Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: Interview with Rodrigo Nunes

Nick Dyer-Witheford: Rodrigo, it is a great pleasure to interview you about your new book, Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization (Verso; 2021) which I read over the summer, admiring and appreciating its many, many insights. You have already given an excellent podcast interview with James Butler of Novara Media. That covers much of the ground customarily addressed in such conversation, discussing your own political formation, and then systematically reviewing the book’s major concepts. I don’t want to just duplicate that fine exchange. So, I have tried to more or less start where it ended, finding some new questions that may circle back the basic ideas of the book, but from different angles.

The title, Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal, clearly refers to the arguments that for the past three decades have bedeviled the left—however one defines that!—over the merits of hierarchically structured parties versus purportedly flat assemblies. These disputes, which of course have deep historical roots, accompanied the alterglobalist movement, the Occupy wave and then electoral efforts such as those of Sanders and Corbyn. And they took place in contexts where no organizational form has been very—or at all—successful in supplanting capitalism. However, it is (as you and Butler agreed) pretty clear that a new round of struggles is now unfolding, supercharged with concerns about environmental and epidemiological issues but also carrying challenges to social inequalities into sustained and intense confrontations with police, something we have seen from Paris to Hong Kong to Santiago. What do you hope participants in these new movements will get from your book?

Rodrigo Nunes: One of the first things that struck me when the 2011 cycle of struggles began was how little memory had been preserved from the alterglobalist cycle. Almost no collective learning had been passed on, and as a consequence many people truly believed that ideas like horizontality and general assemblies were wholly new and untested, which made them unprepared for the fairly predictable impasses they would soon run into. When the 2013 protests exploded in Brazil, another thing that caught my attention was the mismatch between what people were doing, what they said they were doing and what they believed they should do. They had a set of forms they wanted to give to their politics regardless of the content, and staying true to them was more important than achieving anything at all. A self-imposed hamstringing of their own desire for change, so to speak.

This got me thinking both about organization, which was something I’d planned on writing a book about for a while (as you well know, having been there when I first had the idea!), and about this tortuous thing that is left-wing desire. My goal was thus to write something that had both a “clinical” dimension, in the sense that it tried to diagnose these maladies of desire and treat them, and a theoretical discussion of organization that could, at the same time, transmit what I thought sere some lessons learned in the last decades. As I summarized it, its goal would be to free people to make their own mistakes instead of unwittingly repeating other people’s or stopping themselves from trying.

It took me a while to find the time to actually write the book, so I couldn’t be of much use in the moment I was hoping to intervene in––although the short work I published in 2014, Organisation of the Organisationless, did get some conversations going. On the other hand, the delay meant I could watch that cycle develop through several mutations, and this allowed me to draw a balance sheet of sorts. So hopefully it will be useful for a new generation of activists and organizers that will be emerging soon.

Concretely, I expect them to find in Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal a way of thinking organization that helps them avoid false problems and illuminates their practice and the options they are faced with, instead of burdening with a transcendent standard. One that enables them to see the permanent questions that lie behind the different answers bequeathed to us by history, and how these questions can in a way never be answered, only posed anew; and that offers them a perspective from which they can examine their own desire for social transformation and make more conscious decisions about what to do with it.

NDW: You argue that the verticalist/horizontalist disputes are characterized by a false dualism, and propose instead what might be termed a “diagonal” path, in which linkages and interdependencies of vertical and horizontal organizing practices are recognized and acknowledged, allowing for the emergence of new possibilities. To clarify this point, could you say a little about what your mean by your pairing of two interlocking phrases—“horizontality without horizontalism” and “vanguards without vanguardism”?

RN: I’m actually very glad I didn’t use “diagonalism” to describe my position in the book, since between finishing the bulk of it in mid-2019 and it coming out in mid-2021, a Covid-denialist movement emerged in Germany that reclaimed that name! That was lucky, but it wasn’t just luck. I made a conscious decision not to give any labels to what I was doing because, useful as they can be in terms of selling books and carving a niche, labels tend to harden into identities, and identities tend to warp debate by making it less about real problems than about images and associations. Besides, my strategy was to attempt to describe the common background from which different positions and identities on the question of organization can arise, so it made little sense to turn that into a camp in its own right.

