Horizontal Democracy: Anti-Authoritarian Interventions in Democratic Theory Brian Bernhardt Department of Political Science University of Colorado - Boulder March 2012 brian.bernhardt@colorado.edu Prepared for the WPSA Conference 2012 Portland, OR This is a draft. Please do not cite. Comments are welcome.
Introduction: The 2011 Occupations and the Project of Horizontal Democracy Throughout much of 2011, a wave of protests and occupations of public spaces swept across North Africa, Europe and the United States. While the motivations for the occupations varied from opposition to long-standing dictatorial regimes in North Africa, to economic austerity in Greece, Spain and the United Kingdom, to a growing concentration of economic and political power in the United States it is noteworthy that the form of resistance employed in each place bore striking similarities. From Cairo to Barcelona to New York and Oakland, protesters sought to occupy public spaces and hold them for an extended period of time. The tactical strengths of such a strategy were clear: maintaining a visible and accessible space provided an easy way for large numbers of people to engage with the protest and, simultaneously, allowed momentum to build through escalating tension with police and city officials. It is no surprise then that this tactical innovation, which garnered so much attention in Tahir Square, was duplicated in cities across Europe and the U.S. Beyond its tactical strengths, though, the public occupations provided a highly visible testing ground for alternative models of democracy and modes of citizen action. Underlying both the Indignados movement in Spain and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, was a sense that, in addition to concerns about growing economic austerity and inequality, something was fundamentally wrong with democracy in both countries. While the concerns were sometimes expressed in quite reformist terms highlighting corruption or campaign finance, for instance it was clear that many actors in both the Indignados and the Occupy movements sought to radicalize and reinvigorate democratic practice beyond narrow policy reforms. There was, as the Spanish put it, a call for Democracia Real Ya. Campaign slogans aside, the actual practice of decision-making in many occupations emphasized forms of 1
radical and participatory democracy characterized by such mechanisms as the general assembly and the people s mic that clearly transcend narrow policy reforms aimed at limiting corruption or reforming campaign finance laws. In short, there were significant tendencies within these movements, guided by a radically democratic impulse, which used the occupations as a site to experiment with popular and participatory forms of democracy. In this paper, I utilize insights from various contemporary social movements, including the alterglobalisation and anti-war movements, as well as the occupation movements in Spain and the U.S., to develop a theoretical account of (several aspects of) this horizontal form of democracy. Said differently, I take a model of democracy that has grown up in the streets and city squares, and put it in conversation with democratic theory. Before discussing horizontal democracy in more detail, I briefly respond to two objections, the first of which questions the desirability of remaining tied to the democratic framework, and the second of which challenges the relevance of radical democracy in the contemporary world. There are good reasons to be skeptical about democracy. At least in Europe and the United States, it has been in the context of democratic governments that economic inequality has grown, that policies of austerity have been implemented, and that collusion between state and capital has become the norm. Further, democratic governments in these countries have used a variety of repressive tactics to uproot any protests that go beyond state-sanctioned sign-holding. Especially when understood from a historical perspective as the continuation of a long-standing practice of democratic governments repressing social movements, one begins to wonder: If this is democracy, then why exactly are we fighting for more of this? As an anti-authoritarian flier within the Barcelona occupation puts it: There is no single democracy in the entire world where the people are free, and this is not a question of corruption but rather of the normal functioning of 2
democracies In Placa Catalunya we are creating a real democracy and this our great mistake Let s destroy democracy and spread freedom! (CrimethInc. 2011) There is clearly significant and, I think, justified ambivalence about the entire democratic project among at least some of those involved in the occupation movements in Europe and the United States. Though for different reasons, Dean (2009: 84) also challenges the left s attachment to democracy. Insofar as democracy is understood as basically a deliberative meeting where everyone can share their opinions, Dean contends that using the language of democracy does not capture the left s political project and constitutes a way of avoiding the true partisan position. She continues: [The left] does not really want an inclusive conversation. They want organized political resistance, but they don t say this directly. Instead they appeal to democracy, shielding themselves from taking responsibility for the divisiveness of politics. Thus, whether we take democracy to mean something like an uncorrupted version of existing state-based politics or as a system of deliberation designed to produce rational outcomes, neither offers significant prospects for a renewed left project. The former operates under the problematic belief that the problems with state-based democracy can simply be reformed and the latter assumes that democracy would be improved only if there were more information, more participation, more deliberation (ibid. 93). So, if it is not that democracy that the occupations of 2011 and other recent social movements are (or should be) striving for, then what democracy is it? Despite my sympathies with the above critiques, I do not wish to scrap the concept of democracy, but to maintain democracy as a radical ideal; that is, democracy understood as a state of affairs in which the people have the power. This is not only radical in the etymological sense of going to the root meaning of the word, but also in the political sense of seeking a fundamental transformation of 3
