627733

research-article2016

CNC0010.1177/0309816815627733Capital & ClassKiersey and Vrasti

Article

A convergent genealogy?
Space, time and the
promise of horizontal
politics today

Capital & Class

2016, Vol. 40(1) 7594
The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0309816815627733
c&c.sagepub.com

Nicholas Kiersey
Ohio University, USA

Wanda Vrasti

Humboldt University, Germany

Abstract
While the surge in horizontalist activism of the last few years has drawn upon both
Marxist and anarchist traditions, post-Marxist literature offers a useful guide for
evaluating the strategic opportunities available to the movements today. Focusing
on the camp and the event as its conceptual reference points, this article contrasts
the relative merits of the spatial and chronological strategies of the movements,
concluding ultimately in favour of a longer-term strategy ofwithdrawal, or exodus,
for its ability to sustain parallel forms of community and provide longer-termsupport
for radical politics. We conclude with a brief commentary applying these arguments
to the predicaments faced today by movements in Spain and Greece.
Keywords
Anarchism, general strike, horizontalism, Marxism, social movements

Introduction
Invoking anti-capitalist rhetoric yet refusing to issue demands, the horizontalist movements of 2011 seemed to embrace elements from both Marxist and anarchist strategy.
More specifically, the prefigurative approach of the camps suggested that the protestors

Corresponding author:
Nicholas Kiersey, Ohio University, 101 University Drive, Chillicothe, OH 45601, USA.
Email: kiersey@ohio.edu

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had an acute sense of the profound immanence or embeddedness of social power within
processes of everyday life, a trope common especially in contemporary anarchist and
post- or neo- Marxist discourses. However, while this common point of reference
might indicate the potential for some degree of convergence between these two perspectives, it is important to understand the specific ideological commitments of contemporary horizontalist movements. As we argue below, the movements have tended explicitly
to disavow grand ideology, eschewing commitment to any one set of theoretical principles. Their ideology, to the extent that they can be said to have one, must be deciphered
from their actions.
This article thus explores the commitments of horizontalist movements via a genealogy of their practices, both discursive and non-discursive. While horizontally organised
communities can be identified in a diversity of geographical sites throughout human
history, this paper chooses for its starting point the moment of direct action-style resistance which found global resonance around 1968. Of course, as a mode of political
engagement, direct action long predates the events of 1968; the term was first used by
the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) around the turn of the 20th century
(Thompson & Murfin 1976). It is in 1968, however, that we find the sharply articulated
critique of centralised power and established hierarchies that would later shape the alterglobalisation movement in the 90s and the wave of occupations in 201112, as well as a
number of stopovers in between. Critically, through their mode of organisation and their
way of engaging with the world, the movements demonstrated the irreducibility of their
own composition to a single common cause, or a single enemy (capital, the state, the
dreaded 1%).
The guiding ontology of the movements thus established through a genealogy of their
practices, the second and third portions of this article seek to evaluate the strategic
opportunities available to the horizontal left from the perspective of two literatures,
those of anarchism and autonomist Marxism. Addressing the strategic logic of the recent
movements, the second section adopts an autonomist Marxist perspective in order to
evaluate prefigurative strategy in the context of late-capitalist power. To be viable, the
autonomists argue, a strategy of confronting contemporary capitalism must necessarily
start with the recognition that it has stepped outside the factory, so to speak, subsuming
skills and capacities of production, heretofore considered part of the life world, and
aligning social desires with capitalist rationality to an unprecedented extent. By their
rhetoric and their actions, the movements demonstrate a certain awareness of this
change, and its implications for their struggle. Yet questions remain as to how this awareness should translate into effective strategy. Thus, whereas the Occupy movements
refusal to make any kind of plan for the seizure of power was criticised as especially nave,
activists in Spain and Greece have been much more open to traditional leftist questions,
including those of central organisation and the party-form.
In order to grasp something of the stakes of these questions, we argue that the genealogy of horizontalism suggests at least two poles of possible anti-capitalist strategy. In the
third section, we thus outline the spatial strategy, concerned with securing access to democratic space and constructing temporary zones of autonomy from capitalist life, which
we associate more with the anarchist tradition (Graeber 2002; Springer 2010, 2014), and
the temporal strategy, concerned with the production of new political subjectivities and

