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Title: Horizontalism Author: Mark Bray Date: July 11, 2018 Language: en Topics: theory, power, the State, horizontal organizing, organization, Black Rose Anarchist Federation Source: http://blackrosefed.org/horizontalism-mark-bray/
Rosa Negra (BRRN)
We are excited to present “Horizontalism: Anarchism, Power and the
State” by Mark Bray which appears as a chapter in the collection
Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach from Routledge. In this piece Bray
relates a range of global movements from mass neighborhood assemblies in
Argentina, to the squares movement in Europe and Occupy Wall Street to
various political conceptions of power, movement building and electoral
politics. He begins with drawing a distinction between horizontalism as
a specific form of popular mobilization that has recently emerged and
more broadly the practices of horizontal style organizing. From this he
points out that while anarchism is horizontal in it’s approach to
organizing and movement building, horizontalism is much more fluid,
“non-ideological,” and lends itself to decidedly non-horizontal
directions of electoral organizing – politics which anarchist have
traditionally contrasted their politics in opposition.
The essay was originally appears as “Horizontalism” in Anarchism: A
Conceptual Approach edited by Benjamin Franks, Nathan Jun, and Leonard
Williams. Bray is the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook and
Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street and a member of
Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation.
---
Stephen Roblin, Deric Shannon, Miguel Pérez, Özgür Oktay, and Yesenia
Barragan for their insightful feedback and helpful information.
The decades that have followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 have
witnessed a historic resurgence of directly democratic, federalist
politics among global social movements on a scale unheard of since the
first decades of the twentieth century. From the Zapatistas and
Magonistas of southern Mexico, to the global justice movement, to the
squares movements of Tahrir Square, 15M (15th of May), Occupy, Gezi
Park, and many more around the world, to Black Lives Matter, we can see
the powerful impact of the style of leaderless (or leaderful), [1]
autonomous, direct action-oriented organizing that has characterized
resistance from below during this era. Some of the groups and
individuals that composed these movements were directly, or indirectly,
influenced by the enduring anti-authoritarian legacy of anarchism, whose
international popularity has surged over recent decades in conjunction
with a heightened interest in federalist, anti-capitalist politics. Many
more, however, came to reject the hierarchical party politics of
authoritarian communism not as the result of an explicitly ideological
influence, but rather because occupations, popular assemblies, and
consensus decision- making were widely considered to be the most
ethically and strategically appropriate forms of struggle given existing
conditions. Such was the case for most of the Argentines who rose up to
occupy their workplaces and organize neighborhood assemblies in the wake
of the financial crisis of 2001. Out of this popular rebellion against
neo-liberalism came the term “horizontalism” (horizontalidad). While
this slippery term has meant slightly different things for different
people, it generally connotes a form of “leaderless,” autonomous,
directly democratic movement building whose adherents consider it to be
non- ideological. Since the Argentine uprising, the term “horizontalism”
has established itself as the overarching label for this amorphous form
of directly democratic organizing that has swept the globe.
Certainly horizontalism and anarchism overlap in their advocacy of
federal, directly democratic, direct action-oriented, autonomous
organizing. Long before the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, anarchists
railed against the inherently deleterious effects of hierarchy and
authoritarian leadership while building large-scale federal models of
workers’ self-management in the form of anarcho-syndicalist unions with
memberships in the hundreds of thousands, or even above a million in the
case of the Spanish CNT in the 1930s. In some cases, such as the French
CGT in the early 20th century, anarchist unionists even endorsed
creating non-sectarian revolutionary syndicalist unions that could group
the working class beyond political divides (Maitron 1992, 326; Maura,
1975, 495). It is unsurprising that many anarchists have thrown their
lot in with the horizontalist mass movements of the past decades in
order to safeguard and promote their anti-authoritarian tendencies. The
intense proximity that exists between these two currents raises some
important questions: is horizontalism merely a new name for anarchism?
Are they basically the same idea masquerading behind different
histories? Given such a high level of overlap, are we simply quibbling
about semantics if we insist on a distinction between the two?
