one part of the chain against another, and must therefore remain inactive lest they be seen as taking sides. Because they collapse the symbolic and the organisational, however, Laclau and Mouffe cannot see that this double limitation applies only to weak leadership – those situations in which leaders are constrained by the will of the collective because their lack of potestas forces them to constantly seek their approval. The analogy with the empty signifier makes all leadership appear as weak because it neglects the properly organisational power that a leader might have. Once they have that power – an apparatus of enforcement, for example, or a large mass of faithful followers – the analogy breaks down. This is where we hit upon the greatest problem of Laclau and Mouffe’s approach: by using a theory of discourse to think the political, they often end up treating the non-discursive features of politics only metaphorically, emptying them of all specificity. To be clear, this is not a retread of the 225

common misapprehension that accuses Laclau and Mouffe of believing that nothing exists outside of discourse. The question is rather that, once they make discourse into the master theory for thinking social reality, they are forced to flatten whatever dimensions of that reality cannot be grasped in terms of the play of signifiers, rhetorical figures, and so on. This is where readers might get the impression that discourse is for them an infinitely malleable medium, demanding only virtù and talent in order to be shaped into any articulation. Despite their attention to the ‘stickiness’ 31 of ‘popular inventories’ – the hooks and scripts that one needs to negotiate in order to be heard – their theoretical choices end up downplaying two elements that are key to why things ‘stick’. First, the fact that ‘stickiness’ is lived : reproduced in everyday relations that generate experiences in which certain associations of ideas, values, desires, and so on are reinforced. Second, that one cannot rewire those associations in the long run without also transforming lived experience, that is, without organising everyday life differently. In the end, it is as if Laclau and Mouffe inadvertently re-created some of the confusion they had set out to dispel. In response to a widespread wariness towards populism, which sprang to no small extent from some of its historical associations (racism, nationalism, anticommunism), they maintained that populism should be seen as a logic open to different contents. Yet when it came to defining that logic and imagining what a left populism could be, they inevitably gave their vision a determinate shape that many came to see not as their vision of populism, but as populism as such . Conceived within certain determinate conditions and in opposition to a specific kind of politics – the ‘post-political’ consensus that cemented neoliberal hegemony in the 1990s and 2000s 32 – this notion of left populism probably seems most suspicious today in precisely those elements that more closely resemble the context of its original elaboration. After all, many people might feel that a combination of strong leadership, cross-class alliances, tactical flexibility without clear strategic benchmarks and faith in the demiurgic power of political rhetoric does not take us very far from the spin-heavy, content-light centrism of the 1990s and 2000s. True, that brand of politics is the very opposite of what Laclau and Mouffe 226

understand as populism: it makes antagonism disappear through institutionalist totalisation (‘we are all in it together’) and forecloses debate on alternative projects in favour of the administration of isolated demands. 33

Yet experience has often shown that it is perfectly possible for populist rhetoric to serve as a smokescreen for institutionalist practice, sustaining the appearance of an antagonism that finds little or no translation in effective action. And naturally, the risks of that happening are all the greater the less there are checks from below on the autonomy of leaders: to be ‘dependent of some man’s good faith’ alone, as Spinoza put it, is to lack any real guarantees. 34 Perhaps because it hews too closely to the possibilities available at a moment of narrowed horizons, Laclau and Mouffe’s theory seems slightly out of step with our present time, when the space for more radical ideas has expanded both to the left and to the right. It ends up being much stronger on the need for connecting to what is given and staying within the limits of what is viable than on the question of where to go with that, and how. For that reason, left populism is ultimately a much better theory on how to build consent or win elections than it is on how to produce change – which is something that may include winning elections, but is certainly also much more. By virtue of those very shortcomings, however, Laclau and Mouffe’s vision of left populism can shed light on two aspects of the problem of fitness that they fail to develop in full. The first is that fitness cannot be thought exclusively in discursive terms, as if it were a simple matter of steering existing public opinion in a transformative direction. It must be brought to bear on material relations as well: what changes can be brought here and now to the ways in which people produce, consume, organise, relate to others and to themselves? It is ultimately not just about transforming the way people think, but about transforming the conditions in which people exist, hence (also) think. Jon Beasley-Murray points out how Laclau’s analysis of Peronism is strangely oblivious to the ways in which institutions and mass gatherings instilled ‘the habit of being Peronist’, fixing the effects of discourse in and through lived experience. 35 But to really change the way people live is more than simply inculcating in 227

them the love for the leader or the party, both of which at the very best can only be means for change; it involves creating, nurturing and expanding the ends themselves. This, then, is the second point. If change is to be more than just a temporary modification within the rhythm of electoral cycles, fitness is inseparable from a sense of direction: what changes create the conditions for further changes down the line, and how to exploit them? It is not just a matter of doing what is possible now, but equally of expanding the realm of possibilities; not simply about acting within given constraints, but of acting on those constraints so as to transform them. This is why bundling the problem of fitness with that of populism may be a red herring after all: if we focus too much on one attempt to answer a question, we risk losing sight of the question as such. At the same time, to focus too much on the limitations of Laclau and Mouffe’s vision also risks missing the wider implications of their argument. For them, ‘populism’ is ultimately not a particular formula for winning power, nor just a strategy among others, but a concept with a much larger extension. It represents ‘political reason tout court ’, 36 that is, politics reduced to neither mere administration nor the wait for a redemptive revolutionary event. If we take this to mean that a politics capable of producing systemic change must always speak to different interests, build solidarity and reciprocal recognition, constitute new identities, win the active or passive support of a sufficiently large number of people, and create the conditions for people to live and understand themselves differently – regardless of whether one wishes to call that ‘populism’, it is hard to disagree. In that minimal sense, there is no a priori reason to believe that such a politics could not be instantiated by a range of different approaches, from the more centralised to the more distributed, from the more state-centric to the more diffuse. Indeed, there is no reason to think that it could not be done without giving that collective identity the name ‘people’, or without reclaiming the populist label. What matters is that it be capable of connecting to and transforming the lived experience of a large, heterogeneous social base, at the same time as establishing a frontier that excludes – and progressively renders unviable – the forms of sociality that threaten those that it allows to flourish. 228

Indeed, this means that we need not conceive hegemony and autonomy as mutually exclusive terms. 37 Hegemony has a double-edged sense for Laclau and Mouffe. On the one hand, it designates the internal dominance of one element over the others that compose an equivalential chain (demands, identities, social groups). On the other hand, the elements in the chain are equivalent not only in relation to the dominant element that metonymically represents them, but also in relation to what they are not – what is rejected from the chain and defined as the other side of an antagonistic frontier. In this sense, hegemony is the external dominance of the chain over what it excludes. Now, if we return to the argument made in chapter 1 on how climate change exposes the limits of aggregate action, the importance of an antagonistic frontier and that kind of external hegemony becomes evident. It would not be enough to create ‘oil-free zones’ in a world where fossil fuels were still being extracted and burnt. However large the number of autonomous initiatives, they would still be innocuous if they did not also have the strength to force the carbon economy into inexistence. A ‘world in which many worlds fit’ cannot be a world in which all worlds fit, as the existence of some worlds is in fact incompatible with that of others. Some things have to be actively excluded, and that can only happen if a large enough contingent of people recognise themselves as incompatible with the existence of those things. 38 External hegemony is therefore a necessary condition for any change aspiring to attain systemic status. Does that apply to internal hegemony as well? We have already seen that Laclau admits that the empty signifier can be more or less eminent without damaging the viability of the equivalential chain. But we have also seen that it is wrong to conflate, as he and Mouffe tend to do, the symbolic function played by the empty signifier with properly organisational power. That means that at least in principle it is perfectly conceivable that a demand like ‘stop climate change’ could function as a signifier bringing together a number of different demands without this translating into the dominance of a single centre of command over the whole ecology. The real challenge in that case would be translating environmental crisis into ‘hooks’ that were discursively and materially tangible to people at a local level, which can be hard for reasons discussed above; 39 and breaking the problem 229

of transition to a different global system down into achievable steps endowed with directionality.

Fitness, Tension, Directionality

The very idea of tailoring one’s message to an audience or flexibly applying a principle to a concrete situation might seem suspicious to some. It brings to mind mendacious cadres telling their constituencies now is not the time to demand any more, or the unctuous world of spin doctors, focus groups and obsessive ‘triangulation’ that has done so much to mainstream far right discourse. It is perhaps not hard to feel that ‘fitness’ suggests the conciliatory opportunism and unprincipled cynicism of self-appointed leaders. A long catalogue of examples predisposes us to a scheme that pits masses with an inexhaustible and unambiguous radical potential held back and betrayed by their spineless, unscrupulous representatives. What makes that possible is in each case the same conditions: abuse of trust or invested power, unaccountability, a lack of reciprocity between leader and base. Political timorousness and the abandonment of principles are thus symptoms, perhaps even necessary ones, of the pathologies of excessive leadership. Yet experience also teaches that this schema’s clear moral polarity can be misleading. Anyone who has been involved in labour or community organising will know that it is often the leaders or most active members of a group who will have to work hard to break down the fear and passivity of their neighbours or co-workers. ‘People’ can be brave or afraid, radical or resigned, precisely because no essence of ‘people’ exists. The fear of echoing the idea of ‘consciousness from without’ often makes us uneasy about the idea of trying to bring others over to our position; and yet what we criticise in politicians who compromise with bigotry and intolerance is their unwillingness to take a clear stand even if that might go against the tide of opinion and their own potential voters. In fact, if we fault ‘post-politics’ for at once concentrating decision-making power in the hands of small cliques and reducing politics to endless modulations of a narrow range of possibilities according to fluctuations in public sentiment, is that not the same as accusing it of too much and too little leadership at the same time?

230

Top-down and centralised, on the one hand, devoid of a vision or strategic orientation, on the other – is it not both things at once? The paradox is only apparent. It is possible to speak of both too much and too little here because ‘leadership’ means different things in each case; the two extremes do not actually belong on the same dyad. In the first case, excess of leadership means unaccountability, authoritarianism, abuse of potestas , a surfeit of unilateral influence of a few over the many. Its opposite would therefore be the absence of major power differentials and a predominance of reciprocal, horizontal relations. The limit-cases, both of which are impossible in practice, would be, at one end, the complete control of all by the leader(s) and, at the other, the inexistence of differentials of any kind. We could say that this dyad refers to leadership as position, even though we know that position is something that evolves out of the advent of leadership as function. The second dyad, in turn, could be said to concern leadership as function, provided we do not forget that function will often have to stabilise itself as a position if it is to produce more complex effects over a longer duration. Here, ‘too little leadership’ means too much adaptation to present conditions, not enough discontinuity with the existing situation to push it in a qualitatively different direction. It amounts to a weak reformism that may be capable of achieving results within the limits of what is possible, but renounces the ambition to expand those limits so as to make other achievements possible in the future. By contrast, ‘too much leadership’ would denote excessive discontinuity: a break that represents such a leap from the given situation as to not be viable in it. This amounts to the expression of a stance (slogans, programme, subjectivity, action) that is incapable of gathering the amount of support that it would require in order to be effective, either because it is too distant from what most people are ready to engage in, or because it is too incompatible with existing conditions to be feasible in the medium term. Put together, these two different dyads provide us with four extreme combinations: the iron-fisted leadership that bends the situation to its will (Stalinist collectivisation); the unaccountable leadership with a conciliationist attitude (the Third Way); the weak leadership that poses little challenge to the status quo (voluntarist NGO campaigns); and the weak 231

leadership that directs collective efforts towards maximum rupture (Bakunin’s ‘invisible dictatorship’, Tiqqun’s ‘Imaginary Party’). Despite those examples, we should remember that none of these extreme combinations are ever really given as absolutes, but only as part of more complex, mutable realities. In any case, it is the second of the two dyads that interests us here. Thought exclusively in terms of its compatibility with existing conditions, the problem of fitness would correspond to one of its poles: if it is to work, an inflection introduced into a situation must be sufficiently compatible with it. That is, it must be materially feasible, it must be comprehensible and desirable to a large enough number of people that it can produce the desired effects, and so on. This condition establishes a superior threshold: a modulation of collective or aggregate behaviour cannot be too discontinuous with existing conditions, or it will not be viable; if it is too different from the situation it is in, it cannot transform it. The lesson here is simple: not everything is possible at any given time . Yet that, on its own, does not tell us anything about changing the conjuncture in which one intervenes, which involves not only doing what is possible, but making sure that the field of possibilities expands. It is therefore necessary to add another condition, this time establishing an inferior threshold. This is the other pole of the dyad: the change that is introduced cannot be so continuous with the situation (in its goals, practices, ideological justifications, ecological effects, and so on) as to leave it pretty much as it is. As we can see, then, the dyad that describes the problem of fitness is essentially the same as the dyad of leadership as function. We find a model for thinking this in Simondon’s encounter with information theory. Because his main interest was individuation and the genesis of form, rather than the technical aspects of the transmission of messages, Simondon sensed before many contemporaries that something was missing from the quantitative approach developed by Claude Shannon. Information is not just a message sent from a transmitter to a receiver, he reasoned, but implies a transformation in the latter; yet its reception, and the transformation it triggers, are not conditioned by the message alone, but equally by the conditions of reception, that is, by the receiver. This 232

realisation would later be key in the passage from first-order (‘the cybernetics of observed systems’) to second-order cybernetics (‘the cybernetics of observing systems’). 40 While the distinction between noise and signal might appear self-evident in regard to communication technology, that is far from the truth when we are dealing with organisms, cultures, and so on. Among the latter, messages that would be received as information by some receivers and in some contexts pass as noise to other receivers or in other contexts, and vice-versa. The transmission of a signal is no guarantee that signification – the fact that a signal is taken as a signal – occurs at the other end. Therefore, Shannon’s understanding of information as the measure of a message’s uncertainty (its objective probability vis-à-vis all other possible messages irrespective of receptors) had to be complemented by a consideration of the ‘subjective probabilities’ 41 of its reception by a determinate receiver. This, in turn, produced something of a paradox: judged at the sender’s end, more information meant more uncertainty; at the receiver’s end, however, some degree of predictability was the condition for there to be any information at all. This led Simondon to postulate a property he called ‘haecceity’ or ‘tension of information’: ‘what makes it so that this is information and is received as such, while that is not received as information’ 42 , but equally ‘the property that a scheme has to structure a domain, of propagating in it, of ordering it’. 43 Since signification is relational, this must be a relational property: it obtains between an external signal and a system that has intrinsic qualities of its own, and so varies according to the difference between the two. Its existence entails that ‘there is, in the possible couplings of matter and form, a certain freedom, but a limited freedom ’: not any signal can structure any domain, and one ‘that strays too far from the characteristics of the field to be structured no longer has any tension of information in relation to [it]’. 44 However, and this is crucial, this variation has not only a superior threshold beyond which the tension drops to zero – ‘for signals to have a sense within a system, it is necessary that they do not convey something 233

entirely new’ 45 – but also an inferior threshold. The closer the signal is to the system, the less tension, and so the less likely it is to have an effect. If signals do no more than correspond exactly to local reality, they are no longer information, but merely the external iteration of an internal reality; if they are too different, they are no longer apprehended as meaningful, no longer signifying, so they cannot be integrated … 46

‘Tension of information’ is thus synonymous with the problem of fitness. We can make the most of the generality of information as a concept here: this applies indistinctly to a slogan, a programme, a policy proposal, an action. 47 Change requires tension . The right fit for transformation is not a similarity so great that it produces little more than recognition – too acceptable, too ‘realistic’, too much within the coordinates of the situation – but the maximum difference that can still be received as a signal , not as noise. 48 Unlike Shannon’s probabilistic measure of a message’s quantity of information, however, tension of information cannot be calculated in the abstract. Since it refers to ‘ a scheme’s capacity to be received as information by receivers that are not defined in advance … a measure of the tension of information can only be taken experimentally [ par expérience ]’. 49 This, then, is the sense in which it is possible to speak of ‘too little leadership’ without that implying a demand for centralisation or top-down control. It is, of course, not arbitrary that the two things are easily confused. As we have seen, the consolidation of a leadership position is an almost inevitable by-product of a continued capacity to exercise a leadership function. Conversely, the effort to continue to exercise that function supposes the progressive stabilisation of formal or informal organisational structures and roles, divisions of labour, core and periphery dynamics, and so on. As we know, such is the paradox of organisation: that something we need is also a danger and something of which we must be wary. Yet I hope it will be clear by now that this is a paradox we can opt out of only at an even greater risk and cost. It does indeed take effort to prevent the two senses of ‘too much leadership’ from collapsing into one another. This should not, however, be taken as a reason to abandon the problem of fitness altogether, or to think it only in terms of adaptation to existing conditions, without the necessary complement of directionality and the organisational 234

demands that it imposes. Rather, it should be taken for what it is: an unavoidable challenge, if one wishes to act on the world, and a problem to be continually managed.

Pedagogy of the Fit

The concept of vanguard inherited from the Marxist tradition could in fact be read as naming the agent of fitness: the figure in charge of bringing tension into history and managing it with a view to producing systemic transformation. It would therefore be possible to read the oppositions that animate classic Marxist debates on organisation as expressing the same problem that Simondon captured with the concept of informational tension. The two undesirable extremes of ‘fatalism’ and ‘voluntarism’ offer its most general formulation. The ‘two rocks’ mapped out by Rosa Luxemburg (‘abandoning the mass character of the party or abandoning its final aim, falling into bourgeois reformism or into sectarianism’ 50 ) apply the same problem (going neither too fast nor too slow) to the development of proletarian consciousness. Fatalism and reformist opportunism on one side (‘rightism’), voluntarism and sectarian radicalism on the other (‘leftism’), thus defined the two poles to be avoided in a permanent ‘fight on two fronts’, as Mao put it. 51 And what is a fight on two fronts if not a military metaphor for an intensive dyad? At the same time, the contraposition of extremes to be eschewed inevitably outlined an equal number of twin virtues to be pursued and cultivated. Between fatalism and voluntarism, prudence and daring; between opportunism and dogmatism, firmness (of principle) and flexibility (in tactics); between sectarianism and reformism, the capacity to listen and the capacity to lead. All of this, as we know, was for a long time tethered in the last instance to the notion that there is a necessary path of historical development and that it is possible to grasp it in order to apply it back to the process itself. The notion that the difference between vanguard and masses lay essentially in the true knowledge the latter lacked and the former possessed, however much the former had to listen and adjust to the latter, is one that we have rightly come to see as problematic not only in itself, but especially in its effects. After all, it serves to rationalise the abuse of potestas in the name of a greater good for those who suffer it: if present evil is vindicated by future 235

gains, it falls upon those who grasp the necessary connections through which history advances to ignore (or overcome) the resistance of those who do not. The question is what we do with the feeling that this idea is problematic. One option would be to deny there can be differences in knowledge of any kind on the basis that whatever beliefs people hold are equally valid. The problem with that approach is that it eliminates all possibility of appealing to a shared objective world. If you believe capitalism is against my interests and I do not, and our beliefs are equally valid, you certainly cannot appeal to the objectivity of my interests – an objectivity to which you would be implicitly claiming to have privileged access – in order to convince me otherwise. Another possibility is to invert the signs and claim that knowledge differentials exist, but that they work in the opposite direction. It is politicos and self-appointed enlighteners who are invariably deceived by their prejudices and theoretical blinders, whereas ‘the people’, however defined, know everything they need to know. This has an obvious appeal. In one grand gesture, it redresses the inequality of the existing order by inverting its hierarchy, realising in thought a goal that emancipatory politics seeks to materialise in the world. It also draws on the undeniable truth that excessive reliance on theory can wildly distort the ways in which one apprehends a situation. Yet this move runs into all the problems we saw in chapter 4 . It reduces the plurality of ‘the people’ to an essence, it isolates this essence from all interaction with the world, and it implicitly relies on the very claim to special knowledge that it criticises: unlike all of those who believe they know better than common people, I know what people really think. A third alternative supposes two separate moves. We are familiar with the first: it involves distinguishing vanguard as position from vanguard as function. Anyone or anything (a group, a person, a written text, an image) that introduces a difference (a new idea, action, demand, slogan, affective tone) in a situation can occupy the function of a vanguard in relation to it. They will do so to the extent that they modify it more or less according to the tension of information contributed by that difference, that is, the difference that difference makes in relation to available potentials and given constraints. Yet there is no such thing as a position of vanguard that would 236

be the same for all situations at all times, let alone that could be permanently occupied by the same organisation or set of people. The vanguard is a function that circulates, not a position permanently at the cutting edge of a necessary historical development; it is always relative to a situation, however long that situation may last. This severs the tie that connected vanguard to historical necessity and the knowledge of that necessity: vanguard is whoever makes a difference in a given situation, not someone who holds the key for every situation. The second move is to sustain that there is such a thing as a shared objective world, and that it is at once what causes and limits the variability of the knowledge that people might have; but that there is no position that affords, for all situations and in all respects, the most complete or accurate access to it. This means that all knowledge is in principle fallible, though not in the same way: different degrees of certainty and uncertainty can be ascribed to different beliefs, and therefore they cannot all be equally valid. The corollary is that everyone must in principle accept the fallibility of their own claims; and although they cannot but believe that their beliefs are true, they must always be open to the possibility of them being proved false when tested by collective practice. With these two moves, we break with the idea that knowledge is concentrated in any single place, and that emancipation would then mean transferring it from there to everywhere else. We do so, however, without making a well-meaning but ill-founded threefold appeal to immediacy that claims that in their own isolated essence , people already know , and we know that they do . This is the attitude encapsulated in Paulo Freire’s well-known aphorism: ‘no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world.’ 52 Naturally, that does not mean that they teach each other the same things , which would be absurd. ‘Reconciling the poles of the [teacher-student] contradiction’ by making them ‘simultaneously teachers and students’ is not decreeing that everyone knows everything, or that whatever people believe about the same thing has the same value. 53 The very condition for there to be any learning is that knowledge differentials exist (in theory, skill, practical experience, perception). The point, however, is that this differential is always local – 237

relative to a problem or situation and involving revisable beliefs – rather than implicated in a global partition between those who possess all the true knowledge and those who do not. A frequently overlooked aspect in Freire’s argument is that he is making a pedagogical point about politics as much as a political point about pedagogy. For him, not only is pedagogy political, politics is – or ought to be – directly pedagogical: ‘What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures.’ 54 Common misconceptions notwithstanding, Freire did not conceive the dialogical method as a great levelling, the dethroning of all would-be leaders and enlighteners, an unqualified affirmation of absolute equality. On the contrary, he explicitly spoke of it as ‘the correct method for a revolutionary leadership to employ in the task of liberation’. 55 Having socio-political equality as an end does not prevent emancipatory pedagogy from assuming difference as a necessary starting point, not only in the obvious historical sense that people concretely exist in situations of bondage, but as a condition for the pedagogical process itself. There is process because there is tension, and there is tension because there is difference . On the other hand, because future collective emancipation is inseparable from individual intellectual emancipation here and now, the latter is not subordinated to the former in the name of an ‘equality-to-come’, but practiced from the start as exploration of ‘what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other’. 56 Rather than something to be disavowed or expiated like an original sin, then, this tension is the object of the highest skill that an educator must have: the capacity to manage it for the benefit of the process, avoiding the extremes of lack and excess, searching for the balance best suited for each situation, being sensitive to the fluctuations of the process and, above all, being aware that they are not the only ones who are or ought to be in charge of that regulation . This conception of politics as pedagogy runs from Freire’s work in the 1950s through the work of the ecclesial base communities ( comunidades eclesiais de base ) of Liberation Theology in the following decades. Clodovis Boff’s Como Trabalhar com o Povo [How to Work with the People] offers a vital document of the latter experience. To speak of ‘revolutionary 238

leadership’ and ‘educator’, as Freire does, or ‘external agent’, in the case of Boff, already indicates that the starting position is one of ‘pedagogical difference or otherness ’, 57 itself quite often a consequence of the fact that the reality from which the pedagogical process starts is that of ‘the social division of labour between intellectual (decision) and manual work (execution)’. 58 While the aim of the relation is to overcome that difference, otherness must be occupied with neither superiority nor false egalitarianism, which would amount to no more than disavowal: If someone is or becomes an agent, it is because they have something to offer to the people, they have a contribution to make to their journey. The agent is an agent because they are different. This must be taken into account and acknowledged. 59

Understood as a function, ‘leadership’ names the site of that otherness: the formal role of initiator of a pedagogical process, with no indication as to who comes to occupy it. (They may come from inside as well as outside a group or community, may be an individual or a group, and so on). 60 In fact, if emancipation is self-reproducing in the sense that it seeks to cultivate ‘permanent re-creators’, 61 it must be less about eliminating that role than making it circulate freely. While each new process of re-creation would involve some difference, and hence the reinstatement of otherness, the goal would be to arrive at a situation in which extrinsic factors such as disparities in wealth, gender, race or formal education could not prevent anyone from occupying it. 62 By conceiving otherness in this way, Freire and Boff were in a position to acknowledge its inevitability without repeating the ‘dominant pedagogical model’ in which ‘the most advanced guide the less advanced, in order to reduce their backwardness’, which cannot but ‘infinitely [reproduce] the backwardness it is supposed to reduce’. 63 Since the formal difference at the source of the pedagogical process was not substantialised into a division between those who possessed true knowledge and those who did not, it could not be resolved by means of a one-way transfer of knowledge from the former to the latter. Instead, the pedagogical process was understood as a confluence of different knowledges held by ‘teachers’ and ‘students’ alike, and as striving towards whatever emancipation participants managed to produce together , rather than 239

the realisation of some pre-established goal set in advance and from the outside. 64 That otherness is at once the thing to be abolished and the instrument of its abolition is why its essential nature is tension: too little and nothing will happen, too much and it will be reinforced. This makes the appeal to a ‘primacy of practice’ something more profound than a pious gesture through which theory pays lip service to the humble realities of the everyday. If practice is the ultimate ‘criterion of truth’, it is because tension can only be verified experimentally, par expérience , as Simondon says. Hence also why the ‘correct pedagogical relationship’ 65 is presented as essentially an ‘art of dosages’, 66 to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s turn of phrase. It involves a constant effort of constructing a path between extremes of lack and excess: ‘neither frivolous pragmatism nor coarse activism’, 67 ‘neither objectivism nor subjectivism’, 68 neither ‘voluntarism’ nor ‘spontaneism’. 69 That this method is based on dialogue does not mean that it is linear; that this dialogue is respectful does not mean that it is smooth or permanently satisfied with lowest common denominators. If attentive and respectful listening are among the top qualities the agent must have, listening to the people does not necessarily mean going with the first thing that is said . There is nothing ‘less educative’ than aversion or disdain towards the people’s word, but respect does not imply ‘automatic approval’ either. 70 If ‘the group manifests a particular desire or expectation, it must be respected and taken seriously. But it is the agent’s duty to question that desire, to problematise that expectation’, 71 even if the right to criticise can be earned only by ‘respecting the people’s freedom of initiative and their final decision’. 72 There is only process if there is movement, there is only movement if there is tension, there is only tension if there is difference. The agent, leader or teacher must always be ready to ‘meet people halfway’, that is, to have a reciprocal encounter; but the very object of the relationship consists in redefining where ‘halfway’ is every time . This is why we are not dealing here with a constant search for the middle ground. On the contrary, this is an art of ‘calculated risk’. 73 Its 240

mastery demands a strong sense of timing and the political tact to choose which instruments to employ; it is a matter of when, how much and how , ‘the moment, the measure and the means [ o momento, a medida e o modo ]’. 74