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the transformation of common sense, which we associate more with the Marxist tradition (Hardt & Negri 2012; Luxemburg 2007; Virno 1996). Now, importantly, it is not
our purpose in setting up this dichotomy to pigeonhole either approach. Nevertheless, as
we seek to reflect on the basic stakes of leftist convergence, we find this to be a useful
schematic. For, as the experience of many of the occupy camps attest, prefigurative politics is difficult in practice: many camps were hijacked by sections which exhibited little
or no ideological commitment to horizontalist politics outside the site of the camp itself,
and no real understanding of the need for longer-term strategy.
Offering spatial and temporal strategy as two key conceptual reference points for
understanding horizontal politics, then, we conclude by agreeing with those Marxist critics who argue that a longer-term strategy of engaged withdrawal, or exodus, is likely the
most profitable avenue for the movements right now. Strategies of exodus, as we shall
discuss, are those that pursue, in the face of late-capitalist power, the creation of sustainable parallel forms of community and structures of power that can provide longer-term
support for radical politics. Such a strategy, we argue, is especially pertinent in the aftermath of the Greek Oxi vote of 2015. Decrying Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Syriza
for his perceived betrayal, many vanguardist critics have called for a Plan B. That is, a
state-led Grexit from the Eurozone. From the perspective of the movements, however,
in the context of an uneven but global capitalism, there are many reasons to be cautious
of such a pursuit. Putting a premium on the survivability of Europes tenuous horizontalist foothold, it may well be that this is a time for a certain methodological promiscuity.

A brief genealogy of prefigurative politics

By horizontalist politics, we refer to a culture of protest that seeks to bypass traditional
channels of political representation and mediation, through the embrace of relatively flat
or immanent structures of organisation. For us, the recent cycle of global struggles, starting in Tunisia in late 2010, but stretching through Zucotti Park in September 2011 and
as far as Hong Kong, in September 2014, marks the most explicit instance of such politics in history. Much was made of the horizontality of Occupy. Observers and sometimes participants expressed frustrations with the supposed organisationlessness and
leaderlessness of the movement, sometimes because there were no clearly articulated
demands to which the camps could be attached (Dean 2012a), and sometimes because
the camps harboured hidden striations and unaccountable power structures (Shehan
2012). On the other hand, it was this same horizontality, or the attempt to live up to
its ideals of open communication and decision-making, that politicised millions of people hitherto isolated in their singular stories of debt, precarity and powerlessness. In this
section, we want to sketch out the historical contours of horizontalist politics as an
impulse or desire that stretches back to the 19th century, if not earlier, but which eventually comes to shape, we believe, the three most recent waves of mass struggle: 1968; the
alter-globalisation movement of the late 90s and early 2000s; and Occupy.
It might not be controversial to say that the tradition of rogue contestation of power,
when official channels of dispute were closed off, or when they did not exist, has
always been a part of human life. Wildcat anti-authoritarianism, which strikes not only
at those in power but, in its most ambitious form, against the very idea of concentrated,