The two phrases you picked are a good example of this strategy, an important part of which consists in taking both a position and the objections against it seriously at the same time. The aim is to try to get as close as possible to the exact point where the disagreement begins in order to find, by contrast, what are the premises that both sides presumably can share or, in other words, what is the real problem that they can both agree exists. This doesn’t eliminate the divergence, but it hopefully opens up a space in which, even if people continue to disagree, their disagreement can be construed as a genuine difference instead of a moral or cognitive flaw: the other person isn’t evil or stupid, they value or prioritize different problems differently. If we want to continue to argue, the argument is now about how we measure these problems against one another in a concrete situation, not about identities or abstractions.

For example: horizontality, what’s that about? About reciprocity, about avoiding unilateral relations in which one side can just dictate to the other what to do. Now, surely that’s something we strive for if we define ourselves as being on the side of emancipation. More importantly, we all understand that there’s some connection between making reciprocal relations the norm in the future and building those relations now, since we know that, if we hand all power over to a few, it’ll be very hard to claim it back at some later point. I don’t see how anyone could disagree with that, so what is it that people object to? It’s the tendency to treat reciprocity as the goal a movement should always pursue at the expense of all others, to become paralyzed by the impossibility of sustaining it in all situations, to systematically deny oneself the means required to move forward for fear of falling short of an impossible standard. Horizontality is an absolutely indispensable value, but people criticize horizontalism for valuing it in a one-sided way.

Now take leadership: what do people object to, and quite rightly? The concentration of power in the hands of leaders, which enables non-reciprocal relations. Again, if you accept the point about reciprocity above, you can’t argue with that. Does that mean that we should eliminate leadership from politics altogether? One argument I develop at length in the book is that it’s impossible to do so, but that’s not necessarily a problem because leadership can, under certain conditions, be maintained control. What’s more, in a situation in which there are some people who have more experience, or who have an idea of what can be done, or who see things more clearly, you actually want them to step forward and take initiative. What was the problem with vanguardism? It was turning the fact that someone must be responsible for initiating an action into the notion that there’s a part of the movement that knows best in every situation and is therefore justified in always acting unilaterally. In other words, turning a function into a position. There was a whole philosophy of history to justify this, and it had the upshot of rationalizing concentration of power. If we dissociate the idea of vanguard from this philosophy of history, however, we retain the importance of initiative without that rationalization.

So “vanguards without vanguardism” means “leadership is necessary, but in a distributed way, and concentration of power must be kept in check”, whereas “horizontality without horizontalism” means “we must seek reciprocity not by levelling all power differentials, which is not possible, but by exercising control over them”. In other words, since leadership is a need and reciprocity is a goal, we can’t choose one over the other, we must seek a dynamic equilibrium between them. Both problems are real, which is why neither can be posed one-sidedly.

NDW: There are many “how to” organizing manuals for left activists, but you insist on the need for a proper theory of organization in order to go beyond the immediacy of some of the left’s factional antagonisms. Now some of the elements you bring to this theoretical project are very fresh discussions of ideas of familiar figures, from Marx, Lenin, and Bernstein to Hardt and Negri and Laclau and Mouffe. But there are also other, more surprising components—particularly your introduction of “second-order cybernetics”. In your accounts of contingency, compositions, and tendency, I felt I was witnessing an exciting encounter between Marxism and what could, broadly, be termed complexity theory. Would you agree with this characterization of your work?

