#horizontality

[noosphe-re]

Somewhere sonorous, vast vertical seas strum stringed horizontal fields.

Ahmed Salman

[dailyanarchistposts]

Anarchists and Neo-anarchists: Horizontalism and Autonomous Spaces

It is not uncommon, particularly in North America, to see anarchism defined as an ideology rooted in ‘direct democracy’, consensus decision making, and the maintenance of ‘horizontal’ (i.e., ‘non-hierarchical’) social relations, particularly in autonomous zones or public spaces.

This idea of anarchism is unusual in that it places at the centre of its definition an adherence to very specific forms of procedure and interpersonal behaviour while downplaying the political ends a ‘horizontal’ movement should be trying to establish. From this perspective, reclaiming public space as an opportunity to hold non-hierarchical public assemblies, where we can hammer out decisions by consensus, is, in itself, ‘anarchist’ – whatever the result of such processes.

This has little to do with the classical, mass-anarchist tradition and its politics of revolutionary socialism. It is, instead, an approach which is better described as falling under the banner of ‘neo-anarchism’ (or ‘small-a anarchism’). Neo-anarchism is a modern conception of anarchism largely informed by the feminist and peace movements of the 70s, the environmental movement of the 80s, the alter-globalisation movement of the 90s, and the Argentinian uprising of 2001; which coined the term horizontalidad (‘horizontalism’) to describe the movement’s rejection of representative democracy, the use of general assemblies to coordinate activity, and converting abandoned or bankrupt factories into cooperative businesses.

Take, for instance, the insistence by neo-anarchists on the use of consensus decision making. Though consensus (or ‘unanimity’, as it was typically called) was sometimes a feature of anarchist political organisations, and often seen as an ideal to work towards through comradely discussion, it was never a fundamental component of the anarchist movement. Anarchists have generally agreed that the appropriate form of decision making depends on the circumstances concerned, and frequently endorsed variations of majoritarian voting; particularly in mass organisations based on commonalities other than close-ideological affinity, such as unions. The focus for anarchists has generally not been the form of decision-making, but instead the principles of free association and solidarity. Furthermore, though anarchists have always stressed the right ofthe minority to be free of the majority’s coercion, it is even more important that the great majority be free of minoritarian rule or sabotage. As Malatesta wrote in his pamphlet Between Peasants: A Dialogue on Anarchy:

everything is done to reach unanimity, and when this is impossible, one would vote and do what the majority wanted, or else put the decision in the hands of a third party who would act as arbitrator, respecting the inviolability of the principles of equality and justice which the society is based on.

In response to the concern over minoritarian sabotage, he continues by asserting that such a situation would

[make it] necessary to take forcible action, because if it is unjust that the majority oppress the minority, it’s no more just that the contrary should happen. And just as the minority have the right of insurrection, so do the majority have the right of defense, or if the word doesn’t offend you, repression.[3]

As for ‘autonomous zones’ and the tactic of reclaiming public spaces (as seen in the Occupy movement) – here we have no connection to anarchism as a revolutionary tradition, and an example of a tactic which has repeatedly shown its inability to extract significant reforms, let alone revolutionise production and destroy the State.

The fundamental limitations of the ‘public occupation’ or ‘autonomous zone’ , and the defeats which have followed from these limitations, have led some former advocates of the strategy to make a notable transition from neo-anarchism to parliamentary politics. Though inexplicable to some outside observers, the change is easily understood when we consider neo-anarchism’s peculiar view of ‘direct democracy’, or ‘horizontally organised spaces’, as the defining characteristic of anarchism, and not a theory of libertarian revolution against the State and capital.

If we accept the idea of anarchism as proposed by the neo-anarchists, there is no fundamental contradiction between anarchism and involvement in parliamentary politics. If the political party is a directly democratic one, composed of social movements, and committed to horizontal interpersonal relations, what difference does it make if the decision made (ideally by consensus) is to campaign for political candidates, or even administer the State?

