Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization

by Rodrigo Nunes

For something so often described as essential, political organisation remains a surprisingly under-theorised field.

Nunes redefines the terms of organisational theory, and argues that organisation must be understood as always supposing a diverse ecology of different initiatives and organisational forms. Drawing from a wide array of sources and traditions Nunes develops a grammar that eschews easy oppositions between ‘verticalism’ and ‘horizontalism’, and offers a fresh approach to enduring issues like spontaneity, leadership, democracy, strategy, populism, revolution, and the relationship between movements and parties.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, Philosophy

320 pages, Paperback

Published May 25, 2021

Reviews

[Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

probably the best book i've read in a few years, one i'll be returning to for many more to come. Granted, i already knew that Rodrigo Nunes' argument would be right in my sweet spot: teasing out the implications of political marxism for strategic practice via a spinoza-influenced situated evaluative practice. yet the book is still incredibly refreshing in precisely *how* it unfolds the problems that revolutionary practice and political marxism have set for themselves over the last decade of cycles of struggles, debates about which are symptomatic of much deeper problems threading through marx and bakunin, luxembourg and lenin, and the success/failures of '17-'89 / '68-'2011.

the ultimate aim of the book, as the title suggests, is to get out of the stale oppositions between vertical and horizontal, vanguard and distributed action, part and immanent self-organization. these binary choices occlude what Nunes takes as ontological starting point: there is no 'disorganization' as such and thus no teleology to any specific subject or agent of an organizational form. instead, there are only different degrees and forms of organization and complexity, different "ecologies" which make certain strategies and tactics interact in ways that either increase our power (collective capacity, potentia) or cause it to break down. the book is thus part diagnosis (or even therapy, as the conclusion suggests) for the failures of the past, while it offers less a normative solution or directionality than a new lexicon for theorizing different organizational possibilities. this is not to say that there aren't leanings in particular directions: Nunes is a bit harsher on the assumptions of horizontalism, in part because he has actually done the work of going back to various kinds of cybernetics, systems and information theories to demonstrate how certain lessons were selectively imported into the early 2000s sort of negriism (let's say). a further problem is that a series of unexplored assumptions lie behind horizontalism that almost exactly mirror (or inversion) of its critique of 'verticalism' (especially a kind of naturalistic teleology, a presupposition that certain social actors unambiguously have 'the right' knowledge and strategy, and a lack of curiosity, let's say, towards the empirical). the problem of defeating planetary capitalism in the age of climate crisis also orients the argument towards scalar necessity in a somewhat normative way.

nonetheless, the point of the language here is to get us *out* of the stale oppositions that lie behind our organizing assumptions (which might be shorthanded as verticalism or horizontalism, or marxism and anarchism if you wish). the book therefore seeks to redefine organization (of course) as well as leadership (as distributed), vanguard (as a function), party (as but one element in a broader organizational ecology with a specific and above all limited role). to these it adds other new terms that help diagnose the tensions we see appearing in action: the problem of fitness (how does one test the maximal amount of change possible whilst still being intelligible to newly political subjects); directionality (how one deaggregates revolution into achievable points of intervention); nucleation and critical size (necessary elements for gauging the capacity for a system to cross a threshold of transformation) the dialectic between aggregate, collective, and distributed action; and above all, how to actually *think* organizational integration in a fully relational way. if i have one minor critique of the book it is that the saturation of emotional-psychological terms throughout (e.g., the trauma of organization, melancholia, betrayal, paranoia, and suspicion, etc) remains tantalizingly underdeveloped (at least with reference to either post-spinozist affect theory or post-freudian psychoanalysis). nonetheless, it offers us the possibility of thinking these terms *alongside* the organizational ecologies or infrastructures through which they emerge, which is exactly the right question.

i realize that i absolutely devoured this book, and i did so self-consciously. i also recognize it's a theoretically dense text, and i'm not certain how it will be read if you aren't familiar with or interested in the parameters of political marxism. for these reasons, i'll be really curious to see whether it can have the kind of impact it deserves on our political and strategic debates over the coming years.

[Darran Mclaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and thought provoking book which is attempting to reconcile two contrasting approaches on the Left; the more Marxist, structured, vertical tradition which Nunes identifies with 1917 and the more localist, diffuse, Anarchist, horizontal tradition which Nunes identifies with 1968. These two tendencies tend to oppose each other on a fundamental, philosophical level, but in my personal experience they actually work together and get along fine.