Nor is there any linearity to it: ‘the people’s journey can be accelerated by … historical opportunities ( kairós ).’ 75 The agent is not only someone who coordinates or assembles ‘the collective word’, 76 they can also ‘incite the community to leap ahead’ 77 if the occasion arises: ‘Taking risks is indispensable.’ 78

Relationally Radical

A common response to the idea that one must work within the limits of the possible is to point out that not only are the boundaries of what is thinkable at any given time socially conditioned, the pretension to establish what is and is not possible once and for all is the ideological operation par excellence. If our circumstances impose constraints on what we can imagine, the argument goes, anyone who claims to know what is possible is only mistaking their own subjective limits for objective ones, and is ultimately trying to police the borders of social imagination. That is true enough, but one should be careful not to go too fast. Although limits certainly have a subjective dimension, it does not follow that they are exclusively subjective; nor is saying that limits exist the same as claiming to have true knowledge of what they are. That there are limits at any given time is something we can deduce a priori from the simple fact that we are finite beings existing in finite situations. But, while any relation we can have with those limits is in some sense mediated by social construction, that does not prevent us from obtaining empirical knowledge of what those limits might be – or at the very least of what they are not – through experimentation. 79 If we understand fitness as the problem of seeking the maximum change possible within existing constraints , it is clear that it can in no way be confused with a watered-down ‘realism’ that takes reality for a fixed quantity and forever errs on the side of caution. On the contrary, its logical consequence is rather a properly experimental politics: one concerned, that is, with devising and testing hypotheses that experiment on, and expand, the limits of what is possible. From this perspective, 241

organisation is to politics what laboratory equipment is to science: the means people give themselves in order to test hypotheses as comprehensibly as they can. Which is also to say that the difference between conceiving a strategy and assembling the collective capacity required to implement it is like the difference between writing the equations and defining the experimental conditions in which something can be worked out. We could say, in fact, that what fitness does is give a definite meaning to the idea of being radical. Like informational tension, ‘radicality’ is a relative property. Nobody is radical intransitively, in the abstract. To be radical is to be radical in relation to a concrete situation , by identifying the most transformative action compatible with it, the maximum difference it can withstand and absorb. Outside of that, ‘radicality’ is a purely aesthetic gesture, the reiteration of a singularity devoid of commitment to actually producing effects in the world: ‘a unification of acts according to a certain common style rather than their transductive [or transformative] potential’. 80

This is where radicality and an ecological understanding of agency connect. A radical strategy within an ecology supposes taking into consideration a broader context of struggles and agents in order to find what works not for the whole, imposing itself on it and subsuming it, but within it: composing with and potentialising things that already exist, finding points of support and amplification in them. This entails looking for ways to exploit available potentials and opportunities so as to transform existing constraints as much as possible, while also taking care not to damage the conditions that make one’s own action and that of others possible. It thus involves avoiding actions that threaten the continuity of the process, take the work of others for granted, are ungenerous, uncomradely or needlessly antagonistic in the expression of difference, and create rifts with people who make valuable contributions to the ecology and could at least to some extent be allies. Conceived ecologically, in short, a radical strategy entails seeking the most change possible in any situation by choosing what adds reality over what subtracts . 81 Being radical does not mean having a single tune that one always plays on every occasion, but instead demands attentive listening and the willingness to play whatever part appears to be missing from the score – or nothing at all if that is what 242

the occasion requires. We return here to a point made earlier: we can only afford to affirm an identity or position unilaterally if we know that others will pick up the slack by complementing our attitude with everything else it requires in order to be viable. Narcissistic investment in one’s own identity, be it ‘radical’ or ‘realist’, is not a sign of independence from an ecology; it effectively supposes that ecology, except it does so with no sense of responsibility or care. Radicality without realism is empty; realism without radicality is blind. It is not always that demanding the impossible will be the most radical thing to do, and there will be times when moving patiently and cautiously, conserving and protecting, will be the best way to secure and expand the capacity to act. What is more, one can never know how much change is the right amount for any occasion until it has been tried. There is no escape from the fundamental uncertainty of politics, and although it is always possible to prepare oneself better for it, no amount of sincerity or faith in one’s own analysis can compensate for that. All of this should be obvious, and yet the very way in which the concept of revolution has changed in the last century helps muddy the waters by suggesting that radicality could be severed from its relation to positive reality. As we saw in chapter 3 , modernity imagined revolution as inaugurating an age when the labour of humankind would essentially be done: there might still be novelty and progress, but no more political or social upheavals, because whatever divisions could lead to them would have become reconciled. It was in this context that Marx could speak of capitalism as ‘the last antagonistic form of the social process’ and claim that the ‘prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation’. 82 However, from the mid twentieth century onwards, many started to denounce the longing for a final reconciliation as an illegitimate attempt to collapse the distance between idea and history, the real and the symbolic, the infinite and the finite. Experience had shown that the promise ‘of an absolute purification of history, of an inertialess regime without chance or risk’ 83 was such a powerful defence against doubt and uncertainty that it could justify betrayal in the name of fidelity, oppression in the name of freedom, and dishonesty in the name of truth. It was both 243

an error and a danger to confuse revolution with the institution of any particular positive order; instead, it should be identified with the infinite excess that interrupts and unmakes every order, the pregnancy of the event, the movement of deterritorialisation, the promise of the messianic. Revolution was thus subtracted from an ontic or empirical plane and moved to an ontological or transcendental level. In this way, it could be identified with a surplus or negativity that can never be made positive, a power of determination (and indetermination) beyond every determinate thing, an infinite potential that is never actualised. Moving in the opposite direction to the Black Panthers’ demand for ‘revolution in our lifetime’, theory reminded us that the closure once associated with the concept was beyond the reach of anyone ’s lifetime, and ‘revolution’ was thus more adequately understood as precisely the force that ensured that no order was ever either incorruptible or final. There were good reasons for this, of course. To say that redemption could not be made actual was to suspend the immunity from finitude and uncertainty afforded by the mechanism that projected ‘history’s total meaning’ into a single ‘historical fact’. 84 provided. Yet this suspension came with its own form of immunity. Associating revolution with potentiality stops us from confusing it with any actual state, but it can also devalue actuality, turning it into a pale shadow of all it is not and an impediment or threat to everything that could be. A potential that remains indefinitely open will always be more radical than whatever actually exists; by not being invested in anything finite and limited, it excludes no possibilities and cannot be subject to perversion or decay. But if actuality is only seen as what depletes and staves off potential, every relation to it becomes suspect, whether it is partially changing it (hence also partially conserving it), instituting a new positivity, or trying to protect an existing one. The very notion of directionality – that actuality can expand potential by creating the conditions today that make other things possible tomorrow – becomes unthinkable. At worst, it is indistinguishable from rudderless reformism; at best, from a recalcitrant attachment to the hope of bringing history to an end. The turn to pure potentiality thus crushes the present under the weight of a ‘future-to-come’ 85 that cannot be prepared or approximated by 244

intermediary steps. To be radical is then not to transform positive reality, but to have no truck with it: to negate it so thoroughly, to exceed it so completely, that nothing that could be done here and now could ever be adequate. As Lewis Carroll’s White Queen would have it, there can be revolution yesterday (in heroic past defeats) and tomorrow (in the promise of a pure event); there might even be revolution elsewhere, among distant others whom we invest with the authority of subjects supposed to know; but never revolution here, never revolution today. Both forms of immunity protect us from the same thing: the uncertainty of action, the fear of making mistakes. In the first, historical necessity and the conviction of being its agent provide assurance that present decisions will one day be vindicated. The second offers no such guarantees, but comforts us with the knowledge that nothing we could do would be as radical as leaving things open, either by endlessly deferring a decision or simply refusing to decide (at least until the event comes …). In the first case, there is no critical distance between us and our actions, and we do not ask ourselves any questions because we know that we cannot be wrong. In the second, the critical distance is so great that it is hard to commit to anything concrete – but we cannot be wrong for as long as we do not commit ourselves. Not, of course, that one must renounce action entirely. A second immunising operation makes it possible for us to carry on with a clear conscience by instituting two separate worlds: one consisting of practices that are inherently compromised, the other of practices that could only be corrupted from outside. For as long as we restrict ourselves to the latter, that theoretical sleight of hand promises us that the limits associated with actuality will apply to the practices of others but not to our own. This ontological exceptionalism is what allows people to convince themselves that their ways of organising do not carry the risks of organisation, that the orders that they establish are not orders, that the power they exercise is not power, that the forms of closure they create are in fact no closure at all. 86 For ‘organisation’ is not what we do but only what parties do, ‘institution’ can only be said of the state or those that model themselves after it, our relations do not constitute power but in fact destitute it, and so forth. This demands that we abdicate from actively 245

working to project our actions into the future or expand collective potentia beyond a certain scale, but gives us something else in exchange: the faint messianic hope of an event that could one day inaugurate an order that will not be an order, an actuality that will exclude no potential. It should by now be obvious why I cannot see this as anything but special pleading. Every actually existing thing is organised, and is in that sense a combination of actuality and potential, determinacy and indeterminacy, openness and closure; what changes is only the degree to which these are combined in each thing at each time. To the extent that it is actual, determinate and finite, every thing is also corruptible, potentially dangerous, subject to entropy, stasis and destruction. ‘You really have to be a little dim’, as Deleuze put it, not to know that revolutions – and reforms, communes, etc. – can turn out bad. 87 We cannot change this, as it is inevitable, but we can change something else: our desire for immunity, for reassurance that we could never find ourselves on the wrong side, that we will never become the enemy. Between convincing ourselves that whatever we do is but the infinite acting through us or refraining from building anything because it is always going to be finite, a third alternative is possible. It starts from the partiality of anything we can do, taking as given that it will be imperfect, insufficient, surrounded by risks and blind spots; but it does not stop there. Instead of retreating into paralysing anxiety or haughty abstentionism, we can turn this realisation into a reason for taking responsibility (if we do not do what we believe is right, who else will?), but also for critical distance, openness, collaboration, the capacity to listen, change course and even, if necessary, to let go. For at the end of the day, the search for immunity is never about anything but the ‘most fundamental’ difficulty of ‘facing our own death’. 88 That is: the prospect of being constrained by the decisions we make, of making wrong investments we cannot get out of, of identifying with our own limits, of becoming stuck, of turning useless, obsolete or worse, an obstacle. What this third alternative offers us is the possibility of reconciling commitment with self-reflexivity, awareness of our finitude with being ‘a subject of one’s own destiny’, in such a way that we engage in collective processes ‘not so as to hide from desire and death’ but to create things that, although ‘not eternal in nature’, 246

are built to last for as long as they need to in order to make other things possible. 89 A radicality that produces no actuality on the basis of which it can thrive and expand is bound to dissipate or become stuck in the same place, forever in thrall to its own marginality while waiting for a redemptive event to come from elsewhere. The ‘real movement that abolishes the present state of things’ evidently requires both moments: it cannot afford to become permanently settled on any particular state of things, but it is not a real movement unless it becomes actualised in conditions that open some possibilities and render others impossible. If we abandon the fantasy that it would be possible to have one without the other, and accept to share responsibility for the fate of struggles with others with whom we do not necessarily agree, the two cease to be antagonistic poles and become complementary perspectives, two voices that every person must hear in their heads at the same time while retaining the ability to function. That is a condition for developing the capacity to think and act ecologically. Developing that capacity, in turn, is a condition for us to be able to reply to such questions as ‘who leads? who strategises? who organises?’ with the answer: potentially anyone, ideally everyone.

247

Conclusion

_______________

This reason for living: winning.

Victor Serge

Though in many ways not much has changed, a lot has happened since this project began in 2013. The wave of protests that had started in Tunisia two years earlier was then still making its way across the globe, and although no clear victories had been won, there was a tangible feeling of possibility in the air. The umbrella movement in Hong Kong, the sudden rise of Podemos, the election (and capitulation) of Syriza, the Ferguson riots and Black Lives Matter, the emergence of Spanish municipalism, Jeremy Corbyn’s successful leadership bid – all of these were just around the corner, and yet no one could have predicted them until shortly before they took place. The same could be said, on the other hand, of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the worrying rise of the global far right. As I worked on the first draft of this book, I watched the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and the protests of the yellow vests in France unfold. By the time I was writing these words, the COVID-19 pandemic had commenced and the world was once again lurching towards a recession. In many respects, the world appears to have gone in the opposite direction to the one in which the 2011 protesters expected to move it. This deterioration of political conditions could hardly come at a worse time. As a growing number of countries put open climate denialists in charge, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that CO 2 emissions would have to decline by about 45 per cent from 2010 levels within the next ten years if we are to avoid more than an already calamitous 1.5°C rise in global temperatures. 1 The new global recession comes at the 248

end of another decade of low economic growth, and even some establishment voices no longer hesitate to say that the cause for such systematic underperformance is a ‘rentier capitalism’ that is ‘rigged to favour a small elite’. 2 As the global economy is hit hard by the largest health emergency in a century, it becomes clear that the trillions pumped into bank bailouts were used to inflate a financial asset bubble and never made their way down to populations that continue to suffer with unemployment, precaritisation, stagnant wages, mounting private debt, and an ever-diminishing social safety net. The concentration of economic and political power that has blocked structural responses to the financial and climate crises not only remains in place, but is set to increase as the slowdown kills off countless small businesses and wreaks havoc on labour markets. Through it all, the pandemic appears to inspire ‘punitive neoliberalism’ 3 to new heights as governments and bosses explicitly tell workers they must choose between protecting their lives and the economy – and many, having naturalised the idea that there are no other options, agree. There certainly are ways in which a theory of organisation could be useful in such a context. The structural problems that made protestors take to the streets from 2011 onwards have, if anything, become deeper and more evident. With a recession, possibly a depression, coming on top of a recovery that never really took off and a decade of austerity, the situation is even more potentially explosive now than it was ten years ago. Yet if there is one thing that the last decade ought to have taught us it is that the presence of strong objective factors does not automatically translate into powerful movements, let alone into the spontaneous discovery of the ‘correct’ line by the masses. The individuals who will take to the streets over the next years have been shaped to a greater or lesser extent by market discipline and neoliberal desire, atomisation and negative solidarity, the vilification of organised labour and minorities, debt and endlessly reheated Cold War propaganda. If this does not make them necessarily reactionary, it does not make them naturally radical either. Though in many respects antisystemic, the uprisings of our time are unlikely to be socially and ideologically homogeneous or fall along clear-cut political lines, and experience shows 249

that the energies they arouse are open to capture from the far right. New explosions will come, and they will be moments that create and concentrate collective potentia . For that potentia to go in the direction we want it to, for it to produce stable and resilient ties, for it to be invested in activities that root political objectives in the everyday lives of a large number of people and build the capacity to transform our present predicament – none of that comes ‘naturally’, if by that we understand things suddenly clicking together without anyone trying to arrange them. Someone has to do it; that someone is whoever wants to see these things happen. True, no one can ever really prepare for an event. To some, however, even modest talk of increasing the capacity to respond to one – never mind inducing it – will still sound uncomfortably close to a kind of politics associated with the odious vanguard parties of yore. Since organisation appears naturally inclined to disrupting symmetries and producing distinctions (cores and peripheries, leaders and followers), there is something intrinsically suspicious about it, as if it could ultimately be no more than a ruse for usurping the capacity of others to act. From here, anyone who does not want to become a usurper would be excused for concluding that, although everyone should get organised, there is nothing one can do about that apart from organising oneself. Even if they believe that their analysis and action plan are correct – and who does not believe theirs is? – it would be wrong to try to bring other people around to it. If this book could be described as having a therapeutic dimension to it, it is in the sense that it attempts to address this self-defeating logic by going to what I take to be its source: the fear of organisation that derives from the historical traumas associated with it, especially those that the failed experiments of the twentieth century have imprinted in our collective memory and imagination. It is this that obscures the perception of organisation as not only a threat but also an enabling condition, and makes us disproportionately more sensitive to the dangers that follow from its excess (unaccountability, hierarchy, authoritarianism) than to the impotence that results from its absence. For organisation is nothing but the assembling, storing and managing of a collective capacity to act – something people must always find ways of doing if they want to become 250

and remain capable of effecting change on the world. As we fear precisely that which we would need in order to give our desires a practical form, we are constantly running up against the limits of that capacity; but since overcoming those limits would require confronting our fears, we often prefer to rationalise that need away and convince ourselves that powerlessness is a form of virtue. In order to deal with these rationalisations, it was necessary to take a ‘therapeutic’ approach also in the Wittgensteinian sense of not solving but dissolving certain problems by exposing the conceptual confusions from which they arise. That was the case, for example, of the tendency to oppose organisation to spontaneity and self-organisation. As I have argued throughout this book, what we call ‘self-organisation’ at the social level cannot be confused with local forms of self-management like factory councils. Rather, it is the emergent interplay of countless different forces acting simultaneously, many of which are evidently intentionally organised; which ones become dominant is a function of their force and reach, the points on which they act, as well as the system’s tendencies and present state. What emerges ‘spontaneously’ is thus not distinct from, but precisely the effect of hetero -organisation, if we wish to so call the action that elements of a system exercise on one another. Thus, while self-organisation certainly is in one sense something that happens behind our backs, in another it is nothing other than what we and others do; to use it as an argument as to why one need not or should not organise above a certain scale is to fundamentally misunderstand that. No wonder, then, that, as I argued in chapter 4 , attempts to play spontaneity and self-organisation against organisation must covertly suppose some kind of teleology that guarantees that the effects we desire will materialise even if no one actively pursues them. This sort of misunderstanding can be partially explained by the context in which scientific approaches to self-organisation began to gain currency in political debates, especially on the left – a time when the trauma of organisation ran high, and people were looking for ways to think organised political subjectivity not anew but away. At the limit, what many wanted was a theory of social change as the aggregate action of countless 251

individuals, in which concerted collective action played a minor secondary role. When those discourses were transposed from one field to the other, it would have been obvious to see scientific concepts like nucleation and critical size as marking the spot at which questions regarding organisation and subjective initiative would have to be posed again; yet those openings were sidelined and ignored. That is why one of the problems I set myself in this book was to write an account of self-organisation starting from those points. Such an account would have to reconcile a perspective on the global political and economic system and the various subsystems that compose it as self-organising, on the one hand, with the fact that anyone who assumes that perspective is implicated in those systems rather than contemplating them from outside. In other words, this would have to be an account of self-organisation as seen from the inside . From an epistemological standpoint, this entails a perspective that is necessarily limited in the amount of information to which it has access and its power to process it. From a practical point of view, it implies a limited capacity of action: agents are always outpowered by the processes in which they intervene, as the resources they have at their disposal at any given moment (time, attention, physical and emotional effort, money) are necessarily finite. But limitedness and finitude could not be the final words. For being a part of that which we describe also means being responsible for trying to bring about whatever changes we believe should occur to it. This is what I called a politics with the subject in : the realisation that it is precisely because we are implicated in the processes that envelop us that we must implicate our own subjective position and activity into every ‘objective’ analysis of things. This turns every noncommittal question regarding ‘what should happen’ into one about what can be done now, from our partial perspective and with the limited resources we have at hand, in order to bring ourselves closer to it: Lenin (responsibility for producing effects) via second-order cybernetics (consciousness of one’s own partiality). The cost of eschewing that responsibility is to either resign ourselves to impotence and give up on our desire, or seek reassurance in the imaginary comforts of teleology.

252

This meant that there were other problems to dissolve, however. One of the things that taking responsibility for our ideas and desires demands from us is readiness to take on a leading role if the occasion requires. Yet leadership has for decades been as problematic a concept as organisation, if not more. ‘Leaderless’ was one of the favourite ways that the movements of the last decade had of describing themselves, even if it was often not hard to spot who were the most connected and influential people in occupied squares and internet forums. As with organisation, the challenge here was to break the concept down in order to isolate the aspects that people object to and fear from other facets that cannot be easily done away with. My argument was that there is a function that leadership performs which is an ineliminable dimension of politics: the initiation of collective behaviour. At this level, to lead means simply ‘to be followed’, that is, to introduce a behaviour that others will adopt or adapt. This is quite different from a position of leadership, namely, an acquired status that makes it more likely that others will follow those who have it. That, finally, is different from a position of leadership that is armed with sufficient power to make others follow it. This is where the line can be drawn. Presumably, nobody objects to leadership based on reciprocity, which depends on winning the support of others because it lacks the means to demand or extract it. When people reject leadership, they are referring to something else: those situations in which individuals can have others do their bidding without making themselves accountable. Preventing the latter is certainly a goal for any emancipatory politics worthy of the name; that, however, has nothing to do with suppressing the leadership function, which in any case would strictly speaking be impossible. On the contrary, in fact: keeping leadership positions under control depends on making both those positions and the leadership function circulate. This way of seeing the role of leadership supposes a rather different way of understanding what people usually refer to as ‘horizontality’. To conceive political action as taking place within an ecology of other agents is to see it as a spontaneous order in which deliberately created boundaries and protocols are always local. As I argue in chapter 5 , the problem with horizontalism is that it unwittingly tries to understand the ecology in terms 253

that apply only to those local orders, which results in paradox and confusion. (It is the same mistake as thinking self-organisation in terms of self-management.) We can ask whether an assembly is horizontal, but does it make sense to ask the same question of its relation to another assembly, or even the decision that created it and defined its rules? While these conundrums may seem harmless enough, anyone who has been around horizontal spaces will know that they can easily spiral into bad conscience, recrimination, paranoia and paralysis. Where there are no recognised decision-making procedures or even a clearly defined constituency, initiative comes first, and legitimacy may or may not come later. This – what I have described as distributed leadership – entails a number of consequences for horizontality. For starters, it means that, even if it were possible to institute perfectly horizontal local orders, the relations between them would still be prone to being non-reciprocal in the sense of not being the object of common deliberation. (In an ecology, we must remember, one node need not even know another one exists to act on it: it can shape the other’s fields of possibilities indirectly by acting on the environment.) Furthermore, distributed leadership is always present even within those local horizontal orders – hence why we can easily recognise ‘leaders’ in them – and that is not necessarily a bad thing if the group knows how to manage it. Finally, the initiation of collective behaviour always creates power differentials (different capacities to influence the possible actions of others) and depends on other differentials in order to propagate. If we judge it according to an ideal of absolute reciprocity, we would have to conclude that it is ‘ in order to function ’ that horizontality ‘must not function well ’. 4 Its point lies not in pursuing an impossible ideal of total reciprocity at all times, therefore, but in striving to keep power differentials under control so that power continues to circulate. I have stressed throughout that I did not intend to propose an ideal model. I meant this in a few different ways. When talking about distributed leadership or organisation as ecology, for example, my aim was not to invite the reader to bring those things into existence, but to point out that they had always been there, though misrecognised. In other situations, I was addressing a particular type of misrecognition in which something that only 254

ever exists as a mixture is considered solely from the point of view of this or that dominant element, so that what is in fact a single variable tension between forces is broken apart into separate entities. That was the case with the dyads discussed in chapter 2 , or the distributed as always consisting of a combination of the aggregate and the collective, the dispersed and the centralised, to a greater or lesser degree. The aim was not to argue that we should not choose between one or the other, but that effectively speaking there was never any choice : it was only ever a matter of more and less. Moreover, I wanted to show that there is no form that could once and for all resolve the tension between those forces and be the solution ‘at last discovered’ to the problem of how to organise. Forces are living, variable things; they demand constant management, adjustment; that is why no position about organisation could be correct for all situations and times. Against the tendency to see the question of organisation as being about forms, I wanted to show both that there is no single ideal organisational form and that any form is subject to decay, hence requires continuous work to keep going. My insistence on not having an ideal model was thus also about making it clear that the risks associated with organisation are real, and I do not pretend to have found an antidote for them. Collective processes are not and do not remain perfectly flat and homogeneous, and the twin risks of seeing collective potentia dissipate or congeal into potestas never really go away. What we must oppose to these risks is neither the ideal of a final state of equilibrium in which total participation and reciprocity would reign, nor a paranoid suspicion against any emerging power differentials, but the knowledge that avoiding those pitfalls requires effort . This does not mean, of course, that some procedures and organisational arrangements are not more conducive than others to sustaining engagement while resisting the concentration of power. But it is ultimately the extra-procedural question of the relative strength of forces visà-vis one another that is decisive: a formal arrangement can always break down if a disproportionately strong agent has no interest in upholding it. On the other hand, if there is a normative element in what I have written, it can be summarised in the maxim: think and act ecologically . 255