RN: That was certainly the idea. The need for a theory is connected to what I describe as the “therapeutic” dimension of the book, taking that word in something like its Wittgensteinian sense. Without a theory, all you’re left with is slogans, wishful thinking, decontextualized maxims, received ideas and poorly examined notions like “spontaneity”, “radicality”, and even “organization” itself. There’s nothing to hold those things together in a structure that establishes how they are connected, what are their legitimate and illegitimate uses, and so on. You’re then likely to end up with several incompatible sets of assumptions that you apply inconsistently to different circumstances. The “positive” work of advancing a few theoretical principles was thus linked to the “negative”, “therapeutic” work of dissolving badly posed problems, since theory could clarify where there were choices to be made: if you want to do away with determinism, you can’t continue to use the concept of spontaneity in ways that suppose it; if you start by stressing interconnectedness, you can’t have total immediacy as a goal... Furthermore, in the absence of a theory of what political organization is, the question becomes reduced to different currents and traditions think it should be. This deprives our wishes from the resistance imposed by reality, as if it sufficed to get enough people to want something for it to work. Even worse, instead of identifying problems that are common to all regardless of political preference, we end up seeing divergent choices not as distinct but equally legitimate responses to the same challenges, but as moral or cognitive differences: whoever doesn’t want the same as me is either stupid or a bad person.

Complexity comes into Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal on four different levels. The first is ontological: a theory of political organization must start from a theory of organization in general, and since there is no-one directing organization in general, this must be a theory of self-organization, of how interacting elements produce phenomena that are more complex than themselves. Enter entities such as systems, networks, nested hierarchies, scales, clusters, hubs and so on, with which I deal throughout the book. The second level is at once empirical and practical: if political organization (that is, politics) is always plural, always given within an ecology of interacting parts, and always acting on a world that is itself complex, what does that mean for how we act, strategize, organize etc.? Evidently, the first level should be able to offer some guidance here, by means of concepts like nucleation, critical size, distributed action… One of things that having an alternative ontology allows me to do is to return to old questions like leadership and hegemony without needing to carry the metaphysical baggage that used to come with them. In a way, it’s as if I were writing a new operating system in which they could also run, but run in another way.

The next level at which complexity is at stake is that of representing or modeling the real. In order to act on a complex world, we have to model it somehow; regardless of the means we use to do so, however, we’re always but one part of the real trying to represent the whole. This means that the partiality of the act of observing (representing, modeling etc.) can never be fully discounted. Even if we represent ourselves as observers, it’s always from the perspective of another observation that’s taking place in the same world; there’s no God’s eye point of view. This is where second-order cybernetics enters the conversation. To properly take into account the complexity of the world, we have to allow for the fact that it’s multiperspectivally observed. This doesn’t mean relapsing into an empty relativism––this is why there’s room for such things as leadership and pedagogy. But it does require a certain prudence, because we never know what we might be missing, where our blind spots are. Pluralism and democracy are thus cognitive imperatives as much as ethical ones: a more complex collective modeler is in principle capable of more complex modeling. Movement ecologies, as I understand them, are about pooling resources and capacities, including cognitive ones; they’re not loose coalitions that come together once in a while for a big march or symbolic action purely on account of some platitude like “we’re stronger together”.  

The fourth and final level is historical: I offer a very compressed history of the encounter between radical politics and complexity. It’s a modeling of my own modeling, in a sense, since it helps situate my own contribution. One could of course make this story go as far back as Marx and the Hegelian heritage, since dialectics was in many respects a first attempt at dealing with complexity (the excess of the whole over parts, recursivity etc.). But this heritage also carried the metaphysical baggage of a philosophy of history that was often employed to reduce complexity down to what Althusser called “expressive” causality, one in which the simplicity of an essence suffices to explain the whole. What’s worse, it linked cognitive and political simplification. If there’s a perspective from which the movement of the totality can be correctly discerned, it must by definition belong to the revolutionary class; more specifically, to the vanguard of that class, and even more specifically to the party of that vanguard, the leadership of that party, and ultimately, perhaps, a single individual. Political authority can thus be justified as a consequence of intellectual authority, which in turns makes it easier to dismiss dissenting voices as either mistakes coming from those who can’t see the whole picture or deliberate deception.