Nunes argues that Horizontilism, which was the dominant Left tendancy in the period between the collapse of the Soviet Union and a few years after the 2008 economic crisis, was given it's chance and proved incapable of winning any significant or long lasting victories. We saw the Anti-Globalisation movement, the Arab Spring, Occupy and others, and there is the example of Rojava. But it isn't capable of addressing the systemic crises we are facing, the most pressing of which is climate breakdown, which requires the power of the State to do anything about it. But, as he points out, many people on the Left were drawn towards the kind of Horizontal organising and activism he associates with 1968 by being turned off the authoritarian and disturbing states that emerged following the creation of the Soviet Union.

My impression is that Nunes devotes more time and argument to persuading Horizontalists to accept and adopt some vericality and structure, and to learn lessons from Lenin, than he does to persuading Vericalists to accept and adopt horizontal practices. The text is pretty theoretical and philosophical, getting into a debate between Hegel and Spinoza for example. The last book of political organising theory I read was No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey, which is far more empirical and rooted in praxis.

I am glad Nunes has written this book and kicked off a conversation. I want others to read it so I can discuss it with them, because my opinion isn't settled. I need to think about it and reflect on the political organising I am involved in personally before I come to a firm conclusion. I am more sympathetic to the Leninist tradition, but I don't see a lot of evidence of this tradition thriving and succeeding so I am interested in reflecting on what our political situation is in this moment and what kind of solutions are available to us in this conjuncture.

[Zakiriya Gladney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most compelling works of political theory I’ve read. Granted, that may not be saying much — I’m only a second-year college student with a spotty reading habit — but Neither Vertical nor Horizontal left a deep impression on me nonetheless. It revisits enduring political questions in light of contemporary contexts, transcends stale oppositions, and offers serious insights into the dilemmas and possibilities of future political action.

Along the way, Nunes breathes life into several dormant corners of leftist thought. His discussions of “left melancholia,” transitivity, and political subjectivation translate the determinism and optimism of older Marxist frameworks into something more attuned to today’s probabilistic and uncertain terrain. He also revives the idea of revolution by tying it inextricably to the “question of organization,” uniting it with “reformist” and “alternative-building” efforts into a single trajectory that injects urgency and relevance back into the concept.

Nunes draws on network theory and ecology to illuminate the nature and possibilities of political organization. He reframes vanguardism not as a fixed structure but as a relational force, allowing us to rethink its potential without the baggage of its contested history. His invocation of Paulo Freire furthers this point, likening political leadership to the pedagogical role of the teacher: facilitating transformation without imposing doctrine. In a similarly generative move, his reappraisal of populism through the framework of fitness allows us to discern which aspects of populist strategy endure, and why.

Nunes' work is especially powerful in challenging comforting dogmas on the left. He shows that “horizontalism” can itself become an ideology, disguising power, preventing accountability, all while failing to yield strategic returns at scale. His concept of distributed leadership cuts through much of this illusory fog, showing how leadership doesn’t disappear under horizontal structures, but spreads out, now incapacitated. The metaphor of an “ecology of organizations” helps reframe the left’s present diversity not as a weakness but as a strength, where different forms of organizing — vanguards and popular assemblies alike — coexist and evolve in relation to each other. Tying everything together is a deep pragmatism — Nunes asks us to judge strategies and organizations by their responsiveness to historical conjuncture, not by their ideological purity.

I’d highly recommend this book to anyone thinking seriously about how to structure and sustain political organization in the 21st century. It’s especially valuable for those caught between anarchist and communist strategic commitments, or those seeking to think beyond that binary. It's also cool if you like Spinoza.

[pawel · Rating 5 out of 5]

@szkorbut chciałeś review, więc pomyślałem że streszczę i wstawię kilka fragmentów, (ale pewnie połowa książki mi przefrunęła nad głową i czasem mi się nie chciało myśleć więc jeśli napiszę coś głupiego to lepiej to przyporządkować mi niż książce):

skupia się na rozważaniu pojęć organizacji i samo-organizacji politycznej, niemożliwości organicznej samo-organizacji grup ludzi (w przypadku utrzymywania złudzenia braku organizacji tak naprawdę następuje organizacja według schematów już utrwalonych) i stara się udowodnić że organizacja zawsze musi odbywać się z impulsem zewnętrznym i jest potrzebna jako aktywna deliberate czynność. pomieszane jest to z ciekawymi wstawkami z organizacji w świecie roślin i zwierząt, czasem cybernetyką. Całość to przeplatanka z abstrakcyjnych rozdziałów i "zastosowań".