Obviously, an ecology is always already there; it need not be created. But it can be expanded and cultivated, made richer, more diverse and complementary, more internally integrated and capillarised across society. All of that depends on a critical mass of people thinking about the ecology as a whole. To think ecologically is thus not a matter of dispersion for dispersion’s sake, but of making the most of plurality; between extreme centralisation and total dispersion, there are several possible arrangements which are much more fertile than either. Nor does it assume the disappearance of irreconcilable differences and conflict. The point is rather that enmity itself must be conceived ecologically: if everyone is an enemy, our capacity to act becomes very restricted; between total friend and total foe, there are several intermediary degrees that vary according to the occasion and over time. A vibrant ecology does not depend solely on coordination and a collaborative mentality, however. It also requires organising cores to expand their zones of influence, develop social bases founded on strong ties and reciprocity, and generally increase their capacity to act (organisational consistency, skills, strategic nous, etc.). Strong local nodes with no coordination do not make a strong ecology; but as the alterglobalist movement discovered, neither does a densely integrated network whose local nodes are very weak. In chapter 6 , I suggested that the best way to strengthen local activity is not to focus on building organisations for their own sake, without a clear purpose, but to start from concrete strategic wagers and let the work involved in executing them dictate one’s organisational needs. This puts the emphasis more on the strategy than on the structures that pursue it, and fosters fidelity to a social base, an analysis and a general plan of action over group identity. What matters is that work gets done, not who does it; and the strength of an organising core lies not in the size of its membership per se but on what it is able to accomplish. A strategic wager is partial not in the sense that it restricts itself to a small scale or to a single issue, but in that it does not try to be a theory of how all of change happens. In part, this is about information processing: there is only so much that can be kept in focus at any one time, and the more one looks at the whole puzzle, the fuzzier the details become. Yet it is 256

those details, with as much granularity as possible, that one needs in order to know where to start. Developing a finer grasp of specific parts of the puzzle is therefore also about the capacity to act: it breaks the broader systemic goal down into specific interventions that it is possible to plan, organise and build up towards. The idea is neither that any single issue or wager holds the key to all social change, nor that any of them could find an isolated solution within existing conditions, but that strong enough challenges to a number of structurally significant points can generate system-wide instabilities that reinforce one another and open opportunities for greater change. Social totality is thus taken into account twice: in the appraisal of the position that an issue occupies in the overall social structure, which connects it in determinate ways to everything else; and in the ongoing, recursive effort to factor in the strategies and actions of others. Instead of being concentrated in a single point, however, that calculation is done in a distributed fashion by agents looking at the puzzle from the perspective of different parts. Diversity of strategies does not give up on a systemic standpoint, but pluralises it. In chapter 3 , I examined the transformations that the idea of revolution has undergone since the eighteenth century in order to bring out three characteristics (contingency, composition, complexity) that dominate the way we conceive it today. What I did not do then was address the problem posed by Lukács in the quote with which I opened the chapter: if a theory of revolution is necessary for a theory of organisation, what theory of revolution is presupposed in the theory of organisation I have proposed here? ‘Transition’ was the theoretically finite but effectively interminable historical span in which the great disillusionment of actually existing socialism played itself out. Not surprisingly, ever since it started being clear that socialist countries were not in fact transitioning towards anything else, the notion has come to be seen with suspicion. Nobody is warier of it today than communisation theorists like Gilles Dauvé, for whom revolution will either be immediate or it will not be. As he explains it, the problem lies not in the ‘obvious’ fact that ‘communism will not be achieved in a flash’, but in that, in its history as a concept, ‘transition’ has come to imply not just a 257

mere ‘transitory moment ’ but ‘a full-fledged transitory society ’. 5 Yet while that observation rings true if we are thinking about how the word has functioned in Marxist debates, we get the impression as soon as we step outside of those for a moment that the problem of whether transition ought to be a part of revolution is posed the wrong way around. After all, in its general meaning of a passage between states of affairs, ‘transition’ is a broader concept than ‘revolution’, and it therefore seems to make less sense to ask whether transition should be a part of revolution than what part, if any, revolution can play in transition. Inverting the positions of the two terms is also one of the consequences that we could draw from the ‘flexible strategic pluralism’ advocated by Erik Olin Wright. If we think of systemic change as a combination of reformist (symbiotic), alternative-building (interstitial) and revolutionary (ruptural) logics, we can picture it as a process of ‘transition’ which, against the connotations that the concept has accrued within the Marxist tradition, is non-linear, uneven and conflictual instead of continuous, homogeneous and managed from above. It is conceivable that, if it could act fast enough and with sufficient force, a strategy following a single logic of transformation could beat the system’s inertial tendencies without disorganising social reproduction to the point of threatening most people’s survival. Starting from the right critical size, symbiotic forces could modify capitalism quicker than it could co-opt them or mount a backlash; interstitial initiatives could produce a working alternative to existing circuits of production and reproduction before these were able to absorb or marginalise them; a ruptural surge could institute wholly new social forms before the disruption of everyday life became unbearable. Sadly, one cannot count on starting from the right critical size. The alternative is to conceive a process in which destruction, construction and repurposing happen in parallel, and rupture as well as mediation take place at different scales at the same time. This is not a ‘transitory society’, if by that we understand a social formation instituted in the aftermath of a major disruptive event to mediate between the social formation to be destroyed and the one to be created by combining characteristics of both. Rather, what we have here is a plurality of timelines and rhythms of change 258

running at variable speeds, an irregular patchwork of continuities and discontinuities that do not miraculously combine to produce structural transformation but are the object of a constant, deliberate effort to play them both in support of (to reinforce) and against (to correct the course of ) one another . If the challenge of transition is essentially that of managing the velocity of transformation – not so slow that one cannot escape the reproduction of existing social forms, not so fast that social reproduction completely breaks down – the question here becomes one of coordinating multiple temporalities. This means that the problem of fitness is posed not once, in general, about the mediation between two historical stages, but multiple times and by multiple agents. It is, so to speak, fractally distributed across strategies and scales, and is equally asked of the relations between strategies and scales so as to test their compatibility: a change that ‘works’ for some people in some place must not prevent change elsewhere, let alone entrench existing patterns of oppression and exploitation. 6 In chapter 1 , I suggested that something along those lines was the only credible response to the problem posed by the environmental crisis; I expect it will be clear by now that the notion of ‘diversity of strategies’ in chapter 6 was trying to flesh out that idea further. While evidently not all alternatives are compossible or even desirable, it is hard to imagine from where we stand today that any single tactic or strategy could single-handedly avert catastrophic climate change and create an egalitarian global system in the process. Rather than looking for one basket in which to put all our eggs or endlessly multiplying action in innumerable individualised decisions and hyperlocal initiatives, the most reasonable bet seems to be maximising the structural impact that our limited capacities to act can have by combining them at different levels. This will no doubt demand a mix of direct action, state intervention and the construction of autonomous infrastructure. It will also have to integrate the obstruction of attempts to expand commodification and extractive infrastructure with partial disconnection from the ‘long networks’ of capitalism and the targeted refunctioning of existing infrastructure and institutions. 7 No form of action should in principle be off the table, and the question of what is to be obstructed,

259

disconnected or refunctioned must be treated empirically rather than as an a priori problem. I argued in chapter 2 that for some time now the left has artificially reduced its own options by insisting on treating empirical problems as if they were a priori, transforming questions of more and less into absolutes, and unthinkingly rejecting possibilities not on the grounds of situated appraisals of what might work but for merely identitarian reasons. I suggested that this was a melancholic symptom attached to the defeats of the twentieth century, and that it split the left into two broad camps unable to learn anything from failure apart from the endless confirmation of the inherent flaws in the other’s approach. It may be, as Derrida suggested, that mourning is properly speaking impossible, for if it succeeds, it fails to truly honour what was lost; true mourning is interminable, and so we are never done with melancholia. 8 But even that work of never being quite done is performed in the interest of moving on: of renewing the dialogue with what was lost rather than endlessly circling around a memory fixed in time, of discovering new potentials in it so that life – our finite life, with the finite resources we have to build anything bigger than ourselves – can go on. So it ultimately does not matter whether we can ever be really done with melancholia; it suffices that we are done enough to get on with the job of investing those finite resources in giving the projects that matter to us their best possible chance to win.

260

Notes

________

Introduction

1 On this scenario, which he labels ‘exterminism’, see Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2016). The source of the term is E. P. Thompson, ‘Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilisation’, New Left Review 1:121 (1980): 3–31. A similar prognostic has been put forward by Achille Mbembe under the name ‘becoming Black of the world’. See Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason , tr. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 2–6. 2 Anarchist/Communist Assembly for the Class Counter-Attack against the EU, ‘Ochi Stous Ekbiasmous tes Troika’, Syneleusi Enantiastin, 29 June 2015, syneleusienantiastinee.espivblogs.net/2015/06/29/οχι-στουσ-εκβιασμουσ-τησ-τροικα-σε-καθ; Aa, ‘Keimeno Karagiannide, Mpourzoukou, Charise, Theophilou, Stampolou’, Indymedia Athens, 23 July 2015, athens.indymedia.org/post/1547488/; Pozitronios, ‘Demopsephisma 5es Ioulίou 2015 – To Dikό Mou Anarchikό “OCHI” ’, Indymedia Athens, 17 December 2015, athens.indymedia.org/post/1553151. 3 Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings , tr. Gregory Elliot (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 42. Italics in the original. By ‘intervallic period’ Badiou understands what comes between a clear and defined idea of revolutionary political action losing its validity and a new one coming to replace it. It is the end of one such moment that he sees the movements of last decade as signalling. 4 Peter Thomas, ‘The Communist Hypothesis and the Question of Organization’, Theory and Event 16:4 (2013). 5 Jodi Dean, ‘Response: The Question of Organization’, South Atlantic Quarterly 113:4 (2014): 822. 6 Mimmo Porcaro, ‘Occupy Lenin’, Socialist Register 49 (2013): 84–6. Italics in the original. 7 Frank Ruda, ‘Organization and Its Discontents’, 2, paper given at the Radical Philosophy Conference, 17 January 2015, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, academia.edu. 8 Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover, ‘History and the Sphinx: Of Riots and Uprisings,’ Los Angeles Review of Books , 24 September 2012. Italics in the original.

261

9 ‘And finally, we have to realize that all politics is organized, and that the most difficult question is probably that of what type of organization we need.’ Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, tr. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 65. 10 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climates of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222; Rosi Braidotti, ‘Posthuman Critical Theory’, Journal of Posthuman Studies 1:1 (2017): 9–25; Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World , tr. Rodrigo Nunes (Cambridge: Polity, 2017). 11 See, for example, Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organising for Power in the New Gilded Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2017). 12 Notes From Nowhere, We Are Everywhere. The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 71. The passage echoes the argument in Steve Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Gardners, 2002), 125–6. Johnson’s argument is, in turn, essentially the same as Ludwig von Mises’s or Friedrich von Hayek’s, with the ant colony in the role of the market. 13 For Mirowski, of course, the implication is that this is more than just a lack of selfawareness: neoliberals effectively exploit the split that allows them to be ‘radically populist’ in their praise of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and profoundly elitist in their claims to cognitive and policy-making prerogatives. See Phillip Mirowski, ‘Postface’, The Road from Mont Pelèrin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective , ed. Phillip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 425–6, 442–6. 14 Nick Dyer-Witheford remembers that origin story slightly differently; see Nick Dyer-Witheford, ‘Networked Leninism?: The Circulation of Capital, Crisis, Struggle, and the Common’, Upping the Anti 13 (2012), uppingtheanti.org.

1. Towards a Theory of Political Organisation

1 Aleksander Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology , tr. George Gorelik (Seaside, CA: Intersystems, 1980), 5. 2 Ibid., 42. 3 ‘Since for tektology a full, absolute separateness does not exist, it can be stated that as far as separateness appears or develops, so far progresses the operation of the law of divergence.’ Ibid., 125. 4 Ibid., 26. 5 Ibid., 6. Bogdanov finds an unexpected fellow traveller in William James: ‘ “The world is one” just so far as we experience it to be concatenated, one by as many definite conjunctions as appear. But then also not one by just as many definite dis junctions as we find – and the same applies to each totality that composes it’. See William James, ‘Pragmatism’, Writings: 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 550. Italics in the original. 6 It is because ‘individuals alone have little power’, Balibar observes, that ‘at the centre of Spinoza’s political analysis is the multitude.’ Étienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics , tr.

262

Peter Snowdon (London and New York: Verso, 2008), xvii. As we shall see, however, this does not mean that the multitude, if we retain that name, need necessarily be understood in the terms proposed by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. 7 Yann Moulier Boutang, ‘Introduction’, in Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century , tr. James Newell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 19. 8 To be clear, I believe there is a lot to be gained, analytically as well as politically, from reading whatever happens not only as proof of the sovereignty of potestas but also as a product of the actions and desires of ordinary people. What I object to is the inflation of this perspective ‘from below’ into a Manichean scheme that flattens multiple agencies into two large poles (labour and capital, masses and the state, multitude and constituted power), one of which is supposed to be wholly active, the other wholly passive, and both of them free from ambivalence and not riven by contradictions. While this may occasionally make for powerful rhetoric, it hardly ever results in sober conjunctural analysis. 9 Baruch Spinoza, Political Treatise in Complete Works , tr. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 3.5. Modified. 10 It is the example that Guattari employs when asked: ‘For once could you be more concrete about what you mean by molecular transformations?’ See Félix Guattari, ‘The Unconscious Is Turned Towards the Future,’ tr. Arthur Evans and John Johnston, Soft Subversions (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 178. Faced with the same question elsewhere, he would refer to the changes in the ‘way of conceiving the law, religion, the body, filiation, the family, time, literature’ towards the end of the Ancien Régime. See Félix Guattari, ‘A New Alliance Is Possible’, tr. Jeanine Herman, Soft Subversions , 115. 11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 216. 12 Ibid., 216–7. It is often as if those who reclaim the rights of micropolitics by reminding us that ‘every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics ’ forget that the sentence also works the other way around. Ibid., 213. Italics in the original. 13 ‘Once and for all: to speak in terms of micro and macropolitics, molecular and molar processes is not to oppose one level to the other, but to address the question of how the two intersect and act upon each other in each situation. [If ] there’s no device for any attempt to analyse what other types of investment are necessarily at work in the situation on the molecular level … what will inevitably happen is that, sooner or later, the best intentions, the most favourable power relations, will have an appointment with an experience of bureaucratization … Inversely, if the processes of molecular revolution are not taken up on the level of the real power relations (social, economic, and material power relations) , they may begin to revolve around themselves as imploding processes of subjectivation, bringing about a despair that may even lead to suicide, or madness, or something of the sort.’ Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil , tr. Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2008), 183. My italics.

263

14 W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, ‘The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics’, Information, Communication and Society 15:5 (2012): 750. 15 Ibid., 743. 16 See Ilya Prigogine and Gregoire Nicolis, Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems (London: Wiley, 1977); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984). 17 See Henri Atlan, L’Organisation Biologique et la Théorie de l’Information (Paris: Seuil, 1972); Henri Atlan, Selected Writings: On Self-Organization, Philosophy, Bioethics, and Judaism , ed. Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). 18 ‘When a new structure results from a finite perturbation, the fluctuation that leads from one regime to the other cannot possibly overrun the initial state in a single move. It must first establish itself in a limited region and then invade the whole space: there is a nucleation mechanism. Depending on whether the size of the initial fluctuating region lies below or above some critical value … the fluctuation either regresses or else spreads to the whole system.’ Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos , 187. 19 Ibid., 189. 20 In Simondon, the equivalent concepts would be ‘structural germ’ and ‘quantum threshold of resonance’. See Steven Strogatz, Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order (New York: Penguin, 2003); Duncan J. Watts, ‘A Simple Model of Global Cascades on Random Networks’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 99:9 (2002): 5766–71; Gilbert Simondon, L’Individuation à la Lumière des Notions de Forme et d’Information (Grenoble: Jerôme Millon, 2005). For an empirical observation that corroborates these insights in relation to social movements, see Sandra González-Bailón, Javier Borge-Holthoefer, Alejandro Rivera and Yamir Moreno, ‘The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment Through an Online Network’, Scientific Reports 1 (2011): 197. 21 Tiqqun came close to thinking these concepts through in ‘L’Hypothèse Cybernétique’, even citing from the passage in which Prigogine and Stengers discuss them. They appear, however, to interpret them literally, as the need for a spatial basis of a certain size, conflating the problem of nucleation with their problematic of ‘setting up a territory’. Tiqqun, ‘L’Hypothèse Cybernétique’, Tout A Failli, Vive le Communisme! (Paris: La Fabrique, 2009), 312. 22 Although each individual’s capacities ultimately depend on their condition as living beings, it would be wrong to conceive of their potentia as an individual property that they carry around with them and may or may not choose to pool together with others. In different ways and to varying degrees, all these capacities depend on the species’ evolutionary trajectory (hence also the external circumstances in which it evolved), individuals’ conditions of socialisation, and their interactions with one another and the broader environment. In short, it is not that individual power is the ground of the power

264

of the group, but rather that the transindividual is the ground of individual power, and the group is a certain way of drawing a (relative) boundary within the transindividual. 23 Spinoza, Ethics, Complete Works , EIV18S. This statement need not be understood in strictly anthropocentric terms. For starters, since ‘man’ (that is, human) is constituted through interaction with everything else, both human and non-human, ‘human’ is always only human by approximation : not a separate reality but one that bears an intimate connection to what is other than itself. Furthermore, to stress the usefulness of humans to one another is not to minimise all that we draw from our non-human environment, but to point out that cooperation enhances our very capacity to take advantage of those affordances. 24 Constraints might be in place even when people are not aware of cooperating with one another, hence also in aggregate action – for instance, when unrelated people are all dedicating their time on social media to producing content on the same topic. The key difference in the passage to collective action, however loose or informal it may be, is the element of reciprocal recognition that enables collective deliberation regarding those constraints, hence also their complexification. 25 ‘So we confront a virtuous cycle: Work constructs constraints, yet constraints on the release of energy are required for work to be done. Here is the heart of a new concept of “organization”.’ Stuart Kauffman, Investigations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4. I thank Victor Marques for first drawing my attention to this passage. 26 It follows from Spinoza’s equation of the state’s sovereignty ( imperium ) with the power of the multitude ( potentia multitudinis ) that all constituted power ultimately emanates from the multitude, including the one that is used against it . As potentia becomes crystallised in habits, institutions, apparatuses, figures of authority, armaments, and so forth, however, it can continue to exist and act even if people start to question it. That potestas derives from potentia does not make it any less real; what is illusory about it is only the belief that it comes from anything other than potentia . See Spinoza, Political Treatise , 2.17. 27 Frédéric Lordon, ‘Conatus et Institutions: Pour un Structuralisme Enérgetique’, L’Anée de la Régulation 7 (2003): 128. 28 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination , tr. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 61–172. 29 As Jeremy Gilbert put it, ‘the unspoken assumption of neoliberal culture’ is that ‘democracy cannot work, because all collectivities are inherently impotent. Or if they are not, then they should be, because the other informing assumption of individualist culture is this: if collectivities are ever capable of exercising agency, then it is only in the form of a monstrous and homogenising mass, a fascist crowd.’ Jeremy Gilbert, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (London: Pluto, 2014), ix. 30 A clear example is an Occupy Wall Street participant’s protest against the creation of an OWS spokes-council on the grounds that ‘through the Spokes Council working groups become organizations and they become parties … [This] shows a misunderstanding

265

of what exactly we’re doing here. Occupy Wall Street is never, and will never be an organization.’ See Rosie Gray, ‘Occupy Wall Street Debuts the New Spokes Council’, Village Voice , 8 November 2011. 31 The Invisible Committee, Now , tr. Robert Hurley (n.p.: Ill Will, 2017), 88. 32 And I would not: from the perspective I develop here, an organisational ecology that emerges without having been the object of anyone’s concern or effort is better described as the aggregate effect of several intentional organising efforts. It only arises as a consequence of groups and individuals investing concern and effort into their own actions, even if there is no single one responsible for the ecology as a whole . 33 Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy , tr. Eden and Cedar Paul (Kitchener, Ont.: Batoche, 2001), 241. 34 Jo Freeman, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17 (1972/73): 151–65. 35 An analogy with network theory helps highlight the absurdity of forcing a choice between One and Many: it would amount to choosing between a centralised network (where everything connects to one node) and a network in which nodes are randomly connected to one another – whereas the vast majority of networks we can observe in the natural world are somewhere between these two. 36 See Marisol de la Cadena, ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond “Politics”’, Cultural Anthropology 25:2 (2010): 347. 37 Antonio Negri, ‘Negri on Hegemony: Gramsci, Togliatti, Laclau’, tr. David Broder, paper given at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine, Paris, 27 May 2015, versobooks.com. 38 This is a point to which I return at length in chapter 4. 39 See Gilbert, Common Ground , especially chapters 3 and 5. 40 On this point, see Chantal Mouffe’s admission that ‘in a sense, my project is to derive non-Hobbesian consequences from Hobbesian premises’. Chantal Mouffe, ‘On the Itineraries of Democracy: An Interview with Chantal Mouffe’, Studies in Political Economy 49:1 (1996): 131–48. 41 Sigmund Freud, cited in Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 60–1. 42 Not, of course, that Spinoza denies that fear is part of the package; ‘the purpose of civil order’, he writes, ‘is nothing other than peace and security of life.’ Yet this does not mean that it is the sole or always the dominant affect leading people to associate with one another. See Spinoza, Political Treatise , 5.2. 43 Spinoza, ‘Letter 50’, Complete Works , 891–2. 44 ‘From the fact that we imagine a thing like ourselves, toward which we have felt no emotion, to be affected by an emotion, we are thereby affected by a similar emotion.’ Spinoza, Ethics , EIIIP17. 45 Simondon, L’Individuation , 29. My italics. The concept of ‘transindividuality’, in its Spinozan and Simondonian lineages, has been the object of growing attention as an approach to thinking politics and social bonds. See, for example, Étienne Balibar, Spinoza:

266

From Individuality to Transindividuality (Delft: Eburon, 1997); Gilbert, Common Ground ; Vittorio Morfino, Plural Temporalities: Transindividuality and the Aleatory Between Spinoza and Althusser (Chicago: Haymarket, 2015); Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017). 46 Maurizio Lazzarato, Les Puissances de l’Invention: La Psychologie Économique de Gabriel Tarde contre l’Économie Politique (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 2001), 27. 47 A ‘structural germ’ is, according to Simondon, the ‘informational condition’ that triggers a process of individuation. Simondon, L’Individuation , 79. In other words, it is an input of information that, given the availability of potential energy, causes an individual or system to undergo change. 48 This follows from the transindividual logic that considers the individuations undergone by individuals as immediately and reciprocally already also individuations of the collective. There are no actions of individuals on one another on one side and actions of the collective on itself on another; the actions of the collective on itself are nothing but the actions of individuals on one another. 49 It is true that Hardt and Negri’s more recent work has nuanced their position on this issue somewhat. As I argue in chapter 6, I am not convinced that this is enough to solve the problem. 50 I believe that this opposition between leadership as function and position, on which I expand in chapter 5, is not only compatible with Cedric Robinson’s critique of the ‘myth’ of leadership, but is in fact supposed by his analysis of charismatic authority. See Cedric Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 149–54. Since, unlike him, I understand the concept of ‘political leadership’ as encompassing more than just ‘coercion, violence, domination’ and the state, I have no misgivings about calling those other phenomena ‘leadership’, nor any need for Robinson’s concept of the ‘antipolitical’. Ibid., 44. 51 For transindividual interpretations of Spinoza and the multitude, which tend to criticise Negri precisely on this point, see Étienne Balibar, ‘ Potentia Multitudinis, quae una Veluti Mente Ducitur: Spinoza on the Body Politic’, Current Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy , ed. Stephen H. Daniel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 70–99; Warren Montag, ‘Who’s Afraid of the Multitude? Between the Individual and the State’, South Atlantic Quarterly 104:4 (2005): 654–73; Vittorio Morfino, ‘The Multitude According to Negri: On the Disarticulation of Ontology and History’, Rethinking Marxism 26:2 (2014): 227–38; Rodrigo Nunes, ‘Entre Negri y Laclau: Los Límites de la Multitud’, Políticas de la Memoria 16 (2015): 39–55. 52 If Spinoza speaks in such terms about the multitude, it is in fact because, unlike Negri, he never conceived it as a universal subject. For Spinoza, there is not a single multitude underlying the whole of human history, but plural, historical, locally circumscribed multitudes.

267

10.

53 Ernesto Laclau, ‘Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?’, Diacritics 31:4 (2010):

54 Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3: Power , ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 2001), 341. Lest we forget, Foucault makes his mature definition of power as ‘a mode of action on the actions of others’ synonymous with ‘conduct’ understood ‘at the same time [as] to “lead” others … and [as] a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities. The exercise of power is a “conduct of conducts” and a management of possibilities.’ Ibid. Modified. 55 This is also why it is wrong, despite what both sides claim, to characterise the dispute between Negri and Laclau as a choice between immanence and transcendence. On the one hand, Negri’s desire to make transcendence wholly incompatible with the multitude has the paradoxical effect of granting it too much reality, treating it as a substance external to, rather than the outcome of a process immanent to, the multitude. On the other, Laclau’s ‘ failed transcendence’ arguably names exactly that process, and therefore affirms not the reality of transcendence as such but only its real existence as an immanent illusion . See Laclau, On Populist Reason , 244; Nunes, ‘Entre Negri y Laclau’. 56 The problem with the wish to restrict organised agency to a certain scale on a priori grounds is that it takes things in reverse, as it were. It is not staying small that is important, but plurality, to which staying small can be a means. Yet plurality is not dependent on any particular magnitude, but on the relative differences in size among different things; thus it is not a matter of ensuring that everything stays small, but of not allowing anything to become too big in relation to everything else . 57 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ‘The Principles of Philosophy, or the Monadology,’ in Philosophical Essays , ed. and tr. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett: 1989), §58. 58 In this regard, see Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, tr. Ramor Ryan (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010).

2. One or Two Melancholias?

1 Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, boundary 2 26:3 (1999): 20. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 23. 4 Jodi Dean, ‘Communist Desire’, in The Idea of Communism , vol. 2, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 81. 5 Ibid., 84. 6 Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, 20. 7 Dean, ‘Communist Desire’, 87. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 88. 11 They also depart from Benjamin's attitude towards melancholia more generally: as Jonathan Flatley puts it, the issue for the German thinker was not so much one of

268

overcoming melancholic attachments as of politicising one's relation to them. See Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 64ff. 12 ‘Tortured stupidity: this the [sic] latest of two millenia [sic] of metamorphoses of melancholy.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘Left-Wing Melancholy’, tr. Ben Brewster, Screen 15:2 (1974): 31. 13 ‘Kästner’s poems are for the higher income bracket, those mournful, melancholy dummies who trample anything or anyone in their path’ and suffer from ‘the mournfulness of the satiated man who can no longer devote all his money to his stomach’. Ibid. 14 Ibid., 29. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 30. 17 Dean, ‘Communist Desire’, 87–8. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 87. 20 Ibid. My italics. The implication here is that, if these activities are felt to be productive, those who engage in them do so because they consciously seek something effective to do, rather than merely pretending. This should be enough to differentiate them from deliberate traitors even if, as Dean argues, their unconscious desire actually points in the opposite direction. 21 It is generally the case that any attempt to use psychoanalysis in social or cultural critique depends on constituting a collective subject that can be treated as analogous to an individual psyche (as the one who has lost an object of love, failed to mourn it, and so on). Doing so, in turn, implies compressing into that subject a number of individuals who may or may not identify with each other at different times; a web of processes that have their own trajectories; practices whose reproduction has its own inertial pull; individuals who may experience what is predicated of that collective psyche in very disparate ways; and so on. This is not to say that such operations cannot detect true and revealing ‘family resemblances’ among the elements they assemble. Rather, it is only to note that, as operations, they are open to questions as to whether they abstract too much (if what they predicate of the whole they compose is indeed predicable of all its components) or too little (if the behaviour they describe does not have, in fact, a much broader field of application). 22 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , vol. 14, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957), 246. Modified. Although Freud had begun it two years before, this piece, which would come to tinge reflections on the state of left politics so significantly, appeared roughly at the same time as the 1917 Revolution in Russia. 23 Ibid., 249. 24 Ibid., 251.

