Toward an Ecology of Organization?

Book Review | On Rodrigo Nunes’s Attempt to Break Down Binaries With His Book About Political Organization

By Judith Chavarria

[We’ve published this article in our Reform & Revolution magazine #14 along with another contribution to the debate around Nunes’s book by Brandon Madsen and Stephan Kimmerle]

In his book Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation, published in 2021 by Verso, Rodrigo Nunes frames our time as “the age of mass movements without mass organisations.” The emergence of post-Fordist capitalism and the collapse of revolutionary optimism since the fall of the Soviet Union have contributed to a series of objective crises without a sense of coordinated organization. Dozens of potentially significant breakthroughs rose and fell across the globe, including Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and the Greek debt crisis to name a few. As Nunes identifies, one of the primary limitations of these horizontalist movements (‘self-organized’ movements without formal leadership structures) is their inability to sustain themselves against the national and international scale of capitalist crisis. Since then, horizontalism’s dwindling prospects have led many on the left to consider new approaches: “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.”

The question of organization is an important starting point. But as Nunes makes clear, no “proposal, no initiative is good in itself, in abstraction from a situation with objective potentials and subjective dispositions.” As such, socialists today need to dynamically work through their political and theoretical positions, their organizational forms and structures, and their strategies for achieving a fundamental rupture with and replacement of capitalism. Neither Vertical nor Horizontal attempts to rethink the problem of organization, and the binary oppositions that often structure discussions about it, not just because previous strategies have been insufficient, but because the definitions underlying it require some reevaluation. Nunes raises some thought-provoking questions in this regard, but doesn’t go far enough in thinking through what it may mean to answer them. There is a crisis of organization, but a careful study of history and current events shows a way out.

Catastrophe and Melancholy

Nunes is trying to break an impasse: we can’t agree on what the political challenges we’re facing are, and so we can’t effectively work together to address them. The political dynamics fostered by DSA (as a broad tent organization) are a notable exception, but binary oppositions rooted in abstract concepts – autonomy/leadership, spontaneity/strategy, local/global, etc. – continue to impoverish political debate. Sects waiting for the world to come to the right political line are bound to remain small, but movements without a strong program and dynamic organizations remain helpless. Underlying this range of problems is a crisis on the left. How did this occur?

Suffering existential defeat meant that the left, as if seeing its reflection through a shattered mirror, was made irreconcilable with itself.

The answer lies in the decades of political defeat which have entrenched the condition of left-wing melancholia. Suffering existential defeat in the 20th century meant that the left, as if seeing its reflection through a shattered mirror, was made irreconcilable with itself. As Nunes writes about our intransigent debates: “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.” This has made the work of mourning (that is, of accepting the reality of past defeats, internalizing their lessons, and moving on) impossible.

The confusion of failure leads to what Nunes calls the “trauma of organisation.” In rebellion against parties with top-down, anti-democratic practices, the response became an attachment to spontaneity, with its weak hope that things would work out in the end if allowed to follow their own course. Neither Vertical nor Horizontal’s contribution is to highlight that these fractures are a consequence of powerlessness, and that a reconstruction of the left can’t begin by turning powerlessness into a virtue. Rather, Nunes speaks in terms of probabilities: political action always involves a series of wagers made on the part of its participants, the trick is to gather all of our historical and philosophical material and make the wagers which are most likely to succeed. Resituating the terms of engagement this way makes us political agents rather than abstract observers, and serves as a first step to overcoming the listless feeling which loss has created.

Ecological Thinking in the Time of Climate Crisis

Nunes contends that part of rediscovering a shared terrain of struggle from which to organize is seeing that organizing is always already happening around us as part of a diverse “ecology” of people, interests, institutions, social practices, and strategies:

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.

Thinking about organization ecologically is about asking how a web of formal and informal relations can become greater than the sum of its parts, of what particular approaches can or cannot contribute to the whole, and to what end this political activity is being directed. These questions emerge from particular situations and conditions, and so too must any attempt at answering them. “Of course,” Nunes notes, “some causes – people, slogans, ideas, actions, programmes – will have more influence on the final product than others. Yet the 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.”

Beyond the absolutely correct is the potential for correction, something which socialists are capable of enacting throughout the process of struggle.

This observation is one of the book’s most important premises, outlining the fact that we can’t ever decide to make a movement on our own. What this means for a socialist organization is that it can’t seek to dominate a movement, nor prefigure one, if it’s to engage productively – any program or strategy needs to emerge from what is and find a way to connect that to what can be. There’s an unavoidable sense of contingency in the process, but beyond the absolutely correct is the potential for correction, something which socialists are capable of enacting throughout the process of struggle. 