zaczyna od rozważania dwóch tytułowych melancholii dotyczących sposobów organizacji (których przełomowe momenty wyznacza na rok 1918 (vertical, partia jak partia sowiecka) i 1968 (horizontal, niezależne leaderless autonomiczne sieci ludzi jak ruchy occupy w 2011)). Chyba najmocniejszym elementem całej książki jest ten rozdział, w którym proponuje model traktowania ich jako określeń względnych, nie absolutnych. zaczynając od tego, że

... organisation appears as a figure of mediation. Following Georg Lukacs' formula, organisation is the form of mediation between theory and practice, and as in every dialetictical relationship the terms of the relation only acquire concreteness and reality in and by this mediation ...

przechodzi do opisania tych sposobów vertical/horizontal jako sił działających w przeciwne strony, ale nie sprzecznych. Nie istnieje coś takiego jak organizacja pionowa/pozioma, tylko bardziej pionowa albo bardziej pozioma. Przez to nie ma sensu spierać się co do wyższości którejś formy - to tak jak by się zastanawiać czy lepiej jak jest cieplej czy zimniej. Wszystko zależy od kontekstu. Coś tam piszą o arystotelesie bla bla nie zrozumiałem, ale chodzi o to że jeśli istniałaby organizacja która równie mocno stosowałaby naraz techniki związane z organizacją poziomą jak i pionową to chociaż jako siły by się równoważyły (organizacja nie byłaby ani pozioma ani pionowa), to dalej miałyby pozytywny efekt. te dwie siły trzeba dopasowywać do sytuacji, bo, jak wyżej definicja, organizacja jest mediacją, a mediacja zawsze jest pomiędzy dwoma kontekstami, nigdy w próżni,

kolejne dwa rozdziały są poświęcone rozważaniom tego czemu organizacje wyłącznie wertykalne, lub wyłącznie horyzontalne nie są możliwe.

te dwie rzeczy (konieczność organizacji jako aktywnej czynności) i stosowanie modelu ekologii ( współistnienie wielu form naraz bez ich koordynacji centralnej, ale z dopasowywaniem intensywności do sytuacji) to całość książki, ale wchodzą różne ciekawe rozdziały dookoła.

jest jeden o teleologii - więc teorii samoczynnego historycznego zmierzania świata do czegoś np. rewolucji (sorry jeśli znałeś to słowo i tłumaczę, ja wcześniej nie). przykładem najbardziej rozważanym jest teleologia marksistowska gdzie zakłada się samoczynne przebudzenie konkretnie klasy robotniczej jako fakt naukowy, ale potem rozważa współczesne reintepretacje i ewolucje. zaciekawiło mnie to, że Marks skupiał się wyłącznie na naukowości swojej teleologii - wskazał miejsce gdzie najprawdapodobniej przebudzenie jego zdaniem nastąpi - nie rozważając tego czy jest to miejsce które tego potrzebuje, lub jakie cele powinno sobie postawić. wniosek z rozdziału jest taki że model teleologiczny nie działa i znowu - potrzebna jest aktywna ciągła czynność organizacji.

kolejny poświęcony jest problemowi nierówności wiedzy w rewolucji i organizacjach - jak to rozwiązać bez wprowadzenia nowej społeczności klasowej zamiast starej. historyczne podejścia z "stróżami" rewolucji, opiekunami, radami itd. najciekawsze nazwane to zmiana traktowania "opiekunów" z pozycji formalnej do funkcji która jest spontanicznie przejmowana chociaż nigdy nienazwana, albo jakieś sposoby biorące się z teologii wyzwolenia - gdzie każda interakcja różnych grup traktowana jest jako spotkanie pedagogiczne, bez wskazania strony nauczycielskiej i uczniowskiej. w tym drugim jest osoba inicjująca wymianę, ale nie pozycjonuje jej to wyżej, jako że odrzucany jest pomysł strony bardziej i mniej oświeconej.

jest jeden bardzo ciekawy rozdział o historii konceptu rewolucji od XVIII wieku aż do teraz.

Całość kończy dwoma bardzo długimi rozdziałami aplikującymi rozwiniętą wcześniej teorię organizacji do współczesnych sytuacji. dużo miejsca jest poświęconego na reinterpretację populizmu lewicowego Chantal Mouffe w kontekście wyłożonej wcześniej teorii.