To answer this question, I will draw a distinction between
“horizontalism,” which I use as a historically specific term to
demarcate the wave of directly democratic popular mobilization that has
emerged over the past few decades, and “horizontal,” which I use as an
analytical descriptor to describe any form of non-hierarchical activity,
regardless of context. Once this distinction is drawn, it is apparent
that although anarchism is inherently horizontal, the historical
horizontalism of recent years is a fluid entity that occasionally
promotes values and ideas that are at odds with anarchism as a result of
its minimalist, “anti-ideological” ideology. Although some anarchists
and others have characterized anarchism as “anti-ideological” as well,
the history of the movement shows that most of its militants and
theorists have viewed it as a solid, though flexible, doctrine anchored
in a set of anti- authoritarian tenets. This stands in sharp contrast
with the prevalent post-modern tendency of proponents of horizontalism
to view it as a malleable set of practices disconnected from any
specific political center. This “anti-ideological” focus on form over
content, which is to say, its emphasis on how decisions are made over
what is decided, has created significant tensions in the context of more
or less spontaneous popular horizontalism for anarchists who are
supportive of mass organizing and hopeful about the political openings
provided by such movements. Because horizontalism attempts to divorce
itself from ideology, its structures and practices are susceptible to
resignification in decidedly non-horizontal directions, such as
participation in representative government.
It is important to clarify that this critique of the “anti-ideology” of
horizontalism applies to essentially spontaneous popular movements where
thousands of random people suddenly engage in direct democracy with each
other for the first time, not to examples like the Zapatistas of
southern Mexico whose horizontal practices developed slowly over
generations and were inextricably bound to widely shared values. When
assemblies emerge without the opportunity for such steady growth and
development, their lack of formal ideology greatly reduces the barriers
to entry for a mass of disaggregated, disaffected people, yet it also
makes the movement’s content and trajectory capricious. The implicit
horizontalist assumption that horizontal decision-making mechanisms are
sufficient to yield egalitarian results stands in sharp contrast with
the avowed anarchist commitment to both horizontal practices and
anti-oppressive outcomes. This demonstrates that although anarchism is
horizontal (in the analytical rather than the historically specific
sense of the term), and horizontalism is anarchistic (meaning it bears
many of the traits of anarchism), horizontalism and anarchism are not
identical.
In late 2001, a spontaneous rebellion erupted in Argentina when the
government decided to freeze bank accounts to forestall a mounting
financial crisis precipitated by the IMF-mandated privatization and
austerity measures of the 1990s. In under two weeks, popular
mobilizations ousted four governments. Against the hierarchical
machinations of the political elite, social movements organized
democratic neighborhood assemblies and workplace occupations around
principles that were increasingly encapsulated in the concept of
horizontalism. Occupied workplaces forged networks of mutual aid and
assemblies formed locally before establishing inter-neighborhood
organisms of direct democracy guided by both the sentiment and the
practice of consensus decision-making. This uprising was eminently pre-
figurative as it sought to embody the society it desired in its everyday
practices. As Marina Sitrin (2006, 4) argues in her influential
Horizontalism: Voices of Power in Argentina, horizontalism “is desired
and is a goal, but it is also the means – the tool – for achieving this
end.” For many, it was “more than an organizational form,” it was “a
culture” that promoted new affective relationships and communal
solidarity (Sitrin 2006, 49). This culture of openness and rejection of
dogma could even impinge upon the consolidation of horizontalism as a
fixed entity since, as the Argentine Colectivo Situaciones argued,
“horizontalidad should [not] be thought of as a new model, but rather
horizontalidad implies that there are no models…. Horizontalidad is the
normalization of the multiplicity … The risk is that horizontalidad can
silence us, stop our questions, and become an ideology” (Sitrin 2006,
55).
