In the following, I attempt to elucidate a core thesis from Rodrigo Nunes’ Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation. Some formative excerpts can be found in the footnotes.
Strictly speaking, every order – every organization – is self-organized, if viewed from a sufficiently external position. Self-organization is therefore not a special case of conscious organization; rather, conscious organization is a special case of general self-organization. When “self-organization” is brought up in political debates, however, it usually refers to horizontal self-organization – the kind without significant power differentials.
But even in such formations, leadership typically present. Here, leadership should be understood simply as the initiation of new collective behavior. Nature provides an illustrative example: a flock of birds is (horizontally) self-organized, but not self-managed, as no deliberate, collective decisions are made within it. Although there are no significant power differentials, leadership is nevertheless permanently present. Individuals change direction without the consent of their neighbors or the group as a whole, and other individuals follow suit1.
When applied to human organization, a political pitfall becomes apparent: a horizontalism that fetishizes self-management can have a paralyzing effect by elevating the collective to the status of an absolute authority. This authority is then mistakenly perceived as threatened by one’s own or others’ initiatives, since they exercise influence in favor of an individual undertaking without mandate – without the blessing of the sovereign2.
But leadership, understood as initiative, is utterly indispensable for political action – regardless of whether a formation is self-managed or otherwise self-organized. The question for an emancipatory politics is therefore not how to prevent leadership, but to what extent this leadership function is based on a power differential and is prevented from circulating within the group34.
The best leader is one whom no one knows. ...
Then when work is done and things are accomplished,
People will say that things happened by themselves.
– Laozi, Daodejing Chapter 17
What happens, however, if we sever the idea of the vanguard from its association with historical necessity and the knowledge thereof? In this case, a vanguard initiative will not be conceived as the action supposed to establish the correct connection between the present moment and the future after which one strives. Instead, it appears as an effort to explore the ‘adjacent possible’ of a situation – the virtual paths that it makes available – with a view to finding those that are both viable and could lead farthest in the desired direction. It does not try to discover an underlying necessity, but to bring into being something that was not there before: to open a direction.
The worst effect of horizontalism may in fact very well be that it cultivates a mistrust of initiative, turned inwards as self-policing and outwards as paranoia, that ultimately leads to paralysis. If to start anything is to create divisions, to exclude some possibilities, to exercise influence in favour of one’s ideas; and if to do so without mandate or precedent is to act illegitimately, usurping the authority of a sovereign that does not (yet) exist; initiative must then become an inherently suspect thing, regardless of how relevant or useful it might be.31 The collective, in this case, rather than a space in which individuals enhance their capacity to act through cooperation, is made into an entity apart from those individuals: an absolute authority that always knows better than those who compose it, an indivisible unity constantly threatened by its very participants.
A leadership position might derive from publicly manifested personal qualities, adherence to tradition, or explicit, formally binding procedures – which roughly map onto Max Weber’s tripartite scheme of charismatic, traditional and legal authority, allowing (as he does) for some measure of combination between the three.41 The less such consolidated positions exist, however, the more the leadership function is free to circulate. That is the reality of the pack, in which each individual is responding to modifications in a common environment rather than deliberating collectively or following a single leader.
‘Reconciling the poles of the [teacher-student] contradiction’ by making them ‘simultaneously teachers and students’ is not decreeing that everyone knows everything, or that whatever people believe about the same thing has the same value. The very condition for there to be any learning is that knowledge differentials exist (in theory, skill, practical experience, perception). The point, however, is that this differential is always local – relative to a problem or situation and involving revisable beliefs – rather than implicated in a global partition between those who possess all the true knowledge and those who do not.
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