society. To use Arendt s (1963: 20) language in describing the ancient Athenian polis (which Arendt referred to as an isonomy to distinguish it from simple majority rule), radical democracy entails a situation of no-rule, without a division between rulers and ruled. Democracy as a radical ideal, therefore, constitutes vision of a truly free and egalitarian political order. But, is this ideal, as so many have argued, no longer possible? Radical democracy, the argument goes, made sense in small, isolated and homogenous communities. Only in such circumstances could we expect people to participate in face-to-face meetings, reach consensus and enact policies that promoted the common good. Rousseau the theorist par excellence of participatory democracy (Pateman 1970: 22) would not be optimistic about its prospects for the contemporary world. Moreover, empirical studies of Vermont s town hall meetings, which is perhaps the clearest contemporary example of the old radical democratic ideal of the face-to-face assembly, demonstrate convincingly that the degree of democratic participation is inversely related to the size of the town: the bigger the town, the lower the rates of participation (Bryan 2004: 69-81). Thus, the conclusion seems to be that radical democracy, at least insofar as it is understood as an inclusive, deliberative, face-to-face assembly is wholly unworkable given contemporary conditions. Must we conclude that radical democracy is doomed? We have too many people and these people are too diverse and have too little time. Contemporary issues are too numerous and too complex to be solved by participatory democratic assemblies. In short, the size, pluralism and complexity of our current situation suggest, to many observers, that the radical democratic ideal is impossible. Habermas (1996: 471) puts the challenge this way: it is not clear how a radically democratic republic might even be conceived today. Given our contemporary situation, what 4
would it even mean to conceptualize (let alone practice) radical democracy? The theory of horizontal democracy that I develop in this paper is an attempt to conceptualize a radical democracy that is relevant to our world today. In other words, horizontal democracy is an attempt to theorize one possible answer to Habermas s question: What might rule by the people radically conceived actually look like today? Answering this question will lead me to challenge a number of assumptions about democracy. Indeed the model of democratic politics I sketch in this paper suggests that democracy can and should look very different from its current, state-centric forms. A vibrant democratic politics need not involve such standard notions as clearly-bounded polities, elections or unifying decisions. In upsetting these basic democratic categories, however, I do not mean to abandon democracy, but instead to reinvigorate it. A radically democratic politics must dispense with our commonplace notions about what constitutes democracy. Horizontal democracy, the model of radical democracy articulated in this paper, refers to a political project of the anti-authoritarian left, which aims to create decentralized and nonhierarchical forms of decision-making and collective action. I use the term horizontal for two reasons: 1) it nicely captures the decentralized and non-hierarchical nature of this model of democracy, and 2) a range of social movements that have been instrumental in developing this model of democracy have viewed themselves and/or been characterized as horizontal. For example, Maeckelberg s (2009: 39-65) analysis of the alterglobisation movement in Europe contends that there was a definite (albeit frequently contested and renegotiated) distinction between vertical and horizontal social movement actors. The vertical actors were made up mostly of the traditional left (i.e. socialist and communist organizations and parties, as well as some trade unions) who favor hierarchical meeting structures and formalized modes of 5
organization. In contrast, the horizontal actors were made up of new left actors (i.e. autonomous networks and some NGOs) who favor non-hierarchical meeting structures and fluid, networked modes of organization. Similarly, the decentralized Argentinian social movements that emerged in the wake of the 2001 economic crisis including networks of unemployed workers, occupied factories and neighborhood assemblies embodied the political practice of what they termed horizontalidad. As the name suggests, horizontalidad implies democratic communication on a level plane and involves or at least intentionally strives towards nonhierarchical and anti-authoritarian creation Thus, horizontalidad is desired and is a goal, but it also the means the tool for achieving this end (Sitrin 2006: 4). In short, the anti-authoritarian or horizontal perspective can be characterized by its 1) opposition to hierarchy and coercion, 2) skepticism toward centralized power of all kinds, and 3) belief in the capacity of self-organization to solve social problems. Given this backdrop, how might the theoretical insights of an anti-authoritarian perspective intervene in democratic theory? What would an anti-authoritarian or horizontal model of democracy look like and how would it differ from existing, state-centric models? Generally, a horizontal perspective on democracy seeks to disentangle democracy from the sovereign state, resisting the centralization of power even when it power is centralized in the name of the people. In this paper, I focus on specific two anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory. First, the horizontal approach to democracy contests the commonplace notion that the primary democratic objective is to legitimate rules and rulers. From the horizontal perspective, the goal of democracy is not to legitimate power at all, but to disperse power, to open up many nodes of decision-making and action. Building off insights from Arendt s scholarship, I challenge the idea of the democratic state and, more fundamentally, the notion that democracy is compatible with sovereignty. Instead, I theorize the possibility and desirability of 6