The accounts Sitrin gathered from the direct participants in the
Argentine uprising demonstrate that for many, horizontalism was perhaps
an anti-ideological ideology composed of a fluid mixture of flexible,
participatory, non-dogmatic values and practices oriented around
consensus, federalism, and self-management. However, these attitudes and
outlooks emerged in a number of different groups and movements long
before they were associated with the term “horizontalism.” In Unruly
Equality: U. S. Anarchism in the 20th Century, Andrew Cornell (2016)
demonstrates how the diffuse remnants of early twentieth-century
anarchism that were increasingly inclined toward pacifism and the
avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s
provided theories, values, tactics, and organizational forms, which
activists in the antiwar, countercultural, and feminist movements took
up [over the following decades]; in turn, these mass movements
radicalized hundreds of thousands of people, a portion of whom adopted
anarchism as their ideological outlook. (245)
The destruction of the American anarchist movement in the middle of the
century and the polarization of the Cold War led many American
anarchists to experiment with new tactics and strategies. This included
consensus, which was first used by American anarchists in the radical
anti-war organization Peacemakers in the late 1940s (Cornell 2016,
180–181). More than a decade later, consensus was introduced into the
civil rights organization Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) by Peacemakers organizer James Lawson (Cornell 2016, 229;
Carmichael 2003, 300). This influence carried through Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) and other groups into the 1970s and 1980s where
the New Hampshire Clamshell Alliance pioneered the use of spokescouncils
and affinity groups in the anti-nuclear movement, feminist
consciousness-raising circles experimented with non-hierarchical
organization, and the Movement for a New Society (MNS) incorporated
Quaker consensus methods (Farrell 1997, 241; Anarcho-Feminism 1977;
Cornell 2011). During the same decades, similar tendencies were at play
in Europe with elements of the feminist, anti-nuclear, and autonomous
movements (Katsiaficas 1997). The tradition that these groups forged was
adopted by subsequent groups such as the direct action AIDS group ACT
UP, the radical environmentalist Earth First!, Food Not Bombs, and
others feeding into the global justice movement at the turn of the
twenty-first century (Gould 2009; Wall 2002; McHenry 2012). The squares
movements of the Arab Spring, 15M, Occupy, Gezi Park, Nuit Debout, and
others were in part a reboot of the assemblies, spokescouncils, affinity
groups and direct actions of the global justice movement oriented around
a specific geographic space in the form of the plaza. Others have been
influenced by the concept of rhizomatic organizing put forth by Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987; Chalcraft 2012; Anderson 2013). While
the specific practices of these groups and movements varied,
their investment in deliberation, consensus-building, individual
participation, diversity, novel technologies, and creative engagement
stands as a self-con- scious counterpoint to doctrinaire and
hierarchical models of mobilization, political, and religious
sectarianisms, polarizing debates over national identity, and even
representative forms of democracy. (Anderson 2013, 154)
Horizontalist opposition to representative democracy usually comes in
the form of consensus decision-making. Rather than formulating a
proposal and simply concerning oneself with accumulating enough votes to
push it through, consensus requires participants to take the concerns of
the minority seriously and cater proposals to their outlooks. The idea
is not that everyone has to agree all the time (the strawman portrayal
of consensus), but rather that the majority is forced to make
concessions to the minority and, for the group to function, the minority
must grow accustomed to tolerating decisions that it finds less than
ideal. Consensus seeks to promote not only the formal practice of
assuring that proposals will satisfy the minority, but more deeply, a
sense of unity within the group and a culture of care that can all too
easily get trampled in the pursuit of a voting majority. This form of
decision-making works best when all members of a group have a shared
sense of purpose. When they don’t, the process grinds to a halt. For
example, Occupy Wall Street implemented modified consensus, only
requiring 90% rather than 100% agreement, to provide a little breathing
room for such occasions. Nevertheless, when members of a body are
working at cross purposes it only takes 11% to shut down the objectives
of the other 89%. Occupy Wall Street and many of the other squares
movements encountered such problems when spontaneously incorporating
thousands of random individuals into their decision- making bodies. Even
when consensus is practiced by a cohesive group with a shared purpose it
carries an inherent bias toward the status quo by making it more
difficult to pass a proposal or resolution. As George Lakey of Movement
for a New Society remarked, “consensus can be a conservative influence,
stifling the prospects of organizational change” (Cornell 2011, 47).
