Nothing Is What Democracy Looks Like

Openness, Horizontality, and the Movement of Movements

Rodrigo Nunes

Networked, horizontal forms of movement have been at the centre of many political debates in the last decade and have often been treated alternately as the 'limit' (by their enemies) and the 'solution' (by their proponents) to the problems of organising resistance to global capitalism. This however has unfortunately meant that critiques 'from the inside' — ie, by those who have experienced and share a general belief in them — have been much rarer than those articulated by partisans of other forms of organisation, resulting in much backpatting and triumphalism but few discussions of widely shared anxieties and frustrations; a problem that is only enhanced by the fact that it is often felt that horizontality must be 'defended' from its detractors.

It is this kind of internal critique that this paper attempts by envisaging a demystification of openness and horizontality, showing how they are often presented in complete absence of context, and pointing to their inherent limitations, contradictions, and dead-ends. The point is not to open another debate on 'less' or 'more' horizontality, or horizontality versus verticality, but rather to problematise these very notions; and by opening up their problematic nature to argue for a practice that tackles their ambiguities head on.

Before Openness and Horizontality, There Was Openness and Horizontality

Why have openness and horizontality become so central recently? Two answers seem possible. The first concerns the growing disappointment that erupted in 1968 with the real existing socialism. This was very present (and increasingly outspoken) in progressive movements all over the world, culminating in a strange aftertaste of consternation and indifference when those regimes crumbled circa 1989. In this narrative we encounter a learning process where the lessons of Eastern Europe — whose mistakes were universalised, practically or theoretically, to almost everywhere by communist and socialist parties of all shades — made subsequent waves of people struggling for social transformation wise enough to know what not to do, though still in the dark, and in some cases disillusioned, about what could be done. While this process is undeniable, it is clear that it alone cannot account for the move towards the open and horizontal organisation of struggles in recent years; in fact, one could argue it is more capable of explaining the rise of identity politics, single-issue campaigns, NGOs, and / or the sheer surrender of many people to the inevitability of the world as it is / was, and the neoliberal stance taken by many left parties and trade unions.

What is relevant about the 'rise' of openness and horizontality is not that it substitutes one total theory of organisation with another, but the fact that something like 'network' has a place today in the vocabulary and practices of organisations that remain hierarchical or that it is integral to the practices of companies and highly valued in business and management circles. In other words, what is relevant is not that these ideas have become important but that they have become practiced. Even if we say that openness and horizontality are the new ideology — an across the board one at that — the ideology as such can only exist because it has become (or is perceived as being in the process of becoming) materially possible on a large scale.

The bulk of the answer must, therefore, lie in a material process. One current narrative of this process identifies it with a restructuring in the most advanced sectors of capitalism (which, it is argued, exerts a hegemony that restructures all other sectors), commonly called the passage from the Fordist to the post-Fordist model of production. This can be characterised by the transformation of the relations between production and what is 'outside' it, consumption: gathering information about and circulating information that 'constructs' the market, the quantitative and qualitative increase of 'consumer relations' in relation to the productive process, hand in hand with a 'singularisation' of the product.

We are witnessing today not really a growth of services, but rather a development of the 'relations of service'. The move beyond the Taylorist organization of services is characterized by the integration of the relationship between production and consumption, where in fact the consumer intervenes in an active way in the composition of the product. The product 'service' becomes a social construction and a social process of 'conception' and innovation. ... The change in this relationship between production and consumption has direct consequences for the organization of the Taylorist labor of production of services, because it draws into...