"Neither vertical nor horizontal". Rodrigo Nunes asks: how can the power of the local, and our planet-level crises, best join themselves up?
We were immediately caught by the title of this book - Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization, by Rodrigo Nunes, Assistant Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
The implication of it we straightaway agree with - that those who idealise hierarchy and top-down directedness in political movements, or those who idealise mutuality and horizontalism, are both mistaken.
A more “ecosystem”-like metaphor is needed - and it’s thrilling to see, in this excerpt from the book in Viewpoint magazine, that Nunes agrees. But he makes some interesting critiques of a pure “localism” - some of which (not all) we would share - and which are worth cross-posting (some editing below):
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Historically, debates on political organization have tended to be prescriptive. They asked what kind of organization 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 organizational form. Which one was the best (the party, the council, the network, and so on)? What structures and procedures should it have? What kind of relations it should entertain with the masses?
To start by thinking organization as ecology is to break with this tradition in two ways. First, an organizational ecology is not a model to be realized, 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, thinking organization as ecology avoids the hidden assumption that there is a single form that should be shared by all organizations, or a single organization to which everyone tendentially should belong.
Instead, one takes plurality as a point of departure, without supposing that it could or even should be homogenized 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, my 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, the realization of the inherent vice in actually existing socialist regimes and their organizational model has become increasingly impossible to evade. In response, 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 valorization of the ‘local’ over the ‘global’ would resemble more and more an abdication of the systemic dimension altogether….
If there is a certain solidarity between liberalism and post-1968 radical thought, it is above all on this point. They both 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…
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 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 are evidently coordinated. But the vast majority have 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. It cannot be solved within a framework that opposes aggregate to collective action, placing the former above the latter. That is because, on the one hand, the global scale of the problem makes any exclusively ‘local’ solutions implausible…
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…
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 fossil-fuel 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 happens that, in relative terms, this is at a small scale…
Nunes goes on to discuss how some activists have deployed the maths and physics of complexity science. They use it to show that “ in special circumstances, a relatively small cause could trigger a radical transformation of a system’s overarching patterns of organization… global change can come out of locally circumscribed action”. (Maybe you’ll recognise it as “the butterfly effect”).
However Nunes re-assesses the original science here (from papers by Ilya Prigogine). Prigogine reminds us that these “relatively small causes” still have to be of a sufficiently large enough size and intensity, so they can genuinely perturb big systems (which are good at damping down fluctuations in order to hang together, as a system). Nunes goes on to draw the lessons, mapping from systems of nature to systems of politics:
If the problem of organization 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 neighborhood struggle, changing national policy, defeating a global industry or changing the world system, it appears that, to most, the word “local” 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 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. [We’d respectfully disagree on the "only”… Ed.]
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 threat posed by looming climate catastrophe 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…
The strong claim that I am making here is that successful processes of social change are never wholly centralized or dispersed, they are always distributed, even if we may perceive them as being more centralized or dispersed compared to one another or to themselves at different points in time.
A young activist once told me, ‘What we need to do is disperse power.’ 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 (or power-to) is already quite dispersed? How effective can a strategy of dispersing it be in the face of large concentrations of potestas (or power-over)?
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 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 organization.
We recognise much of this argument. Our exploration of “cosmo-localism” and “citizen action networks” shares the same curiosity as to how localism or community power can indeed have global ambitions and connections, and could amass its forces in a “parallel polis” (and alternative economy). However, we have a lot more faith that Nunes that “aggregate small actions” have a transformative power, and our reading of the physics supports that - see our past references to fractality and quantum social science.
But it’s a healthy and subtle debate, and we thank Nunes for sharpening it. For much more on this, pre-order our A/UK founder Indra Adnan’s forthcoming book The Politics of Walking Up.