269

25 Ibid., 248. This sentence is important in the text’s overall economy because, while from that point on Freud will tend to identify the indirect target of recrimination with the lost object (and thus ‘someone whom the patient … has loved’), it implies a different possibility: that the indirect target which the melancholic has in mind when reproaching himself is not the lost object, but a third party which is perhaps blamed for the loss. See Freud: ‘Patients usually still succeed, by the circuitous path of self-punishment, in taking revenge on the original object and in tormenting their loved one through their illness … After all, the person who has occasioned the patient’s emotional disorder, and on whom his illness is centred, is usually to be found in his immediate environment’ ibid., 251. This alternative, as will become clear, is relevant for the reading I propose here. 26 Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, 26. 27 Ibid., 23. 28 Dean, ‘Communist Desire’, 87. 29 Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, 22. 30 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, ‘Lenin the Just, or Marxism Unrecycled’, in Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth , ed. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 270. 31 Even an anarchist like Victor Serge could then say: ‘My mind was made up: I was neither against the Bolsheviks nor neutral; I was with them … Certainly on several essential points they were mistaken: in their intolerance, in their faith in statification, in their leaning towards centralism and administrative techniques. But, given that one had to counter them with freedom of the spirit and the spirit of freedom, it must be with them and among them.’ Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary , tr. Peter Sedgwick and George Paizis (New York: New York Review Books, 2012), 84–5. 32 See Chris Marker, director, Le Fond de l’Air Est Rouge , 1977. Apart from the February 1969 speech by German student leader Rudi Dutschke that Marker quotes in the film, the phrase also figures in a 1966 speech by Chinese general Lin Piao and as the title of Régis Debray’s 1967 bestseller on Latin American guerrillas. Thanks above all to Debray and Carlos Marighella, the Cuban foco guerrillero and urban guerrillas like those in Brazil and Uruguay became, alongside the Chinese Cultural Revolution, important if not always very practical organisational references of that period. See Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America , tr. Gregory Elliott and Bobbye Ortiz (London and New York: Verso, 2017); Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (Berkeley, CA: Long Time Comin’ Press, 1969). Another icon of the period, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, focused less on innovation than on the recovery of what had been lost. For him, ‘if the month of May [1968] saw a breach of modern capitalist society and also of the old authority of the Left, it did far more than that: it represented a return to a revolutionary tradition these parties [had] betrayed.’ Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (London: Penguin, 1968), 16. Modified. 33 A clear example is the way in which ‘identity politics’, originally articulated as a revolutionary intersectional stance by the Combahee River Collective, would from the

270

1980s onwards be interpreted as exclusive of and sometimes in opposition to class and the labour movement. On this point, see Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (London and New York: Verso, 2018), ch. 1. 34 See Freud’s observation that ‘there is no need to be greatly surprised that a few genuine self-reproaches are scattered among [the ostensible self-reproaches actually directed at someone else]. These are allowed to obtrude themselves, since they help to mask the others and make recognition of the state of affairs impossible.’ Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 248. Modified. 35 Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, 23. 36 For instance, see how Félix Guattari, who did otherwise confront hard questions more often than others, states that ‘each time’ movements of prisoners, women, immigrants, mental patients, and so on had failed ‘it was because the old forms and structures of organization take power’. Félix Guattari, ‘Molecular Revolutions’, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews, 1972–1977 , tr. David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker and Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 276. What is not even considered in this passage is the simple idea that those movements could also fail on their own account. 37 Gregory Bateson, ‘Bali: The Value System of a Steady State’, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1981), 112. 38 Gregory Bateson, ‘Culture Contact and Schismogenesis’, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind , 68. 39 Perhaps we could also speak of such a thing as ‘left-wing schizophrenia’: it would consist in thinking some questions from one perspective, some from the other, without ever reconciling the two. 40 For examples taken from both Western culture and the Iatmul of Papua New Guinea, see Gregory Bateson, Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 176–87. On schismogenesis as a form of positive feedback, see this telling remark: ‘The writing of Naven had brought me to the very edge of what later became cybernetics, but I lacked the concept of negative feedback.’ Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind , xix–xx. 41 See, for example: Caio Martins and Leonardo Cordeiro, ‘Revolta Popular: O Limite da Tática’, Passa Palavra, 2014, passapalavra.info; Lucas Legume, ‘O Movimento Passe Livre Acabou?’, Passa Palavra, 2015, passapalavra.info; Yotam Marom, ‘What Really Caused the Implosion of the Occupy Movement: An Insider’s View’, AlterNet, 23 December 2015, alternet.org; Patrice Maniglier, ‘Nuit Debout, une Expérience de Pensée’, Les Temps Modernes , 691 (2016): 199–259; Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Hegemony HowTo ; Paolo Gerbaudo, The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Popular Protest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Graham Jones, The Shock Doctrine of the Left (Cambridge: Polity, 2018); and the excellent dossier organised by the Spanish journal Alexia , ‘De Tahrir a Nuit Debout: la Resaca de las Plazas’, available at revistaalexia.es.

271

42 Enzo Traverso, the latest to grapple with left-wing melancholia, construes it in a more positive light than Brown and Dean. Inevitable in a context in which utopian expectations have been replaced by ‘global threats without a foreseeable outcome’, he argues that it is ‘neither regressive nor impotent’, but keeps open a space in which ‘the search for new ideas and projects can coexist with the sorrow and mourning for a lost realm of revolutionary experiences’. Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), xiv–xv. The ‘conservative tendency’ identified by Brown, Traverso suggests, could just as easily be interpreted as ‘a form of resistance against demission and betrayal’. Ibid., 45. He appears to hesitate, however, as to whether this is an actuality or a project yet to be realised: ‘in order to be fruitful … this melancholia needs to become recognizable.’ Ibid., xv. Finally, Traverso identifies three fields of memory and mourning that correspond to the three ‘sectors’ of world revolution as it was understood in the 1960s and 1970s: the anticapitalist movements in the West, the anti-bureaucratic movements within actually existing socialism and the anticolonial movements of the Third World. I believe it would be possible to show that the cleavage between the two lefts runs through the memory of each. 43 Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, 25. 44 A notable exception being Spain, where veterans of the alterglobalist cycle played an important role in the 15-M movement and the subsequent electoral turn. 45 Alain Badiou, ‘Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of State’, tr. Barbara Fulks, Lacanian Ink 22 (2003): 59. 46 It is in this context that we can see two of the thinkers who were most influential in shaping the broad outlook of alterglobalism state that they are ‘not among those who claim that today’s horizontal movements in themselves are sufficient, that there is no problem, and that the issue of leadership has been superseded. Behind the critique of leadership often hides a position we do not endorse that resists all attempts to create organizational and institutional forms in the movements that can guarantee their continuity and effectiveness.’ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8. 47 It was at this gathering of the Communist International, also known as the ‘Bolshevisation Congress’, that a rigidified version of the Bolshevik organisational model was imposed on all affiliates. 48 Georg Lukács, ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation’, in History and Class Consciousness , tr. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 299. 49 Ibid., 318. 50 One finds instead that he was often enthusiastic about both the praktiki (organisers) of Russian Social Democracy and the spontaneous uprising of the masses: ‘we will be able to do these things, precisely because the mass that is awakening in stikhiinyi [spontaneous] fashion will push forward from its own milieu a greater and greater number of ‘revolutionaries by trade’ (if we don’t convince ourselves that it is a great idea on all occasions to invite the workers to mark time)’. I will be referring throughout to Lars Lih’s

272

new translation of What Is to Be Done? , available in Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008), 774. Italics in the original. 51 See Lih, Lenin Rediscovered , 26–7, regarding Lenin’s well-known observation in defence of What Is to Be Done? at the Second Congress of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, in which the Bolshevik leader explicitly makes that point: ‘Obviously, an episode in the struggle against economism has here been confused with a principled presentation of a major theoretical question … We all know now that the “economists” bent the stick in one direction. In order to make the stick straight it was necessary to bend the stick in the other direction, and that is what I did.’ 52 It is true that the theses on the organisational structure of communist parties approved at the Third International’s 1921 Congress state right at the start that ‘there is no absolute form of organisation which is correct for Communist Parties at all times’. It was nevertheless beyond question that the dominant form of organisation was the party, even though the shape it took might change. The corollary was that, the more successful the party, the more participation in it would become synonymous with participation in politics as such – until, as Yuri Pyatakov famously claimed when explaining his capitulation to Stalinism, ‘there [was] no [political] life outside the party’ at all. 53 For example: ‘The real Organisationsfrage today is not the affirmation or the negation of the party, conceived in the abstract, but rather, the question regarding the particular type of party-form that could help these movements to continue to grow.’ Peter Thomas, ‘The Communist Hypothesis and the Question of Organisation’, Theory & Event 16:4 (2013): 8. 54 Immanuel Kant, ‘Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy’, in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, ed. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 212. This pre-critical distinction would be central to Kant’s attack on the Leibniz-Wolff school in the Critique of Pure Reason and, later, to the deduction of attractive and repulsive forces in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science . Italian Marxist Lucio Colletti mobilised it against the Hegelian influence over dialectical materialism, finding in its affirmation of a ‘heterogeneity between thought and being’ the reason to see Kant as ‘the only classic German philosopher in whom it is possible to detect at least a grain of materialism’. Lucio Colletti, Marxism and Hegel , tr. Lawrence Garner (London: New Left Books, 1973), 104–5. Without knowing it, Colletti was following in the steps of Bogdanov, who, although he did not credit Kant, had proposed the very same revision of Marxist dialectics at the start of the twentieth century. See Aleksander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience , tr. David J. Rowley (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 182ff. After his arrest by the NKVD in 1937, Nikolai Bukharin would blame exactly this aspect of Bogdanov’s thought for having led him to ‘the substitution of Marxist dialectics with the so-called theory of equilibrium’. Grover Furr and Vladimir Bobrov, ‘Nikolai Bukharin’s First Statement of Confession in the Lubianka’, Cultural Logic (2007): 19.

273

55 For example: while the total mass of three bodies will be the sum of their masses (mass being an extensive quantity), the total temperature of a system composed of two bodies will not be the sum of their respective temperatures prior to being put together. 56 Plato, ‘Philebus’, in Complete Works , ed. J. M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 24c. Modified. 57 Simondon, L’Individuation , 163. The distinction between determinate things with opposed qualities and the dyad as the medium from which they arise is also central to Derrida’s interpretation of the pharmakon as ‘the prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced’. Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, 126. 58 Simondon, ‘Histoire de la Notion d’Individu’, in L’Individuation , 374. Modified. 59 In this sense, we could follow Žižek in saying that the object the left melancholic experiences as lost was never really there: there was never any guarantee, and overcoming melancholia requires recognising that fundamental lack. See Slavoj Žižek, 'Melancholy and the Act', Critical Inquiry 26 (4) (2000): 657–81. 60 We could go further and say there is no ‘right measure’ as such either, if what we understand by that is a conduct that agents could be sure to be the most appropriate for a given situation. Agents always act on limited information, and their action is always liable to the interference of factors that they could not have previously taken into account. 61 We find a particularly gruesome example in Machiavelli’s Prince . Having established military control over Romagna under Cesare Borgia’s orders, and having provided ample evidence of his character as a ‘cruel and unscrupulous man’ in fulfilling the task, Messer Ramiro d’Orco was publicly executed once the region was pacified, his body cut in half and his head put on a stake, so that the Duca Valentino could dissociate himself from his mercenary’s brutality. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince , tr. Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 27. 62 See note 50 above. 63 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1973), 36. 64 Machiavelli, The Prince , 85. Lenin, a Machiavellian through and through, makes a similar point about his erstwhile Second International comrades: ‘They fully appreciated the need for flexible tactics; they themselves learned Marxist dialectic and taught it to others … [But] they were hypnotised by a definite form of growth of the working-class movement and socialism, forgot all about the one-sidedness of that form, were afraid to see the break-up which objective conditions made inevitable, and continued to repeat simple and, at first glance, incontestable axioms that had been learned by rote … ’ V. I. Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder , in Collected Works , vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 102. Modified. 65 Clodovis Boff, Como Trabalhar com o Povo (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1988), 20. 66 Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism , 103. 67 This is how, much to the chagrin of contemporaries like Plekhanov, Bogdanov defined the dialectic. Bogdanov, Philosophy of Living Experience , 189. 68 Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology , 41.

274

69 Simondon, L’Individuation , 83. The ‘true mediation’, writes Simondon, ‘institutes an energetic system’, that is, an exchange between forces that results in a new individuation. Simondon, L’Individuation , 46. See also Bogdanov: ‘Our world is generally a world of variety ; only differences in energy tensions are revealed in action and only they have a practical meaning.’ Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology , 41. Italics in the original. 70 Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena , vol. 2, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 651–2. The parable is taken up again in Sigmund Freud, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works , vol. 18, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage/The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2001), 101, n.1; Félix Guattari, ‘Transversality’, in Psychoanalysis and Transversality , tr. Ames Hodges (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2015), 112; Laclau, On Populist Reason , 89.

3. Revolution in Crisis

1 Lukács, ‘Towards a Methodology’, 297. 2 Alain Badiou and John van Houdt, ‘The Crisis of Negation: An Interview with Alain Badiou’, continent 1:4 (2011): 234. 3 Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Polybius’ Reappearance in Western Europe’, in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 79–98. 4 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Times , tr. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 263. See also Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 116: ‘The modern age [ Neuzeit ] was the first and only age that understood itself as an epoch and, in so doing, simultaneously created the other epochs.’ 5 Arthur Hatto suggests that Machiavelli might have avoided the term precisely because of its supernatural associations with astrology and the Wheel of Fortune, preferring to speak of mutazione di stato (state change) instead. Hatto dates the first use of the word in the new sense to Matteo Villani’s Cronica , in which the replacement of an oligarchic regime with a democratic one in 1355 is described as ‘sudden revolution made by the citizens of Siena’, and thus unequivocally associated with human rather than physical or otherworldly causes. See Arthur Hatto, ‘ “Revolution”: An Enquiry into the Usefulness of an Historical Term’, Mind 58:232 (1949): 502. 6 Koselleck, Futures Past , 23. 7 Ibid., 265-6. ‘Don’t immanentise the eschaton’ was, of course, conservative leader William F. Buckley Jr.’s summary of Eric Voegelin’s thesis regarding the Gnostic impulse at the heart of modern political thought. 8 The idea of ‘scientific revolution’ as a way of describing of scientific developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gained currency in the latter half of the 1700s. It occurs in the 1750s in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie , for example, and figures prominently in 1780s writings by the Marquis de Condorcet and Jean Sylvain Bailly, both of which would go on to take part – and die – in the French Revolution. See I. Bernard

275

Cohen, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Concept of Scientific Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas 37:2 (1976): 257–88. 9 The phrase is by Barthold Georg Niebuhr, in his 1845 Geschichte der Zeitalter der Revolution [History of the Age of Revolution], cited in Koselleck, Futures Past , 35. 10 Koselleck, Futures Past , 35. 11 A notable exception in this regard is Thomas Jefferson’s defence of a cyclical reopening of the constituent moment, either by constitutional means (a clause prescribing regular revisions) or through rebellion, as a means of keeping civic virtue alive. See Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence , ed. Michael Hardt (London and New York: Verso, 2007). 12 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century , tr. John Beverly Robinson (New York: Haskell, 1969), 44. 13 Anon., ‘Analyse de la Doctrine de Babeuf, Tribun du Peuple: Proscrit par le Directoire Exécutif pour Avoir Dit la Vérité’ (Paris: self-published, 1796), 3, gallica.bnf.fr. Here, the use of a vocabulary that suggests a return or restoration (‘re-establish’) owes perhaps less to a cyclical conception of history than to a rhetorical recourse to eschatology (the promise of redeeming a lost Golden Age). The passage also suggests that, in France at least, the notion of ‘Revolution’ as an overarching ‘transcendental’ process above ‘empirical’ revolutions might have evolved in part out of the French Revolution’s internal disputes and the ambiguity of statements like ‘the revolution is not over’ – where the referent might be taken to be the French Revolution specifically, or a broader historical fate. 14 For example, see Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals , tr. Patrick Kilmartin (New York: Norton, 1957). 15 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Course at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 , tr. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), 260. 16 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket, 2005), 263. 17 V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution , in Collected Works , vol. 25 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 467. 18 Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific , in Collected Works , vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 321. This line, usually said to be borrowed by Marx and Engels from Saint-Simon, was in fact penned by Auguste Comte in an essay published in Saint-Simon’s journal Catéchisme des Industriels . For a history of the expression, see Ben Kafka, ‘The Administration of Things: A Genealogy’, West 86th (2012), west86th.bgc.bard.edu. Unlike Marx and Engels, of course, Saint-Simon and Comte intended their plans for social reform to prevent revolutions they believed would otherwise become inevitable. 19 A notable exception was Fourier, whose Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies advanced a historical scheme comprised of four phases in which, following 70,000 years of true harmony, there would be 5,000 years of human degeneration, culminating with the earth’s physical extinction.

276

20 Although, as Keith Taylor observes, the actual movements that coalesced around the ideas of those socialist utopians would sometimes change their position according to time, place and the disposition of workers themselves. See Keith Taylor, The Political Ideas of the Utopian Socialists (London: Frank Cass, 1982), 15. 21 Peter Kropotkin, ‘The Coming Revolution’, Freedom: A Journal of Anarchistic Socialism , 1:1 (1886): 1. The text continues: ‘Before the end of this century has come we shall see great revolutionary movements breaking up our social conditions in Europe and probably also in the United States of America.’ 22 In a similar vein, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the ‘great socialist utopias of the 19th century’ should be understood ‘not as ideal models but as group fantasies’ allowing people to ‘disinvest the current social field’ and ‘to further the revolutionary institution of desire itself ’. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus , tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 29–30. 23 Although we should perhaps be wary of such impressions; see Robert Pfaller, On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions without Owners , tr. Lisa Rosenblatt (London and New York: Verso, 2014), ch. 2. 24 Georges Canguilhem, ‘La Décadence de l’Idée de Progrès’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale , 92:4 (1987): 437–54. 25 Curiously, Adorno wrote of the author of The Decline of the West that ‘Spengler is one of the theoreticians of extreme reaction whose critique of liberalism proved itself superior in many respects to the progressive one.’ Theodor Adorno, ‘Spengler After the Fall’, in Prisms , tr. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 65. 26 Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism , ed. Henry Tudor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 31. 27 Ibid., 15. In passages like this, Bernstein comes close to the use Colletti would make of the Kantian distinction between real and logical opposition over half a century later. 28 Louis Althusser, For Marx , tr. Ben Brewster (London and New York: Verso, 2005 [1965]), 112. Italics in the original. 29 Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism , 144. 30 Ibid., 6. 31 Ibid., 84, n.T. 32 Ibid., 147. 33 See Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000[1950]). See also Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1911). Late in life, Marx openly disputed unilineal interpretations of his work, complaining to the editor of a Russian journal about an article that had presented him as the proponent of ‘a historico-philosophical theory of general development, imposed by fate on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves’. Marx, ‘Letter to the Editor of Otechestvenniye Zapiski , November 1877’, in Collected Works , vol.

277

24, 200. See also Massimiliano Tomba, ‘Historical Temporalities of Capital: An AntiHistoricist Perspective’, Historical Materialism 17 (2009): 44–6. 34 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 254. 35 Ibid., 257. 36 Ibid., 249. 37 Michel Foucault, ‘Useless to Revolt?’, in Power: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 , vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 450. 38 Louis Althusser, ‘The Crisis of Marxism’, Theoretical Review 7 (1978): 11. 39 Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject , tr. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 92. 40 Badiou, Communist Hypothesis , 241. 41 On the thoroughly modern notion of history as a tribunal, see Koselleck, Futures Past , 38–9. The idea, which would become commonplace in Marxian discourse, is invoked by Marx himself: ‘History is the judge – its executioner, the proletarian.’ Karl Marx, ‘Speech at the Anniversary of The People’s Paper ’, in Collected Works , vol. 14 (New York: Progress Publishers, 1980), 656. 42 Already in 1983 Stuart Hall noted that ‘we live in a world in which socialism is not inevitable. We live in a world in which there are socialisms which are caricatures of socialism, and the thing that is most inevitable in our world, in a logical calculation, is its termination. Barbarism, which is the other alternative which Marx offered us, is much closer …’ Stuart Hall, ‘Marxism Without Guarantees’, Australian Left Review 84 (1983): 41. 43 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party , in Collected Works , vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 492–4. 44 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 256. See Mikhail Bakunin, ‘The International and Karl Marx’, in Bakunin on Anarchy , ed. and tr. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Vintage, 1971), 294. 45 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth , tr. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963); Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Fanon and the Revolutionary Class’, in The Essential Wallerstein (New York: New Press, 2000), 14–32. 46 Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Intellectuals and Power’, in Language, Counter-Memory and Practice , ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 216. 47 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , 469. 48 Ibid. 49 ‘The power of minority, of particularity, finds its figure or its universal consciousness in the proletariat. But as long as the working class defines itself by an acquired status, or even by a theoretically conquered State, it appears only as “capital,” a part of capital (variable capital), and does not leave the plan(e) of capital. At best, the

278

plan(e) becomes bureaucratic. On the other hand, it is by leaving the plan(e) of capital, and never ceasing to leave it, that a mass becomes increasingly revolutionary and destroys the dominant equilibrium of the denumerable sets.’ Ibid., 472. 50 André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Society , tr. Michael Sonenscher (London: Pluto, 1982), 7. Modified. 51 Ibid. 52 Mario Tronti, Workers and Capital , tr. David Broder (London and New York: Verso, 2019), 26. Italics in the original. 53 See Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto, 2017), 40–1. 54 Sergio Bologna, ‘An Overview’, Italy 1977–8: Living with an Earthquake (London: Red Notes, 1978), 121. Italics in the original. This lament was purely for tactical reasons (losing what the operaisti regarded as the chief weapon in the proletariat’s armoury), not nostalgic ones. Bologna vigorously advocated: ‘We must break down this idea of a “separate” working class culture; we must break down false ideas of “hegemony”; we must break down the idea of the factory as a separate political institution!’ Ibid., 122. 55 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London and New York: Verso, 2001 [1985]), 2. 56 Ibid., 86. Italics in the original. 57 On Karl Kautsky’s fondness for the expression ‘natural necessity’ ( Naturnotwendigkeit ) and the relation between his determinism and the Bolshevik conception of the party, see Lih, Lenin Rediscovered , 74–82. 58 See, for example: ‘We can begin from political processes, from political oppositions, from conflicts and contradictions, obviously. But it is no longer possible to code these phenomena in terms of representations of classes. In other words, there may exist emancipatory politics or reactionary politics, but these cannot be rendered immediately transitive to a scientific, objective study of how class functions in society’. Alain Badiou, ‘Politics and Philosophy’, in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil , tr. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 97. Italics in the original. 59 Alberto Toscano, ‘Communism as Separation’, in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy , ed. Peter Hallward (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 142–3. For Badiou, ‘communism is to be revitalized by traversing a certain nihilism, by giving up on the idea that its movement is inscribed in the structure of representation … or that it can refer to the consistency of a representative – however transitory – of the unrepresentable (the hypothesis of a dictatorship of the proletariat)’. Ibid., 144. Bosteels suggests that a critique of transitivity was already noticeable in Badiou’s Maoism before his mid-1980s moment of self-critique. See Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2011), 150–3. 60 Arendt, On Revolution , 28. 61 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France , ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 31.

279

62 Bakunin, ‘The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State’, in Bakunin on Anarchy , 268. 63 Bakunin, ‘Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism’, in Bakunin on Anarchy , 116. 64 Ibid. 65 Bakunin, ‘Letter to La Liberté ’, in Bakunin on Anarchy , 278. 66 Bakunin, ‘The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State’, 268–9. 67 Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy , tr. Marshall S. Satz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 136. Italics in the original. Curiously, Bakunin did grant the state one possible revolutionary role: ‘The only thing we believe the State can and should do is to change the law of inheritance, gradually at first, until it is entirely abolished as soon as possible.’ Bakunin, ‘Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism’, 126. 68 See Karl Marx, ‘Critical Marginal Notes on the Article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform”. By a Prussian’, in Collected Works , vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 205–6. 69 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party , 515. 70 Ibid. 71 Needless to say, that convergence (and ultimate coincidence) between consciousness and science is only possible if one assumes transitivity: it is because the proletariat is structurally determined to occupy a position of universality that its subjective consciousness automatically corresponds to an objective knowledge of structure itself. 72 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology , in Collected Works , vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 49. 73 Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism , 192. 74 Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader , ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 305. 75 Luxemburg herself recognises as much in relation to land policy. Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 291. 76 V. I. Lenin, ‘The Importance of Gold Now and After the Complete Victory of Socialism’, in Collected Works , vol. 33 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 111. 77 V. I. Lenin, ‘The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of the Political Education Departments. Report to The Second All-Russia Congress of Political Education Departments, October 17, 1921’, in Collected Works , vol. 33, 77. 78 Lenin, ‘The Importance of Gold Now’, 110. 79 Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York: Vintage, 1973), 147. 80 Which is not to say that this tendency had not been presaged by the ‘war communism’ of the Civil War years and such proposals as the militarisation of labour (Trotsky) and a ‘socialist primitive accumulation’ (Preobrazhensky). 81 Ibid., 129. 82 Cited in ibid., 314.

280

83 See, for example: ‘I do not at all mean that the state apparatus is not important, but it seems to me that … one of the first things to understand is that power is not localised in the state apparatus and that nothing will change in society if the mechanisms of power that function outside the state apparatus, underneath it, beside it, at a more infinitesimal, everyday level, are not modified.’ Michel Foucault, ‘Pouvoir et Corps’, in Dits et écrits , vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1626. Elsewhere, Foucault claims that ‘if one fails to recognize these points of support of class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process.’ Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky, ‘Human Nature: Justice versus Power’, in Foucault and His Interlocutors , ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 130– 1. 84 Ultimately, as Paulo Arantes has argued in a Koselleckian vein, the crisis of revolution is inseparable from a shift in our experience of temporality: a shrinking of the modern horizon of expectations and its transformation into a horizon of risks to be managed. See Paulo Arantes, O Novo Tempo do Mundo e Outros Estudos sobre a Era da Emergência (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2014). 85 ‘By the 1980s, waiting for the revolution for thirty years had gotten a little tiresome. When I was really young and full of enthusiasm in the 1960s, we really, actually, sincerely believed that a major transformation was imminent … We now live in the world of the triumph of capital. And in this world, it would seem that the TAZ is, perhaps, the last possible revolutionary form. I hope that’s not true, but it may be.’ Hakim Bey, ‘Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Hakim Bey’, e-flux 21 (2010), e-flux.com. See Hakim Bey, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 2003). 86 For Rancière, politics is ‘the art of the local and singular constructions of cases of universality’, whereas for Badiou ‘every universal is singular, or is a singularity’. See Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy , tr. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 139; Alain Badiou, ‘Eight Theses on the Universal’, in Theoretical Writings , ed. and tr. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2005), 144. 87 Badiou and Rancière often defend themselves from critics by saying that the heterogeneity is not as radical as it seems. Yet this relativisation usually appears as an afterthought, much as in the procedure criticised in the previous chapter: one starts by establishing a sharp theoretical opposition only to acknowledge that in practice things are never that simple. See Bosteels, Badiou and Politics , 172–3, 283–6; Jacques Rancière, ‘The Use of Distinctions’, in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics , ed. and tr. Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 205–7. 88 He continues: ‘But the real situation demands instead that we pit a few rare political militants against the “democratic” hegemony of the parliamentary State.’ Alain Badiou, ‘Rancière and Apolitics’, in Metapolitics , tr. Jason Barker (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 121–2. 89 On the accusation of ‘gradualism’, see Laclau, On Populist Reason , 22–6, 234.

