Nodes of Revolution
Toward a Workable Strategy for Organizing the Left
As socialists, our express goal is to start and carry out a lasting, viable and positively transformational social revolution. Only the most deluded, internet-poisoned “leftist” would try deny that any task is more essential or integral to this goal than the task of mobilizing the masses.
Nothing can fundamentally change without a millions-strong movement or ordinary people, all of them willing to stand up, and refuse to sit down until they’ve transformed their reality. However, the means of achieving this goal have been a point of endless, destructive and fractious contention among self-professed leftists since a time before “The Left” could truly have been said to exist.
The Vertical-Horizontal Dichotomy
There are countless, more specific theories of mass mobilization. We have our more widely-recognized ideological frameworks like anarchism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc. There are also countless “boutique” ideologies tailored to the specific analysis of fringe thinkers that are not widely recognized outside of their cultivated following. Anything from Bob Avakian’s “new communism” to J. Posadas’s prediction of post-atomic UFO communism can fall into this group.
Each of these heuristics will have points in common with the others, as well as points in which they diverge. That said, we traditionally perceive all these theories of building working-class power as being divided into two broad, fundamental models: vertical organization, and horizontal organization.
With “vertical” organizing, we have a codified organization (i.e. a party) with a formalized, clear hierarchy, rules, and aims. Members of the organization tend to view themselves as conservators of the one, true, correct political line. That’s not to say that they necessarily view political work performed outside of the party as inherently worthless. However, without the party’s guidance, such actions are going to be stochastic, inconsistent, and incapable of yielding transformative results.
In contrast, horizontal organizing is deliberately “leaderless.” It’s predicated on decentralization and direct democracy; all decisions are to be arrived at through consensus. This was the model generally adopted within the Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged in 2011. Advocates of horizonalism often favor spontaneous action over gradual base-building. While horizontalism does not necessitate spontaneity, they do tend to compliment one another.
Strategic Weaknesses to Both Approaches
There are generally recognized weaknesses with both of these models of organizing. For verticalist groups, this often comes in the form of a certain rigidity of ideas and resistance to compromise. For example, a verticalist group will often work in coalition with others, but it’s understood that any activity that is not done in service of their political line, under the leadership of their organization, is ultimately of marginal utility, or even futile.
As I see it, the fundamental weakness of such an organization, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of their political line, is in achieving broad recognition and support among the working class. I can draw on my own experience here; in my twenties, I spent a year organizing with a marginal political organization. I won’t name the group, but they were an adherent of one of those “bespoke ideologies” I mentioned earlier.
The party had formal structures, leadership, rules, and norms, as well as institutions established in major cities across the US like a long-running party newspaper, a publishing imprint, a radio station, and permanent meeting halls. The party even owned several retail outlets which were used as both fundraising avenues and channels for political education. Regardless, after fifty years of organizing, party membership never grew beyond the low-triple digits.
Even within the cities where the party had long-established roots, average working people within the marginalized communities that the party professed to represent tended to keep them at arm’s length. Party members were viewed as annoying at best, or “culty” at worst. Despite decades of agitation, the promised revolution was no closer in 2018 than it had been in 1968.
A leftist organization cannot affect broad change in the absence of genuine, broad support among the working class. It doesn’t matter how formalized an organization’s structures may be, or how dedicated to the cause are the party’s rank-and-file members; it’s all meaningless without broad support. And, if there is no prospect of that support materializing anytime soon, then energy spent building the party is energy wasted.
This should not be taken as an endorsement of horizontalism, though. In contrast, horizontal organizing has even more damning issues than vertical organizing.
The leaderless structure which horizontal organizing necessitates makes it so that no one possesses any executive decision making capabilities. This proves to be a serious liability in moments of political opportunity or crisis, as it can lead to the moment passing by before any decision can be made and action taken. Even in day-to-day organizing, it presents more opportunities for miscommunication and factionalism, and makes it exceedingly difficult to coordinate projects or campaigns. It can also lead to lapses in accountability for ensuring projects get finished.
Further, horizontal organizing may as well be a model designed to collapse into infighting. There is no singular point of organization, and no theoretical guidelines. As such, ideology becomes very malleable, and the will of the group may become the will of the most charismatic character, divorced of theory or ideology.
Exhaustive critiques have been made of democratic centralism as an organizing principle. But for all its faults, democratic centralism is, undeniably, an organizing principle. Thus, in the grand scheme of revolutionary potential, a party dedicated to democratic centralism is still far ahead of a horizontalist non-party.
Leftist Infighting: An Online Disorder
In his book Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization, Rodrigo Nunes talks about the weaknesses inherent in both conventional “vertical” and “horizontal” models of organizing. Nunes, a Brazilian professor of modern and contemporary philosophy, contrasts these two models, then proposes a new theory of organizing based on decentralized nodes of action. The author calls for an “ecology of different initiatives and organi[z]ational forms” to facilitate social revolution.
Where is the practical application here? In short, it may be a means to finally ditch the factionalism that has been a cancer to the left for generations.
At this point, it’s practically cliche to point out the common animosity between adherents of the dozens of leftist currents and syntheses. However, much of this contention within the contemporary left, at least in The West, seems to be a largely online phenomenon. There are some exceptions; some lost souls who seem to think that the best way to use their limited time on Earth is to force physical confrontation with other progressive organizers deemed insufficiently “revolutionary.” But, those outliers notwithstanding, most “leftist infighting” is done not in the streets, but in subtweets.