Overall bardzo fajne (jak widać po ocenie), dla mnie było dosyć dostępne nawet bez wielokrotnego czytania fragmentów, chociaż większość konceptów początkowo obca.

to co mi zostanie najbardziej, tak poza wspomnianym wcześniej modelem ekologicznym organizacji, to rozważania dotyczące jej celu, które bardzo mi się skojarzyły z ukradzioną asi książką emmy goldman:

from the mid twentieth century onwards, many started to denounce the longing for a final reconciliation as an illegitimate attempt to collapse the distance between idea and history, the real and the symbolic, the infinite and the finite. experience had shown that the promise 'of an absolute purification of history, of an inertialess regime without chance or risk' was such a powerful defense against doubt and uncertainty that it could justify betrayal in the name of fidelity, oppression in the name of freedom, and dishonesty in the name of truth. It was both an error and a danger to confuse revolution with the institution of any particular positive order; instead, it should be identified with the infinite excess that interrupts and unmakes every order, the pregnancy of the event, the movement of deterritorialisation, the promise of the messianic.

nic odkrywczego, ale jako że od października przenoszę się z uniwersytetu do pracy, a technologia jako świat jest dalej bardzo wroga organizacji pracowniczej, to mam nadzieję że w tym kontekście chociaż coś mi to wszystko ułatwi.

książka jest na libgenie, verso ma drogie wysyłki do polski i ceny w funtach

[shev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rodrigo Nunes's Neither Vertical nor Horizontal arrives at a genuinely difficult moment when the two main answers the left has given to the question of how to organize are both exhausted. The disciplined vanguard party homologous to the vertically-integrated corporation has left a historical record nobody can look at without discomfort. The leaderless horizontal assembly that replaced it has its own familiar pathologies: the meeting that never decides, the movement that burns out, the assembly that becomes a small sect policing its own purity. Nunes doesn't pick a side. Instead, he goes back to dismantling some assumptions -- visiting Bogdanov, Simondon, Spinoza, and more -- and builds a case that both traditions were wrong in the same basic way: both were looking for the correct organizational form, as if such a thing existed, rather than asking how opposing tendencies should be managed and dosed differently in different situations. Nunes' account of left melancholia, developed in dialogue with Wendy Brown and Jodi Dean, adds a psychological dimension that most organizational theory ignores: the argument that the orthodox left and the post-68 left aren't just politically opposed but are locked in a system of mutual reinforcement, each feeding the other's attachment to a past that can't be recovered, lands with the uncomfortable force of something you've seen but couldn't name.

The concept of the organizational ecology, developed in chapter five, is the book's central positive contribution, and it is both genuinely useful and philosophically underspecified in ways that matter. Nunes is right that no political movement has ever operated in isolation, that the party-form's central error was to mistake itself for the whole, and that "leadership" names a function that can and should circulate across distributed nodes rather than concentrate in a fixed position. He is also right that "acting ecologically" is dispositional and practical -- less investment in organizational self-image, genuine functional differentiation, non-competitive ethos -- and not merely drawing up of a better map of political forces in a given situation.

What remains undertheorized is the relationship between the ecology concept and the critique of self-organization that immediately precedes it in the book. Nunes spends a chapter convincingly arguing that the boundary between any "self-organizing system" and its environment is never given by the world -- it is always drawn by an observer, based on what they decide is relevant to include. A strike looks self-organized from inside the factory, but organized by other forces from the perspective of the union federation that helped prepare it, and a tiny node in a much larger ecology from the perspective of the national political situation. Which description is correct? All of them, depending on where you draw the line -- and where you draw the line is a practical decision, not a fact you discover. The problem is that this argument applies with equal force to the ecology concept itself. I would say that the distinction between an "organism" (a tightly bounded, internally coordinated unit like the Leninist party) and an "ecology" (a distributed, loosely coupled field of interacting organizations) is not a fact about the world either. It is a decision about how much to include within the organizing frame. The party cadre who saw only their party was drawing the boundary tightly. Nunes is proposing we draw it more loosely. But the act of drawing it -- deciding what counts as part of our relevant political world and what doesn't -- is still an operation of consciousness, still a practical judgment that can be made well or badly, and still something that no theory can make for you in advance. The ecology concept doesn't escape the problem of the boundary; it relocates it.

Now, Nunes is aware of this to a significant degree. He subscribes to second-order cybernetics, which puts the observing subject back inside the system they are describing, and his account of "acting ecologically" is as much about disposition and practice as about awareness. So the critique here is not that he naively privileges consciousness over practice. It is something more specific: that "thinking and acting ecologically" cannot itself be a stable normative prescription, because what counts as ecological thinking and acting is itself determined by the historical configuration of the ecology one is already embedded in. The ecology conditions what appears as ecological. A political subject formed in one historical moment, with one set of practical capacities and one set of intermediate organizational tools available to it, will draw the boundary differently from one formed in another -- and crucially, whether a more expansive or more bounded orientation is appropriate depends on what the situation actually requires, not on some general virtue of ecological awareness. This means the value of ecological orientation can only be assessed relative to what a given political formation is capable of, what it is trying to do, and what stage of development it is at. Which is another way of saying that the ecology concept, however valuable as an orientation, still requires a materialist account of how political consciousness and political capacity actually develop -- and that account is not fully supplied.