multiple, non-sovereign sites of political power, each with the ability to act, but none with the ability to dominate. This is the subject of the next section. Then, in the final section of the paper, I discuss the implications of a non-sovereign democratic politics for the possibility of coordinated and democratic collective action. I argue that horizontal democracy, detached from sovereignty, challenges the idea that democracy requires that a clearly defined people come together (whether literally in a town square or metaphorically in an election) to make a single collective decision. Instead, I argue for a networked democracy that would enable cooperation and collaboration in the context of nonsovereignty, and the radical dispersion of power it implies. Networks enable coordinated action without requiring a single central decision or even complete agreement among the network s constituent parts. In short, I theorize a model of democracy without decision. That is, I articulate a networked democracy in which a single unifying decision is replaced by the cumulative decisions of the many non-sovereign actors within the network. As such democratic collective action is possible without requiring either centralization or uniformity. I conclude by critiquing the directly democratic general assemblies that have characterized recent occupation movements in the U.S. and Spain. I argue that a horizontal model of democracy would be better served by applying the logic of networks not only to organization across large spaces, but even to the relatively small and shared space of the occupations. Against the Democratic State: Dispersing Power, Rather Than Legitimating Power Democracy is often invoked as a mechanism for legitimating rules and rulers. According to this conceptualization, democracy provides a justification for some to rule over others through the use of either aggregative procedures such as proportional or majoritarian elections, or 7
deliberative procedures designed to produce consensus. Differences between aggregative and deliberative democrats notwithstanding (Young 2002), thinking about democracy as a way of legitimating rulers is dominant within much of democratic political theory. An important task of these theories is, therefore, to solve the legitimation problem. Such theories ask, How can a rule or ruler each with coercive implications for citizens be legitimated through democratic procedures? Habermas has tried to solve the legitimation problem in contemporary democracies by theorizing how citizens might discursively participate in the polity, even though politics is too complex and citizens too diverse to rule in the more traditional sense: The democratic process bears the entire burden of legitimation (Habermas 1996: 450; emphasis in original). However, insofar as we understand democracy to mean rule by the people a radical conception that Habermas is right to not want to surrender then democracy is inadequately conceptualized when it is seen primarily as a way of legitimating the rule of some over others. While there may well be forms of representation or delegation that are compatible with democracy, to reduce democracy to a justification for some to rule over others is to abandon the notion that the people might actually govern themselves. While one of the central questions of much democratic theory asks, What gives some the right to rule over others?, I argue that, from the perspective of horizontal democracy, this is the wrong question. [A]s long as democracy is defined as a system of majority rule it necessarily requires an apparatus of coercive force This relationship between democracy and violence is part of what leads many movement actors to question the desirability of democracy and to insist [on] a radically different form (Maeckelbergh 2009: 32). From this perspective, therefore, instead of asking how power can be legitimated, democratic theory should ask, how can power be dispersed? Said differently, what would it look like to theorize a model of 8
democracy whose goal was not to legitimate the centralization of power, but to enable the decentralization of power, in order to: a) best foster the agency of citizens to shape their lives, and b) enable pluralism, difference and experimentation to coexist with cooperation and collective action? In other words, on a theoretical level, horizontal democracy bypasses the question of legitimating a single locus of power, focusing instead on how multiple nodes of decision-making and action multiple sites of power might coexist and interact. I develop the argument for democracy as the dispersion of power by critiquing the notion that democracy is compatible with sovereignty that is, with the presence of a supreme and final authority and, instead, articulating a theory of democratic non-sovereignty. Rather than theorizing a single sovereign people, a horizontal theory of democratic conceptualizes the polity as constituted by an indeterminate and shifting boundary that is made up of many non-sovereign peoples. While each of these peoples should have the capacity to act in order to build power, none should have the capacity to dominate or take power. In other words, people should all have power, but no one should have sovereignty. On the horizontal view, democratic power can and should emerge from the collective actions of citizens. As Arendt (1963: 166) puts it, power comes into being only if and when men (sic) join themselves together for the purpose of action and it will disappear when, for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another. A democratic politics that is detached from sovereignty, thus, conceptualizes the self-authorized (Ferguson 2012) action of citizens their appearance as political subjects that is authorized only by the participants in the action themselves as a core democratic practice. Habermas rejects just the sort of approach I advocate, but he rejects it because he fails to thinking outside of the bounds of sovereignty. He argues that: [D]emocratic movements emerging from civil society must give up holistic aspirations to a self-organizing society Civil society can directly transform only 9