We have seen this with the so-called ‘Movements of the Squares’ in Europe. Activists who took part in the 15M (or ‘Indignados’) movement in Spain abandoned their dismissal of all politicians (“¡Que no nos representan!” – “They don’t represent us!”) with the formation of Podemos and various other ‘municipalist’ parties.[4]

A similar trajectory was followed by the anthropologist David Graeber towards the end of his life. Graeber – a figurehead of Occupy Wall Street and, prior to that, a participant in the alter-globalisation movement – apparently saw no contradiction between his professed (neo-)anarchism and his efforts to join the British Labour Party in support of Jeremy Corbyn. In particular, Graeber was enthusiastic about the Labour-affiliated organisation Momentum; an outgrowth of the Corbyn leadership campaign, which he argued constituted a unique attempt to fuse a radical social movement with a traditional parliamentary party.[5]

More recently we have witnessed the absurdity of a self-proclaimed ‘libertarian socialist’, Gabriel Boric (who touts his association with Chile’s radical student movement), ascending to the presidency in the aftermath of a militant popular uprising.

The damage caused by these supposedly ‘unique’ attempts to translate the ‘horizontalism’ of neo-anarchism into the party-form – which, in reality, hardly differs from the historic approach offered by Marxists as an alternative to anarchism – has been outlined well elsewhere, and there is no need to go over the details here.[6] It suffices to say that in each case there was bureaucratisation, accomodation with the necessities of administering the capitalist state (or even just campaigning to administer it), and zero empowerment of workers against the bosses.

The reality is that there is no way to fully ‘prefigure’ anarchy and communism through ‘directly democratic’ spaces of ‘autonomy’. Anarchism requires a specific anarchist movement and anarchist practice. Though we must certainly organise ourselves from the bottom up, with a consistent federalist structure, we can not simply bring about our ideal by ‘living anarchisticly’ or relating to one another as ‘horizontally’ as possible. Similarly, the content of anarchism can not be limited to the structure of our movement – its content of revolutionary class struggle must be maintained. To quote Luigi Fabbri:

If anarchism were simply an individual ethic, to be cultivated within oneself, and at the same time adapted in material life to acts and movements in contradiction with it, we could call ourselves anarchists and belong to the most diverse parties; and so many could be called anarchists who, although they are spiritually and intellectually emancipated, are and remain, on practical grounds, our enemies.But anarchism is something else… proletarian and revolutionary, an active participation in the movement for human emancipation, with principles and goals that are egalitarian and libertarian at the same time. The most important part of its program does not consist solely in the dream, which we want to come true, of a society without bosses and without governments, but above all in the libertarian conception of revolution, of revolution against the state and not through the state… [7]

[plagiarmola]

(Esp) Por mi y por todos mis compañeros. Solidaridad - Esfuerzo - Horizontalidad.

(Eng) For me and for all my colleagues. Solidarity - Effort - Horizontality.

[vuenville]

Photo credit David Cousin Marsy

[athousandgateaux]

Just as the ‘self-management’ construct was seminal in the reorganization of capitalism over the past thirty years, citizen action is nothing other than the current instrument of the modernization of politics. This new ‘civilizing process’ is based on the critique of authority developed in the 1970s, when second-order cybernetics was crystalizing. The critique of political representation as a separate power, already recuperated by the new management in the sphere of economic production, is not being reinvested in the political sphere. Everywhere you look it’s all about the horizontality of relations of participation in projects that are meant to replace the old-fashioned hierarchical and bureaucratic authority, counter-powers and decentralizations that are supposed to undo the monopolies and the secrecy. In this way the chains of social interdependence are extended and tightened without hinderance; here they’re made of surveillance, elsewhere of delegation. The integration of civil society by the State and the integration of the State by civil society mesh together more and more smoothly. In this way the the division of labor for the management of populations is organized, an organization necessary to the dynamic of cybernetic capitalism. In the foreseeable future, the affirmation of a ‘world citizenship’ will complete the process

Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis, pg. 88-89

[feministdragon]

「"What is it that we want? What is our project?" The good thing is we have no program. We are creating tools of freedom. First is the obvious: to meet our basic necessities. But the process of finding solutions to meet our basic needs leads us to develop tools that make us free. For me, that's the meaning of autonomy. If you start to think about what constitutes autonomy, and you then start to discuss the notions of autogestión, self-sufficiency, web­-like articulations, noncommercial exchange of goods, horizontal orga­nizing, and direct democracy, you eventually end up asking yourself, "If we achieve all these things, will we then be autonomous?" Autonomous from what? No. If one day we achieve true autonomy, we won't be au­tonomists or autonomous, but will, in fact, be free.」