This leads to the book's central tension, in my opinion. Nunes's ontological argument establishes that the ecology is always already there, always operative regardless of whether participants recognize it, and that even the party cadre who denied being in an ecology was nevertheless responding to one. But his normative prescription is that organizations should "think and act ecologically." The gap between these two claims requires a mechanism by which a particular orientation produces better political outcomes than another. The activity-theory tradition, from Marx's Theses on Feuerbach through Vygotsky and his successors, is precise about this: consciousness does not improve political practice by expanding to cover more of the field, but by developing through and in practical activity, in the back-and-forth of engaging an object and being forced to reconceive it. The relevant question is not "how much of the ecology should we include in our frame?" but "what forms of joint practical activity, at what scales, with what objects, generate the kind of political subjectivity capable of developing it further?"

The problem is deepened by an anthropological observation Nunes does not make but that his own argument implies. When Nunes criticizes the party-form, he is careful to say that no action is genuinely unilateral -- the party was always embedded in an ecology, always dependent on the reproductive activity of countless actors it didn't acknowledge and couldn't see. Its error was not that it acted, but that it acted as if it were self-sufficient, parasitic on the contributions of others while projecting an aura of unilaterality. This is a sharp observation. But it carries a tacit assumption: that the remedy is more reciprocity, a fuller acknowledgment of the ecology's distributed contributions. The anthropologist David Graeber complicates this. His argument, developed in Fetishism as Social Creativity is that the selective disregarding of some background activity is not a correctable error but a structural feature of how humans act collectively at all. Every culture misrecognizes some of the conditions of its own reproduction -- treats the products of collective human activity as if they were independent forces, natural facts, or the achievement of particular individuals or institutions. This is what Graeber means by fetishism, and he insists it is a characteristic of human culture as such, not a peculiarity of capitalism, or, for that matter, patriarchy. We cannot see all the conditions of our own action, not because we are insufficiently conscious, but because human action is symbolic: and that requires foregrounding some things and backgrounding others. The question, then, is not how to strive towards 'reciprocity' in the ecology, but something more modest: can we remake the fetishes rather than simply expose them?

Finally, this structure-agency problem, which we have indulged above, names a historical loss. Namely, the cultural tools through which people have historically been capable of acting at multiple scales simultaneously, shifting their political subjectivity from family to workplace to class to nation and back, inhabiting different organizational forms as different scales of the same collective project, have been progressively dissolved by the same late capitalism that expanded the scope and speed of our material entanglement with one another. The result is not that agency has disappeared but that it has become excessive: overabundant, rigid, and alien to itself. The products of human collective activity stand over their producers as alien powers, not because agency was suppressed but because the intermediate forms through which it could be made revisable and multi-scalar have been destroyed. The structure-agency impasse is the theoretical form taken by this historical loss, and I am mostly convinced that the ecology concept could be valuable because it names the kind of organizational world that could begin to rebuild those intermediate forms as a developmental challenge (Also: that developmental challenge need not be taken as a linear or teleological one, as Nunes is rightly criticizing; but as a co-development of potentialities, every form of activity carries multiple possible directions and, within those, historical stages, yet the kind of stages which can regress or zigzag).

To say this is a developmental rather than theoretical challenge is to say that the assessment of specific organizational forms, including the party-form and its successors, must be historical and dialectical not abstractly normative. The authoritarian deformations of state socialisms and the ineffectiveness of anti-state socialisms were real and cannot be explained away. But they cannot be assessed in abstraction from the conditions that produced them -- the specific configurations of state power, division of labor, the prevailing forms of collective subjectivity, the intermediate social worlds that did or did not exist to provide internal counterweights to the concentration of organizational power. At its most dynamic, the early German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was not the rigid, top-down machine of popular caricature, but the organizational backbone of a thick working-class civil society that equipped people to operate on multiple scales at once. The symbiotic bond between its civil-society and electoral wings unraveled as it evolved within Bismarck’s reshaping of the German state and the deepening of capitalist relations of production, ending in co-optation. It suggests that the question to ask about any organizational form is developmental rather than structural: what kind of political subjects does this form produce, and are those subjects capable of carrying the activity toward its next stage?

