by Another take → Book Review | On Rodrigo Nunes’s Attempt to Break Down Binaries With His Book About Political Organization
By Brandon Madsen and Stephan Kimmerle
[We’ve published this article in our Reform & Revolution magazine #14 along with a book review by Judith Chavarria.]
Flowing from the discussions in Reform & Revolution around Rodrigo Nunes’s book, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal, we – Brandon and Stephan – had a less positive view on the book than Judith in her great book review in this magazine. We believe that these discussions can be helpful to sharpen the view of Marxists in the US and internationally toward what we understand to be key questions. To be clear, attempting (as Judith has done) to draw out insights even from non-Marxist authors like Nunes and make them useful within a revolutionary socialist approach is something we fully support. We simply felt the need to make the consciously anti-Marxist foundations of the book more clear.
Attempting to draw lessons from the failures of the previous decade’s horizontalist movements like Occupy Wall Street to achieve systemic change, Nunes argues for the left to rehabilitate its view of the role of leadership and to allow for a somewhat more vertical approach to organizing. That much is welcome.
Despite being well read in Marxism, however, when Nunes speaks about “organizing” he does not mean organizing the working class to take power. In his own words, Nunes tells us that there is no “revolutionary subject” based on the objective position of “this or that social group.” Even through the author’s very academic writing style, the book clearly resounds with the mantra that there is no reason to believe that the working class is the agent of change in any Marxist sense or that a socialist revolution is in any way likely. The question of organizing is therefore posed in a very different way – and with very different context and basic assumptions – than it would be for revolutionary Marxists.
Nunes shows a lot of interest in Lenin as an organizer, but much less in the fundamental political problem around which all of Lenin’s organizing was centered: how to arrive at a mass party with a Marxist program, deeply rooted in the organizations and struggles of the working class and its vanguard. (By “vanguard” we mean an advanced layer of experienced working-class fighters and organic rank-and-file trailblazers – far exceeding the bounds of any one party – which also acts to hold leaders accountable to the movement.)
The starting point Nunes takes for organizing is that today there are not many people who actually hope for a revolution – and, even amongst those, a significant part would not consider a revolution to be likely or viable. But his intention is not to change that; instead he tries to find an organizational solution fully adapted to the present consciousness.
Organizing like Lenin?
Nunes gives up on the role of the working class, gives up a Marxist concept of history, and gives up on the idea that a revolution is needed to take power away from the ruling classes. Instead, he concludes that what we will face is a long and messy transition period. With Marxism having been set aside, the reader is left a bit unclear as to what we would be transitioning to; still, Nunes indicates a desire for some type of fundamental change, especially given the threat to human existence posed by climate change. But how is this change to be accomplished?
His answer: organization! Nunes wants to bring some people (it’s unclear whom: “potentially anyone, ideally everyone”) together into a stronger network of organizations than anything we’ve seen over the last decades, one embedded in the broader “ecology” of movements and other organizing. Reading between the lines, these would ostensibly be smart, insightful people who don’t root themselves in any particular social class – ideally good organizers too, maybe? Again, it’s not really clear; Nunes studiously avoids ruling anything out.
In contrast, we believe that Lenin’s approach – forming and organizing the vanguard (meaning the advanced layers of the working class as described above, not self-declared revolutionaries) into a movement and a party – was and still is correct. This type of organizing is still plenty messy and takes on many shapes, some of them more vertical, others more horizontal. The process of forming and consolidating such an organization will often need to run through broader (politically more diverse) parties and formations in order for the working class to take the next step forward. A mass revolutionary party is forged in the heat of real battles of the working class, sometimes starting from a low level. In fact, today we already face a crisis of low levels of consciousness and organization, and this complicates our organizing tasks.
However, in our view – and in contrast to Nunes’s – our organizing should be guided by and directed toward the goal of developing a mass revolutionary party with a Marxist program, deeply rooted in the working class. Within this, of course, questions about how horizontal or vertical our approach should be in any given situation are very interesting, but these questions and our mode of answering them flow from that overall framework.
For us, the absence of (and, indeed, explicit opposition to) that framework limits the insights and value of Nunes’s book quite significantly.
Brandon Madsen
Brandon Madsen has been a Marxist and activist since the early 2000s, when he helped organize students at his high school against the Iraq War and military recruitment in schools. He moved from the US to Copenhagen, Denmark, in September 2022. He serves on the Reform & Revolution editorial team and works in the Hearing Systems labs at Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He is a member of the trade union IDA (Ingeniørforeningen i Danmark).
Stephan Kimmerle
Stephan Kimmerle is a Seattle DSA activist. He's been involved in the labor and socialist movement internationally from being a shop steward in the public sector in Germany to organizing Marxists on an international level.