Clearly consensus carries a number of pitfalls, but so does majority
voting. Ultimately it is very difficult to navigate conflict which is
why anarchists place such a great emphasis on voluntary association
(and, therefore, voluntary disassociation). Sometimes the only solution
is for two groups to go their separate ways rather than forcing them to
coexist.
Many of horizontalism’s most energetic advocates view it as means and
ends wrapped together into a unified set of practices and values. From
this perspective, values inform practices which shift as they encounter
varied circumstances. In turn, the horizontalist hostility to “dogma”
allows values to adjust to the needs of the people as movement contexts
twist and turn. Horizontalism’s “non-ideological,” “apolitical” focus on
form, practice, and immediate problem-solving over large- scale
“sectarian” conflicts has endowed this historically specific tendency
with a portability and adaptability that has allowed it to flourish in
contexts as different as rural Greece and lower Manhattan, Istanbul and
Hong Kong. Unsurprisingly, the politics undergirding horizontalism have
varied drastically. This is unproble- matic if one has no predetermined
goal; if one adheres to the liberal notion I have referred to elsewhere
as “outcome neutrality” (Bray 2014). Yet, anarchism has always been
about much more than direct democracy; it is a revolutionary socialist
ideology grounded in anti-domination politics as well as
non-hierarchical practice.
Anarchist responses to the growth of popular horizontalism have ranged
from elation to disgust, with many in between. Those who have been more
enthusiastic have viewed horizontalist movements as opportunities for
the mass promotion of non-hierarchical politics while critics have seen
them as betrayals of truly horizontal principles especially as they have
ventured into electoralism. There are a range of anarchist responses to
horizontalism, as the examples below from Spain, the United States, and
Turkey will demonstrate.
The shared federalism [2] of anarchism and horizontalism can be traced
back to the eighteenth century. While one can also trace it back even
further, in terms of the history of socialism it makes sense to start
with the influence of the dictatorial Jacobin “republic of virtue”
during the French Revolution, which pioneered elements of central
planning and modern conscription. Over the following decades, the
European republican movement was split between Jacobins and their
sympathizers who longed for a renewed “reign of terror” and federal
republicans who were aghast at the bloody consequences of centralized
authority, even in the hands of republicans, and instead advocated local
and regional autonomy. Unsurprisingly, many of the first disciples of
the anti-authoritarian works of Proudhon and Bakunin began their
political lives as federal republicans while many Marxists have hailed
the Jacobin dictatorship as a preview of their desired dictatorship of
the proletariat (Zimmer 2015, 73; Esenwein 1989, 16–17; Maura 1975, 68;
Toledo and Biondi 2010, 365; Lenin 1975; Mayer 1999).
Anarchists advanced the federal republican opposition to centralization
by forming a critique of the state, whether federal or centralized, and
developing modes of struggle and methods of self-organizing that
reflected the world they sought to create. Most Marxists reject the
notion that anything approximating communism could be enacted in a
capitalist society and therefore conclude that the form that an
organization or party takes is only of instrumental value. For
Marxist-Leninists, for example, this essentially amounts to the position
that it is acceptable for a vanguard party to act in the best interest
of the proletariat – to act as the proletariat would allegedly act if it
had already achieved full class consciousness – as long as the same end
result of communism is eventually achieved (though, of course, it never
was). For most anarchists, however, the society of the future will
inevitably reflect the values, principles, and practices that went into
making it.