281

90 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , 177. 91 I will return to this point in the last chapter. 92 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 212–3. Italics in the original. 93 Gilles Deleuze, ‘ “G” as in “Gauche” (Left)’, in The ABC Primer (1995), tr. Charles Stivale, deleuze.cla.purdue.edu. 94 We can contrast Laclau and Mouffe’s stress on the need to actively construct political subjects with a statement such as: “‘How to win the majority” is a totally secondary problem in relation to the advances of the imperceptible.’ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , 292. See also: ‘I no longer have much faith in the specificity of the group, and I would even say that I believe less and less in the existence of the group as an entity … I would prefer to start from a much more inclusive, perhaps more vague, notion of assemblage.’ Félix Guattari, ‘Institutional Intervention’, in Soft Subversions , 48. Already cited in Ch. 1 95 It is true that Hardt and Negri have given more attention to these questions from Commonwealth onwards. I will discuss these later developments in chapters 4 and 6. 96 ‘It may be no longer useful to insist on the old distinction between strategy and tactics. In the constitution of Empire there is no longer an “outside” to power and thus no longer weak links … On the contrary, the construction of Empire, and the globalization of economic and cultural relationships, means that the virtual center of Empire can be attacked from any point.’ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 58–9. 97 On this curious attachment of communisation discourses to some of the aspects of historical materialism that seem most outdated today (a strong dependence on periodisation, transitivity, residual determinism), see Gilles Dauvé, From Crisis to Communisation (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2018), 148–61; Bue Rübner Hansen, ‘Surplus Population, Social Reproduction, and the Problem of Class Formation’, Viewpoint , 31 October 2015, viewpointmag.com; Alberto Toscano, “Limits to Periodization”, Viewpoint , 6 September 2016, viewpointmag.com. 98 See Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir , tr. Richard Veasey (New York: New Press, 1993), 211.

4. Critique of Self-Organisation

1 Deleuze and Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, 209. 2 Heinz von Foerster, ‘On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments’, in SelfOrganizing Systems , ed. Marshall Clinton Yovits and Scott Cameron (London: Pergamon Press, 1960), 31. 3 W. Ross Ashby, ‘Principles of the Self-Organizing System’, in Principles of SelfOrganization , ed. Heinz von Foerster and G. W. Zopf Jr. (London: Pergamon Press, 1962), 269. 4 Von Foerster, ‘On Self-Organizing Systems’, 36.

282

5 René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy , in Philosophical Essays and Correspondence , ed. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), I.52. 6 That this was a conclusion that Descartes himself had repressed is clear from what comes immediately after that definition: ‘And in fact only one substance can be understood which clearly needs nothing else, namely, God. We perceive that all other things can exist only by the help of God’s concurrence. That is why the word substance does not pertain univocally to God and to other things, as they say in the Schools, that is, there is no meaning that can be distinctly understood as common to God and to his creatures.’ Ibid. It is important to note that by Nature Spinoza does not mean only the physical universe (it includes thought and other attributes unknown to us), let alone only what is ‘natural’ in a strict sense (it includes all humanmade things), and not only actually existing things ( Natura naturata ) but also the causal activity by which they come to be ( Natura naturans ). 7 Spinoza, Ethics , EIIP13S. 8 See Herbert A. Simon, ‘The Architecture of Complexity’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106:6 (1962): 467–82; Timothy F. H. Allen and Thomas B. Starr, Hierarchy: Perspectives for Ecological Complexity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 9 As Kevin Kelly puts it, this is not a ‘rank hierarchy’, in which ‘information and authority travels … from top down’, but a ‘subsumption or web hierarchy’, in which ‘information and authority travel from the bottom up, and from side to side’. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1994), 45. 10 On why boundaries are perspective-dependent without being arbitrary, see Lars Vogt, Peter Grobe, Björn Quast and Thomas Bartolomaeus, ‘ Fiat or Bona Fide Boundary – A Matter of Granular Perspective’, PLoS ONE 7:12 (2012): e48603. 11 We might think, for example, of the ways in which many in the leadership of the Black Panther Party both fit (as Black people mostly raised in impoverished areas) and did not fit (as skilled workers and college-educated professionals) the social profile associated with the party. See Charles E. Jones and Judson L. Jeffries, ‘ “Don’t Believe the Hype”: Debunking the Panther Mythology’, in The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered) , ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 44–6. 12 Although it is less common, it is of course possible to invert those values – the most famous example being Lenin’s infamous ‘from without argument’, in which the purposeful behaviour brought ‘from outside’ (by the party) diverts the spontaneously reformist tendencies of workers in the direction of socialism. 13 This becomes very clear when the boundary moves downwards, drawing a line where there previously was none: what had until then been seen as a self-organising process is suddenly perceived as split between a cabal of self-appointed leaders and a periphery of followers. Because it is a judgement on the quality and tendencies of a relation, the hetero-/self-organised distinction tends to be a key rhetorical device in disputes over the orientation of social processes. Groups with different political lines normally claim to

283

represent the position towards which this or that social group would tend ‘spontaneously’ arguing, for example, from an alleged ‘natural’ radicalism or conservatism of the working class. It is also worth noting that activist lamentations about spontaneity being perverted share the same structure as governmental denunciations of ‘outside agitators’, but with inverted signs. Whereas in the first case spontaneous behaviour is supposed to be more radical (people would do certain things were it not for external inhibiting influences), in the latter it is assumed to be less (people would not do what they are doing without incentive from outside). 14 For a short history of the concept, see Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Organisms, Machines, and Thunderstorms: A History of Self-Organization, Part One’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38:1 (2008): 45–75; Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Organisms, Machines, and Thunderstorms: A History of Self-Organization, Part Two. Complexity, Emergence, and Stable Attractors’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 39:1 (2009): 1–31. 15 Hekousion is more usually translated as ‘voluntary’, but I choose to render it as ‘spontaneous’ precisely because it covers both behaviours that involve rational deliberation (which most people would understand as ‘voluntary’) and those that do not (and might in fact be called ‘involuntary’). See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , tr. and ed. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1111b. 16 Ibid., 1110a–11a. 17 ‘Longer’ here still refers to the individual’s lifetime. Evidently, even what is most literally innate in an individual can be described, on an evolutionary timescale, as the product of external causes to the extent that it involves traits that were developed by the species under the influence of evolutionary pressures. 18 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks , vol. 2, ed. and tr. Joseph Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 48–9. 19 Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Mass Strike’, in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg , ed. Helen Scott (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008), 160. Italics in the original. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 129. 22 Ibid., 148. 23 Ibid., 161–2. 24 Ibid., 117. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 161–2. My italics. 27 Ibid., 157. 28 Ibid. Further proof that Luxemburg’s position is fully within the logical space of Marxist theory is the fact that her defence of spontaneity is entirely compatible with the notion of Social Democracy as vanguard: ‘The social democrats are the most enlightened, most class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat. They cannot and dare not wait, in a fatalist fashion, with folded arms for the advent of the “revolutionary situation” … On the contrary, they must now, as always, hasten the development of things and endeavor to

284

accelerate events. This they cannot do, however, by suddenly issuing the “slogan” for a mass strike at random at any odd moment, but first and foremost, by making clear to the widest layers of the proletariat the inevitable advent of this revolutionary period, the inner social factors making for it, and the political consequences of it.’ Ibid., 161. Italics in the original. 29 As Lukács observed, although she had thoroughly criticised Bernstein’s notion of ‘an “organic” growth into socialism’, Luxemburg did not break with the idea of ‘an ideological organic growth into socialism’. Georg Lukács, ‘Critical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg’s “Critique of the Russian Revolution”’, in History and Class Consciousness , 277–8. Italics in the original. 30 Lenin, What Is to Be Done? , 712. 31 Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 27. 32 Lenin, What Is to Be Done? , 702. Lars Lih proposes a painstaking reconstruction of this and other passages to argue that Lenin was making a perfectly trivial (and, at the time, widely accepted) historical point about the origins of socialist doctrine and the tasks of Social Democracy. It was a fact that ‘modern scientific socialism’ had been elaborated by two bourgeois intellectuals, Marx and Engels; in that sense, it had come from outside the workers’ movement. Now that this doctrine existed, however, the job of Social Democrats was to bring its message to workers so as to ensure that it merged with their movement ever more completely, instead of waiting for them to work it out for themselves. If they failed to do so, dominant bourgeois ideology would lead the proletariat astray in the direction of tred-iunionizm , that is, ‘an explicitly anti-socialist ideology that urges the workers to restrict their class activity to the economic struggle’. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered , 660. Italics in the original. Nevertheless, it remains the case that Lenin appears to suggest that workers will necessarily develop in a tred-iunionist direction if left to their own devices, which is ultimately as much an overstatement as claiming they will always progress towards socialism, even if it supposes neither teleology nor interiority, but only the superior material force of bourgeois ideology. Lenin's response to the 1905 Revolution was in any case quite similar to Luxemburg's: it had shown that 'we are still inclined to underestimate the revolutionary activity of the masses', and proved, with the Moscow uprising of December 1905, that workers intuitively grasped the need to go beyond the general strike and seize power. V. I. Lenin, “The Lessons of the Moscow Events”, Collected Works , vol. 9 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 384–7; 'Lessons of the Moscow Uprising', Collected Works, vol. 11 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 171–8. 33 Bakunin, ‘The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State’, 262–3. My italics. 34 Ibid., 268. Modified; my italics. In a letter written in April 1871, Marx lamented that the Communards had succumbed out of ‘too “honourable” scrupulousness’ because they failed to immediately march on Versailles to bring down the Thiers government and the radical-dominated Central Committee of the National Guard had handed power over too quickly to the Council of the Commune. Karl Marx, ‘Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 12 April 1871’, in Collected Works , vol. 44 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), 132.

285

35 Peter Kropotkin, ‘Modern Science and Anarchism’, in The Essential Kropotkin , ed. Emile Capouya and Keitha Tompkins (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1975), 88– 9. Italics in the original. 36 That is how Malatesta derided ‘Kropotkinian optimism’: see Errico Malatesta, ‘On “Anarchist Revisionism”’, Polemical Articles, 1924–1931 , ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 87. 37 Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy , 28. 38 And, while there is evidence to suggest it can, the same evidence could be used to substantiate Bakunin’s claim that what results from it cannot be communism. 39 Ibid., 200–1. 40 Ibid., 200. 41 Bakunin, ‘Letter to Albert Richard’, in Bakunin on Anarchy , 180–1. ‘Our aim is the creation of a powerful but always invisible revolutionary association which will prepare and direct the revolution. But never, even during open revolution, will the association as a whole, or any of its members, take any kind of public office, for it has no aim other than to destroy all government and to make government impossible everywhere. It will give free rein to the revolutionary movement of the masses and to their social construction from the bottom up through voluntary federation and unconditional freedom, but at the same time it will always keep watch so that authorities, governments, and states can never be built again.’ Bakunin, cited in Eugene Pyziur, The Doctrine of Anarchism of Michael A. Bakunin (Milwaukee, WI: University of Marquette Press, 1955), 129. 42 In several respects, Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee’s ‘Imaginary Party’ is the most faithful heir to this aspect of Bakunin’s thought. See Tiqqun, Thesis on the Imaginary Party , tr. Chicago Imaginary Party (Chicago: n.d.); The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, tr. Robert Hurley (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2015). The metaphor of the scaffolding first occurs in ‘Where to Begin?’ in reference to the role that an all-Russian Social Democratic newspaper could play in terms of structuring existing local networks into a party. See V. I. Lenin, ‘Where to Begin?,’ Collected Works , vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 23–4. It is taken up again in Lenin, What Is to Be Done? , 828. The newspaper, incidentally, is also described by Lenin as a ‘collective organiser’. 43 The passage is also remarkable for associating ‘spontaneously’ with ‘being convinced’. Ibid., 263. My italics. 44 We can think here of the way in which technological utopianism – a key element of modern futurity in both liberal and revolutionary versions, as we saw in the previous chapter – functions as an obstacle to action on climate change. The faith that a ‘technical fix’ is always just around the corner enables both the indefinite deferral of a response and the marginalisation of more radical, comprehensive proposals. See Max Oelschlager, ‘The Myth of a Technical Fix’, The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 10:1 (1979): 43–53; Imre Szeman, ‘System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster’, South Atlantic Quarterly 106:4 (2007): 805–23.

286

45 Errico Malatesta, ‘Note to the Article “Individualism and Anarchism” by Adamas’ (1924), Marxists Internet Archive , marxists.org. Modified. 46 Karl Marx, Capital , vol. 1, Marx and Engels Collected Works , vol. 35 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 739. 47 See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 33–9; Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, ‘The Californian Ideology’, Science as Culture 6:1 (1996): 44–72. 48 See Céline Lafontaine, L’Empire Cybernétique: Des Machines à Penser à la Pensée Machine (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004); Bernard Dyonisius Geoghegan, ‘From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus’, Critical Inquiry 38:1 (2011): 96–126. Outside structuralism, as a precursor in many ways, stood Gilbert Simondon. 49 See William Grey Walter, ‘The Development and Significance of Cybernetics’, Anarchy 25 (1963): 75–89; John McEwan, ‘Anarchism and the Cybernetics of SelfOrganizing Systems’, Anarchy 31 (1963): 270–83; Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Sam Dolgoff, The Relevance of Anarchism to Modern Society (Minneapolis, MN: Soil of Liberty, 1977); Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011; John Duda, ‘Cybernetics, Anarchism and Self-Organisation’, Anarchist Studies 21:1 (2013): 52–72; Thomas Swann, ‘Towards an Anarchist Cybernetics: Stafford Beer, Self-Organisation and Radical Social Movements’, ephemera 18:3 (2018): 427–56. 50 Carles Feixa, Inês Pereira and Jeffrey Juris, ‘Global Citizenship and the “New, New” Social Movements: Iberian Connections’, Nordic Journal of Youth Research 17:4 (2009): 421–42. 51 Richard F. Day, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto, 2005). 52 See also Arturo Escobar, ‘Other Worlds Are Already Possible: Self-Organisation, Complexity and Post-Capitalist Cultures’, in World Social Forum: Challenging Empires , ed. Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar and Peter Waterman (New Delhi: Viveka Foundation, 2004), 349–58; Graham Chesters and Ian Welsh, Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos (Oxford: Routledge, 2006). 53 W. Ross Ashby, ‘Principles of the Self-Organizing System’, 263. 54 Ibid., 273. Italics in the original. 55 See Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind , part 3. 56 For Hayek, of course, that inequality is a hallmark of its self-organisation: ‘the market order does not bring about any close correspondence between subjective merit or individual needs and rewards. It operates on the principle of a combined game of skill and chance in which the results for each individual may be as much determined by circumstances wholly beyond his control as by his skill or effort.’ Friedrich Hayek, ‘The

287

Principles of a Liberal Social Order’, in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (London: Routledge, 1967), 172. 57 Hayek might be the only one among those in discussion here who could claim not to be doing so when he upheld the ‘natural’ inequality of the market’s spontaneous order against the ‘artificial’ inequality arising from what he considered arbitrary, particularist criteria of fairness. Yet even he would still maintain that, being the best possible allocation of resources, ‘natural’ inequality was the closest thing to justice possible. Evidently, Hayek could not sustain this neutral, ‘systemic’ perspective throughout and occasionally relapsed into ‘particularist’ judgements such as this: ‘This is not to say that there may not be a case in justice for correcting positions which have been determined by earlier unjust acts or institutions. But unless such injustice is clear and recent, it will generally be impracticable to correct it. It will on the whole seem preferable to accept the given position as [if it were] due to accident and simply from the present onwards to refrain from any measures aiming at benefiting particular individuals or groups.’ Friedrich von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy (London: Routledge, 1998), vol. 2, 131. Leaving aside the substance of this proposal, it is clear that it introduces criteria of judgement that make sense only from a particular perspective: ‘clear and recent’ is whatever those in charge of deciding say it is, not something that has a fixed meaning considered from a systemic perspective. 58 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture , 35–6. 59 Ibid., 37. 60 Stewart Brand, cited in ibid., 59. 61 ‘Anarchy is a function, not of a society’s simplicity and lack of social organisation, but of its complexity and multiplicity of social organisations.’ Ward, Anarchy in Action , 50. 62 Ibid. 63 Duda, incidentally, suggests that it was Dolgoff’s productive mistranslation of Bakunin, from ‘free organisation’ to ‘free self-organisation’ in the collection Bakunin on Anarchy , that first established a connection between anarchism and self-organisation discourses. Duda, ‘Cybernetics, Anarchism and Self-Organisation’, 54. 64 Ibid., 68. Modified. 65 See Koselleck on the effort of the Enlightenment to disavow its own political nature by using the ‘blind fatality’ of the philosophy of history as a way ‘to negate historical factuality [and] to “repress” the political realm’. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 11–12. Modified. 66 On neoliberalism’s ‘double truth’, see Introduction, n. 13. One should note that, while all the positions considered in this section could broadly be described as ‘antistate’, neoliberalism is in fact the only one that does not contemplate the end of the state even as a possibility. 67 Ibid., 91. 68 Hardt and Negri, Empire , 92.

288

69 Ibid., 28. 70 Despite their avowed Spinozism, Hardt and Negri are intriguingly fond of Hegel’s indirect swipe at the Dutch philosopher, according to which ‘everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject’. Hardt and Negri, Assembly , xiii. My italics. 71 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 354. 72 Other models are ‘economic innovation in networks’, language and the open-source movement. Ibid., 338–40. 73 Ibid., 337. Modified. 74 Ibid. Modified. The phrase resonates with one that cybernetician Grey Walter wrote in his pioneering attempt to approximate cybernetics and anarchism: ‘we find no boss in the brain, no oligarchic ganglion or glandular Big Brother.’ This would lead him to conclude: ‘If we must identify biological and political systems our own brains would seem to illustrate the capacity and limitations of an anarcho-syndicalist community.’ Walter, ‘The Development and Significance of Cybernetics’, 89. Although ‘radical politics seems to have skipped a generation’ when it came to him, Walter’s father and son were anarchists; his granddaughter is feminist writer and activist Natasha Walter. Swann, ‘Towards an Anarchist Cybernetics’, 5, n. 1. 75 This is how McCulloch summarises redundancy of potential command: ‘the possession of the necessary information constitutes authority in that part possessing the information’. Warren McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 408. On the functioning of the brain, see Francisco Varela, ‘Resonant Cell Assemblies: A New Approach to Cognitive Functions and Neuronal Synchrony’, Biological Research 28 (1995): 81–95; Alicia Juarrero, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as Complex System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 76 Since ‘every individual thing … cannot exist or be determined to act unless it be determined to exist and to act by another cause which is also finite and has a determinate existence’, knowledge of that thing is incomplete unless, apart from its ‘remote’ cause (God, or, in this case, the multitude), we also understand the proximate causes that produced it. Spinoza, Ethics , EIP28 and EIP28S. 77 The comparison with Hayek is not entirely exact because, like Leibniz’s God, he promised only that the market’s spontaneous order would produce the best outcome possible, which did not exclude an indivisible remainder of inequality. Hardt and Negri would certainly find that not enough. 78 Hardt and Negri, Multitude , 222. 79 Ibid., 220–1. 80 Ibid., 221. Modified. 81 Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth , 165. 82 Ibid., 363. 83 Ibid.

289

84 Ibid., 365. 85 Ibid., 361. 86 Hardt and Negri, Assembly , 280. 87 Hardt and Negri, Multitude , 358. 88 Or rather, it is perhaps the case again that their discourse inhabits two different positions: while they can present their reinvention of a ‘materialist teleology’ as an immanent, contingent act of creation, occupying the ‘prophetic function’ that such a teleology demands requires them to speak the language of necessity and transcendence. See Hardt and Negri, Empire , 65–6. 89 Spinoza, Ethics , EIApp. 90 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus , 42. Italics in the original. 91 Lih makes a compelling case that Lenin’s emphasis on the role of the party arose not from scepticism regarding the proletariat’s spontaneous upsurge but from fear of not being prepared for it: ‘the stikhiinost of the mass demands from us … a mass of purposiveness.’ Lenin, What Is to Be Done? ’, 721. 92 For both Luxemburg and Lenin, of course, their adversaries were mostly acting in bad faith: the constant dismissals of revolutionary stirrings as premature were a ruse ‘to assure predominance to the petty bourgeois elements that have entered our party’ and as bad as the efforts to theorise revolution away. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Reform or Revolution’, in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg , ed. Helen Scott (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008), 43. Lenin’s polemic in What Is to Be Done? was not so much against spontaneity as such as it was against those within Russian Social Democracy who he perceived as using it as an excuse. By arguing that political work should be restricted to supporting workers’ demands for economic reforms and dismissing any talk of workers taking political power as a preoccupation brought ‘from outside’, he believed they were in fact trying to confine the proletariat to economic issues in order to entrench themselves as its political representatives. As it turns out, he was right; the irony, of course, is that this is what ended up happening under the Bolsheviks anyway. 93 This is a play on Ingold’s well-known quip about anthropology being ‘philosophy with the people in’. Tim Ingold, ‘Editorial,’ Man 27:4 (1992): 695–6. See Rodrigo Nunes, ‘It Takes Organizers to Make a Revolution’, Viewpoint , 9 November 2017, viewpointmag.com.

5. Elements for a Theory of Organisation I: Ecology, Distributed Leadership, Organising Cores, VanguardFunction, Diffuse Control 1 Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism , tr. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 1999). 2 See Hardt and Negri, Multitude , 79–95; Escobar, ‘Other Worlds Are Already Possible’, 401.

290

3 Marina Sitrin, ed., Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 3. Modified. 4 Marianne Maeckelbergh, The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement Is Changing the Face of Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 109. 5 ‘Now that we better understand the workings of decentralized, diverse interconnected networks within networks where everything is in flux, there is no excuse for our political forms to remain stuck in ways of seeing and thinking from the past, it’s time to evolve … The global movement of movements for life against money, for autonomy and dignity, for the dream of distributed direct democracy, are [sic] following an irresistible logic. It is a logic as old as the hills and the forests, an eco-logic, a bio-logic, the profound logic of life.’ Notes From Nowhere, We Are Everywhere , 73. This radical optimism had a capitalist counterpart in New Economy boosterism: in order to ‘survive in turbulent times’, one had to ‘embrace the swarm’, ‘obey the logic of networks’, ‘ride to the edge of disruption’. Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Viking, 1998), 161, 10, 114. 6 It is this generality that makes the question of political organisation amenable to being treated with resources taken from network science, even if evidently not reducible to those. I have undertaken this structural-topological analysis in Rodrigo Nunes, Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective Action After Networks (London: Mute/PML Books, 2014). To be clear, ‘network’ refers throughout this book to both online and offline interactions. 7 See, respectively, Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, ‘Collective Dynamics of ‘SmallWorld’ Networks’, Nature 393 (1998): 440–2; Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert, ‘Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks’, Science 286:5439 (1999): 509–12. 8 See Javier Toret (ed.), Tecnopolítica: la Potencia de las Multitudes Conectadas. El Sistema Red 15M, un Nuevo Paradigma de la Política Distribuida . IN3 Working Paper Series (Barcelona: UOC, 2013); Nunes, Organisation of the Organisationless ; Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London and New York: Verso, 2015); Jones, Shock Doctrine of the Left . The concept of ‘organisational ecology’ obviously has a longer history in organisation and management studies, dating back to the 1970s. See Eric Trist, ‘A Concept of Organizational Ecology’, Australian Journal of Management 2:2 (1977): 161–75; Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman, ‘The Population Ecology of Organizations’, American Journal of Sociology 82:5 (1977): 929–64. 9 Foucault and Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, 212–6. 10 Rosso, ‘Raccogliere la Generalità dei Bisogni di Liberazione: Autonomia Operaia con la ‘A’ Minuscola’, Rosso 3:6 (1976), rosso.spazioblog.it. From June of the same year, nevertheless, and with increasing vehemence until the crackdown on the movement in 1978, Rosso and its most famous editor, Antonio Negri, would speak of the need to bring the ‘area of autonomy’ together into a ‘movement of autonomy’ leading to the constitution of a party. See Rosso , ‘Dall’Area dell’Autonomia Operaia e Proletaria al Movimento

291

dell’Autonomia Operaia’, Rosso 3:10/11 (1976); ‘Per il Partito dell’Autonomia’, Rosso 6:29/30 (1978); Antonio Negri, ‘Domination and Sabotage’, Books for Burning (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 231–90. 11 See The Free Association, ‘What Is the Movement?’, in Moments of Excess: Movements, Protest and Everyday Life (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 22–30; Francisco Whitaker, Boaventura de Souza Santos and Bernard Cassen, ‘The World Social Forum: Where Do We Stand and Where Are We Going?’, in Global Civil Society 2005/6 , ed. Marlies Glasius, Mary Kaldor and Helmut Anheier (London: Sage, 2005), 64–87; Rodrigo Nunes, ‘The Global Moment: Seattle, Ten Years On’, Radical Philosophy 159 (2010): 5–7. 12 Ward Churchill, ‘Pacifism as Pathology: Notes on an American Pseudopraxis’, Ward Churchill and Michael Ryan, Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections of the Role of Armed Struggle in North America , 3rd edn (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017), 69. 13 As Garrett Hardin put it, in an ecology it is impossible to ever do ‘merely one thing’: every action has unintended consequences for someone. Garrett Hardin, ‘The Cybernetics of Competition: A Biologist’s View of Society’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 7:1 (1963): 80. It goes without saying that this need not lead anyone to the same racist, eugenicist conclusions as Hardin. See Fabien Locher, ‘Cold War Pastures: Garrett Hardin and the “Tragedy of the Commons” ’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 60:1 (2013): 7–36. 14 For a recent iteration of this polemic, see Chris Hedges, ‘The Cancer in Occupy’, TruthDig , 6 February 2012, truthdig.com; David Graeber, ‘Concerning the Violent PeacePolice’, n+1 , 9 February 2012, nplusonemag.com; Carwil Bjork-James, ‘Debating Tactics: Remember to Ask “What Works?”’, Carwil Without Borders , 13 February 2012, woborders.blog. 15 In this regard, see Mark Fisher, ‘Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction)’, in K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016 ), ed. Darren Ambrose (London: Repeater, 2018), 753–72. 16 The belief that partial reforms or compromises are always a betrayal of movements that would otherwise have arrived at wholesale transformation is based on something we could call the ‘Scooby-Doo theory of history’. This is the illusion that supposes that the power that movements manifest at their peak could only ever either remain constant or grow, so that, like the villains in the famous cartoon, they would always be victorious if only it were not for their meddling internal or external enemies. Unfortunately, that premise is wrong: movements also wane, sometimes swiftly and definitively.. 17 See George Lakey, ‘What Role Were You Born to Play in Social Change?’, Open Democracy , 9 March 2016, opendemocracy.net. 18 Although the origins of the vertically integrated, multidivisional corporation can be traced back to the great colonial companies of the seventeenth century, it was in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, with the likes of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, that this form of organisation became a trend. Despite growing public antipathy to monopolies and the passing of legislation (such as the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts

292

in the United States), it was a model that continued to flourish into the 1920s and beyond. See Gary Anderson, Robert McCormick and Robert Tollison, ‘The Economic Organization of the East India Company’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 4 (1983): 221–38. 19 See Bogdanov’s analysis of cooperative labour in Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology , 39– 41. 20 See Clayborne Carson, ed. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 268. 21 Lenin, What Is to Be Done? , 690. 22 Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave: A Cultural and Critical Edition , ed. Robert S. Levine, John Stauffer and John R. McKivigan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 143. 23 Jan Smuts, cited in Frank Benjamin Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology: More than the Sum of Its Parts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 26. Smuts was speaking of nature as a whole, but the sentence could just as well apply to an ecology. 24 See Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty , vol. 1, 37. This is where my use of the idea of organisational ecology departs from that of Graham Jones, who imagines an ecology of different autonomous organisations with a system of nested assemblies and a ‘guiding coalition’ composed of lottery-selected volunteers and mandated delegates. See Jones, Shock Doctrine of the Left , 111–12. While this scheme certainly merits being tried out in practice, it effectively corresponds to a federation with functionally differentiated collectives and organisations. As soon as it were adopted and a boundary drawn around its component groups, whatever remained outside that boundary would be that federation’s ecology. 25 For an endearingly honest account of an assembly struggling with such quandaries, see Maniglier, ‘Nuit Debout: une Expérience de Pensée’. 26 Badiou, The Rebirth of History , 58. 27 Ibid., 91. Italics in the original. ‘“Mass democracy” imposes on everything outside the dictatorship of its decisions as if they were those of a general will. ’ Ibid., 59. Italics in the original. 28 Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 229. Italics in the original. 29 Maniglier’s text registers this oscillation in the form of an ongoing argument at the Place de la République: ‘On one side there were those who remonstrated, usually during the Assemblies, that there was no other source of power than the Assemblies, so what was decided here and now should be valid as a “law” or a decision of all; on the other, there were those who objected that the people assembled one day did not represent anyone, that their decision could not be binding on those who were there the next day … ’ Maniglier, ‘Nuit Debout: Une Expérience de Pensée’, 249.

