Movements of Movements, The Part 2: Rethinking Our Dance (Openworld's Challenging Empires, 5) - Softcover

Jai Sen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629633801 ISBN 13: 9781629633800

Publisher: Pm Press, 2017

Synopsis

Our world today is not only a world in crisis but also a world in profound movement, with increasingly large numbers of people joining or forming movements: local, national, transnational and global. The dazzling diversity of ideas and experiences recorded in this collection capture the fluidity within campaigns for a more equitable planet. Rethinking our Dance offers a range of essays from activists in Afghanistan, Argentina, Brazil, Niger and Taiwan, as well as from Europe and North America that address the question, 'What do we need to do in order to bring about justice and peace?'

About this title

About the Author

Jai Sen, based at the India Institute for Critical Action: Centre In Movement (CACIM), is an activist/researcher/author on and in movement.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Movements of Movements, Part 2

Rethinking Our Dance

By Jai Sen

PM Press

Copyright © 2018 Jai Sen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-380-0

Contents

Acknowledgements and Credits, 
0 INVOCATIONS, 
Proem: Offering Shailja Patel, 
Introduction: On Rethinking Our Dance: Some Thoughts, Some Moves Jai Sen, 
3 INTERROGATING MOVEMENT, PROBLEMATISING MOVEMENT, 
Nothing Is What Democracy Looks Like: Openness, Horizontality, and the Movement of Movements Rodrigo Nunes, 
Worlds in Motion: Movements, Problematics, and the Creation of New Worlds The Free Association, 
Break Free! Engaging Critically with the Concept and Reality of Civil Society (Part 1) Jai Sen, 
Believing in Exclusion: The Problem of Secularism in Progressive Politics Anila Daulatzai, 
Is Global Governance Bad for East Asian Queers? Josephine Ho, 
Incorporating Youth or Transforming Politics? Alter-Activism as an Emerging Mode of Praxis among Young Global Justice Activists Jeffrey S Juris and Geoffrey Pleyers, 
The Antiglobalisation Movement: Coalition and Division Tomás Mac Sheoin and Nicola Yeates, 
The Strategic Implications of Anti-Statism in the Global Justice Movement Stephanie Ross, 
Negativity and Utopia in the Global Justice Movement Michael Löwy, 
The Global Moment: Seattle, Ten Years On Rodrigo Nunes, 
Autonomous Politics and its Problems: Thinking the Passage from the Social to the Political Ezequiel Adamovsky, 
Boundary as Bridge John Brown Childs, 
Effective Politics or Feeling Effective? Chris Carlsson, 
PR Like PRocess! Strategy from the Bottom Up Massimo De Angelis, 
The Power of Words: Reclaiming and Reimagining Revolution and Non-Violence Matt Meyer and Ousseina Alidou, 
Break Free! Engaging Critically with the Concept and Reality of Civil Society (Part 2) Jai Sen, 
4 REFLECTIONS ON POSSIBLE FUTURES, 
"Becoming-Woman"? Between Theory, Practice, and Potentiality Michal Osterweil, 
The Asymmetry of Revolution John Holloway, 
The Shock of Victory David Graeber, 
Gathering Our Dignified Rage: Building New Autonomous Global Relations of Production, Livelihood, and Exchange Kolya Abramsky, 
Towards the Autonomy of the People of the World: Need for a New Movement 449 of Movements to Animate People's Alliance Processes Muto Ichiyo, 
Towards a Fifth International? Samir Amin, 
The Lessons of 2011: Three Theses on Organisation Rodrigo Nunes, 
'We Still Exist' François Houtart, 
Afterword: Another World Is Inevitable … but which Other World? Lee Cormie, 
Notes on the Editors and Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

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 question both the contents of labour and the division of labor (and thus the relationship between conception and execution loses its unilateral character).

This transformation is only possible through the socialisation of the material means through which these new relations can be established — ie, the means of communication. The Internet adds another layer to this process, since it is a multipolar (many-to-many) means of production and circulation, as opposed to a one-to-many like television (even though television channels establish their own many-to-one media through surveys, polls, etc). The large-scale massification of these media, and a multipolar one in particular, is thus the chief material cause behind the 'renaissance' of openness and horizontality. It is only within the horizon of a social life that has become networked that a politics of networking as such can appear; and it is only in a politics of networking that openness and horizontality can appear as goals.

'Networks' and 'open spaces' are, therefore, ambiguous: on the one hand, they are what we perceive as the conditions of the possibility of horizontality and the means by which it can be achieved; on the other, they are only partial actualisations of the idea they make possible — not only as instantiation but also as idea, since it is only within a politics of networks and open spaces that horizontality becomes both means and goal.

This is not to deny that many earlier social and political groups practiced open and horizontal ways of organising. While this is obvious, they were always faced with the practical impossibility of extending this internal relation to all of society or even to large numbers of people, because they lacked the material means — they could only propose it as a desirable future by means of some kind of eschatological argumentative device, such as an 'end of history' in the classless society of communism. Faced with material limits, horizontality had to 'stay small' and could only 'think big' in a 'march of history'.