To understand how anarchists have attempted to put this idea into pre-
figurative practice, it’s important to distinguish between what David
Graeber (2002) and others have come to refer to as “capital-A” and
“small-a” anarchism. Although the gap that separates the two tendencies
is often vastly overstated, the distinction can help us identify the
connection between consensus and majority decision making and the areas
of overlap that exist between anarchism and horizontalism. The
anarchists that Graeber referred to as “capital-A” anarchists are much
more self-consciously influenced by the legacy of “classical” anarchism
(from roughly the 1860s to 1940). They tend to focus on the construction
of large federal organizations, such as anarcho-syndicalist unions or
anarchist communist federations, that operate by majority voting with a
strong focus on class struggle and mass resistance. Historically such
organizations have operated by federating local unions or political
groups into regional, national, and even international bodies that
operate by majority voting as carried out by recallable mandated
delegates. As opposed to parliamentary democracy where elected
representatives decide on behalf of their constituents, anarchist
delegates are only empowered to express the perspective of their union
or locality. Legislative power remains at the base level while allowing
collective self-management to scale up. This does not mean that such
systems become hierarchical, rather they allow locally-grounded
decision-making bodies to coordinate across large regions. Lately
consensus has become so ubiquitous in certain horizontalist/anarchist
circles that some don’t realize that the majority of anarchists
throughout history have implemented majoritarian voting.
The anarchists that Graeber referred to as “small-a” anarchists are
generally those whose anarchism has grown out of the anti-authoritarian
and countercultural currents of the Cold War era rather than “classical”
anarchism. They tend to create smaller, less formally structured groups
and collectives that operate by consensus, associate with more
countercultural milieux, and focus on non-class politics such as
environmentalism or feminism. “Small-a” anarchist collectives are
essentially examples of small-scale horizontalism infused with anarchist
politics. This is unsurprising considering the fact that horizontalism
and “small-a” anarchism grew out of the same post-war constellation of
non-hierarchical, consensus- oriented groups discussed above, and
“small-a” anarchists were among the original organizers of many recent
manifestations of popular horizontalism. This demonstrates that, to some
extent, horizontalism grew out of certain strains of anarchism. They
part ways, however, when horizontal practice is divorced from
anti-authoritarian politics. Certainly some anarchists eventually
disowned the horizontalist movements they helped create because they
allegedly strayed too far in a popular and/or reformist direction away
from the more intentional and explicitly radical designs some of their
early organizers had envisioned. Yet, pro-mass-movement anarchists
(whether of a “smaller” orientation or not) have continued to play
important roles in horizontalist movements because they see them as
opportunities to promote elements of anarchist politics on a large
scale.
I was certainly among those who joined Occupy Wall Street in order to
advance the movement’s non-hierarchical agenda and infuse it with more
anarchist content while maintaining its popular appeal. I made a case
for such an approach in my bookTranslating Anarchy: The Anarchism of
Occupy Wall Street where I documented how 72% of OWS organizers in New
York City had explicitly anarchist or implicitly anarchistic politics
(Bray 2013). For these anarchist(ic) organizers, and their counterparts
in other movements, the horizontalist movement is a broad, dynamic space
where popular struggles can interact with revolutionary politics,
ideally shifting through such comingling. Such struggles are
opportunities for anarchists to reclaim the mantle of democracy and
attack what they consider to be the fraud of hierarchical, capitalist,
representative government. In the United States, for example, anarchists
have had some of their greatest successes winning liberals and centrists
over to their ideas by arguing that non- hierarchical direct democracy
is the only true democracy. In a country where the ideal, if not the
actual practice, of democracy is universally revered, such arguments can
strike a popular chord.
Yet not all anarchists have been equally enamored with the squares
movements. Some anarchists rejected Occupy either because their local
encampment truly was reformist (the politics of the many Occupy
encampments ranged widely) or because they were hostile to popular
politics that was not explicitly anarchist (Bray 2013, 168). In Spain,
for instance, many anarchists supported and participated in their 15M
movement for similar reasons as the anarchists of Occupy, but a
significant number withheld their full support because they considered
the movement to be reformist (Taibo 2011; 2014). Even when some of the
anarchist unions wanted to support a 15M march, for example, they were
frustrated by the movement’s refusal to have unions and parties march
with their flags which stemmed from the 15M’s desire to remain
“non-sectarian.”