293

30 ‘Elites are not conspiracies … Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities … These friendship groups function as networks of communication outside any regular channels for such communication that may have been set up by a group. If no channels are set up, they function as the only networks of communication. Because people are friends, because they usually share the same values and orientations, because they talk to each other socially and consult with each other when common decisions have to be made, the people involved in these networks have more power in the group than those who don’t.’ Freeman, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, 154. 31 One of the most remarkable expressions of this paranoia is how it is sometimes a cause for recrimination that people submit to discussion at an assembly a proposal elaborated beforehand in an informal group, as if the sheer fact that there could be discussions outside of the assembly constituted a scandal. The consequence is evidently not that people refrain from having such discussions, which would in any case be impossible (and undesirable), but conceal them, which is much worse. 32 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , 33. 33 Ibid., 241. Modified. 34 Ibid., 358. I would amend: around permanent organs of power. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 33. I leave aside here the quantitative distinction Deleuze and Guattari draw, in which the mass or crowd is characterised by ‘large quantity’ and the pack by ‘small or restricted numbers’. That is because I believe this distinction is better understood not in terms of actual numerical limits – the pack is defined by intensive, non-quantitative relations, and can, as we keep rediscovering, be very large indeed – but in relation to the problem of scalability: the greater the number, the harder it is for the pack not to either become a mass or to break down into several parts. 37 Ibid., 244. 38 This is the case even if ‘in reality there exist an infinite number of centres and foci, from different points of view and to varying degrees’ that contribute to each particular outcome. Gabriel Tarde, Monadology and Sociology , tr. Theo Lorenc (Melbourne: re:press, 2002), 62. Modified. 39 The approximation of Tarde and Gramsci here is less arbitrary than it might seem: the Italian Marxist did much to establish what he called the ‘molecular’ as a key dimension of political analysis. 40 ‘The elements of “conscious leadership” in the “most spontaneous” of movements cannot be ascertained, simply because they have left no verifiable document.’ Gramsci, Prison Notebooks , vol. 2, 49. This whole passage could in fact be rephrased in terms of scale and a nested hierarchy of systems. Were proletarians totally spontaneous, that would not be evidence of their self-organisation but rather proof of their being determined by a larger system – namely, the economic base. On the other hand, movements only appear

294

spontaneous and leaderless to an observer incapable of apprehending them in their finer grain, that is, the lower-order elements of which they are composed. 41 Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, in Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 309–69. 42 The same observation can in fact be made about party structures. See Paolo Gerbaudo, The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy (London: Pluto, 2018). 43 See for example Pablo Rodríguez, ‘Como Se Gestó el 15M?’, Storify (2011), web. archive.org; Andy Kroll, ‘How Occupy Wall Street Really Got Started’, Mother Jones , 17 October 2011; Myriam Aouragh, ‘Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions’, Triple C 10:2 (2012): 518–36; Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2012); Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0: A Memoir (London: Fourth Estate, 2012); Arnau Monterde, Rubén Carrillo, Marc Esteve and Pablo Aragón, ‘#YoSoy132: Un Nuevo Paradigma en la Política Mexicana?’, Doctoral Working Paper Series, DWP15-003. IN3 Working Paper Series. Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (Open University of Catalonia, 2015). 44 ‘Very rarely … is there only a single logic operating in a mind and even more rarely in a society, which is essentially a collective and enormously inclusive mind. These most diverse and mutually contradictory deductions advance by zigzags, crossing each other, mingling sometimes, then separating once again.’ Where Tarde says ‘very rarely’, I would say ‘never’. Gabriel Tarde, ‘Invention’, in Gabriel Tarde on Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers , ed. Terry N. Clark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 156. 45 The technical difference between authorities and hubs is that, while the latter are nodes with a high out-degree (they point to several other nodes), the former are nodes with a high in-degree (several other nodes point towards them). Therefore, while hubs are more central to interaction in the network-system, distributing more traffic and connecting more clusters, it is towards authorities that a lot of traffic and attention is directed. In activist networks on digital platforms like Twitter and Facebook, hubs will tend to be individuals and groups who play an organising role, whereas authorities might be big news outlets and celebrities that are also important outside those networks. See Sandra González-Bailón, Javier Borge-Holthoefer and Yamir Moreno, ‘Broadcasters and Hidden Influentials in Online Protest Diffusion’, American Behavioral Scientist 57:7 (2013): 943–65. 46 For an example of how this discussion has played out in Black Lives Matter, see Barbara Ransby, ‘Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of the Leaderless Movement,’ ColorLines , 12 June 2015, colorlines.com. ‘Those who romanticize the concept of leaderless movements often misleadingly deploy Ella Baker’s words, “Strong people don’t need [a] strong leader”. Baker delivered this message in various iterations over her fifty-year career working in the trenches of racial-justice struggles, but what she meant was specific and contextual. She was calling for people to disinvest from the notion of the messianic, charismatic leader who promises political salvation in exchange for deference. Baker also

295

did not mean that movements would naturally emerge without collective analysis, serious strategizing, organizing, mobilizing and consensus-building … Baker was not against leadership. She was opposed to hierarchical leadership that disempowered the masses and further privileged the already privileged.’ 47 There is no implication, however, that online influence automatically translates into offline influence or vice-versa. Online and offline networks interact but are irreducible to one another. See Nunes, Organisation of the Organisationless , 20–1. 48 See Cedric Robinson’s analysis of charismatic leadership as ‘the responsive instrument of a people’, in which ‘the submission of one identity to the demand that it become the vehicle of a collective, and thus embodied, identity’ forces the leader to become ‘a sensitive, finely tuned instrument’. Robinson, The Terms of Order , 150–1. 49 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation’, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2:1 (2004): 3. 50 In this regard, it is worth remembering Francesca Polletta’s point on how assessments of different organisational practices are often done on the basis of the identity they project or the associations that surround them, so that ‘the source of top-down structure’s appeal [is frequently not] its capacity to yield more efficient outcomes or its consistency with an existing ideology but its symbolic resonance’. Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 110. Modified. 51 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus , 37. Modified. 52 See Manuel Castells, ‘A Network Theory of Power’, International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 773–87. 53 David Graeber, ‘The Twilight of Vanguardism’, in Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007), 301–12. 54 ‘A vanguard would not be in business unless it trusted profoundly in the capacities of ordinary people, as elites by definition disdain them. Semiotically speaking, the relation between vanguard and army is metonymic rather than metaphorical. To see it as the latter would be the heresy of substitutionism.’ Terry Eagleton, ‘Lenin in the Postmodern Age’, in Lenin Reloaded , 49. 55 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party , 497. 56 Lukács, ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’, in History and Class Consciousness , 41. Italics in the original. 57 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party , 497. 58 See Kauffman, Investigations , 142. 59 See Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: Shambhala, 1987); Humberto Maturana and Jorge Mpodozis, ‘The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Drift’, Revista Chilena de Historia Natural 73:2 (2000): 261–310.

296

60 In Maniglier’s account, this was the solution at which Nuit Debout arrived after much soul-searching: ‘Legitimacy … could never be separated from the multiplicity of acts of consent. It could not be considered as obtained once and for all either. It was not a matter of “yes” and “no”, but of degrees; a decision would be all the more legitimate the [more often and widely] it was approved. Yet the debate would never be closed. It just happens that the crowd eventually lets it go.’ Maniglier, ‘Nuit Debout: une Expérience de Pensée’, 253. 61 Deleuze and Guattari make an explicit link between the pack and societies against the state in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , 358. To be clear, my interest in Clastres stems from what the ‘society against the state’ thesis renders thinkable about the nature of power and leadership in general, not any particular commitment to its ethnographical accuracy, regarding which I suspend my judgement. As is well-known, Clastres’s first sketch of it predated his field research in Latin America, and other anthropologists have criticised it for overgeneralisation (Descola) and ‘Rousseauism’ (Amselle). See Samuel Moyn, ‘Of Savagery and Civil Society: Pierre Clastres and the Transformation of French Thought’, Modern Intellectual History 1:1 (2004): 58–9; JeanLoup Amselle (ed.), Le Sauvage à la Mode (Paris: Sycomore, 1979); Philippe Descola, ‘La Chefferie Amérindienne dans l’Anthropologie Politique’, Revue Française de Science Politique 38:5 (1988): 818–27. For a measured defence, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “The Untimely, Again”, in Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence , tr. Jeanine Herman (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2010), 15–20. 62 Clastres, Society Against the State , 37. 63 Ibid., 207–9. 64 Ibid., 206. Italics in the original. 65 Ibid. 37. Modified. ‘An order? Now there is something the chief would be unable to give.’ Ibid., 154. 66 Ibid., 45. 67 Clastres, Archeology of Violence , 169. 68 Clastres, Society Against the State , 207–9. Modified. 69 Clastres, Archeology of Violence , 169. Modified. 70 Freeman, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, 164–5. 71 See Deleuze and Guattari: ‘The leader of the pack or the gang plays move by move, must wager everything in every hand, whereas the group or crowd leader consolidates or capitalises on past gains.’ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , 33. 72 Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism , 126. Evidently, a sanction suffered in one section of the ecology does not prevent a node from being embraced somewhere else – such as when individuals trade activist prestige for media or academic notoriety.

6. Elements for a Theory of Organisation II: Platforms, Diversity of Strategies, Parties 297

1 Dean, The Communist Horizon , 235. 2 See Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 3 On social movements as a process of tactical interaction with other forces, see Douglas McAdam, ‘Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency’, American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 735–54. 4 ‘[We] are not interested in “dissolving ourselves into the movement” but, on the contrary, in managing to connect the movement’s vanguard autonomous organising cores [ forme organizzative ] and developing in this organisational network a capacity for the broad politicisation of mass strata of the working class, students, women and young people starting from their own needs.’ Gruppo Gramsci, ‘Una Proposta per un Diverso Modo di Fare Politica’, Rosso 7 (1973), rosso.spazioblog.it. ‘ Forme organizzative ’ seems to refer here to actually existing groupings of various kinds rather than to different types of organisational form per se (parties, trade unions, affinity groups …), hence my decision to render it as ‘organising cores’. 5 The concept’s scale dependence imbues it with a certain fractal effect: within an organisation that acts as an organising core it might be possible to identify a group of people who act as an organising core, within that group an even smaller one, and so forth. Once again, it is the granularity of the analysis that determines which of these levels matters. 6 While collectives and platforms like Democracia Real Ya, Juventud Sin Futuro, No Les Votes, X.net and Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca played a major role in organising the demonstrations on 15 May 2011, the first few years of the 15M ecosystem saw a proliferation of new groups and coalitions focusing on different issues, such as Yayoflautas (pensioners), ToqueaBankia and 15MPaRato (bank bailouts) and the various Mareas (public education, public health, employment, and so on). That was key to why, unlike movements in other countries, it continued to evolve and mutate for much longer. 7 See Jeremy Gilbert, ‘An Epochal Election: Welcome to the Era of Platform Politics’, Open Democracy , 1 August 2017, opendemocracy.net. See also Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2016); Gerbaudo, The Digital Party , ch. 3. 8 I am adapting here my friend Victor Marques’s description of platforms as ‘not causing but permitting’. 9 See Toret (ed.), Tecnopolítica , 86; Jones, Shock Doctrine of the Left , 53ff. 10 Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting , 9. As Polletta summarises it, ‘when people share ownership of decisions … their sense of solidarity and commitment is heightened.’ Ibid., 8. Italics in the original. Or, as Tom Hayden explains it: ‘you need to count on other people putting their bodies on the line with you. Giving people a stake in the decision gives them a stake in the success of the action and in the survival of the group.’ Ibid., 2. To these benefits of participatory democracy, which she calls solidary , Polletta adds innovatory benefits (participation facilitates the creation of new ideas) and developmental ones (it offers relatively inexperienced people training in a range of valuable skills).

298

11 Hardt and Negri, Assembly , xviii. Modified. 12 Ibid., xv. The difference is that, in the model I am proposing here, the mechanism of this subordination is clearly specified (it is the diffuse control exercised by the ecology) and openly acknowledged as fallible. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. This inversion, presented as Assembly ’s key innovation, has in fact a much longer pedigree. It can be traced back to the beginnings of operaismo , when Tronti identified the refusal of work as a strategy already ‘materially embodied’ in the working class that nonetheless had to be made to ‘live subjectively’ by ‘that moment of political organisation which still now seems best to define with the word “party”’. Tronti, Workers and Capital , 269. This scheme would resurface over a decade later in Negri’s 1977 pamphlet ‘Domination and Sabotage’. There, the strategy was the proletarian practice of self-valorisation, and the party ‘a function of proletarian force, conceived as a guarantor of the process of self-valorization’ or ‘the army that defends the frontiers of proletarian independence’: ‘If jesting were allowed, I might say that the party is a militant religious order, not the ecclesiastical totality of the process.’ Antonio Negri, Domination and Sabotage , 276–7. Italics in the original. Then as now, the assertion that the proletariat/multitude already possesses the correct strategy is inseparable from the implicit claim that those making the assertion are not proposing one strategy among others, to which it could be compared and judged according to its virtues and drawbacks, but presenting the right (spontaneous, transitive) one. 15 It is only if the multitude is turned into a universal subject imbued with a telos that one can distinguish between what it actually is at any given moment, in an ‘alienated’ or ‘corrupted’ form, and some latent content that is yet to become actualised. In strictly Spinozan terms, the multitude is always actual : it is only ever whatever it presently is. ‘Spinoza’s assertion that desire is man’s very essence, an essence determined and defined by its history of affective relations, undermines not only any idea of alienation or disindividuation, but also any idea of a latent potential of subjectivity unrealised, and not actualised’. Read, The Politics of Transindividuality , 262. 16 Hardt and Negri’s retraction of Assembly ’s potential theoretical breakthrough is evident in the way ‘entrepreneurial function’ goes from being predicated of leaders to being attributed to the multitude itself, which is ‘gaining the capacities to be a political entrepreneur’ – that is, ‘to interpret the structures of oppression in all their forms, to form effective counterpowers, to plan with prudence for the future, to organize new social relations’. Hardt and Negri, Assembly , 280. 17 Guattari, ‘Students, the Mad and “Delinquents”’, Psychoanalysis and Transversality , 316. 18 The term is taken from right-wing libertarian hacker Eric S. Raymond’s ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’, catb.org. Clay Shirky expands on it as signifying that a project must ‘hit a sweet spot among several extremes’: neither too mundane nor too outlandish, neither too provisional nor too sweeping, and so on. To the plausible promise, Shirky adds

299

‘an effective tool’ and ‘an acceptable bargain with the users’ as secrets to the success of online collaboration platforms like Wikipedia. See Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organisations (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 260–2. 19 As Bogdanov reminds us, organised activities and the resistances opposed to them are reversible notions: ‘If two armies or two classes are engaged in a struggle, then the activities of one side represent resistances for the other; the whole matter is but a question of the point of view taken.’ Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology , 42. 20 To be clear, what is in question here is viability as a strategy for change on a worldsystemic scale . Such experiences as Chiapas, Rojava and the ZAD can of course be described as locally viable. Yet the difference between local and global is not simply in spatiotemporal scale but in complexity, and it is therefore impossible to deduce global viability from the fact that something is viable at a local level. (The same would be true, incidentally, of ‘socialism in one country’.) Of course, it could always be argued that experiences like Chiapas, Rojava and the ZAD do not have global systemic change as a goal. But then the point made in chapter 3 stands: distinctions between global and local, more and less change still matter, and we should not let the slipperiness of words like ‘revolution’ obscure that. 21 Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis , 38–40. 22 Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 370–1. 23 See Ben Trott, ‘Walking in the Right Direction?’, Turbulence 1 (2007): 14–15; Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 220–4. 24 It has been observed, for example, that peripheral participants can be as important as central nodes in spreading a movement’s message online. Pablo Barberá et al., ‘The Critical Periphery in the Growth of Social Protests’, PLoS ONE 10:11 (2015): e0143611. 25 Lenin, What Is to Be Done? , 822. 26 The difficulty with a complex problem like climate change is that people do not experience it directly as such, but only through a number of different symptoms whose structural connections to each other remain partially obscured. While revealing such connections is part of any strategy’s work of politicisation, it is always much easier to work one’s way up from the symptoms than the other way around. 27 Manuela Zechner and Bue Rübner Hansen, ‘Building Power in a Crisis of Social Reproduction’, ROAR Magazine 0 (2015): 138. They continue: ‘Being able to temporarily opt out of dominant forms of access to resources — be it via labor strikes, road blocks or boycotts — generates a huge increase in collective bargaining and blockading power.’ On the centrality of a Clausewitzian ‘capacity to resist’, see Howard Caygill, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 28 Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (London and New York: Verso, 2020 [1978]), 13.

300

29 Thus, for example, even if they stand to lose privileges from the end of patriarchal power, men can support the struggle against it because they believe it is just, because it improves the lives of people in other positions on the gender spectrum, and because it can free them from the suffering caused by toxic modes of masculinity. 30 ‘Non-material’ is used here as a way of distinguishing these interests from those that have to do with meeting basic needs or securing well-being. To the extent that they are rooted in feelings of pleasure and displeasure, they are evidently also material. 31 People can obviously go to great lengths through the sheer force of conviction. Yet conviction, as an interest in its own right, is limited by other interests, the most important of which tends to be self-preservation – whose function as a brake is normally only overridden once survival is perceived as improbable. See Serge on a conversation with a colleague leaving for the front in the Russian Civil War: ‘He told me that since we were facing utter ruin, and were probably doomed, he saw no point in gaining a few month’s reprieve for his own life …’ Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary , 103–4. The point is that it would be wrong to make such extreme situations into the gold standard of commitment. 32 See Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, 311. Italics in the original. See also Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). This helps explain the pull that the idea of societal breakdown exercises on the revolutionary imagination – a pull not without relation to the traumas and fears associated with organisation. Collapse, as caused by an internal crisis of capitalism or an external shock like a virus, is expected to solve in one fell swoop the problems of generating commitment (people have no other option but to fight for a different order), offering a viable alternative (the existing order has become unviable) and of cadre formation (people become activists overnight). In short, it promises all the benefits of organisation without the need to organise. 33 André Gorz, ‘Reform and Revolution’, tr. Ben Brewster, Socialist Register 5 (1968): 115. Modified, italics in the original. 34 To be clear, MPL is here an example more for what it allows us to think than what it ultimately achieved. Ironically, when faced with a success that exceeded anything they could imagine or control, the movement retreated and tried to restrict the protests to the demand of fare reduction, eventually abandoning the streets while demonstrations still raged on. This retreat exposed how unprepared they were to follow through on their own preferred tactic of inciting popular revolt. In the end, much of the energy that had been aroused by MPL and similar groups was appropriated by the far right. See Martins and Cordeiro, ‘Revolta Popular’. 35 The latter expression did not belong to MPL’s vocabulary; I am importing it from municipal experiences in places like Germany and Spain. See Bertie Russell and Keir Milburn, ‘Public-Common Partnerships: Building New Circuits of Collective Ownership’, Common Wealth (2019), common-wealth.co.uk. 36 The Debt Collective present themselves in similar terms: ‘In the short term the Debt Collective offers services to empower people to dispute debts. Over the long term, we

301

are conducting direct actions and campaigns of non-cooperation with the finance industry. We work toward broad debt cancellation while fighting for policies to end mass indebtedness, including free public higher education, universal healthcare, worker owned business, fair wages for everyone, decarceration and reparations for racial justice.’ The Debt Collective, ‘About’, debtcollective.org/#about. 37 A small example of what can be done in this direction is the US network Bargaining for the Common Good, which aims to bring trade unions, community groups and social and racial justice organisations together to expand the scope of union bargaining beyond wages and benefits and use contract fights as opportunities for making structural demands. See bargainingforthecommongood.org. 38 On this point, see Thea Riofrancos, ‘Plan Mood Battlefield: Reflections on the Green New Deal’, Viewpoint , 19 May 2019, viewpointmag.com. 39 Invisible Committee, To Our Friends , 82. Italics in the original. 40 See Jasper Bernes, ‘Logistics, Counterlogistics and the Communist Prospect’, Endnotes 3 (2013): 172–201; Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London and New York: Verso, 2014). 41 Lenin, ‘Left Wing’ Communism , 62. 42 Invisible Committee, To Our Friends , 75–6. Modified. 43 Mimmo Porcaro, ‘A Number of Possible Developments of the Idea of the Connective Party’, Transform! Europe (2011), 1–2, transform-network.net. Modified. 44 Ibid., 2. 45 Mimmo Porcaro, ‘A New Kind of Art: From Connective to Strategic Party’, The Bullet , 22 August 2013, socialistproject.ca. 46 Porcaro, ‘A Number of Possible Developments’, 8. 47 Ibid. Italics in the original. 48 Ibid. Modified. 49 Porcaro, ‘A New Kind of Art’. 50 Note his insistence that different groups or sectors will at different times ‘[take] the upper hand and “call” the political line’, and that policy and strategy might come from groups that ‘are also formed by members of political parties, but which do not correspond to the parties themselves’ or their internal procedures. These ‘informal mechanisms’ that ‘were unacceptable’ in a traditional mass party – or, I would suggest, systematically disavowed – ‘are instead essential developmental resources’ in an ecology. Porcaro, ‘Some Developments’, 10. 51 Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (London and New York: Verso, 2016), 183. 52 Ibid., 259. 53 Ibid., 183. 54 See, for example, Guattari, Psychonalysis and Transversality , 122ff, 314ff. See also Gilles Deleuze, ‘Three Group Related Problems’, Psychonalysis and Transversality , 12ff: ‘unification must occur through analysis … it must play the role of an analyzer with respect to the desire of the group and the masses, and not the role of a synthesizer operating

302

through rationalization, totalization, exclusion, etc.’ Italics in the original. ‘Analyser’, a concept drawn from institutional analysis, was defined by René Lourau as ‘social phenomena that produce, through [their] own action rather than the application of whatever science, an analysis of the situation’. René Lourau, L’Analyseur Lip (Paris: UGE, 1974), 13. The difference between ‘analyst’ (Dean, Žižek) and ‘analyser’ (Guattari) is not without political consequences. See Rodrigo Nunes, ‘Anonyme, Avant-Garde, Imperceptible: Trois Variations autour du Devenir en Politique’, Rue Descartes 92 (2017): 76–101. 55 Dean stresses that the subject supposed to know is a purely formal figure: it is not that the party really knows or occupies the point of view of totality, but that it performs the function of that perspective, which is in fact impossible, for its members. There are two problems with this account. The first is that the distinction between really knowing and being as if it knows is one made by an external observer, not necessarily party members themselves; what if people do not know that the subject supposed to know knows not? (See the account of a party trial in Dean, Crowds and Party , 244–8.) The second is a lack of a discussion of the properly organisational dimensions of the party: the mechanisms through which the actual content of what it is ‘supposed to know’ is produced, what control members have over it, and so on. 56 Ibid., 209–10. 57 Ibid., 213. 58 Ibid., 227. Modified. 59 Ibid., 210. 60 Ibid., 249. 61 Gerbaudo, The Digital Party , 5, 14–15. 62 Ibid., 97. The exception to this trend is the DSA. Gerbaudo stresses that this tendency arises not only from belief in the superiority of online participation, but also as a mechanism to prevent entryist attempts to take over or derail the party. 63 The two things are obviously connected: as those who wished to have a more active role in the party’s affairs drifted apart, others fell back into the condition of passive participants. See Ángel Villarino and Rafael Méndez, ‘Podemos Se Instala en el Desencanto: ‘A Muchos Círculos Ya No Viene Casi Nadie’, El Confidencial , 18 November 2018, elconfidencial.com. 64 See Rodrigo Nunes, ‘From Networks to Parties … And Back’, Viewpoint , 1 June 2015, viewpointmag.com. At least until the infighting that spilled over into the 2019 elections, the social legitimacy of these citizen initiatives effectively precluded Podemos from running alone in bigger cities. 65 Michels, Political Parties , 41. 66 For example, Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), for some time, and Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT), in its early days. 67 Michels, Political Parties , 241. My italics.