What is important about horizontality today is that the material conditions for its existence are now perceived as given, at least in potential, in the present. This explains the emphasis that we see today on horizontality both as means and as goal: by working horizontally, we are developing horizontal forms of cooperation; developing the very social fabric we want to produce, and the means for its production. Organisation and politics coincide. In the past, the non-separation of means and ends was a point of principle or ideology. Now it is a simple matter of practice. And since large-scale media of communication seem to provide the conditions under which this process is possible, it is no wonder that the models of networking, openness, and horizontality we use are largely derived from them. It is today common, for instance, to point to the practices of free and open-source software communities as the 'vanguard' of this democracy to come.

Openness and Horizontality — and Their Contradictions

This however, it must also be said, is the ideology of openness and horizontality. It is a way of charting the present and perceiving lines along which the future can be constructed. The ideology is thus secondary to existing practices of horizontality and openness and their condition now. The distinction is important to highlight the fact that it is concrete practices that create the conditions of possibility in which the ideology is produced, and therefore the latter can only be a theoretical production sharing the situation and limits of the practices.

Foucault: In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and regional ... and not totalising.

Deleuze: Precisely. A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself.

First contradiction: one or many horizontalities? Dependence on material context Again, the point here is not that 'horizontality is something that happens to people with Internet access' but to highlight the difference between a model that springs from certain practices and models that spring from others. In other words, there can be many horizontalities.

Thus the universalisation of certain ideas of openness and horizontality suffers precisely from the problem of abstracting these ideas from their material contexts. What kind of 'horizontality' do we speak of, for instance, when referring to a social movement such as the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra; 'Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement'), with over a million members, many illiterate and with little access to any means of communication, with no territorial autonomy, constantly criminalised by the media, and facing attacks from landowners' henchmen? It is true that this is a movement with a strong Marxist-Leninist influence, but that does not stop one from asking what form of horizontality it does or could have. If we look at the five "ways in which the kind of openness identified" in free and open-source software communities "practically correspond to specific moments of organisation in the social movement" listed by Jamie King (the organisation of meetings and discussions; their documentation; decision-making; the organisation of demonstrations; the organisation of actions), the problems of applying a model become clear.

The MST as a 'movement' does take part in global networking, through Via Campesina and the World Social Forum (WSF). Many of the material conditions that make networked politics possible in Europe, however, are unavailable to the vast majority of their membership: time-flexibility; high mobility; language skills; technological literacy; access to means of communication, particularly the Internet. Inversely, the frustration many people sense in attending something like a Social Forum is the realisation of the existence of a restricted number of 'hyper-activists' who can attend all these networking spaces. (Of course, as soon as one has this first-hand realisation, one is part of this group.) This is when real-existing networking runs against the real-existing differences in material conditions of its "wider environment". And by fetishising one model of horizontality, it becomes necessary to make the same distinction that is made in liberal democracy between 'formal' and 'material' democracy or access.

Second contradiction: supernodality

A ghost haunts networked politics: the ghost of the supernode. If networked politics is based on communication flows, the supernode can be seen as "not only routing more than their 'fair share' of traffic, but actively determining the 'content' that traverses them". The definition already points to one attribute of the supernode: hyperconnectivity. In other words, some individuals are 'more networked' than others, a quality that can be derived from material conditions such as those described above, and others that are more contingent, such as knowing the relevant people, 'having been around longer', being friends with particular individuals, and personal attributes such as being a good speaker, charisma, etc.

Since in all networks these characteristics — 'external' to the network itself — will apply in different ways to different individuals and contingence will distribute others in an equally random fashion, it is safe to say there is no given way of preventing the emergence of supernodes. Also, it is clear that this is not necessarily a matter of "a malicious will to power"; supernodality is an emergent function of the way networks (and groups generally) work. For example, one may become a supernode as a result of a temporary group or task-related need or by being active in periods of hypoconnectivity. And, since there are no visible formal structures, the possibility of these informal hierarchies becoming sedimented is high.

Of course, this is only the network age variation of the process described in Jo Freeman's classic text about informal structures within the US American feminist movement: "the tyranny of structurelessness". One must note that her final conclusion is not (unlike that of many who use her arguments today) that the way to counter these tendencies is a return to democratic centralism or the Leninist party. She proposes instead "a few principles we can keep in mind that are essential to democratic structuring and are politically effective also", such as "diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible", "equal access to resources needed by the group", and "rotation of tasks among individuals". These are common practices among groups that profess openness and horizontality today. One could say, then, that she does not have anything to say to those who, even when abiding by these principles, keep encountering the problems she identifies. But maybe we are asking the wrong question.

Third and fourth contradictions: no such thing as an open space; determination and indetermination

If networks are the 'permanent' structures of our model of horizontality, 'open spaces' are the temporary coming together of these structures. But how open is an open space? Many are based on hallmarks (People's Global Action, Dissent!) or charters of principles (WSF) that define an inside and an outside; they work, therefore, by exclusion. Others (such as the Caracol Intergaláctica) allow the identity of the groups organising them or the process by which they are organised to exercise a 'soft power' of exclusion. In this case, in a chat discussion before the Caracol Intergaláctica in 2005, one participant raised the question of the possibility of the youth of a Communist Party wishing to take part in it; there was consensus, however, that there was no need to create a distinction, because the identity of the space itself created it. The very idea of an 'open space' is therefore contradictory — for it must be opened by someone, for some purpose, and with some people in mind; no matter how open this first determination is, it always already creates an exclusion.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Pm Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1629633801
• ISBN 13: 9781629633800
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 648