itself, and it can have at most an indirect effect on the self-transformation of the political system.but in no way [do civil society movements] occupy the position of a macrosubject supposed to bring society as a whole under control and simultaneously act for it. (Habermas 1996: 372; emphasis in original) In essence, Habermas contends that the collective actions of citizens cannot form the basis of a democratically legitimate sovereign. In a sense, I agree with Habermas: no one group can legitimately occupy the position of a macrosubject that can govern all of society. But, he misses the bigger picture. First, his objection applies to the state as much as it does civil society organizations both of which can represent the people only partially, given our fundamental plurality. Second, Habermas fails to think outside of the boundaries of sovereignty by assuming that there, is or ought to be, one entity that acts for all of society. Why would he assume that democratic movements emerging from civil society want to bring society as a whole under control and simultaneously act for it? As should become clear later in the paper, the networked structure that many contemporary social movements adopt suggests that they want to act for themselves, but not for others, and certainly not for everyone. Thus, despite positioning himself as an advocate of radical democracy, Habermas remains deeply wedded to the idea that democracy requires a single macrosubject. He continues to focus democratic theory on the task of legitimating a single sovereign some entity that can occupy the position of a macrosubject In contrast, a theory of horizontal democracy abandons this search for a single, legitimate macrosubject that can bring all of society under control. From the perspective of horizontal democracy, this is not a problem that can be solved democratically a democratic society is not one in which anyone possesses the final decision-making authority and the coercive apparatus to enforce its will. Instead, a democratic politics should instead seek to disrupt the notion that a macrosubject is necessary at all, creating space for multiple non-sovereign subjects to act and 10
exert collective power. However, it is no doubt true that self-authorized action always involves only some small part of the demos, and this is surely Habermas s concern about the legitimacy of democratic movements emerging from civil society. They are, in Wolin s (2008: 277) words, the initiatives of a fraction, not a collective whole. And this, of course, raises a problem: If self-authorized action is always partial, does this not fly in the face of the notion that all of the people should rule. In other words, how can a partial people be considered democratically sovereign? The short answer is that they cannot, but this does not mean we should scrap the democratic potential of self-authorized action. Instead we should scrap the idea that sovereignty itself is democratic. More generally, Habermas s criticism of the self-authorized action of democratic movements emerging from civil society is misplaced. Insofar as the people who establish a democratic government are always partial, Habermas is critiquing democracies starting point. Even in the most renowned cases of popular democratic movements, only a fraction of the people was represented. During the American Revolution, no more than 50 percent of Americans actively supported the revolution and some 15 to 20 percent were actively opposed (Calhoon 2004: 235). Similarly, Poland s Solidarity Movement against Soviet rule, mobilized, at most a quarter of the population (Canovan 2005: 136). Thus, the partiality of the people is a historical fact about democracy, one that has not been (and cannot be) avoided. Instead of continuing to pursue the myth that a whole and complete people can be sovereign, democratic theory should acknowledge that the people are always partial. Once this is recognized, the right theoretical move is not to discount the democratic potential of self-authorized actions (which are, ultimately, at the root of even the most desirable democratic revolutions and foundings), but to challenge the idea of sovereignty itself that is, as Habermas puts it, to dispense with holistic 11