The crisis of Marxism and the rise of complexity and self-organization studies developed more or less in parallel in the second half of the 20th century; structuralism and poststructuralism functioned as a clearing house between the two for a while. One of my intentions with this book was in fact to furnish poststructuralism with a theory of organization, or rather to flesh out the theory it never developed. We find the building blocks for it in places like Guattari’s writings of the late 1960s and Foucault’s work from 1972 to 1977, but they were never systematized. That may be in part because the crisis of Marxism that exploded in the 1970s wasn’t just a theoretical affair, it was a crisis of collective agency––in the threefold sense that it affected the organizations that used to shape that agency, the industrial proletariat on whom these organizations pinned their hopes (as well as the alternative movements that had emerged since the late 1960s), and the very idea of collective agency, tarnished with the suspicion that there was something intrinsically totalitarian and dangerous about it. Suddenly, there was nobody left who could make the revolution, nor any certainty that the revolution was something worth making. This is the context in which a scientific discourse on self-organization is imported into radical politics, and it was one in which the question was not so much “how do we situate collective agency in complexity?” but “how do we use complexity to obviate the need for collective agency?” This was also the context in which the political philosophy of poststructuralism ended up being developed in directions that strike me as antithetical to the very concept of power supposed by the likes of Foucault and Deleuze. By bringing collective agency back into complexity, I was seeking to redress both of those errors.

NDW: At a strategic level, you write eloquently of a “ecological” perspective on left organizing. Such an optic would, you suggest, recognize there is no “one right way”—be it unionizing, riots, commoning, or electoralism––to push beyond capital. Instead, it emphasizes the interdependence and symbiotic possibilities of such different approaches, seen not as competitors but as complementary within a broader anti-capitalist current. Now that’s not bad advice. But of course, there are choices, sometimes very hard choices, that have to be made in struggles––real bifurcation points. To take one example, more or less out of the air, in environmental movements today there are splits over geoengineering and nuclear power as answers to climate emergency. And I’m not sure the book gives much sense as to how these critical, and highly contentious questions get sorted out within an “ecology of organization”. Is that a fair criticism?

RN: It’s fair to the point of making clear what my argument can and cannot claim to do. Of course, such real bifurcation points exist, and thinking ecologically doesn’t mean saying yes to everything indiscriminately. As I put it in the book, “a world in which many worlds fit” is not a world in which all words fit, because there are incompossible worlds between which we must choose. Drawing the boundaries that separate the compossible and the incompossible, friend and foe, is an essential part of politics. So what does the idea of movement ecology bring to the table?

First of all, it raises the issue of how we draw those boundaries. The question here is one of calibration: are we perhaps not being too stringent in our definition of “friend”––and, as a consequence, treating as incompossible things that could perfectly well coexist? Secondly, it points to all the cooperation that takes place “behind our backs”, as it were, as a consequence of the fact that, by acting on the same environment, agents can positively impact each other’s fields of possibilities without even being aware of each other’s existence. Naturally, they can also shape those fields in negative ways, restricting rather than expanding them (it’s always the case that opening up some opportunities closes off others, at any rate). Yet my gamble here is, thirdly, that a successful movement will always be one in which the gains of this cooperation, the depth of which often goes unnoticed precisely because much of it isn’t deliberate, outweigh the losses. In the terms of Bogdanov’s tektology, if a system overcomes external resistances, it’s because the activities of its component parts outweigh the resistances between them.

Moreover, that this should be a factor in the success of a movement is not just because of strength in numbers but of diversity itself. Thus, and this is the fourth point, thinking movements as ecologies brings complementarity to the fore. Movements need different people to perform different functions, a diversity not only of types of action, but of attitudes and strategies. If you’re only doing your own thing and the movement is still thriving, you can be sure that it’s because others are picking up your slack and doing the things you won’t or can’t do. I compare this to domestic labor: if you can’t see it, it’s because someone else is doing your share. This applies to liberals who don’t understand that power yields nothing unless you can force it to as much as to radicals who take for granted the work of consolidating victories, to give but one example.

Becoming aware of this cooperation that happens behind our backs opens up another dimension, which is that of care––for the others whose work enables and potentializes our own, and for the ecology as a whole, because we now can see collaboration where we previously only saw competition. That would be the fifth point. I believe this changes the way we think, makes it less one-sided, and so expands the possibility of conscious cooperation. The point is not to converge towards the same middle ground, everyone moderating everyone else until they all arrive at a single lukewarm temperature, but to become more adept at choosing when to raise the tension and when to let go, when to push for your position and when to settle for beneficial compromises, and so on. To play with a full deck, in other words; or, switching to a musical metaphor, to play with a full range of tonal, rhythmic and dynamic possibilities instead of always hitting the same note.