Another interesting element of the relationship between the 15M and
Spanish anarchists is that they generally don’t attempt to reclaim the
mantle of “democracy” from the political parties and government. For
example, a popular 15M chant goes “They call it democracy, and it
isn’t.” Once, however, I was marching near a group of anarchists who
sarcastically chanted “They call it democracy, and it is!” Here, the
intent of the chant is to convince listeners that the corruption and
disregard for the masses that epitomized the government is inherent to
its very nature. From an anarchist perspective, that is what
governmental “democracy” is and will always be. In part this stems from
the popular association between the post-Franco parliamentary regime and
the term “democracy.” For many Spaniards, the government that has been
in power since the 1970s is “la democracia,” and therefore the term has
more of a specific meaning than in the United States, where it is
understood more as an egalitarian decision-making method that the
government allegedly happens to embody.
In 2013, the Spanish Grupos Anarquistas Coordinados (Coordinated
Anarchist Groups) published a little book called Contra la democracia
(Against Democracy). This book created quite a stir in Spain in December
2014 when it was cited as evidence to support the arrest in Catalonia
and Madrid of eleven people from Spain, Italy, Uruguay, and Austria
accused of being members of what the state claimed was “a terrorist
organization of an anarchist nature” responsible for “several bomb
attacks” (“Catalan Police” 2014). In what came to be known as Operation
Pandora, seven of the original eleven were held on terrorist charges
because they had “Riseup” e-mail accounts, owned copies of Contra la
democracia, and were found with a canister of camping gas. Later, the
Chilean anarchist Francisco Javier Solar, who was ultimately convicted
with fellow Chilean Mónica Caballero of bombing the Pilar Basilica in
Zaragoza in 2013, denied accusations of being one of the text’s main
authors (Pérez 2016).
Given the importance that the authorities placed on this text, one might
assume that it’s a bloodthirsty bomb-making manual, but in fact, it’s
simply a historical analysis and critique of democracy. The book’s
introduction concludes by arguing that “If we believe that democracy is
liberty we will never stop being slaves. We will unmask this great lie!
We will construct anarchy” (Grupos Anarquistas Coordinados 2013, 8).
Later, in its only reference to the 15M, the text attacks the movement,
because it “asks for electoral reforms that benefit the small political
parties … it propagates citizenism (ciudadanismo) as ideology; a
‘democratization’ of the police … [and] the total pacification of
conflicts through mediation and delegation by a corps of social services
professionals” (Grupos Anarquistas Coordinados 2013, 68). Yet, despite
these critiques of “democracia” and the 15M, the authors of this text
are not against all directly democratic organizing. They advocate the
creation of networks of social centers, free schools, and other bodies
“to build a new society capable of freely self-managing (the only real
sense that the term ‘democracy’ could have) …” (Grupos Anarquistas
Coordinados 2013, 66). That, of course, is exactly what anarchists who
call for true direct democracy have in mind. Contra la democracia shows
us that although many anarchists in Spain and elsewhere may have a very
similar vision of the future self- management of a post-capitalist
society, some find it strategically useful to fight to reclaim
“democracy” while others seek to permanently discard it.