aspirations entirely. Democratic theory should seek ways to disperse power so as to foster the creation of multiple, dynamic, non-sovereign sites of political power to enable self-authorized actions, even though no single group of people can legitimately claim to represent the people. The notion that democracy and sovereignty are opposed finds support in Arendt s analysis in On Revolution. Arendt interprets political developments in America following the war for independence as, fundamentally, a challenge to sovereignty itself. Arendt was particularly interested in the development of institutions that separated powers and then opposed these powers to each other through checks and balances. [T]he great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same (Arendt 1963: 144; emphasis added). The separation of powers and the implementation of checks and balances, on Arendt s account, fundamentally challenged the notion of sovereignty by spreading power between different bodies and making it difficult for any single body to monopolize it. Curiously, in On Revolution Arendt seems to come down on the side of the Federalists (whose actual political goal was centralization) against the Anti-Federalists, a position which is difficult to reconcile with her vehement critiques of sovereignty and apparent support of decentralized councils as a mode of governance (Martell 2011). This apparent contradiction aside, Arendt s central point was that by enabling multiple powers and opposing them to each other, a society could simultaneously maintain the capacity for collective power (a normative good) while preventing the rise of tyranny (a normative bad). In essence, the aim of dispersing power through a theory of democratic non-sovereignty can be thought of as a radicalized version of the familiar theory of separation of powers and checks and balances that Arendt lauded. Whereas liberal theory centralizes power in a state and then pits 12
levels and/or branches of government in opposition to each other, horizontal theory seeks to prevent the initial concentration of power in the state from emerging in the first place. While both approaches are resistant to sovereignty in theory, the Federalists solution has proven insufficient as evidenced by the concentration of political and economic power and the growing sense of distrust of the democratic government in the U.S. Arendt further develops her view on the desirability of non-sovereign forms of political organization through her study of the council system. Arendt sees the council system as mode of governance that has appeared in a variety of historical and cultural contexts: it was espoused by Jefferson after the American Revolution, practiced in the early days of the French and Bolshevik revolutions before being crushed by Robespierre and Lenin, respectively, and, ultimately, appearing as spontaneous organs of the people in every genuine revolution throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Arendt 1963: 241). The decentralized councils, in all of these instances, were meant to provide a space for public freedom to flourish a venue in which citizens could act and collectively shape their fate. The councils stood in stark contrast to the nation-state, which constituted for Arendt a sovereign system of rule [that] cannot even be properly called political at all since it prevents citizens from being active members in their own political existence (Martell 2011: 148). Though councils were essential organs of the revolution in France, they were subsequently crushed precisely because they constituted loci of power separate from the state. Robespierre and the Jacobin government hated the very notion of a separation and division of powers [The councils], each a small power structure of its own, and the self-government of the Communes were clearly a danger for the centralized state power (Arendt 1963: 237). The decentralized and radically democratic councils made it impossible to unify national opinion or exert a cohesive national will. The logic of the non-sovereign councils 13
is deeply at odds with the logic of the sovereign nation-state. Arendt s problem with sovereignty involves her basic opposition to an entire edifice of governance whereby the state is understood as somehow conveying or representing the will of its inhabitants and seeks to impose one particular vision of the the people on to everyone in all their diversity (Martell 2011: 144-145). Thus sovereignty, even if it is exercised in the name of the people, is, from Arendt s perspective, deeply problematic and, from the anti-authoritarian perspective, fundamentally anti-democratic. Horizontal democracy, therefore, is premised on the idea that democracy and sovereignty are incompatible: public freedom in the sense of acting together and exerting collective power cannot coexist with a political entity that claims the final word and has the necessary coercive means to implement it. As such, horizontal democracy is a form of democracy that is necessarily detached from the state. As Maeckelberg (2009: 140) has observed: The democracy of the alterglobalisaton movement is a non-state democracy, for some actors an anti-state democracy. In either case, democracy is decoupled from the state. The task of a horizontal democracy is no longer to legitimate the holding of power in one body, but disperse power through many bodies. Said differently, the task is not to legitimate a sovereign people, but to enable the self-authorized actions of many non-sovereign peoples what Arendt called the council system and contemporary social movements call affinity groups, clusters and spokescouncils (Starhawk 2002). These distinct nodes of political power can be theorized as constantly in flux: sometimes they will collaborate with each other and amplify their power, and sometimes they will contest each other and diminish their power. It is the back and forth interplay of these varied nodes of power that constitutes the basic political process in a non-sovereign democracy. 14
