Horizontalism is an emerging term used to describe the key common characteristics of the
waves of rebellion of the last decade. Occupy in 2011 was the peak to date but the term
Horizontalism itself appears to originate the rebellion in Argentina after the 2001
banking crisis there. Marina Sitrin in her book on that rebellion says the term (in
Spanish obviously) was used to describe the neighborhood, workplace & unemployed
assemblies that emerged to form "social movements seeking self-management, autonomy and
direct democracy." ---- Horizontalism is a practice rather than a theory, which is to say
in the various writings that use the term it has been described in practice rather than
theorised as an ideal. It's easiest to see the practice in the context of the
assembly-based movements that have come and gone since the rebellion in Argentina.
Particularly of course the wave that built up from 2010 on in North Africa, Southern
Europe and then went global in late 2011 with Occupy. What these movements had in common
was not a single theoretical underlay but a set of developed common practices and to some
extent common ways of looking at the world. I'm using the past tense there but of course
they all still have some existence, with Gezi park this summer being a fresh blossoming
somewhat along that common theme - although it lacked a single assembly. But because these
are not formal organisations or even theoretical themes they largely exist in the moment
even if in between such moments relatively small groups continue to organise under their
various banners between those moments. This is both strength and a weakness.
Key point of Horizontalism
In writing about Occupy Sitrin listed the following characteristics which also apply
generally across horizontalist movements
?To open spaces for people to voice their concerns and desires?and to do so in a directly
democratic way."
"People do not feel represented by the governments that claim to speak in their name"
?Attempting to prefigure that future society in their present social relationships."
?They want the power of corporations contained and even broken, access to housing and
education expanded, and austerity programs and war ended"
?Food, legal support, and medical care"
In a more critical look at Horizontalism, partially replying to Sitrin, David Marcus
defined it as "part of a much larger shift in the scale and plane of Western politics: a
turn toward more local and horizontal patterns of life, a growing skepticism toward the
institutions of the state, and an increasing desire to seek out greater realms of personal
freedom"
The qualification 'western' is probably unneeded as the movements in Egypt & Turkey share
many of these same characteristics. Marxists and neo-reformists are increasingly inclined
to see all these tendencies as a problem in challenging capitalism; anarchists on the
other hand would broadly welcome them.
Horizontalism & Anarchism
Horizontalism includes aspects that are in parallel with anarchist methodology, in
particular the emphasis on direct democracy and direct action. It also includes aspects of
what are sometimes incorrectly described as anarchist methods, in particular consensus
decision making, which actually entered radical politics via Quaker influence on the peace
movement of the 60's. But most participants at least start off unaware of those historical
links and WSM members involved in Occupy found that participants often imagined that these
methods are entirely new concepts that were being invented by them on the spot. That is
they were unaware of the very long history of experimentation through the anarchist and
other movements that preceded their experiments
At least in the context of the Occupies we had some involvement in this was a significant
weakness. A certain amount of skill and knowledge is required to make assembly processes
effective. The inventing it from scratch approach resulted in the 'tyranny of
structurelessness' problems of the loudest voices tending to dominate assemblies and
dynamics of bullying, in group formation and various power games filling in the vacuum.
Inevitably these reproduce the patterns of our patriarchal, racist society - if left
unchecked conversations will tend to be almost completely dominated by white men who are
comfortable in playing out their expected gender role. In places this produced such
unhealthy dynamics that Post Occupy this has allowed authoritarian outfits like the SWP to
claim that horizontal decision making in general always leads to such outcomes and so is
'not really democratic'.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of these horizontalist movements is that they either lack a
class analysis, as was the case with Gezi Park, or replace it with a pretty crude
wealth/corruption/corporations concept that lends itself a little too easily too
conspiratorial and reformist approaches to fighting for change. This tends to reduce what
is wrong to 'evil people making evil decisions? and the idea that if this is exposed to
the light of day change will come about.
The whole 1% meme could be a useful starting point to explain capitalism & class from and
to move people away from seeing the posh/poor neighborhood down the road as the problem (a
grim example of all politics being local). But it can also be a starting point for a
conversation about how the Rothschild?s controls the world via secret meetings at
Bilderberg and spraying us all with fluoride from jet planes. As was found at Occupy
challenging these and the associated Freeman ideas becomes quite frustrating once you
don't have the shorthand of the historic tradition of the left as a common point of origin
under which they can quickly be dismissed as the latest manifestation of old and
frequently anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
The question of winning
Horizontalism also differs from anarchism in that it doesn't have either a vision of what
a free society might look like or a process to move us from here to there. I don't means
some sort of detailed blueprint, I'm skeptical enough of the value of tiny number of
people devoting time to planning a future for the entire world at that level of detail. I
mean at the level of the picture anarchists share of a world where workplace assemblies
take over the workplaces and neighbor assemblies take over and manage communities. It need
not be detailed for it to be clearly enormously different to the world we live in today.