Feminists, we can learn a lot from the Horizontalidad movement

here's a link to a pdf of a book that directly quotes interviews with many people about how Horizontalidad has been transforming movement in Venezuela

files.libcom.org/files/Sitrin%20(Ed.)%20-%20Horizontalism%20-%20Voices%20of%20Popular%20Power%20in%20Argentina.pdf

[robertogreco]

The trailer for Unrueh (Unrest) is embedded above. I haven’t seen the film yet, but I look forward to watching when it is available to me. It’s compelling for many reasons, some of which are the watchmaking, the labor organizing, the history of anarchism, and the way the film was made. Here are two long clips from an excellent interview with the director Cyril Schäublinby Soren Hough to give you an idea of what I mean:

The idea of decentralizing these famous figures comes through in the filmmaking both narratively (Kropotkin and Josephine both say they are not protagonists in dialogue) and in the actual framing of individual scenes where use wide shots that literally decenter the characters. “Unrest” has this almost Altman- or Haneke-like voyeuristic perspective.

It’s also just the way I like to make films and the way that I like to watch [them]. It goes a long way back that I came up with this way of creating an image so that when you watch the movie, you are aware that you’re watching a movie. It’s transparent that it’s a made up thing. Maybe this could sound Brechtian, but it’s not really. And also to give liberty [to the audience] of what to choose from this big tableau image, and what to do with it—but also to give the people who appear in the film, which are all non-professional actors, space to just do what they what they do and not be too [restrictive to them].

Kind of the exact opposite of Kubrick. He would keep one particular shot over and over again until he got what he eventually wanted.

He worked with actors, and I work with people. It’s very fragile, and delicate. I have to work a lot with them and tell them "don’t act" or "don’t play." But then they are suddenly just doing it. It’s like a situationist approach.

And of course, situationists have a connection to the anarchist movement, as well. It sounds like your natural aesthetic instinct tied well into this particular story where you, as you say, have this big name in “Unrest”—Peter Kropotkin. He’s not in a huge amount of the movie, he doesn’t have that many lines, he’s not a central character, and it’s certainly not a biopic.

The guy who acts as Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov) is a very avid Kropotkin guy. I mean, he’s really into him. And he said to me at the end, "I didn’t say that much!" But he told me the way we were doing the film, and how the film was organized, and how we talked to each other, he felt [it took a] mutual aid approach. That was really interesting for me.

Could you elaborate on what he meant by that?

Finding out together how to [tell this story]. Just simple gestures. I mean, we were cooking for each other. There’s a lot of help involved now in filmmaking: people made his hair, his beard. They helped him with the clothes, the microphone. It was very important for me to have a gentle, open feeling between people, and that we could talk in the breaks.

It’s unusual, because I think filmmaking is one of those places where there’s a presumption that it has to be run in a quite clear, hierarchical manner, but it sounds like you were able to be more collaborative.

A lot of people came to me because this was the first big film that I made. The first film we made for 60,000 francs—only friends acted in it and it was very low budget. With this film, we had much more. So we had people who worked professionally for 30 years come to us and say, "Oh my God, this was the kindest set we’ve ever seen. How do you do it? What’s happening?" It was funny. Everybody thought it was really nice. For me, it was really tough, because it’s always tough to make a film as a directing person. Just really intense. But it was nice. Good feelings.

It sounds like even if it was difficult for you, you made it a good environment for other folks. Earlier, you mentioned cadence, the sense of rhythm of working life. And obviously this is a ubiquitous motif in "Unrest," where you have ticking clocks, stopwatches, the winding of the camera. For my part, it seemed to reflect the mechanical nature of industrial society, but also this sense of social progression. Could you talk a bit more about what these ideas mean to you?

I think it was something that fascinated me with watchmaking. Because it’s a very simple machine, you know, that creates two events, the tick and the tock [from] which you can count and compare to other events. And it’s crazy how we integrated this machine, or industrial time, into our bodies. We have a feeling [that] ten minutes have passed by. We really think it’s 4:30. We believe it’s true. It’s so concrete. And I think this is interesting, because it’s such a construction. It’s so made up. With this film, I really try to show the construction of this machine. The four different time [zones the watchmakers had to keep track of] were real, but it’s absurd from an outsider’s point of view. I think if that is a construction, other capitalist mythologies are also constructions. And I think it’s important not to forget that, that we live in a made [world] and not an ultimate finished truth or anything.