Democracy Without Decision: Networks as Democratic Organizational Structures If horizontal democracy promotes a radical dispersion of power and fosters a democracy without sovereignty, does it render cooperation, coordination and collective action impossible? When considering the founding of a new political order, Arendt wondered whether freedom in its most exalted sense as freedom to act [should] be the price to be paid for foundation (Arendt 1963: 224). In other words, she wondered whether the exercise of public freedom by revolutionaries in the creation of a new political order, rendered such freedom impossible for subsequent generations. While my concern here is different, the dynamic is similar: Does resistance to the authoritarian implications of sovereignty through the creation of non-sovereign political forms, endanger public freedom itself? That is, does the radical dispersion of power result in the obliteration of collective political action? While theorists such as Hayek (1944) and Friedman (1962) who, similarly, begin from a deep skepticism toward the centralization of state power argue for a radical individualism and for private rather than public freedom, I do not think this is a necessary conclusion. On my view, the democratic dispersion of power is compatible with the democratic drive for the public freedom to act together and shape our collective lives. The very presence of social movements that practice horizontal forms of democracy suggest that, even when power is dispersed across many non-sovereign entities, cooperation and collective action is still quite possible. Indeed, the rather exceptional coordination of the apparently leaderless occupations of 2011 suggests that networks offer a viable organization structure for collective action. Networks as a mode of organization are so central to the theory and practice of horizontal democracy that one observer goes so far as to call the alternative model of democracy network democracy (Maeckelberg 2009). In this section, I contend that networked modes of 15
communication and organization allow for coordination, cooperation and collective action (across both small and large geographic scales) without recourse to hierarchical coordination and formal modes of decision-making. In a typical, hierarchical model of organization and decision-making, there is a definite top or center, from which enforceable decisions flow. Those at the bottom of the pyramid or on the periphery may be able to communicate with and even influence the central decision-maker (as, for example, democratic elections aim to do), but these actors do not have the ability to make decisions on their own. Further, most actors within this organization do not have easy ways of communicating with each other and must go through prescribed channels and chains of command. However, this is not the only model of coordination that exists. Hierarchical models of decision-making can and should be theoretically separated from coordination. To coordinate means to place or arrange things in proper position relative to each other and to the system of which they form parts to bring into proper combined order as parts of a whole. It means, in essence, to bring about some kind of order, not to provide a hierarchical unified structure I strongly dispute the reflexive assumption that coordination is inexorably tied to centralized arrangements such as comprehensive plans and consolidated agencies. (Chisholm 1989: 13) While centralized, hierarchical and unified organization is one approach to resolving problems of coordination, it should not define coordination nor be seen as the only viable approach to resolving coordination problems. Any process of coordination involves four elements: 1) a plan of action must be developed; 2) the plan of action must be communicated to the parties who will carry it out; 3) the plan as developed and communicated must be accepted by those parties; and 4) relevant information must be acquired and disseminated (Chisholm 1989: 29). While one way of accomplishing these four components is through centralized issuing of directives, hierarchical chain-of-command is not the only way. It is theoretically possible that a plan of action can be developed, communicated and accepted through decentralized, networked 16
communication of dispersed actors. One important benefit of informal modes of communication is that individuals at any level of one organization can communicate with individuals at any level of another organization, rather than following a circuitous chain-of-command mode of communication (ibid: 33-34). The advantages of decentralized and informal communication has become even stronger with technology such as Twitter that allows instant communication between individuals, linked by some common interest or issue, that do not even know each other. Because of the intense decentralization, any individual can update others, providing highly responsive feedback mechanisms that increase efficiency. Furthermore, because informal organization permits the continued existence of formally autonomous organizations in the face of mutual interdependence, it can achieve other values, such as reliability, flexibility, and representativeness, that would otherwise be precluded or substantially diminished under formal consolidation (ibid: 17-18). As an example of the way that networks can provide an organization structure that can facilitate collective action, consider the February 15, 2003 international day of action against the impending invasion of Iraq. On that date, millions of people around the world participated in coordinated protests against the impending U.S.-led war on Iraq. Estimates of the global turnout vary, with the BBC estimating between six to ten million participants from up to 60 countries, though various other sources put the number of participants at between ten and thirty million. Regardless of the specific number, the fact that millions of people participated in coordinated, but decentralized, protests throughout the world suggests that informal, networked communication can be a quite powerful force. The coordination of millions of people from some 60 countries to voluntary participate in protests was accomplished without a single centralized authority issuing a command or controlling the course of events. Rather, a call for a day of 17