Neither Vertical nor Horizontal is, finally, a book that poses the right questions more clearly than any available source, and answers them partially -- which is probably the most one can honestly ask of a theoretical intervention. Its genuine contributions -- the real-opposition framework, the dissolution of the spontaneity/organization binary, the organizational ecology, the account of melancholia, the insistence on leadership-as-function over leadership-as-position, the multiple temporalities of revolutionary transition -- represent a significant advance in how the left can think about its own organizational dilemmas. The tension between its ontological argument and its normative prescription, between its materialist dissolution of the subject/object binary and its implicit appeal to a consciousness that would be adequate to the ecology it describes, is not a failure of the book but a productive indication of where the next work needs to happen. That work is developmental rather than theoretical: it concerns the forms of practical activity that generate the political subjectivity adequate to the situation, the organizational forms that make such activity sustainable across time and defeat, and the conditions under which the intermediate social world of multi-scalar agency can be rebuilt.

[Colin Thin · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Great content, demolishes the binary between vertical and horizontal modes of political organisation, arguing for a diverse ecology of models and tactics. Only problem with it was how much of a fucking mission it was to read. Definitely think most of the ideas could've been explained much more succinctly.

[Seahorse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the book, especially the bit about the 2 melancholias (1917, 1968) and the cybernetics and information theory stuff. Simondon, Guattari Lenin and Spinoza worked quite well in this grammar, which is what it is: a descriptive project to construct a grammar. Politically I share many premises and strategic inclinations, I now find myself having the correct language to improve my messaging.

[Eduardo Souza · Rating 4 out of 5]

assim que recebi esse livro pelo circuito ubu, fiz o padrão: dar uma lida na introdução e conclusão. achei a proposta muitíssimo interessante e fiquei encorajado sobretudo pela clareza da escrita de rodrigo nunes. eis aqui um excelente espécime de uma escrita extremamente densa, mas plenamente nítida. a estrutura do seu texto é loquaz e as relações que estabelece são sempre muito lúcidas e explicadas.

nas últimas semanas, retomei o livro para especificar algumas questões com que tenho lidado diante da greve docente federal, deflagrada na minha instituição em 3 de abril. a desmobilização atroz dos colegas e estudantes me levaram à leitura a fim de tentar alguma saída para essa crise. fui diretamente para os capítulos 5 e 7, em que rodrigo faz apontamentos mais diretos para as questões organizativas na contemporaneidade, paradigma que ele denomina uma ecologia.

na introdução, ele diz que o capítulo 5, começa “com uma discussão do conceito de ecologia organizacional” e segue para pensar “os conceitos de liderança distribuída, funções-vanguarda (…), plataformas e núcleos organizativos”. já o capítulo 7 se volta para o que ele denomina do problema da aptidão: “ele se refere às qualidades que um projeto político deve ter para reunir apoio e produzir mudanças dentro de uma determinada conjuntura”.

seções do capítulo 5
[das redes à organização como ecologia]
depois de apresentar alguns fatores que ajudaram a estabelecer o paradigma das redes, nunes vai demonstrar que há uma ilusão de horizontalidade que é prejudicial para a ação (pp. 200-205). superado isto, ele segue para caracterizar uma ecologia: seus precedentes (pp. 205-208); “seis pontos mais gerais” (pp. 208-215). de maneira muito sucinta, o que ele quer demarcar é que qualquer elemento político depende de todos os outros elementos políticos – ainda que qualquer um deles não esteja ciente de qualquer um dos outros.

[como uma ecologia decide?]
aqui (pp. 216-223), nunes vai tentar caracterizar uma ecologia em oposição a organizações “horizontalistas”, analisando os paradoxos que as levam a ansiedade, paralisia e renegação (p. 222).

[horizontalidade sem horizontalismo]
“como seria a horizontalidade se a concebêssemos (…) ecologicamente?” (p. 223) é a pergunta que ele vai tentar responder. é aqui que ele vai caracterizar a liderança distribuída (p. 225), utilizando uma analogia com uma matilha: a liderança torna-se, portanto, uma função, não uma posição. isso leva a pensar núcleos organizativos (p. 230) para apontar que “uma horizontalidade total seria (…) semelhante a um estado de entropia máxima, no qual somente flutuações pequenas e estatisticamente irrelevantes poderiam acontecer” (p. 234).