The most contentious leftists are the terminally-online variety. These are the same leftists who, in an earlier age, might have spent their time building a glorified study group or book club, or writing furious letters to the editor of a Trotskyite newspaper.
This is conjectural; I can only rely on subjective experience here. That said, in my subjective experience, questions of ideology seem surprisingly easy to table when in the company of actual, on-the-ground organizers. It’s not that some of these questions don’t have to be wrestled with at some point. Rather, it’s in the interest of basic pragmatism that, more and more often, we see anarchists, Marxist-Leninists, and social democrats working in coalition with one another to achieve tangible, measurable change.
There seems to be a growing realization among on-the-ground socialist organizers that, given the nebulous, even prenatal state of “The Left,” there is more to be gained by working alongside one another when our goals align, and amicably parting ways when those interests diverge.
Forming nodes of revolutionary potential in a distributed, locally-focused network could prove to be a more effective approach than enforcing a strict adherence to either traditional “top-down” party structures or horizontalist non-organizations. In this network, you have different parties, working groups, solidarity networks, and radical unions, each working toward a goal which might be more narrowly targeted, but which ultimately aligns with the broad interests of all. Or, at least those actions might facilitate the actions of other nodes.
This model of the revolutionary nodal network is not without vulnerabilities; no model of organizing is. There is, for instance, the threat that one faction within a node might connive to overawe the others for their own purposes. There is also the prospect of one organization approaching collaboration in bad faith, and seeing it as an opportunity for entryism or poaching members from another group. Finally, the problem of a lack of interorganizational accountability.
Nodal organizing will not remove all challenges from organizing. However, it aims to balance the strengths and weaknesses of the vertical and horizontal models, producing not an ideal model, but at least an optimal and pragmatic one.
To Envision Nodal Organizing in Context
At the local level, one might have a body of different organizations, all of which agree to enter into a coalition in good faith and with a sense of mutual respect. Each agrees to dedicate a small share of their resources to the coalition, in exchange for the promise of mutual support when the interests of multiple organizations align. However, it is never incumbent on any member organization to take any action; interorganizational cooperation is always voluntary.
While this latter point may make the entire affair seem toothless and liberal, it is actually quite crucial.
Allowing members in any coalition to maintain autonomy to act and to organize as they see fit is the key to a workable coalition. Otherwise, a sense may emerge among members that they must keep themselves at arm’s length from their supposed comrades, or else risk losing autonomy over an internal program; that they might, in effect, become a junior partner in their own political project. A lack of organizational autonomy could also lead to a situation in which more moderate elements of a coalition de-fang a promising, radical project; or vice versa, one faction within the coalition attempts to overextend and radicalize a project which has no real potential for such radicalization. Any of the scenarios could quickly lead to the irrelevance or breakup of the coalition.
Clear aims must be established before the coalition should take on any project, along with means by which progress toward a stated goal can be tracked. It should also be established how this project is sound in the context of political theory, that there is a reasonable expectation of success, and which organization will be principally responsible for directing action. Only then should member organizations within the nodal network be asked to agree-or decline-to participate.
There must be a means for coalition partners to amicably exit a project at any time if they believe that it is not bearing results. There should also be a means by which to expel coalition members. However, such expulsion should never be based on any ideological question. The only justification for the full expulsion of an entire organization from the coalition should be a failure to uphold the principle of mutual assistance; of coming to the coalition with a hand out, but offering no hand in return.
Establishing Trust
There is a century’s worth of mistrust among leftist factions. Much of this is felt as a generational trauma; a sense of injury done to one’s political ancestors, rather than to oneself. In most cases, it is expressed in the form of subtweets and Discord flaming, rather than through any functional critique or transformatory discussion.
Each faction waits for historical necessity and intolerable conditions to force the majority into their own arms. That “come-to-Jesus” moment will never arrive in the current context of a competitive and highly sectarian political left, though.
Nodal inter-organizing may be the solution to the contemporary left’s morass. It can be understood as a kind of “organizing mutual aid;” an agreement to offer material assistance to allied groups, regardless of theoretical differences, based on a shared understanding and mutual trust.
The underlying bedrock is an agreement to work together on shared projects, with a mutual understanding made explicit and clear ahead of time. While one organization will take a position of leadership on a specific project, all nodes are invited to offer constructive, good-faith critique to address the contradictions that will, inevitably, arise in the course of carrying out the work. This trust and sense of mutual respect will be the glue that makes any inter-organizational or inter-tendency cooperation possible.
These are critical times. We face the converging pressures of climate change, looming healthcare crises, and technological innovations that threaten to destabilize labor’s traditional role in production. All the while, individual members of the ruling class see the writing on the wall and are quietly prepping their exit strategies, intent on leaving the masses to die in the ruined world from which they extracted all value.
We stand on the precipice of a better world. But, we will not seize it without mass organization.
Dispelling the bad blood built up over two centuries of socialist agitation will take effort; more than that, though, it will take good faith and trust. It may be hard, but it is also absolutely necessary. Humanity cannot afford for self-conscious leftists to remain cloistered in insular parties, affinity groups, and reading rooms. The time for political cooperation is now.
Originally published at https://arguechat.substack.com on January 17, 2023.