303

68 ‘We proposed a programme that was premised on levels of working class organisation which do not yet exist. Alongside other factors, this contributed to our inability to win a majority … and would have made the implementation of that programme incredibly difficult had we done so.’ Callum Cant, ‘Understanding Our Defeat’, Notes from Below , 18 November 2019, notesfrombelow.org. 69 Organisation building for its own sake is a form of strategic wager, but a very simple one. It is driven not by a notion of what one seeks to achieve and the steps that may require, but by the purely quantitative calculation that, if one has sufficiently large numbers, it is possible to achieve things, whatever they are. Instead of starting from a common object, one sets out to create an organisation that would in principle deal with all objects; unfortunately, its primary object often ends up becoming the organisation itself. Even more so when divorced from a concrete strategy, the imperative to grow is also an injunction to compete, as the main purpose of politics becomes recruiting more than others. A noticeable side-effect is that perfectly compatible differences will often be magnified into anathema, and tribal allegiance will trump efficacy and the interests of the ecology. Diversity of strategies is an attempt to think how organising cores could grow their capacities without becoming increasingly bogged down in zero-sum games.

7. Radically Relational: The Problem of Fitness

1 See Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion. An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Laclau, On Populist Reason ; Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016). 2 Laclau, On Populist Reason , x. 3 See Íñigo Errejón and Chantal Mouffe, Podemos: In the Name of the People (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2016). After Podemos’s disappointing performance in the Spanish elections of April 2019, Mouffe took some distance from the party’s strategy, saying that she ‘never took very seriously this idea [they had] of “storming heaven” … They mistook populist strategy for a “war of movement” strategy. For me, populist strategy is always a “war of position” strategy’. Samuele Mazzolini, ‘La Apuesta por un Populismo de Izquierda: Entrevista com Chantal Mouffe’, Nueva Sociedad 281 (2019): 131. 4 The difference in attitude between the present moment and that of twenty years ago is palpable, for instance, in communication strategies. Whereas the alterglobalist movement’s paradigmatic communication channel was Indymedia, a stylistically austere service which carried reports on activism written by activists for other activists, we see today a proliferation of glossy publications and alternative media channels designed with a broad audience in mind. 5 See Day, Gramsci Is Dead ; Jon Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth , 173–5.

304

6 For Laclau, the two terms ‘coincide entirely. By radical democracy I do not understand a political system [but] the expansion of the chain of equivalence beyond the limits admitted by a certain political system … This is exactly the same thing as creating a popular identity, because the popular identity is created through the chain of equivalence.’ Ernesto Laclau, ‘The Defender of Contingency’, Eurozine , 2 February 2010, eurozine.com. Modified. 7 Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Marxism Today , January 1979, 20. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. Modified. 10 ‘An economy made up of enterprise-units, a society made up of enterprise-units, is at once the principle of decipherment [of society] linked to liberalism and its programming for the rationalization of a society and an economy.’ Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 , tr. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 225. 11 Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London and New York: Verso, 2018), 71. 12 Ibid. 13 What Mouffe has to say in this regard is that it need not follow the right’s example in ‘promoting closed and defensive forms of nationalism, but instead [should involve] offering another outlet for those affects, mobilizing them around a patriotic identification with the best and more egalitarian aspects of the national tradition’. Ibid. Modified. 14 Laclau, On Populist Reason , 227. See also Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left: Psychonalysis, Theory, Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 207. 15 Yves Citton, Mythocratie: Storytelling et Imaginaire de Gauche (Paris: Amsterdam, 2010), 101–7. ‘To say that, in order to be receivable, a script or a hook must rely on the already known is to place the forms of [political] narration and scriptwriting under the heading of a kind of dynamic evolution that proceeds by means of progressive (incremental) displacement in relation to the statistical point where the attractor lies, rather than by irruptions of absolute novelty.’ Ibid., 106. 16 Stuart Hall, ‘Authoritarian Populism: A Reply to Jessop et al.’, New Left Review 151 (1985): 122. 17 Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, 17. 18 Laclau, On Populist Reason , 63. My italics. 19 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , xii. It would be more precise to say that it does not predetermine them in an absolute way, or that it conditions without predetermining. 20 Ibid., 114. 21 Ibid., xii. It should be noted that ‘external’ here does not mean ‘coming from outside a specific social group’. It merely indicates that articulation does not express an already given reality (an essence) but produces it: ‘heterogeneity does not tend, out of its own differential character, to coalesce around a unity which would result from its mere internal development.’ Laclau, On Populist Reason , 98.

305

22 Laclau, On Populist Reason , 100. Italics in the original. 23 Mouffe, For a Left Populism , 70. My italics. 24 Ibid., 20. 25 Laclau, On Populist Reason , 100. Thus, while he states that ‘the symbolic unification of the group around an individuality … is inherent to the formation of a “people”’, he also observes that ‘Nelson Mandela’s role as the symbol of the nation was compatible with a great deal of pluralism within his movement’. 26 Mouffe, For a Left Populism , 63. 27 In Spain, Podemos’s emphasis on charismatic leadership was resisted from the start by what some have described as the feminisation of politics . Rather than the mere inclusion of women in political spaces or anything to do with a supposed ‘feminine essence’, this is understood as an approach informed by questions and practices historically associated with the feminist movement. It is characterised as embracing partiality and fallibility; being constantly attentive to the heterogeneity produced by class, race and gender differences; foregrounding care and social reproduction; and rejecting a masculinist (aggressive, zerosum, heroic, more rhetorical than empathetic) style of leadership. Many would argue that this more inclusive, dialogical attitude is one of the reasons why mayor of Barcelona and former PAH spokesperson Ada Colau has generally fared better than her Podemos counterparts. See Silvia López Gil, ‘Feminización de la Política’, Diagonal , 19 July 2016, diagonalperiodico.net; Laura Roth and Kate Shea Baird, ‘Municipalism and the Feminization of Politics’, ROAR Magazine 6 (2017): 98–109. 28 ‘The equivalential bond’ established by the empty signifier, Laclau writes, ‘preannounces key aspects of the leader’s function’. Laclau, On Populist Reason , 99. The ultimate source of the dyadic element in Laclau and Mouffe’s thought is the interplay of the mutually limiting logics of equivalence and difference. This effectively places real opposition at the centre of their ontology, despite their superficial and off-the-point remarks about Colletti in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy . See Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , 122–3. 29 Laclau, On Populist Reason , 115. 30 Ibid., 217. Italics in the original. 31 ‘Attractors always carry with them the inertia of past habits: the grammaticality of the script – which conditions their receivability and signifying virtues – is always endowed with what economists call a certain “inelasticity”, which we could refer to as a viscosity ( stickiness ).’ Citton, Mythocratie , 106. In English in the original. See also Sarah Ahmed on ‘a concern for “what sticks”’ as the ‘glue’ holding together different traditions like Marxism, psychoanalysis and, we might add, affect theory. Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 11. 32 For a sustained engagement with the ‘post-political Zeitgeist ’, see Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2005). See also the reflections on ‘postdemocracy’ in Rancière, Disagreement , ch. 5.

306

33 Laclau goes as far as to say that it is ‘the death of politics and its reabsorption by the sedimented forms of the social’, and that only populism is political. Laclau, On Populist Reason , 155. Modified. 34 Spinoza, Political Treatise, Complete Works , 1.6. 35 ‘Ask a populist subject “why?” and a response is seldom forthcoming. Peronism shows that populist politics are structured by habit, rather than belief.’ He concludes: ‘the basic flaw in hegemony theory is not its underestimation of the economy; it is that it substitutes culture for state, ideological representations for institutions, discourse for habit.’ Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony , 60–6. Laclau does recognise this dimension of habit – ‘our notion of “discourse” … involves the articulation of words and actions, so that the quilting function is never a merely verbal operation but is embedded in material practices which can acquire institutional fixity’ – but this is about everything he has to say on the subject. Laclau, On Populist Reason , 106. 36 Ibid., 225. 37 This is, in fact, the conclusion at which Laclau and Mouffe finally arrive by following the dyadic opposition between the logics of difference and equivalence: neither autonomy (difference) nor hegemony (equivalence) can stand on their own as the foundation of the social. ‘From this we can deduce a basic precondition for a radically libertarian conception of politics: the refusal to dominate — intellectually or politically — every presumed “ultimate foundation” of the social.’ Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , 183. 38 It could be objected that this is no different from the logic of anti-Semitism or state racism; but that would only confirm Laclau’s point that this is the logic that any political project, good or bad , must employ. 39 See chapter 6, n. 27. 40 Heinz von Foerster, ‘Cybernetics of Cybernetics’, in Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (New York: Springer-Verlag), 285. 41 The expression was used (critically) by Shannon himself in an exchange with Donald MacKay at the 1951 Macy Conference on cybernetics. Noting that later cybernetics would move closer to Simondon’s position, Yuk Hui points to this moment as the start of a shift towards a new definition of information (leading up to Bateson’s ‘a difference that makes a difference’) and second-order cybernetics. See Yuk Hui, ‘Simondon et la Question de l’Information’, Cahiers Simondon 6 (2015): 38–41. Change was certainly in the air: already at the 1950 edition of the same event, Lawrence Frank had observed that cultures evolve by selecting, from the background noise of events, which signals they will treat as messages, ascribing them relevance and meaning. See Claude E. Shannon, ‘The Redundancy of English’, Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences 1946–1953. The Complete Transactions , ed. Claus Pias (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2016), 268–9. 42 Simondon, L’Individuation , 221. ‘Haecceity of information’ is first proposed as an alternative to ‘quality of information’ for the reason that ‘quality seems to be the absolute

307

property of a being, while we are dealing here with a relation’. He later speaks of ‘ quality … or tension of information’. Ibid., 550. Italics in the original. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 546. Italics in the original. It is easy to see how this connects to the critique of hylemorphism and its illusions of sovereignty as discussed in chapter 3: 'skill is not the exercise of a violent despotism but of a force that is adequate [ conforme ] to the being it directs. At the heart of the skilled individual's true power [ puissance ] there is a relation of recursive causality [with what they act on].' Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode d'Existence des Objets Techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 92. 45 Simondon, L'Individuation , 222. 46 Ibid. 47 Or an aesthetic: a materialist is someone who understands that, in the phrase ‘if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow’, the problem often lies in ‘carrying pictures’. 48 Or, to say the same thing with inverted signs: the most noise that can still be received as information. See Atlan, ‘Noise as a Principle of Self-Organization’, in Selected Writings , 95–113. 49 Ibid., 544. Italics in the original. 50 Luxemburg, ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg , ed. Helen Scott (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008), 103. 51 Whereas ‘Right opportunism’ fails ‘to advance with changing objective circumstances’, ‘Leftists’ wish to outstrip ‘a given stage of development of the objective process’ and ‘strain to realize in the present an ideal which can only be realized in the future. They alienate themselves from the current practice of the majority of the people and from the realities of the day, and show themselves adventurist in their actions’. Mao Zedong, ‘On Practice: On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice, Between Knowing and Doing’, in On Practice and Contradiction , ed. Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 64. 52 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed , tr. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 2005), 80. 53 Ibid., 72. 54 Ibid., 176. 55 Ibid., 67. 56 See Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons on Intellectual Emancipation , tr. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 5, 39. Confusion arises if one fails to heed that Rancière’s argument is about (individual) intellectual emancipation, whereas Freire is speaking of both intellectual and (collective) socio-political emancipation. 57 Boff, Como Trabalhar com o Povo , 23. Italics in the original. 58 Ibid., 15. Evidently, neither Freire nor Boff were concerned with describing an ‘ideal’ pedagogical situation. Rather, they started from their experience in a context of

308

extreme social disparities in which ‘usually [the] leadership group [among the dominated] is made up of men and women who in one way or another have belonged to the social strata of the dominators’. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed , 163. 59 Boff, Como Trabalhar com o Povo , 24. 60 ‘This role may be political, technical, pastoral, educational. For lack of a better word, we could speak of a pedagogical function , so as to bring together all the functions relating to the integral development of the community or the people.’ Ibid. Italics in the original. 61 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed , 69. 62 ‘The paedagogical relation cannot be limited to specifically “scholastic” relations. It exists in all of society in its totality and for each individual with respect to other individuals, between intellectual and non-intellectual strata, between the governing and the governed, between elites and followers, between leaders and those led, between vanguards and bodies of the army. Every relation of “hegemony” is necessarily a paedagogical relation …’ Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. and tr. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 349. 63 Jacques Rancière, Todd May, Saul Newman and Benjamin Noys, ‘Democracy, Anarchism and Radical Politics Today: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,’ tr. John Lechte, Anarchist Studies 16 (2008): 182. In the case of Joseph Jacotot, from which Rancière generalises in The Ignorant Schoolmaster , the tension was not non-existent; it was given in the very fact that students and teacher could not communicate. 64 ‘In fact, the pedagogical process is a two-way thing: it consists in the reciprocal encounter between the agent and his knowledge and the people and their knowledge. And this takes place in a context of reciprocity , dialogue and vital sharing. It is only in the exchange of knowledges that the education process can develop, on the side of the people as well as on the side of the agent.’ Boff, Como Trabalhar com o Povo , 30. Italics in the original. 65 Boff, Como Trabalhar com o Povo , 20. 66 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , 160. 67 Boff, Como Trabalhar com o Povo , 10. 68 Ibid., 68. 69 Ibid., 80. 70 Ibid., 48. This corresponds to the distinction drawn by Carlos Nuñez Hurtado between a ‘ basista ’ (‘grassrootist’) leadership and a ‘ saber preguntar ’ (‘knowing how to ask’) one. Whereas the first raises the people’s immediacy (of attitudes, opinions, etc.) to the level of an argument of authority, the second sees its own role as building alongside the people. See Carlos Nuñez Hurtado, Educar para Transformar, Transformar para Educar (Quito: CEDECO, 1987). I thank David Backer for drawing my attention to this text. 71 Boff, Como Trabalhar com o Povo , 69. See Fanon’s warning: ‘The danger that will haunt [the intellectual who joins the popular struggle] continually is that of becoming the uncritical mouthpiece of the masses [ faire du populisme ]; he becomes a kind of yes-man

309

who nods assent at every word coming from the people, which he interprets as considered judgments.’ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth , 49. One of the main problems with that attitude is that, by reifying certain positions as ‘authentic’, it may fail to incentivise or effectively hinder transformations in course. ‘In an underdeveloped country during the period of struggle traditions are fundamentally unstable and are shot through by centrifugal tendencies. This is why the intellectual often runs the risk of being out of date. The peoples who have carried on the struggle are more and more impervious to demagogy; and those who wish to follow them reveal themselves as nothing more than common opportunists, in other words, latecomers.’ Ibid., 224. 72 Boff, Como Trabalhar com o Povo , 49. 73 Ibid., 10 74 Ibid., 20. 75 Ibid., 81. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 65. 78 Ibid., 81. There may in fact be situations in which actions that would have been reckless or absurd in other circumstances will produce the most powerful response. For example, it is hard to deny that the storming of Conservative Party headquarters in London at the end of 2010, which many decried at the time as mindless vandalism, pushed the British student movement of the period across a quantitative and qualitative threshold. See David Harvie and Keir Milburn, ‘On the Uses of Fairy Dust: Contagion, Sorcery and the Crafting of Other Worlds’, Culture and Organization 24:3 (2018): 179– 95. ‘The interpretation may well be given by the idiot of the ward if he is able to make his voice heard at the right time’, as Guattari puts it (‘Transversality’, 111); and sometimes perhaps ‘the dumber [an initiative] is, the better it works’ – though it is probably better not to turn that into a rule of thumb. Guattari, ‘The Masochist Maoists or the Impossible May’, Psychoanalysis and Transversality , 359. 79 As a matter of fact, whatever capacity we have to carry out such experiments is inseparable from social cooperation past and present, which is precisely one of the things we mean when we say that our knowledge is socially mediated. Even in the case of an experiment we do on our own using nothing but our sense organs, both the world on which we experiment and everything we use to do so – ideas, language, instruments, even our sense organs themselves, taken in evolutionary perspective – bear the imprint of collective effort. ‘The elements of experience … are the product of social efforts in work or in thought … What appears objective in experience is … socially organised .’ Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience , 234. 80 Simondon, L’Individuation , 324–5. 81 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern , tr. Catherine Porter (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 47. It is important to note that this does not mean adding reality indiscriminately , as if everything should be treated as belonging to the ecology, but doing so to those things that one sees as ultimately being, despite differences,

310

‘on the same side’. What many people criticise in Latour seems to be the tendency to elide this distinction. 82 Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , in Collected Works , vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987), 263–4. 83 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Adventures of the Dialectic , tr. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 5. Merleau-Ponty uses the image of the ‘end of prehistory’ to defend Marx from being confused with some of his followers, holding it as evidence that, for the German philosopher, the true revolutionary ‘navigates without a map and with a limited view of the present’ after the revolution just as much as before. Ibid., 6. 84 Ibid., 205. 85 Derrida, Spectres of Marx , xix. 86 One example here is the way in which The Invisible Committee borrow Foucault’s notion of power as the government of conducts (‘action on actions’) but restrict its application to institutions and the state, instead of making it coextensive with all power relations, as the French thinker did. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends , 67–8. This allows them to pit ‘government’ as a transhistorical alien power against the immediacy of ‘the forms that [shared] life spontaneously engenders’ – a sociality that appears to be naturally free from unequal distributions of influence and immune to the centrifugal pull of particular interests. Ibid., 233–4. 87 Deleuze, ‘G’ as in ‘Gauche’. 88 Ibid. ‘Can the group at once pursue its economic and social objectives while allowing individuals to maintain their own access to desire and some understanding of their own destiny? Or, better still: can the group face the problem of its own death? Can a group with a historic mission envisage the end of that mission — can the State envisage the withering away of the State? Can revolutionary parties envisage the end of their socalled mission to lead the masses?’ Guattari, ‘The Group and the Person’, Psychoanalysis and Transversality , 230. 89 Guattari, ‘Transversality’, 79.

Conclusion

1 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ‘Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C’, 8 October 2018, ipcc.ch. 2 Martin Wolf, ‘Why Rigged Capitalism Is Damaging Liberal Democracy’, Financial Times , 18 September 2019, ft.com. 3 William Davies, ‘The New Neoliberalism’, New Left Review 101 (2016): 121–34. 4 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus , 151. Italics in the original. 5 Dauvé, From Crisis to Communisation , 29. Italics in the original. 6 For a discussion of the Green New Deal in light of this problem, see Nicholas Beuret, ‘A Green New Deal for Whom and for What?’, Viewpoint , 24 October 2019, viewpointmag.com. 7 See Rodrigo Nunes, ‘O Luxo do Comunismo’, paper presented at the international colloquium The Thousand Names of Gaia , Rio de Janeiro, 19 September 2014,

311

osmilnomesdegaia.files.wordpress.com. 8 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man , tr. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 34–5.

312

Index

________

A accroches (hooks), 246–7 , 252 , 256 Adorno, Theodor, 81 , 92 , 173 African independence movements, 92 aggregate action, 23 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 36n24 , 142 , 203 , 223 , 255 , 282 alterglobalisation movement, 2 , 16 , 63 , 67 , 68 , 159 , 165 , 230 , 243n4 Althusser, Louis, 45 , 93–4 , 96 , 118 Amazon, 205 American Revolution, 84 , 86 Amerindian societies, 195 anakyklosis politeion , 82 anarchism/anarchists, 3 , 5 , 40 , 55 , 58 , 59 , 63 , 89–90 , 136–7 , 138 , 140 , 141 , 142 , 143 , 146 , 147 , 151 , 197 , 236 Anaximander, 74 antideterminism, 94 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 91 , 116 , 153 , 189 , 285 Arantes, Paulo, 112n84 Arendt, Hannah, 17 , 77 , 105 Argentina, autonomous movements in, 159–60 Aristotle, 83 , 88 , 130 artificial intelligence, 144 Ashby, W. Ross, 123–4 , 145 Asian independence movements, 92 Assembly (Hardt and Negri), 68 , 149 , 152 , 209 , 211n16 atheist providentialism, 138 attractors, 246 , 247 , 252n31 authorities, 184n45 Autonomia (Italian movement), 62 , 164 , 165n10 B Badiou, Alain, 3 , 4 , 81 , 96 , 104 , 113 , 114 , 115 , 214

313

Bakunin, Mikhail, 98 , 100 , 106 , 107 , 108 , 137 , 138 , 139 , 140 , 142 , 258 Balibar, Étienne, 21n6 , 45n45 , 47n51 Bargaining for the Common Good, 223n37 base building, 16 , 129 , 217–8 , 220 , 227 , 228 Bateson, Gregory, 63–4 , 145 , 260 Battle of Seattle (1999), 67 , 166 Beasley-Murray, Jon, 243n5 , 254 Beer, Stafford, 144n49 , 201 Bellamy, Edward, 88 Benjamin, Walter, 51–4 Bennett, W. Lance, 26–7 Bergson, Henri, 91 Berlin Wall, fall of, 68 Bernes, Jasper, 4 Bernstein, Eduard, 93–6 , 108 , 134 Black Lives Matter, 186n46 , 248 , 279 Black Panther Party, 62 , 92 , 127n11 , 129 , 166 , 218 , 273 Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 89 , 106 Boff, Clodovis, 77 , 266–9 , 294 Bogdanov, Aleksander, 8 , 18–21 , 73n53 , 79n67 , 171 , 213 , 270 Bologna, Sergio, 102 Bolshevism/Bolsheviks, 58–9 , 72 , 108–9 , 110 , 111 Bolsonaro, Jair, 279 Boltanski, Luc, 160 , 198 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 94 boundary/boundaries, 80 , 123 , 126–8 , 174 , 225 , 284 Brexit, 279 Brown, Wendy, 51–5 , 57 , 61 , 67 Bukharin, Nikolai, 73n53 , 109 Buonarroti, Philippe, 107 Burke, Edmund, 105 C Cabet, Étienne, 89 , 98 Cadena, Marisol de la, 42 ‘Californian Ideology’ (Barbrook and Cameron), 143 Canguilhem, Georges, 91 capitalist globalisation, 111 , 159 , 160 Carnot, Nicolas Léonard Sadi, 91 Carroll, Lewis, 274 Castells, Manuel, 190

314

Castoriadis, Cornelius, 17 chain of equivalences, 244n6 , 250–1 , 255–6 change as requiring tension, 261 theory of, 155 , 206 , 212 , 213 , 214 , 215 , 216 Chiapello, Ève, 160 , 198 Chinese Cultural Revolution, 59 , 92 Chomsky, Noam, 4 Churchill, Ward, 166 , 170 , 172–3 Cinque Stelle, 232–4 Citton, Yves, 246–7 , 252 Civil Rights Movement, 166 Clastres, Pierre, 195–6 , 235 , 251 Clausius, Rudolf, 91 Clements, Frederic, 174 climate change acceleration of, 2 and anthropocentric exceptionalism, 6 as organising issue, 218n26 climate crisis as exposing limits of aggregate action, 29–30 , 255–6 as most complex challenge facing political action today, 12 as problem for collective action, 30 as problem of political organisation, 29–34 temporal dimension of, 29–30 climate denialists, 279 Clover, Joshua, 4 CO 2 emissions, 280 cognitive sciences, 144 Colau, Ada, 250n27 collective action, 23 , 24–5 , 26–7 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 33 , 34 , 116 , 120 , 141–2 , 163 , 184 , 187 , 203 , 205 , 216 , 223 , 282–3 collective behaviour, 46 , 180 , 181 , 284 , 285 collective identity, 12 , 202 , 248 , 255 collective power, 35 , 36 , 39 , 218 collective powerlessness, 38 , 68 collective processes, 185 , 186 , 191 , 236 , 276 , 286 collectivity, 37 , 43 , 44 , 64 , 202 Colletti, Lucio, 73n53 , 93n27 , 251n28 Combahee River Collective, 60n32 communalism, 118 , 143 , 146

315

D

communism organisation of, 73n51 revival of idea of, 3 tension of with recourse to scientificity, 108 Como Trabalhar com o Povo (How to Work with the People) (Boff), 77 , 267–9 complexity as characteristic of revolution, 13 , 118 , 288 from hylemorphism to, 105–11 composition as characteristic of revolution, 13 , 118 , 288 class composition, 102 , 201 of ecology, 216–17 , 285 political composition, 68 , 79 political recomposition, 237–8 from transitivity to, 97–105 Comte, Auguste, 89 , 91 Condorcet, Marquis de, 91 confluencias (shared platforms), 233 connective action, 26–7 connective party, 226–8 conscious leadership, 181n40 constraints, 36 , 38 , 40 , 71 , 128 , 214 , 219 , 254 , 264 , 270 , 271 contingency as characteristic of revolution, 288 from necessity to, 90–7 contingent outcome, 194 , 215 Corbyn, Jeremy, 234 , 238 , 279 corporations, vertically integrated, multidivisional corporations, 168n18 COVID-19 pandemic, 279 , 280 critical size, 31 , 32 , 155 , 283 , 289 cybernetics, 7 , 11 , 143 , 146 , 259 , 283

Darwin, Charles, 94 Dauvé, Gilles, 288 Dean, Jodi, 3 , 4 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 61 , 64 , 175–6 , 228 , 229–30 , 231–2 Debt Collective, 218 , 222n36 Deleuze, Gilles, 23 , 91n22 , 100 , 115 , 116 , 164 , 179 , 189 , 268 , 275 Democracia Real Ya, 204n6 Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, 117 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), 232 , 233n62 , 234

316

E

Derrida, Jacques, 37 , 115 , 290 Descartes, René, 125 determinism, 13 , 67 , 79 , 93 , 99 , 118 , 122 , 130 , 132 , 133 , 136 , 140 dialectic, 22 , 73n53 , 77n62 , 79n65 , 93 , 156 , 157 diffuse control, 159 , 198 , 199 , 205 , 209n12 , 236 digital networks, 197 digital party, 232–4 digital platforms, 184n45 , 190 Di Maio, Luigi, 234 Di Prima, Diane, 201 directionality, 221 , 256 , 262 , 274 dispersion, 29 , 34 , 41 , 42 , 49 , 52 , 61 , 179 , 223 , 286 distributed action, 12 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 170 distributed leadership, 159 , 180 , 187 , 189 , 190 , 198–9 , 202–3 , 285 Dolgoff, Sam, 147 , 148n63 ‘double truth of neoliberalism’ (Mirowski), 10 , 148n66 Douglass, Frederick, 172 Duda, John, 148n63 dyad/dyadic, 16 , 75–6 , 141 , 223 , 250–1 , 255n37 , 257–9 , 262 , 285 dynamic systems theory, 144

ecology, 195–9 , 216–17 , 285 , 287 functional differentiation, 167 , 168 how does an ecology decide? 173–9 integrated ecology, 228 , 230 and leadership, 182 , 188 , 198–9 , 203 , 236 , 250 , 284 less than an organism, more than an organisation, 173–4 needs of, 223 from networks to organisation as, 159–73 organisational ecology, 14–15 , 39n32 , 41 , 49 , 164–173 , 174n24 , 182 , 203 organisation as, 49 , 163–4 , 166 , 170 , 215 , 225 , 285 party-ecology relation, 227–8 , 230 , 231–2 and plurality, 28 thinking and acting ecologically, 168 , 170 , 199 , 277 , 286 ecosystem, 19 , 126 , 173 , 174 Egyptian Revolution, 224 electoral politics, 204 , 217 , 224 , 231 , 235 , 237–8 emancipation, 37 , 94 , 98 , 107 , 111 , 147 , 148 , 192 , 194 , 264 , 265 , 267 , 284 embryology, 144