None of this eliminates disagreement; what it does is differentiate between degrees of disagreement and pose the question of how to deal with the various shades. A movement is a collection of agents, each one of which has a different way of drawing the boundaries of the movement, a different definition of friend and foe, a different way of appraising the distances between themselves and others. This means that, the more shades they see between friend and foe––the less either-or that distinction is for them––the more movement there will be for everyone. Boundaries and points of bifurcation will always exist, however. After all, a movement that had no boundaries would essentially coincide with the world as it is.

How do these bifurcations get dealt with, then? As with everything else, it’s ultimately a matter of strength. And in cases like geoengineering and nuclear power, to the extent that they are more convergent with the interests of powerful groups––among other things because they suggest that, if implemented at scale, everything else could carry on more or less as it is––they will almost certainly command greater resources, media coverage, political access etc. than more radical alternatives, even if their actual social base is exceedingly small. Now, this is all the more reason for those who see it as a foe to find ways to work together, which in turn means seeing their differences with one another as being of a different order––one in which you’re looking to build enough strength to modulate or inflect what the other is doing, not to prevent or destroy it.  

NDW: One of the aspects of recent organizational efforts you discuss is the importance of “platform politics”, in which movements rely on digital networks to support “user-generated” initiatives predicated on more or less common themes. This does seem to be a persistent, ongoing characteristic of today’s mass uprisings; with a small group of colleagues I have been tracking the “riot platforms” created by movements ranging from the Gilets Jaunes to Colombian popular rebellions. But these are being countered by “police platforms”, featuring not only surveillance, blackouts, and state-sponsored hacking but also the mobilization of reactionary digital vigilantism and counter-riots. How do you see the future of platform politics? And more generally, how does your theorization of anti-capitalist organizing address its adversaries’ counter-moves?

RN: Something I hardly discuss in the book––even though it’s clearly one of the most important features of the last decade––is the way our perception of the internet has changed. Web boosterism caught a second wind around 2011, which was another way in which that moment was at once very similar to and seemingly oblivious of the 90s/2000s. It may even have been more naïve than the first time around, because now you had a whole generation of people who’d grown up with the internet and for whom constant exposure on social media was second nature. Ten years later, however, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who still believes in the internet as an unequivocal force for good.

On top of the dangers you’ve listed, we could add algorithmic biases, the gatekeeping power of platform monopolies, the decentralized and coordinated spread of misinformation, the manipulation of the attention economy and public perception through resources like bots and click farms… It’s not only what certain agents do with it, but increasingly the architecture of much of the web as we know it that appears as highly problematic. And we’ve only spoken of problems coming “from outside”, as it were; but that architecture also has tremendously damaging effects on the ways we relate to each other as comrades, and even to ourselves. So much of our lives is now spent on these platforms in which everything is mediated by recursively constructed digital personae and geared towards competition in the market of likes and follows, where the incentive is always to capitalize individually at the expense of collectivity, generosity and even basic security. These are public spaces that we experience as interlocking private spheres, which results in powerful in- and out-group dynamics, constant friction and extreme desensitization towards others. Finally, they are highly addictive and colonize not just our time but our activity: if so much who we are is caught up with being seen and recognized on social media, this puts a greater premium on building simulacra of things than on building the things themselves.

That none of this is particularly conducive to a form of politics that is collective and emancipatory is obvious. Right-wing politics may in fact be more compatible with the internet as it presently exists than anything you and I would be comfortable with. Then again, life’s much easier when you have no qualms about astroturfing, mobilizing through lies or building social bases that you can switch on and off according to political convenience. Having said that, the affordances are there, and it can be a very useful resource for some purposes, so platform politics is certainly going to be a major element in organizational ecologies to come. And although it has some obvious limits, it’s also a fairly new form, and therefore it’s likely that a critical examination of the experiences we’ve seen so far will reveal potential solutions to at least some problems. For example, I point out in the book that a platform’s success invariably leads to tensions between initiators and later adopters, and the way those tensions are resolved is determinant of the kind of politics that it will make afterwards. Now that people know about these crisis points from the start, how can they prepare for them differently?