That’s one of the things I find really interesting about the film. As you say, narratively, it’s not about Kropotkin or any of the characters in particular. But it is thematically about Kropotkin’s ideas. Kropotkin, contra Karl Marx or Adam Smith or even some other anarchists, believed in the abolition of any kind of wage labor whatsoever—that there was no way to meaningfully compensate somebody’s labor, to quantify it in such a way that you can pay them a wage. In "Unrest," the exact opposite is happening. You have this constant refrain about wages being paid for particular amounts of time and for particular amounts of work. The incongruity of that notion is really laid bare.

Yeah, of course. There’s an interesting thing that we did that in the end didn’t [make it] into the film. But one of the first demands of the anarchist union in this town was that they wanted to be paid for the time when they were not allowed to work. They were like, "We want to get money for the Sundays that you don’t let us work because of your religious conviction. Or Christmas." This demand completely shows this whole thing is crazy, no? Who can say when you work and for what, when, and how?

Another aspect that came up quite a bit in “Unrest” was this idea about photography and portraiture. Throughout the movie, the authorities are trying to document the town through photos, and the police are constantly trying to move anarchists out of the shot as if they’re not part of the town, or they’re not important enough to record. The local amateur photographer is perfectly happy to photograph them, but the official authorities exclude them. Meanwhile, the anarchists are trading photos of famous revolutionary figures as if they were baseball cards.

Yeah, they really did [trade and sell] pictures of martyrs. They were selling pretty well, I guess. First, I thought this idea of who can create objective reality, or say this is true, this is our village, this is how we organize society in the beginning of the nation state, is interesting. With photography, that was funny and strange to me. Who can say, "We’ll take a picture of this town, this is how it looks"? And then they print postcards and there are no women on it, only men, or no people at all. This made sense to me to show. And of course, this idea of the anarchists to create a parallel public space, or to kind of hack into these new technologies. It was this attempt to create an anarchist identity, or an anarchist community, with technological means—with photography, there was a clear strategy, and of course with the telegraph. There’s this bit in the movie [that came about when] Florian Eitel found out that many of the factory directors and owners were subscribing to anarchist newspapers, because they were much better connected internationally than the normal press."

[...]

So some of the people in the film actually are watchmakers themselves?

Quite a few. Yeah. The main actor, Josephine (Clara Gostynski), is an architect. And she really likes Kropotkin, as well, and Simone Weil, and she spent a lot of time with one of the other actors who explained to her the mechanics. As an architect, she really could build on that.

The nationalist versus anarchist perspective in “Unrest” is most obvious when they’re running the two lotteries in parallel, one managed by the industrialist and the other by the anarchist community as a fundraiser. Later, when they’re voting, there’s a nice illustration of something that Errico Malatesta talks about, which is essentially that you have this direct marriage between capital in the state which necessarily excludes certain people (usually the powerless, the poor) from participating in governance. With all these ideas in mind, we’re in a moment where we’re seeing a revitalization of the labor movement across the globe. Unions across the United States, strikes in the UK and Europe, all in response to extreme societal precarity. Where do you see this film fitting into the current discourse about nationalism versus internationalism, workers and the state?

Big question. I wonder if internationalism is still a word that will affect us because nations are a concept that I don’t think will prevail. I don’t think it will make sense, really. But I think this is not for us or for the film to explain. I think this is just obvious. And I think our close surroundings will become much stronger—our experience of neighborhoods and direct mutual aid. And I think with cyberspace, the concept of nation and what you should have in common with all these people will fade at one point, I’m sure. There’s a lot of open question marks. [laughs]

I think also what’s really important is how we organize information. I think that is the main thing for me right now, maybe also with this film. Like [the question the workers face] in the movie, do you want to reenact a medieval battlefield? Or do you want to reenact the Paris Commune? This is a question we’re also [facing] right now. What information do we take and reproduce and turn into reality?"

(via Justin)