[vanguardas versus vanguardismo]
ele inicia essa seção apontando “quatro tendências históricas que, pelo menos por ora, parecem irreversíveis” (pp. 236-237) para colocar um paradoxo sobre as vanguardas: o momento de sua maior desconfiança é quando ela está mais amplamente acessível. a partir de uma crítica da noção marxista ortodoxa, ele enfatiza que a vanguarda deve ser pensada 1) como de maneira relacional (p. 238), e; 2) necessariamente experimental e contingente (p. 240). daí que surge a noção de funções-vanguarda (p. 241), de modo que “seu sucesso depende de sua capacidade de atrair apoio, o que significa que deve necessariamente ser concebida levando os outros em consideração” (p. 242).

[ecologia contra o estado]
dialogando com pierre clastres, ele busca aportar o pensamento das sociedades contra o estado para pensar que “a falta de institucionalização, na medida em que deixa o líder sem os instrumentos para impor suas decisões, constrange-o a procurar o apoio do grupo” (p. 244). essa precariedade e incerteza, em certa medida, é o que garante o movimento e o equilíbrio dinâmico de um grupo: “a conservação desse equilíbrio é (…) constantemente contra-balançada pelo imperativo da ação, e cada nova ação pode tanto criar novos diferenciais de poder quanto fortalecer aqueles que já existem” (p. 246). não há como haver garantias.

seções do capítulo 7
[o espectro do populismo]
essa seção estabelece um contexto sucinto da recepção de laclau e mouffe, enfatizando a confusão dos conceitos de “populismo” e “hegemonia”. isso, no entanto, é menos importante. o interesse central aqui é que esses mal-entendidos ajudam a esclarecer o problema que nunes quer colocar: o da aptidão, que “uma preocupação em pensar sobre as qualidades que um projeto político precisa ter para encontrar na conjuntura um encaixe concreto que lhe permita transformá-la” (p. 299).

[populismo: uma pista falsa?]
nessa seção, nunes vai fazer uma revisão de laclau e mouffe acerca do conceito de populismo. inicialmente, ele vai pontuar como os conceitos apresentados no capítulo 5 ajudam a dar tração à ideia de populismo no contexto atual (pp. 299-308). entretanto, ele faz sua crítica central aos autores por submeterem o político à sua dimensão discursiva (pp. 308-310). de todo modo, o que nunes busca aqui é pensar como populismo e hegemonia podem ajudar a mudar as condições dadas para fazer política – e isso nos leva de novo à questão da aptidão.

[aptidão, tensão, direcionalidade]
nunes vai superar uma teoria mecanicista da informação para, apoiado na teoria da informática de george simondon (p. 316), equacionar a ideia de “tensão de informação” ao problema da aptidão (p. 319): é a tensão que produz mudança, estabelecendo novos horizontes do fazer político. nesse sentido, esse é precisamente o “desafio incontornável, caso se deseje agir no mundo, e um problema a ser continuamente gerido” (p. 320).

[pedagogia do mais apto]
nunes tem como objetivo principal superar o abuso da potestas por uma pretensa vanguarda de suposto saber. ou seja, pensar a dinâmica da aptidão, sobretudo a partir da circulação da função-vanguarda. ele aponta que a vanguarda estaticamente definida mimetiza a ideia da educação bancária: a vanguarda deve transferir conhecimento para as massas. portanto, a solução para isso está em dialogar com a pedagogia de paulo freire (p. 323) e clodovis boff (p. 325): à liderança é designado o papel de criar tensão para engendrar mudança – sabendo-se que a distinção entre “educadores” e “educandos” é transitória.

[relacionalmente radical]
nesta seção final, nunes define sua política experimental: “uma política interessada em conceber e testar hipóteses que experimentem com, e expandam, os limiteis do que é possível” (p. 330). aqui, não pude deixar de pensar em sylvain lazarus, que se aproxima muito dessa abordagem. ele argumenta, de maneira muito compreensiva, que “a radicalidade sem realismo é vazia; o realismo sem radicalidade é cego” (p. 332). o que é inevitável, portanto, é a incerteza da política e o trabalho que precisa ser feito para lidar com ela; eis o domínio próprio do político.

[Smacky Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nunes is at his best when he's looking critically at modern left organizing efforts. The pendulum shift between mass party type dead enders and local horizontalism swings back and forth every decade or so, with little in the way of actual movement in the class struggle. Nunes refuses to believe that one need to be a verticalist or a horizontalist, and takes this one step further by saying that it's impossible to actually be one or the other.

Once you make this realization, you're halfway there. Nunes argues for what he calls distributed action, which can be read as "pushing on all fronts all the time". Does this amount to a type of reformism, as others have said? Well, I'm not sure it matters. Nunes might just be right that this is the only type of organizing that will have tangible results in the modern day.