If the kind of platform arms race you suggest will be an important part of our near future, this type of critical reflection is essential. And it must necessarily be extended to the architecture and ownership structure of the internet: the fight over these is a fight over the terrain in which struggle takes place just as much as any conflict about legislation or trade agreements.

NDW: I found Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal an immensely heartening book. It tells me that, from the many disappointments, traumas and defeats of the last twenty years, some things are being learned. And it also presents a new twist on one of the most enigmatic passages in Marx, where, towards the end of what is generally regarded as his most “vanguardist” texts, The Communist Manifesto, he and Engels cryptically remark that the communist belongs to no particular faction, but instead strives for the unity of the movement as a whole; so, to close, how would you situate your book in relation to that famous passage of revolutionary theory?

RN: It’s great to hear that you felt this way. I didn’t necessarily think it could be a heartening book, because it tries quite doggedly to live by the Althusserian maxim that to be a materialist is “not to tell oneself any stories”–– to shun the comfort of verbal formulas that change nothing in practice and to accept that there are no magical solutions, only the effort to continually sustain things. As a Spinozist, I obviously believe there’s something joyful in this determination to “stay with the trouble” of the world and live without hope or fear, but most people probably won’t find it exactly cheery.

Marx and Engels say four things in the passage you mention: that communists “support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things”; that in each of those movements they stress the centrality of the property question; that they work everywhere “for the union and agreement” of the different forces involved in those struggles; and that, even though they fight for immediate aims, they constantly “take care of the future” of the movement as a whole. All of these remain essential principles, I’d say. In an earlier chapter, they also write that communists “do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties”, which I take as implying that communism is the direction towards which they see all other positions as spontaneously developing. This raises the question of how those four principles connect to this belief: is the pluralistic unity they profess premised on the expectation that history tends towards unification around their point of view?

For us today the question would certainly be how to uphold those four principles with no guarantee that there’s a correct path gradually revealing itself through history which we’ll all eventually recognize. The first thing one needs, then, is a sense of direction: eyes on the prize, “taking care of the future”. Even if the exact coordinates are kept relatively open, you have to be going somewhere, you have to be chasing something qualitatively different from what we have today, or else the best you can do is manage what exists a little better. That sense of direction also allows one to recognize who else is part of the same movement and to link immediate aims and future purposes, to pose one thing now as creating conditions for another later. Here the property question remains central: the transition to a substantially different form of social and political organization will inevitably involve a substantial transformation of the property regime. Yet this is no longer sufficient as a common ground. The conditions for the existence of humankind, and of much of life as we know it, are presently under threat, and the transition to a different property regime must also involve a rapid transition to a different energy regime. Ideally, one thing would serve to reinforce the other.

Now, I think we all must admit that we have no formula or historical precedent for how something at the required scale and speed could take place. What’s more, there’s no single collective agent who can do this on their own. By definition, then, we seem to be looking at a joint effort in which different agents are pursuing different strategies, and the problem ceases to be ‘which is the right one?’ and becomes instead ‘how can we make them work together?’ That is: how can these different courses of action boost and/or modulate one another in ways that inch us closer to somewhere we might want to go? But also: what is missing from the strategies we have at the moment that could amplify and accelerate them––and who or what can fill this gap? A major issue is, for instance, the velocity of transformation. You can’t just assume that change is cumulative and irreversible, that it only goes in one way; that is the liberal teleology to which “progressives” fall prey. Hence another question is: how do you ensure you make the most of whatever changes you bring into existence before they lose their transformative edge or are reversed?  

The expectation that all paths would eventually converge on a single one generated the question of who was holding the prize ticket: who would finally be revealed as the true vanguard? I’d say the issue today is no longer being the vanguard, but combining the capacity to open and advance fronts of struggles––the work of what I call ‘vanguard-functions’––with activities more usually associated with the rearguard: surveying the overall movement, pondering the best allocation of resources, building and maintaining supply and communication lines, and making choices that will allow everyone to gain terrain even if we are not the ones leading the charge.