action was issued and that call was transmitted through activist networks, using tools such as the internet, around the world. Organizers in different locations accepted that call to action and autonomously created specific events in their city or country, which brought hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of people into the street. The cumulative result was that February 15, 2003 constituted the largest anti-war protest that has ever occurred. That the coalition of the willing launched the Iraq War anyway may call into question the strategy and/or tactics employed by the anti-war movement more generally, but it does not belittle the sheer coordinating power of decentralized networks. In contrast to the hierarchical model of decision-making, a network has many nodes but no center. That said, networks should not be considered perfectly non-hierarchical. Research into a diverse array of networks from the internet, to citation patterns to food webs in ecosystems has shown that networks are built around their own internal hierarchies, in which some parts are more important than others. [I]n most real networks the majority of nodes have only a few links and these numerous tiny nodes coexist with a few big hubs, nodes with an anomalously high number of links. The few links connecting the smaller nodes to each other are not sufficient to ensure that the network is fully connected. This function is secured by the relatively rare hubs that keep real networks from falling apart We see a continuous hierarchy of nodes, spanning from the rare hubs to the numerous tiny nodes. (Dean 2009: 28; quoting Barabasi) Thus, while networks are decentralized and encompass many different nodes, not all of those nodes are as important, influential or powerful as others. For example, on the internet, websites that already have many existing links attract newcomers to link to them, as well. Nodes that have been around for awhile have distinct advantages over newcomers (ibid: 30). Therefore, it is important not to idealize networks as being perfectly egalitarian or spontaneous. Networks have both hierarchies and histories, and both of these (at least potentially) reflect unequal 18
distributions of power. Just as internet networks have hierarchies, networks of organizations and activists have less important nodes and more important hubs. The hubs are those individuals or groups that have better connections and greater influence. Agents could hold those privileged positions simply because they are older and more established, or because they have greater access to resources, or because they have done the hard work of establishing relationships with many others. Whatever the reason, an important point is simply that such privileged positions exist in networks. This does not, of course, mean that networks should be scrapped as a potential mode of coordination and governance. Though they too suffer from problems of hierarchy and coercion, the contention underlying support for networked organization is that the level of hierarchy present in networks is frequently much less severe, and much more flexible, than in state-based models of organization. Critically, it is generally the case that no single node or hub dominates the network. No single node can issue commands that others must follow. Moreover, communication is possible between many (though perhaps not all) nodes in the network, enabling multiple nodes to be sources of innovation and action. How does network theory relate to democratic theory and what are the implications of reconfiguring democratic organization along the lines of networks? Generally, democracy is theorized as a system that requires hierarchical coordination and formal modes of decisionmaking. In a typical model of democracy, a polity comes together either directly or through representatives to address some issue. The end result of that process is a (singular) decision. Agreement must be reached, whether by plurality, majority or consensus. This model of democracy remains fundamentally the same whether employed at the local level (such as a town hall meeting), at the national level (as in Congress) or at the global level (as in the United 19
Nations). The networked model of organization is distinct: it is a vision of democracy in which people can collaborate with each other, without requiring: 1) Clearly defined boundaries around the polity, since people within a specific geographic location might not be included in a network, while those outside a geographic location may be included. More fundamentally, the boundaries of the polity are shaped by whoever is participating at that moment. 2) A centralized decision-making body, since all a single actor can do is issue proposals or lead by example, but cannot require that (or how) other actors engage. 3) A single, unifying and binding decision, since each actor in the network is able to choose if (or how) to participate and the final outcome the network produces is the result of the numerous and diverse decisions of the actors in the network. In short (and at the risk of oversimplifying), horizontal democracy is a model of democracy without decision. In networks, elections the prototypical democratic institution do not play a clear role at all. Decisions are not made, they emerge. Recall the February 15, 2003 anti-war protests as an example. No formal body claiming to represent all the different protestors agreed that people around the world would protest that day. No collective decision, in that sense, was made about the decision to protest or what shape the protest should take. Rather, a proposal a plan of action was put forward that other citizens could take up or not and shape as they saw fit. Organizers in different locations accepted that call to action and created specific events in their city or country, each of which was different. Instead of a single big decision, there were many small decisions about how exactly to protest. This enabled different groups to adopt different approaches to the protest (with, for example, varying tactical choices), while also allowing the cumulative effect to result in a cohesive global protest. 20
