Neither Vertical nor Horizontal

Neither Vertical nor Horizontal:A Theory of Political Organization

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How do we organize in a world after both Occupy and the Sanders campaign?

A decade ago, a wave of mass mobilisations described as “horizontal” and “leaderless” swept the planet, holding the promise of real democracy and justice for the 99%. Many saw its subsequent ebb as proof of the need to go back to what was once called “the question of organisation”. For something so often described as essential, however, political organisation remains a surprisingly under-theorised field. In this book, Rodrigo Nunes proposes to remedy that lack by starting again from scratch. Redefining the terms of the problem, he rejects the confusion between organisation and any of the forms it can take, such as the party, 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 that include cybernetics, poststructuralism, network theory and Marxism, Nunes develops a grammar that eschews easy oppositions between “verticalism” and “horizontalism”, centralisation and dispersion, and offers a fresh approach to enduring issues like spontaneity, leadership, democracy, strategy, populism, revolution, and the relationship between movements and parties.

Reviews

  • This is the book we've been waiting for: Rodrigo Nunes systematically assesses the problems the left has faced since the Occupy movement and its failure. A must-read for the activists of our time.

    Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, author of Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility
  • This is quite an achievement: one of those period-defining books that turns all usual assumptions upside down.

    Wu Ming, authors of Q and Altai
  • This is an exciting, innovative book. Rodrigo Nunes has utterly revitalised the stale theory of political organisation with new evidence, new thinking and new strategic concepts. All of the suffocating clichés of both horizontalists and vanguardists are briskly overturned here. Everyone can learn something from this book.

    Richard Seymour, author of Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics