I have to say my familiarity with NVNH is very surface level, as in I have no familiarity with it, but this concept of trying to create a “protocol” for safe, effective, and strong communication and cooperation between different people and groups sounds like the purpose of a socialist party. For example, a reason for a socialist party to exist is to give people from these different groups to sit down in one space, talk, compare notes, resolve tensions within working class communities for greater cooperation, etc. Am I wrong in saying that?
That’s what a socialist party might aim to do, but it’s probably not the best tool and for sure it’s not main reason why such a thing would work. One core part of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal is to deconstruct the narrative that the Bolshevik party was the main driver of the Russian Revolution, as if Lenin had a blueprint emanating from the center of the party that was executed at the periphery and then in the struggle itself. Nunes attributes the success not to the party form or how it was operating (the execution was good, but that’s not the point), but rather to the culture of mediation between conflicting powers that the party and Iskra were promoting in their political ecology. This clearly wasn’t framed as a protocol, but it had the same role.
The party form was a historical accident, that at the time was fit enough for the material and social conditions, for the culture, for the informational infrastructure of the time. Nowadays, it is very clear that parties are unfit for whatever they are trying to achieve and every battle is uphill, while in different conditions in the past they proliferated and grew.
One core tenet of the book is that organizational forms should follow the goals, strategy and environmental conditions and should be picked accordingly. It would be a mistake to start with the idea of building a party form and then find a problem to apply that form to.
I think you raise some interesting points but I think that this just falls back into the failures of prefiguration and expecting resistance and revolution to grow out of an “organic” movement.
If we require prefiguration for our organizational forms, i.e. that we try and create the world that we want in miniature in the organizations we create, then we’ll largely fail without a greater strategic basis. This is the thesis of If We Burn by Vincent Bevins, which goes into how these tenets of prefiguration for our organizations lead to them being ultimately too flexible and loose to take hold of national revolutionary crisises which better-led movements are able to take to their advantage.
This just sounds like the age old problem of relying and requiring “organic” growth to happen. It’ll happen, it’ll get us far, but it has absolutely never been shown on a large national scale to get us far enough to lead to a revolutionary overthrow of society. The party justifies itself by being a conscious organ for working class people to collect knowledge, theory, and practice under one roof which is able to coordinate itself and operate outside the bounds of what would be “organic” or occur naturally otherwise. It doesn’t exist at the exclusion of organic left-wing growth, as that’s very necessary, but instead represents a section of this organic growth which is then conscious of itself and able to operate outside the bounds previously thought possible.
We are in agreement here on the premises. The work of Nunes is the most rigorous critique of contemporary “spontaneism” (you call it organic growth, but it’s the same in this context). If We Burn is the more pop version of it, but the idea is the same. I’m also very hostile to prefigurative politics and any kind of escapism. The politics must be done rooted in the here and now. There’s no outside. Nunes says “the history with the subject inside”.
We disagree on the conclusions though and that’s what gives the title to the book. “Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal” means that a lot of people, to escape the failures of spontaneism and horizontalism (or the trauma of the '68) take refuge in older forms of vertical rigidity, like the traditional party form. This is a false dichotomy, that is paralyzing the left. They are just different, ineffective, coping mechanisms. The failures of one doesn’t justify the other, and vice-versa.
The party justifies itself by being a conscious organ
Here we go into metaphysics of organizational theory, but I would argue that a party is conscious on the same level of any assemblage of more than two humans. They just perform their consciousness differently. Nunes takes like two chapters to make this argument, so I won’t repeat it here. See it as like the same difference there is between human intelligence, action and decision-making compared to the intelligence of mycelium networks, forests or other forms of non-human agency.
collect knowledge, theory, and practice under one roof
In today’s world, this is a weakness, not a strength. Centralized knowledge is slow and world around us is slow. This was less true in 1917 or it is less true at the periphery of the empire, where party forms still deliver the goods. Being slower than your environment means not only that you can’t act effectively within your environment, but that you also lack the tools to observe that this is happening. That is one of the arguments for which I said before “the party form is unfit”. Decentralization and localism is for sure fetishized by many as “more democratic”, and I don’t necessarily believe that’s true, but decentralization is necessary because it creates faster and more flexible systems, that can match capitalistic structures in speed.
That said, you also see it as complementary to what happens outside the party, and that’s already good ecological thinking in Nunes terms.
I have to say my familiarity with NVNH is very surface level, as in I have no familiarity with it, but this concept of trying to create a “protocol” for safe, effective, and strong communication and cooperation between different people and groups sounds like the purpose of a socialist party. For example, a reason for a socialist party to exist is to give people from these different groups to sit down in one space, talk, compare notes, resolve tensions within working class communities for greater cooperation, etc. Am I wrong in saying that?
That’s what a socialist party might aim to do, but it’s probably not the best tool and for sure it’s not main reason why such a thing would work. One core part of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal is to deconstruct the narrative that the Bolshevik party was the main driver of the Russian Revolution, as if Lenin had a blueprint emanating from the center of the party that was executed at the periphery and then in the struggle itself. Nunes attributes the success not to the party form or how it was operating (the execution was good, but that’s not the point), but rather to the culture of mediation between conflicting powers that the party and Iskra were promoting in their political ecology. This clearly wasn’t framed as a protocol, but it had the same role.
The party form was a historical accident, that at the time was fit enough for the material and social conditions, for the culture, for the informational infrastructure of the time. Nowadays, it is very clear that parties are unfit for whatever they are trying to achieve and every battle is uphill, while in different conditions in the past they proliferated and grew.
One core tenet of the book is that organizational forms should follow the goals, strategy and environmental conditions and should be picked accordingly. It would be a mistake to start with the idea of building a party form and then find a problem to apply that form to.
I think you raise some interesting points but I think that this just falls back into the failures of prefiguration and expecting resistance and revolution to grow out of an “organic” movement.
If we require prefiguration for our organizational forms, i.e. that we try and create the world that we want in miniature in the organizations we create, then we’ll largely fail without a greater strategic basis. This is the thesis of If We Burn by Vincent Bevins, which goes into how these tenets of prefiguration for our organizations lead to them being ultimately too flexible and loose to take hold of national revolutionary crisises which better-led movements are able to take to their advantage.
This just sounds like the age old problem of relying and requiring “organic” growth to happen. It’ll happen, it’ll get us far, but it has absolutely never been shown on a large national scale to get us far enough to lead to a revolutionary overthrow of society. The party justifies itself by being a conscious organ for working class people to collect knowledge, theory, and practice under one roof which is able to coordinate itself and operate outside the bounds of what would be “organic” or occur naturally otherwise. It doesn’t exist at the exclusion of organic left-wing growth, as that’s very necessary, but instead represents a section of this organic growth which is then conscious of itself and able to operate outside the bounds previously thought possible.
Am I understanding this all correctly?
We are in agreement here on the premises. The work of Nunes is the most rigorous critique of contemporary “spontaneism” (you call it organic growth, but it’s the same in this context). If We Burn is the more pop version of it, but the idea is the same. I’m also very hostile to prefigurative politics and any kind of escapism. The politics must be done rooted in the here and now. There’s no outside. Nunes says “the history with the subject inside”.
We disagree on the conclusions though and that’s what gives the title to the book. “Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal” means that a lot of people, to escape the failures of spontaneism and horizontalism (or the trauma of the '68) take refuge in older forms of vertical rigidity, like the traditional party form. This is a false dichotomy, that is paralyzing the left. They are just different, ineffective, coping mechanisms. The failures of one doesn’t justify the other, and vice-versa.
In today’s world, this is a weakness, not a strength. Centralized knowledge is slow and world around us is slow. This was less true in 1917 or it is less true at the periphery of the empire, where party forms still deliver the goods. Being slower than your environment means not only that you can’t act effectively within your environment, but that you also lack the tools to observe that this is happening. That is one of the arguments for which I said before “the party form is unfit”. Decentralization and localism is for sure fetishized by many as “more democratic”, and I don’t necessarily believe that’s true, but decentralization is necessary because it creates faster and more flexible systems, that can match capitalistic structures in speed.
That said, you also see it as complementary to what happens outside the party, and that’s already good ecological thinking in Nunes terms.