If Nunes recognizes that nothing is inevitably bound to succeed, he also leaves open the possibility for anything to succeed. In my view, this is an overcorrection, especially as it relates to the displaced role of the working class. Political subjects need to be created over time, but they’re bound to objective conditions which give them a particular place in the ecology. Understanding these conditions doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to predict what will always come of them, but in the tension created by class struggle it’s clear that we have a better way of understanding which wagers are more likely to produce the world we’re trying to build, and that this not only includes the working class, but has them playing an essential role.

The onset of capitalist decline and the material force of nature’s ongoing devastation certainly gives us cause to consider what actions might still be available to us to pull the emergency brake. We need to join as productive participants in mass movements for political, economic, and environmental justice, but we also require an approach which is consciously attempting to transform people’s desires and bring them toward revolutionary conclusions; not vertically imposing ourselves, but not horizontally dissolving ourselves either. For Nunes, what matters for successful interventions “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 metastrategy playing out at the ecological scale, the overall direction of which is permanently at stake.” Nunes is reluctant to outline what these strategies may look like, highlighting the limitations of attempting to recognize a problem without a concerted effort to address its solutions concretely. However, his focus on the ecology of movements and organizations is a thoughtful framework to consider a starting point.

Whither the Socialist Party?

What, then, is to be made of the party and the role of leadership, about which so much has been written? The afterimages of countless sects and the tragedy of recent projects such as Syriza have allowed the traumas of organization to reverberate into the present. Yet as Nunes reaffirms, 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.”

We shouldn’t forget that any healthy mass party will contain a diverse ecology of its own: factions with varying degrees of coordination and conflict, electoral programs which mediate between membership and representation, and social functions which cohere and consolidate it as a politicized fixture of everyday life. While Nunes is careful to privilege the party as an organizational form, what he makes clear is that this diversity is what can sustain it as an institution. It will succumb to inertia if its inner dimensions – as well as the movement ecology writ large – do not flourish through democratic discussion and debate. 

For Nunes, this calls for distributed leadership which counterbalances the respective limits of centralized leadership (verticalism) and total leaderlessness (horizontalism) with a focus on bringing out leadership functions from every part of an organization and movement. One challenge for a socialist party is finding ways to build a resilient member-run democracy, because collective agency emerges by making it possible for all involved to see themselves as part of a broader movement requiring their participation and initiative in critical moments. As Nunes outlines, 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.” 

Nunes’s basic project is twofold. He’s returning to old forms of organizing that horizontalists would call obsolete, while emphasizing the actual interconnectedness of forms like the party in movements (i.e. implementing a wide range of tactics, engaging with other organizations in a principled united front, and connecting directly to the ordinary people who show up to a movement). Ultimately, he misses what can make a mass socialist party special: particular organizations can and will contribute in different ways, but only a party can synthesize today’s many battles into a common, multifaceted struggle. Even so, his work shows that for such a party to be generative it needs to be intricately linked to a broader movement, not merely trying to stand in for one.

Notes on DSA’s Structure and Strategy

If Neither Vertical nor Horizontal communicates anything, it’s that there’s still a need for path breaking approaches to problems new and old. To this end, it’s worth briefly grounding the book in the context of DSA.

One of the most important open questions in DSA regards the relationship between local chapters and national leadership bodies. Nunes’s concept of directionality is constructive here: it is “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 [the capacity to act] and create opportunities that did not exist before.” The challenge for DSA is in turning 78,000 members into a force capable of producing effects at a nationwide and even international scale. Binary oppositions between localism and capital’s all-consuming power need to be overcome by recognizing chapters as a component of the whole apparatus that is a mass-membership organization. This is one of the critical functions of cohesive, well-integrated campaigns, and distributed leadership – both of which DSA is currently without.

Nunes, in thinking of organization in terms of ecologies, emphasizes that local formations such as DSA chapters are “nodes” which help direct a wider political goal through on-the-ground organizing. Two questions arise: 1.) how can chapters be empowered to have the greatest impact and coordination with each other, and 2.) how can their interventions translate upward to a mass organization? In my view, this begins with an elected leadership which can act decisively and implement clear political strategies across DSA, alongside a membership which is empowered through a middle layer to check and recall leadership if it makes mistakes. 

If we’re actually going to consider our organizing without one-size-fits-all blueprints, DSA members need to have regular, systematic discussions about the direction our organization should take, clarifying together what we hope to accomplish and how. Issues of form and function are intertwined; only through a critical and democratic process will we be able to build a socialist organization which is capable of recognizing the potential flames of revolution where only embers are yet visible. Asking the questions Nunes asks is a good start, but to actually answer them we need to begin laying the groundwork for concrete solutions to the impasse. The book doesn’t fully untangle the way forward for today’s movements, but it offers an interesting critique which shows that we can’t succeed by prefiguring them with a sect, nor with no organizations at all.