There is more than enough fertile ground for organizing. Everywhere you look there is anti capitalist sentiment, it just doesn't seem to take the form that we as lefties are used to it taking (and by used to it taking, I mean the nostaligic way of looking at the past 150 years that may or may not be what actually happened). People seemingly aren't interested in being told that all their problems would be solved by the ever elusive mass party, just like how they roll their eyes at Occupy type organizing, which clearly goes nowhere meaningful.

As I said, Nunes might be right about distributed action being the only way forward. If that's the case, our ecological and sociological predicaments are much more worrying than we may have thought. But hey, might as well try.

This is a very dense book and at times it feels like a literature review. I'd like to see Nunes write a pamphlet for organizers that cuts a bit of the fat of this book. Overall, very worth a read though.

[Rui · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rodrigo Nunes is a Brazilian activist. In this book he reflects on the dead-lock of present-day radical politics: the campist division between two dogmatisms, verticalism and horizontalism. The author proposes, we understand radical politics as a dynamic ecosystem populated by a plurality of actors with diverse (but complementary) tactics and strategies, re-shaping each other and their environment trough their interactions.
Such perspective brings together some of the best inovations of the last decade, in radical political theory: strategic pragmatism (tom nomad) and a complementarian view of political diversity (gelderloos, josep gardenyes).

[Subliminal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book appeared at the right point in time for me. I left a political movement about one year ago and since then I was writing an analysis of what went wrong when and why. The question I was unable to resolve was exactly the one that Nunes is discussing in this book: How can the progressive left build an organisational ecosystem without reproducing the historical mistakes of left organisations? I found a lot of ideas and inspiration in this book. While the whole philosophical derivation seems a bit overcharged at times it was an interesting and inspiring experience.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This spends way too much time getting bogged down in tired, internecine debates instead of doing what its title would suggest it would do, which would be to actually propose a model that was neither vertical nor horizontal. Instead, what we mostly get is endless throat-clearing: it turns out that false dichotomies are, indeed, false. Brilliant. I would suggest only leaving Chapter 5 and discarding the rest, for only there does one find some interesting suggestions (distributed leadership, ecology, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the "pack," Clastres' Society Against the State, etc.).

[Subvert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it and I need to reflect on it by writing a proper summary and critique. Hopefully will get to that in the near future... It's very dense and took me some time to get through. It doesn't have the answers, but it does ask some of the right questions and provides some language and concepts to talk about organization that could be useful for people active involved in radical left groups.

[Cristobal Peña · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though Nunes presents the book as theoretical, there are a lot of practical takeaways. It's rooted in history and makes a very compelling case for structure and hierarchy to some degree at a time when both have become deeply unpopular. Not too long and not too hard to follow. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in political organizing.

[Lucy Haslam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspiring, especially regarding the concept of an ecology made of strong core, bringing together the local and the (inter)national

[Marisa]

Took me six months and I only got halfway through it....just too much required prior reading for me to be able to make much sense of individual sections.

[Sean Irving]

Rating and review to follow. Thoroughly enjoyed and got a lot from reading this.

[Coaiemici123 · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Das Kapital of Organizational Theory

[Jackie M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll certainly be thinking ecologically when organizing from here on

[H R · Rating 4 out of 5]

the practical stuff is in the last three chapters.

[Justin Law · Rating 5 out of 5]

felt very very underread going into this, still got a lot of insights out of it. love how author breaks down and presents his arguments, quite easy to follow. would have to revisit this sometime later, with more experience both on paper and irl.

ecology of organisational forms, history in multiple cyclic timelines instead of a singular linear one, against hierachy but not organisation (structure), coop between organisations like mlk using mx as leverage during crm, moving away from dogmatic thinking of looking for an ideal form period, but what suits the time, situation, and goal in hand, distributed leadership, power as a tool (to share) instead of a resource (to compete for), think less position think more function

[Francisco Mota · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bom livro, que joga uma luz num debate que considero urgente: o da forma de organização política. Reúne uma série de autores que não costumam estar nas "cartilhas" das organizações políticas, fazendo, assim, um trabalho essencial de diálogo com as organizações.

Acho que as conclusões deixam muitas pontas soltas, entretanto.

[Swarm Feral · Rating 3 out of 5]

I need to do a longer view. There's good general points here about ontological ethics vs dogma not said as such. but it trips over itself and doesn't have a strong historical understanding of even horizontalism imo.

[Eduardo Camargo · Rating 4 out of 5]

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