Much of the reluctance that anarchists have had in getting involved in
the Spanish 15M and other movements has had to do with the prevalent
tendency of horizontalist mass movements to be siphoned into
non-horizontal, electoral politics. The allure of representative
government is so powerful that although early on movements may proclaim
“¡Que se vayan todos!” (“Get rid of them all!”) in Argentina or “¡Que no
nos representan!” (“They don’t represent us!”) in Spain, frequently such
cries are transformed into calls for horizontalism to be extended into
office through the ballot box. Often such arguments are couched in terms
of the perspective that after the initial wave of protest has raised
awareness about an issue, what is necessary is to transition into the
“serious work of making concrete change” through governing. In Spain,
the most significant party that grew out of the 15M was Podemos (We can)
which has formed electoral coalitions with other similar parties and
platforms like Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) and Ganemos
Madrid (Let’s win Madrid) which calls for the promotion of “democratic
municipalism” and the creation of political structures that are
“democratic, horizontal, inclusive, and participatory …” (Ganemos Madrid
2016). Their rhetoric is rife with horizontalist references to
“autonomy” and “autogestión” (self-management). They essentially claim
to be merging the spirit and ideals of horizontalist assembly with the
lamentable “necessity” of taking office. Moreover, they fully embrace
horizontalism’s antagonism toward formal ideology by rejecting the
left/right binary and eschewing the usual trappings of leftism. Yet,
within a year Podemos had already drastically moderated its platform to
cater to the electoral center, thereby alienating a number of the
party’s more leftist leaders who later resigned (“Spain’s Poll-Topping”
2014; Hedgecoe 2016). After the June 2016 elections Podemos leader Pablo
Iglesias announced that it was time for his unconventional horizontalist
party to become “normalized,” and enter a phase “of much more
conventional politics.” He even went so far as to argue that “this
idiocy that we used to say when we were of the extreme left that things
change in the street and not in the institutions is a lie” (Ríos 2016).
Turkish anarchists also formulated critiques of horizontalism. As the
Gezi Park occupation movement of 2013 in Istanbul’s Taksim Square
developed, the Turkish anarchist organization Devrimci Anarsist Faaliyet
(Revolutionary Anarchist Action, DAF) distributed hundreds of copies of
a pamphlet it had written called “An anarchist criticism to ‘Occupy’ as
an activity of ‘99%.’” The pamphlet sought to diagnose what the group
perceived to be the reformism and depoliticization of Occupy. It argued
that the tactics of Occupy have “worn a libertarian discourse but [are]
far far away from practicing it …” and instead the movement tended, in
their eyes, “to consume concepts such as occupy, direct democracy,
freedom, action etc.” While the pamphlet contains many insightful
critiques of Occupy, certain elements of the authors’ analysis suffered
from the extreme distance separating them from events on the ground. At
a meeting with several of the pamphlet’s authors years later at the DAF
office in Istanbul, I had the opportunity to answer their questions and
clarify some misconceptions that they and many others had developed
about Occupy Wall Street through the press and speak about the
centrality of anarchist organizers. Nevertheless, the heart of their
critique about the misapplication of libertarian principles applied to
many (if not most) Occupy encampments and horizontalist movements in
general. Despite the presence of DAF and their pamphlet, the Gezi Park
movement also experienced electoral spinoffs such as the Gezi Party.
Seeking to remain true to the movement’s horizontalism, the party
claimed that its leaders would only act as “spokespersons” (“Official
Gezi Party” 2013).
Similar developments would have unfolded during the Occupy movement in
the United States if it weren’t for the narrowness of the two party
system. Yet, several years later, many former Occupiers campaigned for
Bernie Sanders in his failed bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential
nomination. Certainly many who participated in Occupy before supporting
Sanders were simply leftists who travel from one manifestation of left
populism to the next without any allegiance to (or often direct
knowledge of) horizontalism. Others, however, attempted to argue that
the Sanders campaign was an extension of Occupy. This was manifest in an
article titled “Occupy the Party” from the Not An Alternative collective
that appealed to former Occupiers to treat the campaign “like any street
or park and occupy it” (Not An Alternative 2016). In the name of
pragmatic populism, this article sought to drain the term “occupy” of
its associations with direct action, direct democracy, “leaderlessness,”
and revolutionary politics to convince readers that it can be used as a
catchy shorthand for buying into the cult of personality developing
around a moderate social democrat attempting to burrow into a strati-
fied, capitalist political party. From an anarchist perspective, parks
and streets are terrain of struggle that can be occupied because
non-hierarchical, direct action politics can be transplanted onto them.