Anarchist processes to get from here to there tend to involve a process of mass
participation (e.g. syndicalist unions) followed by a moment of insurrection, sometimes
pictured as a general strike, sometimes as an armed populace on the streets but actually
most often a blend of the two. While there is much that can be discussed around this, are
armed insurrections even viable in the age of the helicopter gunship, it clearly is a
transformative moment that can be imagined. What does that moment look like for
Horizontalism? What would it look like to win?
Horizontalism also dispenses with and is often hostile to the idea of formal revolutionary
organisation. Having seen how revolutionary movements tend to interact with social
movements over many years we can sympathises with the reasons for this and around Occupy
we decided to respect the bans on political organisation banners and paper sales at Occupy
events. Technology has made this approach feasible to hold alongside trying to build mass
movements for change. Once individuals who wanted such movements too emerge had to
co-operate with revolutionary organisations because they needed access to their
organisation resources, their press and their communication networks.
Parties knew this and thus didn't have to modify their behavior on the basis of
accumulated negative experience; some organisations like the SWP instead turned isolating
those who refused to tolerate negative behavior into an advanced art form. But that period
appears to be over as the various tools of the Internet and mobile communications greatly
weaken the link between mass organisations before mass communication. The old style party
form has been spending its accumulated capital to resist that process, and as a result is
starting to disintegrate as recruitment dries up and funds are exhausted. In extreme cases
it faces hostility from without and rebellion from within as its own membership use these
new technologies to route communications around the formal leadership.
Anarchism has a different approach to both horizontalism and the party form. Anarchist
organisation was of course also about finding a way to fill a need for mass communication,
but it also arose as recognition of a need to transmit lessons across time and space in a
way that they would arrive and be trusted. And the need for a common platform around which
solidarity could be built across distances and different experience and cultures. In the
period since Occupy I've probably had conversations with anarchists who were involved in
the region of twenty Occupies and are broadly share the WSM?s politics. All of these
conversations quickly went to quite a deep level of critique because it was simple for us
to quickly establish our own political and organisational common ground.
Reform by riot & electoralism
Paul Mason writes that "the power of the horizontalist movements is, first, their
replicability by people who know nothing about theory, and secondly, their success in
breaking down the hierarchies that seek to contain them. They are exposed to a montage of
ideas, in a way that the structured, difficult-to-conquer knowledge of the 1970s and 1980s
did not allow (...) The big question for horizontalist movements is that as long as you
don?t articulate against power, you?re basically doing what somebody has called "reform by
riot" a guy in a hoodie goes to jail for a year so that a guy in a suit can get his law
through parliament"
Now Mason wants to deploy that argument for the creation of a new syndicalist party
somewhat crudely in the tradition of De Leon or James Connolly. That is for a broad
electoral formation that would provide Horizontalism with the vision of a new society and
the electoral method it needs to bring that about. Not something we?d agree with. But he
still has a point about ?reform by riot?. Horizontalism without a vision and method for
revolution simply provides then protest fodder behind which once one government can be
replaced with another. That indeed is one of the lessons of the experiences of Argentina
in 2001, the slogan 'they all must go' meant government after government went but after a
while stability was reimposed and new stable governments came into power and stayed there.
A key way of understanding this is to understand that Horizontalism as constructed lacks
power except the power of the individual bodies putting themselves in harm's way. Perhaps
that is why nudity commonly spontaneously arises as a tactic. Anarchism has expressions of
power in the form of the general strike or the people armed. Horizontalisms power consists
of mobilising numbers to occupy spaces and block routes. In Argentina the power of the
unemployed assemblies rested only in the power derived from blocking motorways and
bringing the flow of commerce to a halt. With Occupy Wall Street the intention to block
the Brooklyn Bridge was one key flash point, as were the attempts to block Wall Street
itself. As long as the numbers can be sustained these can be powerful tactics but they are
tactics of protest and not of transformation.
What anarchism offers as an alternative to Horizontalism is a vision and method that
doesn't have simply repeat the endless pattern of government following government. We have
a sense of what it might feel like to win even if the route from where we are to that
point has yet to be discovered.
Home »
» Anarkismo.net: An anarchist critique of horizontalism by by Andrew Flood - WSM