The Traumas of Organization

Excerpt from Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization (Verso 2021)

by Rodrigo Nunes

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.  

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 in 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 fully 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. 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.[1] 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; as there is no unlimited stock of individuals either, in that sense they are 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. Depending on the work to be done, more or less energy is required. Individuals can expand their capacities through the use of non-human instruments or through cooperation with other humans; “nothing is more useful to man than man”.[2] 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), of how it can be expediently deployed (strategy and tactics), and of 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 (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.[3] Contrary to a rather elementary confusion, self-organisation is not the absence of constraints, but the emergence thereof.[4]

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.[5] 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 make themselves accountable. This concentration of collective investment in certain “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”.[6] 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).[7]

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 20th century totalitarian regimes and the tarnished legacy of really 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.[8] Activists coming of age in the last four decades were much more likely to see constraints only as hindrance 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 “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 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.[9] 

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 those. 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”.[10] 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.

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 into their concern. Even if one were to concede that point,[11] 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. Evidently, 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 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 20th 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”.[12] Closer to our time, Jo Freeman argued convincingly that informal groups are as prone to developing hierarchies as formal groups.[13] 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 trade-offs, 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 present themselves always in the same way. They are never given in 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. Hence 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?”, “under what conditions?”. It therefore makes more sense, rather than suppose a universal form, to assume a plurality of them, and rather than project all of our expectations on a single form or organisation, to distribute them across a diverse organisational ecology.

[1] 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, the individual’s conditions of socialisation and their interactions with one another. In short, it is not that individual power is the ground of the power 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.

[2] Baruch Spinoza, “Ethics”, Complete Works, EIV18S.

[3] 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.

[4] “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 guiding me to this passage.

[5] 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 etc., 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.

[6] Frédéric Lordon, “Conatus et Institutions. Pour un Structuralisme Enérgetique”, L’Anée de la Régulation, 7 (2003): 128.

[7] See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”, Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 61-172.

[8] 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.

[9] A clear example is an Occupy Wall Street participant’s protest against the creation of a OWS spokes council on the grounds that “through the Spokes Council working groups become organizations and they become parties. … [This] shows a misunderstanding 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”, The Village Voice, November 8 (2011), https://www.villagevoice.com.

[10] The Invisible Committee, Now, tr. Robert Hurley (SL: Ill Will, 2017), 88.

[11] 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 responsible for the ecology as a whole.

[12] Robert Michels, Political Parties. A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul (Kitchener: Batoche, 2001), 241.

[13] Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 17 (1972-73): 151-65.