317

F

G

Empire (Hardt and Negri), 144 , 152 Engels, Friedrich, 100 , 106 , 107 , 108 , 151 , 192–3 equivalences, chain of, 244n6 , 250 , 251 , 255 , 256 essentialism, 247 experimental politics, 270–1 exterminism, 2n1 Extinction Rebellion, 205 failures, 214 , 215 , 281 Fanon, Frantz, 100 fatalism, 154 , 189 , 262 feminisation of politics, 250n27 Ferguson riots, 279 15M movement, 67n43 , 204 , 248 fitness agent of, 262 problem of, 15 , 244–77 , 289 across various scales, 289 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 51 , 73–4 force, over form, 71–80 , 198 form force over, 71–80 , 198 organisational form, 160 Fortini, Franco, 173 Foucault, Michel, 48n54 , 96 , 100 Fourier, Charles, 89 , 98 , 107 France Insoumise, 234 Freeman, Jo, 40 , 178 , 197 Freire, Paulo, 15 , 241 , 264–7 French Revolution, 23 , 84 , 85 , 86 , 88n13 Freud, Sigmund, 43 , 52 , 56–7 , 61n33 , 92 Fukuyama, Francis, 96 Fuller, Buckminster, 92 futurology, 92 Gay Liberation, 25 , 129 , 165 Gerbaudo, Paolo, 233 Gezi Park, 248 Gilbert, Jeremy, 37n29 , 43 gilets jaunes (yellow vests), 175 , 248 , 279 global economic crisis (2007), 2 , 67

318

global far right, 279 globalisation alterglobalisation movement, 2 , 16 , 63 , 67 , 68 , 159 , 165 , 230 , 243n4 capitalist globalisation, 111 , 159 , 160 global recession, 280 global temperatures, 280 the global, 29 , 33 , 148 , 214n20 global warming, 34 Glorious Revolution, 85 Google, 205 Gorz, André, 101 Gramsci, Antonio, 132 , 181 , 187 , 247 ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ (Freud), 43 Guattari, Félix, 23 , 61n35 , 91n22 , 100 , 115 , 116 , 121 , 179 , 189 , 211 , 229 , 268 H haecceity, 260 Hakim Bey, 113 Hall, Stuart, 97n42 , 244 , 247 Hardin, Garrett, 166n13 Hardt, Michael, 14 , 46n49 , 116 , 144 , 146 , 148 , 149 , 150 , 151 , 152–3 , 209 , 210 Hatto, Arthur, 84n5 Hayek, Friedrich von, 14 , 142–3 , 145n56 , 146n57 , 151 , 174 Hegel, G.W.F., 91 , 151 hegemonic articulation, 103 , 104 , 250 , 255 hegemony external hegemony, 255 , 256 ‘false ideas of ’ (Bologna), 102n54 fragile, 203 internal hegemony, 256 metonymic structure of, 249 neoliberal hegemony, 58 , 63 , 252 return of, 243 theory of, 42 , 254n35 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe), 103 , 249 Heidegger, Martin, 92 hekousion , 130–1 Henwood, Doug, 4 hetero-organisastion, 48 , 123 , 124 , 126 , 127 , 128 , 282 hierarchical organisation, 60 , 162 , 250

319

historical determinism, 13 , 99 , 118 , 130 , 133 , 136 historical development, laws of, 91 historical materialism, 11 , 93 , 108 , 117n97 , 156 , 194 Histories (Polybius), 82 history Scooby-Doo theory of history, 167n16 tribunal of, 97 Hobbes, Thomas, 43 , 44 , 249 Holloway, John, 116 homophobia, 2 Hong Kong, 279 hooks ( accroches ), 246–7 , 252 , 256 horizontalism/horizontalists/horizontality, 1 , 2–3 , 5 , 8 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 38 , 40 , 42 , 45 , 48 , 63 , 65 , 67 , 68 , 70 , 76 , 126 , 159 , 160 , 161 , 162 , 175 , 176 , 177 , 178 , 179–89 , 194 , 209 , 210 , 250 , 251 , 257 , 284 , 285 hubs, 184n45 , 198 , 204 Hungarian uprising (1956), 92 Hurricane Sandy (2012), 217 hylemorphism, 105–11 hyperleader, 233 , 234 I identitarianisms, 2 identity collective identity, 12 , 202 , 248 , 255 national identity, 246 political identity, 173 , 248 popular identity, 244n6 , 249 , 251 identity politics, 52 , 60n32 Imaginary Party, 140n42 , 258 immunity, 273 , 274 , 275–6 individuation, philosophy of, 8 , 32 , 45 , 46 , 48 , 259 information, tension of, 260–2 , 264 , 271 information theory, 8 , 143 , 259 Ingold, Tim, 157n93 integrated ecology, 228 , 230 Interdisciplinary Symposium on Self-Organizing Systems (1959), 123 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 280 interiority, 42 , 130 , 132 , 136 internal hegemony, 255–6 internet, impacts of, 67 , 144 , 159 ‘Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (Marx), 98

320

J

K

L

‘invisible collective dictatorship’ (Bakunin), 139 The Invisible Committee, 140n42 , 159 , 224 , 275n86 ‘iron law of oligarchy’ (Michels), 40 , 236 Jackson, William, 166 James, William, 21n5 Jameson, Frederic, 4 Jefferson, Thomas, 87n11 Jones, Graham, 174n24 Juventud Sin Futuro, 204n6 Kant, Immanuel, 72–3 , 73n53 , 74 , 91 , 219 Kästner, Erich, 53–4 Kautsky, Karl, 103n57 , 248 Kelly, Kevin, 126n9 Kelvin, Lord, 91 Khmer Rouge, 89 King, Martin Luther, 171–2 Koselleck, Reinhart, 83 , 85–6 Kropotkin, Peter, 137–8 , 142

Labour Party (UK), 232 Lacan, Jacques, 131 Laclau, Ernesto, 42 , 43–4 , 48 , 48n55 , 103–4 , 114–15 , 234 , 241–2 , 243 , 244 , 245 , 246 , 247 , 248 , 249–52 , 253 , 254 , 255 , 256 Lakey, George, 167–8 leaderless/leaderlessness, 43 , 180 , 186n46 , 188 , 283–4 leaders defined, 187 as good listeners, 211 hyperleaders, 233 , 234 relation of with base, 250 , 269 leadership. See also potentia ; potestas according to Laclau, 247 , 249–52 according to Mouffe, 249–52 charismatic leadership, 187n48 , 247 , 250 and collective identity, 248 conscious leadership, 181n40 distinction between weak and strong leadership, 234 distributed leadership, 159 , 180 , 187 , 189 , 190 , 198–9 , 202–3 , 285 ecology and, 250

321

as function, 47n50 , 248 , 257 , 258 , 259 , 266 , 284 . See also leadership function meanings of, 46–7 , 180 , 182 , 186 , 257 pathologies of excessive leadership, 257 as position, 47n50 , 257 , 258 , 284 . See also leadership position as problematic concept, 283 role of, 209 too little leadership, 257 , 258 , 261 too much leadership, 258 , 261 leadership function, 180 , 182 , 183 , 184 , 188 , 261 , 284 . See also leadership, as function leadership position, 44 , 182 , 186 , 188 , 248 , 261 , 284 . See also leadership, as position left melancholia, 13 , 51–3 , 66n42 the left crisis of, 51–2 1917 left, 213 1968 left, 143 paralysing dualism in, 13 , 69–70 the two lefts, 56–65 , 70 left-wing melancholia, 63 , 66n41 left-wing schizophrenia, 64n38 legitimacy, 176 , 194–5 , 251 , 285 . See also political legitimacy Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 49 , 151n77 , 223 Lenin, Vladimir, 69–70 , 77 , 77n62 , 108 , 109 , 127n12 , 135 , 140 , 156 , 283 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 95 liberal democratic institutions, crisis of, 2 Liberation Theology, 15 , 129 , 266 libertarians, 40 , 67 Lih, Lars, 135n32 , 156n91 localism, 41 the local, 9 , 10 , 29 , 33 , 212 , 214n20 , 217 logical opposition, 71 , 75 , 76 , 93n27 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 88 Lukács, Georg, 69 , 72 , 81 , 135n29 , 288 Luxemburg, Rosa, 108 , 133–4 , 135 , 136 , 156 , 157 , 159 , 262 M Machiavelli, Niccolò, 77–8 , 84n5 macropolitics, 13 , 24n12 , 24n13 , 62 , 70 Maeckelbergh, Marianne, 160–1

322

Malatesta, Errico, 141 , 142 Malcolm X, 171–2 Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels), 151 Maniglier, Patrice, 175 , 177n29 , 195n60 the Many, and/or the One, 41–50 Maoism/Maoists, 21–2 , 104n59 Mao Zedong, 262 Marcuse, Herbert, 100 Marker, Chris, 59 Marx, Karl, 91 , 93 , 95n33 , 98 , 100 , 106 , 107 , 108 , 137 , 138 , 139 , 140 , 151 , 156 , 191–3 , 272 Marxism/Marxists, 32 , 40 , 77 , 89–90 , 91 , 93 , 94 , 96 , 99 , 101 , 105–6 , 108 , 117 , 132 , 141–2 , 143–4 , 231 , 288 mass connective party, 226–8 mass movements, 201 , 224 , 236 mass organisations, 41 , 121 , 164 , 183 , 190 , 197 , 201 , 202 , 228 mass self-communication, 190 mass strikes, 133 , 134 , 159 materialism dialectical materialism, 73n53 historical materialism, 11 , 93 , 108 , 117n97 , 156 , 194 McCulloch, Warren, 150 McLuhan, Marshall, 92 mediation, 69–73 , 76 , 78 , 79 , 80 melancholia, 13 , 52 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 64 , 66 , 69 , 120 , 212 , 213 , 290–1 . See also left melancholia; left-wing melancholia Mélènchon, Jean-Luc, 234 memes, 182 , 184 , 212 Michels, Robert, 40 , 235 , 236 micropolitics, 13 , 24n12 , 24n13 , 55 , 62 , 70 molar revolution, 24 molecular biology, 143 molecular revolutions, 23 , 24 Momentum, 232 Morris, William, 89 Mouffe, Chantal, 42 , 103–4 , 114–15 , 241–2 , 243 , 244 , 245 , 246 , 247 , 248–52 , 253 , 254 , 255 Movement of 1977, 102 movements. See also alterglobalisation movement; mass movements; Occupy

323

movement; social movements African independence movements, 92 as always nebulae or networks, 26 Argentina, autonomous movements in, 159 , 160 Asian independence movements, 92 Civil Rights Movement, 166 drawing boundaries as central question for, 80 15-M movement, 67n43 , 204 , 248 Movement of 1977, 102 networked movements, 3 , 202 new social movements, 59 , 144 , 230 political movements, 107 , 249 workers’ movement, 26 Movimento Passe Livre (MPL), 221–2 Moyer, Bill, 167–8 multitude, 21n6 , 36n26 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 147 , 149 , 150 , 151 , 152 , 153 , 209 , 210–11 , 243 N national identity, 246 nationalism, 2 , 243 , 246 , 252 necessity, from necessity to contingency, 90–7 Negri, Antonio, 14 , 42 , 44 , 45 , 46n49 , 47 , 48n52 , 48n55 , 101 , 116 , 144 , 146 , 148 , 149 , 150 , 151 , 152–3 , 209 , 210 neoliberalism, 10 , 37n29 , 58 , 63 , 93 , 143 , 146 , 148 , 241–2 , 245 , 252 , 280 networked Leninism, 15 , 16 networked movements, 3 , 202 network-event, 182 , 183 , 217 network paradigm, 160 , 162 , 163 networks digital networks, 197 from networks to organisation as ecology, 159–73 offline networks, 186n47 online networks, 186n47 social networks, 161 , 162 , 190 network theory, 8 , 42n35 New Communalism/New Communalists, 143 , 147 , 148 New Economic Policy (NEP), 109 , 148 New Labour, 55 New Objectivists, 54 new social movements, 59 , 144 , 230

324

O

1917, 58 , 60 , 61 , 63 , 64 , 66 1977 movement, 164 1968, 58 , 59 , 61 , 63 , 64 , 66 , 68 , 100 , 224 1989, 68 , 224 No Les Votes, 204n6 non-equilibrium thermodynamics, 144 non-material returns, 219 nucleation, 31 , 32 , 45 , 155 , 181 , 283 Nuit Debout, 195n60 , 248

Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 234 Occupy movement, 4 , 38n30 , 175–6 , 217 , 248 offline networks, 186n47 oligarchy, iron law of, 40 , 236 the One, and/or the Many, 41–50 online networks, 186n47 On Populist Reason (Laclau), 249–50 operaismo , 22 , 101 , 209n14 , 237 order from noise, 31 order through fluctuation, 31 organisation. See also hetero-

organisastion; mass

organisations; political

organisation; self-organisation as coming in various forms and variable degrees, 5 compared to self-organisation, 155 as domain with its own relative autonomy, 5 as ecology, 49 , 163–4 , 166 , 170 , 215 , 225 , 285 and forms, 286 hierarchical organisation, 60 , 162 , 250 as historically and by its very nature a site of traumas, 11 importance of, 3 meanings of, 17–22 as mediation, 69–71 , 78 natural organisation, 7 paradox of, 261 and party, 6 , 40 as pharmakon , 12 , 37 , 39 and politics, 270–1 and potentia / potestas , 34–7 question of, 3–4 , 5 , 14 , 28 , 39 , 65–9 , 163 , 286

325

return of the question of, 4 , 65 , 68 and spontaneity, 6 , 7 , 155–6 theory of, elements for, 159–99 , 201–39 theory of, start of, 27 theory of, usefulness of, 280 as though of in terms of forces more than forms, 12 trauma of organisation, 34–41 , 155 , 202 , 281 , 282 organisational ecology, 14–15 , 39n32 , 41 , 49 , 165 , 174n24 , 182 , 203 organisational experimentation, 62 organisational form, 5 , 12 , 28 , 38 , 40 , 41 , 49 , 60 , 72 , 76 , 161 , 162 , 163 , 164 , 202 , 204 , 225 , 229 , 286 organisation building, 239n69 Organisationsfrage , 3 , 69 , 72n52 organised collective subject, 112 , 121 organising cores, 14 , 183 , 185 , 186 , 190 , 197 , 198 , 202–10 , 216 , 223 , 225 , 231 , 233 , 238 , 239n69 , 250 , 287 organising costs, 190 otherness, 266 , 267 , 268 Owen, Robert, 89 , 98 P packs, 179–80 , 182 PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages), 129 , 205 , 218 Paris Commune, 138 particularity, 101n49 , 151 , 251 party-builders, 40 party/parties. See also specific parties afterlife of, 224–39 as compared to social movements, 235–6 connective party, 226–8 Dean’s plea for, 228–30 , 231 digital party, 232 as element for theory of organisation, 201 experimentation with formats by, 202 mass connective party, 226–8 organisation and, 6 , 40 party-base relation, 234–5 party-ecology relation, 227–8 , 230 , 231–2 Pirate parties, 232 platform parties, 208 return of, 225 as service providers, 234–5

326

patriarchalism, 2 peaceful revolution, 139 pedagogical process, 265 , 266 , 267 , 267n64 peripheral participants, 217n24 Peronism, 254 pharmakon , 12 , 37 , 39 , 75n56 , 188 Phillips, John, 174 Pirate parties, 232 Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, 204n6 Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH), 129 , 205 , 218 platform logic, 201–11 platform parties, 208 platform politics, 205 platforms digital platforms, 184n45 , 190 as element for theory of organisation, 201 examples of, 205 role of, 206 shared platforms ( confluencias ), 233 tests of, 207–8 Plato, 74–5 , 83 plausible promise, 212 plurality, 28 , 49 , 49n56 , 225 , 263 , 286 Podemos, 232 , 233 , 234 , 250n27 , 279 political identity, 173 , 248 political legitimacy, 2 , 224 political movements, 107 , 249 political organisation climate crisis as a problem of, 29–34 defined, 21 , 282 form of, 160 as part of a general theory of organisation, 7–8 question of, 162n6 thinking of ecologically, 164 , 168 , 170 , 199 , 277 , 286 towards a theory of, 8 , 17–50 traditional political organisations, 233 political revolution, 89 , 90 , 107 , 137 politics electoral politics, 204 , 217 , 224 , 231 , 235 , 237–8 experimental politics, 270 feminisation of, 250n27

327

identity politics, 52 , 60n32 macropolitics, 13 , 24n12 , 24n13 , 62 , 70 micropolitics, 13 , 24n12 , 24n13 , 55 , 62 , 70 as pedagogy, 266 platform politics, 205 with the subject in, 153–7 , 283 Polletta, Francesca, 189n50 Polybius, 82–3 popular identity, 244n6 , 249 , 251 populism, 15 , 227 , 241–56 Porcaro, Mimmo, 3–4 , 225–7 , 228 , 231 , 232 post-industrial revolution, 92 post-political centrist consensus, 190 potentia , 21 , 34 , 35n22 , 36 , 38 , 39 , 47 , 49 , 50 , 80 , 129 , 148 , 155 , 179 , 187 , 216 , 235 , 236 , 237 , 275 , 281 , 286 potestas , 21 , 36 , 37 , 47 , 49 , 129 , 138 , 155 , 187 , 236 , 257 , 263 , 286 powerlessness, 30 , 68 , 129 , 141 , 154 , 282 Prigogine, Ilya, 31–2 Prince (Machiavelli), 77n59 Progress, 84 , 85 , 86 , 88 , 89 , 90 , 91 , 92 , 93 , 95 Project Cybersyn, 143 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 89 , 98 , 107 PSOE (Socialist Party), 233 psychoanalysis, 56n20 , 252n31 Q quantum threshold of resonance, 32n20 R radical democracy, 244 radicality, 15 , 117 , 271 , 272 , 276 radically relational, 241–77 Rancière, Jacques, 113 , 114 , 115 realism, 270 , 272 real opposition, 72 , 74 , 75 , 78 , 93n27 , 171 , 251n28 reciprocity, 47 , 128 , 129 , 155 , 173 , 257 , 267n64 , 284 , 285 , 286 , 287 recomposition, 237–8 ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’ (Brown), 67 revolution after the, 111–20 age of, 96 American Revolution, 84 , 86 Chinese Cultural Revolution, 92

328

S

complexity as characteristic of, 13 , 118 , 288 composition as characteristic of, 13 , 118 , 288 as concept of political change, 86 contingency as characteristic of, 288 in crisis, 81–120 crisis of, 13 , 14 divorce of with Progress, 92 Egyptian Revolution, 224 as fairly recent idea, 82 French Revolution, 23 , 84 , 85 , 86 , 88n13 meanings associated with, 29 in modern era, 272 molar revolution, 24 molecular revolutions, 23 , 24 move of to ontological or transcendental level, 273 peaceful revolution, 139 political revolution, 89 , 90 , 107 , 137 post-industrial revolution, 92 in the revolution, 59 Russian Revolution, 58 , 109 , 133 , 135 , 167 scientific revolution, 85n8 sexual revolution, 23 , 25 social revolution, 87–8 , 89 , 90 , 107 , 137–8 taking of off the agenda, 93 tendency as characteristic of, 13 , 118 time for, 81–90 and transition, 288 uses of term, 84–5 Robinson, Cedric, 47n50 , 187n48 Rosso (journal), 164–5 Ruda, Frank, 4 Russian Revolution, 58 , 109 , 133 , 134 , 167 Russian Social Democratic Party, 140

Saint-Simon, Henri de, 98 , 107 Sanders, Bernie, 234 , 238 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 116 scale, 1 , 10–14 , 17 , 19 , 20 , 22 , 23 , 26 , 29–34 , 49n56 , 80 , 113 , 116 , 119 , 125–7 , 131 , 150 , 155 , 181–2 , 184 , 186 , 188 , 202 , 203 , 214n20 , 216 , 220 , 223 , 282 , 287 , 289 in relation to organisation and self-organisation, 155

329

relativity, 19–20 , 33 126 , 127 , 155 , 204n5 scientific revolution, 85n8 Scooby-Doo theory of history, 167n16 Segerberg, Alexandra, 26–7 self-management, 7 , 143 , 176 , 186 , 282 , 284 self-organisation as compared to self-management, 176 , 186 , 282 , 284 defined, 46 as emergence of constraints, 36 and hetero-organisation, 48 , 124 , 126–8 , 282 and organisation in relation to scale, 155 relation with organisation, 7 scientific approaches to, 282 as seen from the inside, 10 , 16 , 190 , 283 spontaneity and, 14 as theory of justice, 145 as value-neutral, 144–5 Serge, Victor, 59n30 , 279 sexual revolution, 23 , 25 Shannon, Claude, 259–60 , 261 shared objective world, 263 , 264 shared platforms ( confluencias ), 233 Silicon Valley, 143 , 146 Simondon, Gilbert, 15 , 32 , 45 , 46 , 75 , 259–60 , 262 , 268 Sitrin, Marina, 160 Situationist International, 143 social heterogeneity, 250 Socialism or Barbarism, 143 Socialist Party (PSOE), 233 social media, 128 , 164 , 182 , 183 , 184 , 198 , 232 social movements, 17 , 26 , 60 , 144 , 230 , 235–6 , 250 . See also new social movements social networks, 161 , 162 , 190 social revolution, 87–8 , 89 , 90 , 107 , 137–8 socio-technical assemblages, 121–2 Soviet bloc, 59 , 62 , 63 , 68 , 92 , 93 Spanish municipalism, 279 Spencer, Herbert, 91 Spengler, Oswald, 92 Spinoza, Baruch, 21 , 22 , 36n26 , 44 , 48n52 , 124–5 , 126 , 153 , 253 spontaneity

330

according to Gramsci, 181 development of, 123 interiority or exteriority? 130–6 organisation and, 6 , 7 , 155–6 , 282 perversion of, 128n13 self-organisastion and, 14 , 122 stabilisation, 47 , 185 , 186 , 187 , 202 , 261 Stalin, Joseph, 109 , 110 Stalinism, 258 strategic wager, 216–8 , 221–3 , 227 , 231 , 238 , 239 , 287 strategies, diversity of, as element for theory of organisation, 201 , 215–16 , 222–3 , 288 , 290 strategy, 15 , 35 , 50 , 111 , 116n96 , 142 , 170–1 , 202 , 209–16 , 218 , 220 , 222 , 223 , 224 , 227–8 , 239n69 , 242n3 , 254 , 271 , 287 , 289 , 290 left populist, 242n3 , 246 Thatcherism's, 247 strategic pluralism, 215 , 216 , 288 structural analysis, 220 structural germ, 32n20 , 46 structuralism, 143 symmetrical schismogenesis, 63 , 65 Syriza, 111 , 224 , 237 , 279 systemic change, 13 , 32 , 34 , 115 , 118 , 119 , 120 , 148 , 214 , 222 , 223 , 254 , 288 T Tahrir Square, 248 Tansley, Arthur George, 174 Tarde, Gabriel, 23 , 181n39 , 184n44 Taylor, Keith, 90n20 tektology, 8 , 18–20 teleology, 14 , 94 , 99 , 117 , 122 , 130 , 141–53 , 154 , 157 , 161 , 186 , 194 , 199 , 282 , 283 Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), 113 tendency, as characteristic of revolution, 13 , 118 tension change as requiring, 261 of information, 260–2 , 271 as verified experimentally, 268 Thatcherism, 247 theories dynamic systems theory, 144

331

elements for theory of

organisation, 159–99 , 201–39 .

See also diffuse control;

distributed leadership; ecology;

organising cores; party/parties;

platforms; strategies, diversity of; vanguard-function information theory, 8 , 143 , 259 network theory, 8 , 42n35 Scooby-Doo theory of history, 167n16 self-organisation as theory of justice, 145 start of theory of organisation, 27 theory of change, 155 , 206 , 212 , 213 , 214 , 215 , 216 theory of hegemony, 42 , 254n35 towards a theory of political organisation, 8 , 17–50 usefulness of theory of organisation, 280 thermodynamics non-equilibrium thermodynamics, 144 second law of, 91 , 94 , 124 , 236 use of, 7 thinking and acting ecologically, 286 thinking and acting globally and locally, 28–34 Third International’s Fifth Congress (1924), 69 Third Way, 55 , 258 Thomas, Peter, 3 Tiqqun, 32n21 , 140n42 , 258 Toffler, Alvin, 92 Toscano, Alberto, 104 transformation environmental transformation, 119 historical transformation, 22 logics of, 215 , 289 molecular transformation, 23n10 , 24 political transformation, 112 social transformation, 2 , 13 , 60 , 117 , 142 , 212 structural transformation, 289 systemic transformation, 262 transindividuality, 45 , 47 , 125 , 210 transition, 288 , 289 transitive theory of consciousness, 122 , 132–3 , 138 , 153 transitivity, 97–105 , 110 , 111 , 112 , 247 Traverso, Enzo, 66n41

332

U

Tronti, Mario, 209n14 Trotsky, Leon, 88 , 108 Trump, Donald, 279 Turner, Fred, 143 2001 crisis (Argentina), 159 2011 protests, 4 , 65 , 67 , 68 , 159 , 177 , 204 , 224 , 230 , 237 , 279 , 280 2013 protests (Brazil), 204 , 221

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), 30 universality, 99 , 108n71 , 110 , 114 , 251 utopians/utopianism, 57 , 89 , 90n20 , 91n22 , 108 , 141n44 , 146 , 147 , 193 , 222 V vanguard according to Marxist tradition, 262 association of with necessity, 193 as function, 264 and masses, 263 old conception of, 199 as position, 264 use of term, 191–3 versus vanguardism, 190–5 vanguard-function, 14 , 159 , 194 , 195 , 198 , 199 , 209 , 211 , 227 , 251 vanguardism, twilight of, 191 verticalism/verticalists/verticality, 5 , 8 , 13 , 15 , 16 , 38 , 40 , 42 , 43 , 45 , 48 , 68 , 70 , 71 , 76 , 78 , 80 , 117 , 125 , 126 , 160 , 161 , 162 , 168 , 169 , 192 , 209 , 251 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 6n10 , 188 , 195n61 voluntarism, 155 , 262 , 268 Von Foerster, Heinz, 123 , 124 , 125 W Walter, Grey, 149n74 Ward, Colin, 147 War on Terror, 67 Weber, Max, 182 Weitling, Wilhelm, 98 Western Marxism, 93 What Is to Be Done? (Lenin), 69 , 140n42 , 156n92 white supremacism, 2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 282 Women’s Liberation, 25 , 129 , 165

333

X

Y

Z

workers’ movement, 26 World Social Forum, 165 Wright, Erik Olin, 215 , 220 , 288 xenophobia, 2 X.net, 204n6 yellow vests (gilets jaunes) , 175 , 248 , 279 #YoSoy132, 248 Zapatistas, 117 , 159

334