A similar dynamic existed for the occupation movements of 2011, wherein occupations in each city were able to craft their own tactics and strategies, messages and initiatives. Precisely because of this, occupiers were able to collaborate with each other, without requiring conformity or consensus, and without mandating compliance with any single occupation s decisions. The theory and practice of horizontal democracy takes difference and pluralism as a given and unavoidable reality and employs practices that help individuals and groups work together despite their differences to simultaneously cooperate while resisting unity through networks (Maeckelberg 2009: 188). Through networks, we can conceptualize how democracy can exist without requiring clear decision points with definite outcomes. To further elaborate the idea of networks as an organizational structure, I critically evaluate the model of the directly democratic general assembly that has been adopted in the ongoing occupation movements around the world. While the above discussion should make clear that horizontal social movements have been and continue to be a source of innovation and inspiration for the project of building a horizontal democracy, the practice of these movements certainly has its own internal tensions. By way of a conclusion, I will discuss one of these tensions. Though horizontal networks have frequently characterized the coordination of protests and occupations across cities and countries, the mode of organization within each individual occupation has made significantly less use of networked modes of organization. The occupations in cities across the U.S. and Spain this year have employed the model of the directly democratic general assembly as the mode of organization internal to the occupation. While there is much that is desirable about a directly democratic general assembly, horizontal democracy would be better advanced by applying the logic of networks not only to organizations across 21
large geographic spaces, but even to the relatively small and shared space of the individual occupation. If the occupations have indeed provided a testing ground for non-state forms of democracy, then it is worth considering whether the model of democracy employed in the occupations themselves reproduces the same dynamics that have rendered state-based democracy so thoroughly undemocratic. To put it bluntly, my contention is that direct democracy insofar as it is equated with a single general assembly is not democratic enough. While [unanimous direct democracy] is a genuine solution to the problem of autonomy and authority (Wolff 1970: 27) it is an impossible ideal. The traditional model of direct democracy is insufficiently democratic for two reasons. 1) The size of general assemblies quickly becomes too large for most people to truly be participants; there is quickly a division of specialists and spectators. Direct democracy (understood in this traditional way), given even moderate participation in a city-wide general assembly, becomes representative democracy anew (see also Plotke 1997: 25-27). 2) Attempts to reach decisions whether by majoritarianism or a (modified) form of consensus that most generally assemblies utilize cannot help but smother difference and plurality by requiring that a single decision be reached. In essence, the general assembly shares with the state-centric model of democracy a drive toward reaching singular decisions and enforcing uniformity on an inherently heterogeneous people. Though the citywide general assembly brings people (those that participate anyway) closer to the exercise of sovereign power than the state does, it nonetheless is still premised upon sovereignty. As such, radical democracy should not be equated with the traditional democratic ideal of the one big meeting in which all the people deliberate and decide. 22
Consider, for example, the occupation of city squares throughout Spain in the May 2011 as part of the movement for Democracia Real Ya. The dominant model of decision-making adopted by organizers for these occupations was a single directly democratic assembly, in which all who attended could participate. Anti-authoritarian elements within the Barcelona occupation launched a critique of this model on the basis of the two objections noted above: Like all states, [direct] democracy is based on the centralization and monopolization of decisionmaking Imagine [instead] a Placa de Cataluna with diverse assemblies, where everyone could launch initiatives without going through a centralized and stagnant meeting, thus letting everyone experience participation in self-management rather than remain spectators. We can organize millions of initiatives, more fluidly, without having to go through committees easily dominated by specialists. We don t need others to dictate what we can do. We are not satisfied with only one voice as the centralized assembly, because it s hardly better than the daily silence of capitalism. We want a placa full of voices, of assemblies, of conversations. We re truly interested in the weaving of connections between everyone, but we d like to do so in a different way: through solidarity of struggles and not the homogenization of ideas. (CrimethInc. 2011) In this vision, the self-authorized actions of many decentralized and non-sovereign actors contribute to the enactment of a collective project, without requiring consensus or agreement about all of its constituent parts. In place of the traditional conception of direct democracy, a horizontal democracy built through networks of non-sovereign actors enables both multiplicity and decentralization, on the one hand, and effective coordination and collective action, on the other. The theory of horizontal democracy elaborated in this paper pushes at the boundaries of what we think of as constituting democracy: The people are not fixed or even definitively known at any given point in time, they are not sovereign and they do not come together to make a collective decision. However, it is precisely by upsetting these assumptions that a radical democracy, in which people have the power to shape their lives, remains possible today. 23
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