Working within political parties, especially those like the Democratic
Party, requires jettisoning those practices and incorporating oneself
into the party structure. As the Irish Workers Solidarity Movement
organizer Andrew Flood (2014) argued in his essay “An anarchist critique
of horizontalism,” “horizontalism without a vision and method for
revolution simply provides protest fodder behind which one government
can be replaced with another.” Indeed, many anti-horizontal organizers,
have been perfectly willing to humor the directly democratic “quirks” of
horizontalist movements while biding their time waiting for
opportunities to convert popular upheavals into “protest fodder” for
reformist objectives cloaked in the imagery of rebellion.
Debates over electoral participation within horizontalist movements are
merely the latest rounds of a conflict that has challenged the broader
socialist movement since the nineteenth century. Although his position
changed several times, ever since Proudhon advocated electoral
abstention in 1857 in response to the authoritarianism of Napoleon III,
conflicts over electoralism have raged (Graham 2015, 62). Historically
anarchists have opposed parliamentary participation for a variety of
reasons, including their opposition to the hierarchical nature of
representation, their rejection of the social democratic notion that it
is possible to vote away capitalism (a goal that social democrats
eventually discarded), and their argument that, as Mikhail Bakunin
phrased it, “worker-deputies, transplanted into a bourgeois environment
… will in fact cease to be workers and, becoming Statesmen, they will
become … perhaps even more bourgeois than the Bourgeois themselves”
(quoted in Graham 2015, 116).
In 1979 a group of German radicals attempted to bypass the dichotomy of
socialist workers’ parties and anarchist abstentionism to create a
non-hierarchical “anti-party” that would operate based on consensus and
rotate their representatives to preserve their commitment to direct
democracy. This attempt to stuff horizontalism into the ballot box was
called the Green Party. Despite the best of intentions, internal
conflicts and “realist” calls for “pragmatism” doomed the party once it
entered parliament. Within less than a decade it had become simply
another left party (Katsiaficas 1997, 205–208).
In the wake of the sectarian strife of the twentieth century, many
radicals have found refuge in the anti-ideological ideology of
horizontalism. Yet, as we can see, it is often insufficient to guarantee
truly horizontal and non-hierarchical outcomes. Even apart from
electoralism, horizontalist movements have at times struggled to
counteract the encroachment of patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic,
white supremacist, and ableist tendencies that inevitably come when
broad swaths of society are suddenly brought together. I can still hear
the common refrain of many white men in Occupy Wall Street that we had
“lost sight of Wall Street” as our main focus when we addressed race or
gender. Horizontalist movements spread notions of direct democracy,
direct action, mutual aid, and autonomy far and wide. This is incredibly
important insofar as they influence broader cultures of resistance and
extend beyond the standard reach of most radicalism. Since political
ideologies are digested whole only by their most committed militants,
shifting political sentiments and practices in mass contexts is
essential. Yet, the horizontalist reliance on form over content runs the
risk of producing a muddled populism that is easily redirected away from
its non-hierarchical origins. As the work of Michael Freeden (1996)
suggests, the meaning of horizontalism shifts depending on its political
content. From an anarchist perspective, this illustrates the value of
anarchism’s holistic analysis of the interrelatedness of all forms of
domination and the interconnectedness of forms of self-management and
their political outcomes. While they differed on the details, anarchists
from Mikhail Bakunin to Errico Malatesta, from Nestor Makhno to the
creators of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) in Spain have agreed
on the need for anarchists to collectively engage with mass movements to
disseminate their truly horizontal political visions.
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[1] By “leaderless,” Occupy and others really referred to the absence of
institutional leadership, not the absence of those who lead. Hence the
shift some made toward the term “leaderful” which implied that in a
horizontalist movement anyone could become a leader by getting involved.
[2] I use the terms “federal” and “federalism” to refer to broadly
decentralized forms of organization. Certainly the anarchist use of the
terms “federation” or “confederation” to describe their organizations,
such as the Fédération Anarchiste in France and Belgium or the
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo in Spain, entails a greater level of
decentralization than the federal state advocated by federalist
republicans. Nevertheless, there is a shared tendency