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established power, does not lend itself to easy ideological mapping. Its ostensibly progressive values notwithstanding, it is not the invention of socialism. In some ways it predates
it and, in the modern context, it has often occupied a position tangential to it. Examples
of wildcat anti-authoritarianism include: the heretical movements of 12th and 13th century Europe that sought greater autonomous organisation of daily life, property and sexual relations (see Federici 2004); the Peasants War of 152526 in central and southern
Germany against the landed aristocracy (see Luther Blissets novel Q); the Diggers and the
Levellers of the English Revolution, seeking self-government, extended suffrage and egalitarianism (Lowes 2006); the Quaker movement in the 1950s, which is often credited with
inventing consensus decision-making (Graeber 2010: 125); and, naturally, indigenous
stateless societies from all over the world living out alternative conceptions of sovereignty
and stewardship.
Various iterations of a modern and more explicitly politicised (i.e. leftist) antiauthoritarianism can also be identified, from the Paris Commune to the groundbreaking
organising of the anarchist International Workers of the World (IWW) syndicate around
the turn of the 20th century (responsible for introducing the 8-hour workday in the
USA), the US civil rights movement, anti-colonial guerilla focalism, radical feminists,
rank-and-file strikes and work stoppages, anti-nuclear activism, anti-fascists, squatters,
punks, deep ecologists and, finally, occupiers. The list of such cases is very long, and we
have no wish to draw a straight line between them all. Not only do their contexts and
points of contention vary, but their tactics were also, in many cases, as distinct as Rosa
Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger vs. colonised people
taking up armed struggle in remote areas. Nonetheless, we want to insist that, in spite of
this diversity of tactics, these movements share a core set of principles that distinguish
them from, and even place them in opposition to, politics as government. In Katsiaficass
terms, they are marked by antiauthoritarianism, independence from existing political
parties, decentralized organizational forms, emphasis on direct action, and a combination of culture and politics as a means for the creation of a new person and forms of
living through the transformation of everyday Life (2006: 34).
Barbara Epsteins ethnographic account of three American anti-nuclear activist groups
in the 80s, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution (1991), shows how anti-authoritarian
direct action attempts to conduct this transformation, insofar as its participants see such
action as a kind of cultural revolution. Epstein details how these groups relied on a strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience, devising and implementing a host of small-group,
consensus-based structures to assist in the coordination of their efforts. While their
immediate objectives revolved around slowing down or preventing the construction of
nuclear power stations, they relied for their organisation on consensus-based decisionmaking mechanisms, thereby also making the accommodation of difference a central
part of their very existence. In this sense, while they brought together rather different
sub-constituencies, and harboured only a vague fidelity to the writings of the classical
anarchist tradition, Epstein concludes that they shared nevertheless an anarchist sensibility (2001). The non-hierarchical nature of the movements, combined with their penchant for direct action, or acts that explored the margins of freedom within their society,
suggested that they were engaging in a kind of prefigurative politics. That is, that they
were concerned not only with drawing attention to the limits of democratic life within

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their society, but also with demonstrating the possibility of a new society, built within the
shell of the old.
In order to fully appreciate the significance of the culture of protest of the US antinuclear movements in the 70s and 80s, however, we must address their theoretical
context as part of the wider cycle of struggles that was 1968. More than just a calendar
year, as Katsiaficas suggests, the 1968 moment was the point of convergence for a whole
set of struggles and sensibilities that predated and succeeded it, from the US civil rights
movement to the Italian year of lead in 1977, and encompassing a whole range of postmodern struggles in diverse locations around the world, all with significance beyond
their immediate domestic contexts. What the year marks in this sense is a turn in radical
thinking and practice away from established traditions of rule and (instrumental) rationality, whether manifested in colonial authority, vanguard leadership or managerial capitalism, towards self-directed activity. By 1968, both mass utopias of the 20th century
democratic capitalism and state socialism had revealed their true colours: imperialism, militarism, patriarchy and colonialism. For people on the left, it had become difficult to believe the alternatives put forth in the ideological battle of the Cold War. Relative
peace and harmony were being maintained on both sides of the Iron Curtain with the
high price of political repression at home, military interventions abroad, authoritarian
and alienating forms of production, reproduction and governance. 1968 thus blew wide
open the false choice presented by the showdown between capitalism and socialism,
bringing together for the first time the critique of economic exploitation with that of
political oppression, to explore new possibilities for self-rule, and self-creation.
Crucially, while the movements never achieved mass popularity, they did achieve
notable victories in raising popular consciousness about a range of areas in which an
entire life world was made vulnerable to colonisation. One remarkable example was the
Italian 68 moment, which lasted an entire decade, and included a vast array of experiments with wildcat strikes, university occupations, pirate radio stations, self-reduction
of food, rent and theatre prices, and a refusal of work in favour of autonomous selfprovisioning (Wright 2002). Instead of campaigning to reclaim and control the process
of production, a goal seen as being devoid of any emancipatory potential, given the
intensification of the industrial division of labour and technologised tactics of managerial control, operaist (workerist) Marxist organisations engaged Italian industrial workers
in assemblies and councils to debate the specific challenges arising from Italys industrial
miracle, and the possibility of minimising the role of work in their lives altogether.
These new workers presented themselves not merely as an underclass, but rather as a
self-directed and post-socialist proletariat (Berardi 1980: 155-156). Self-direction was
also a goal for Italian Marxist feminists, who, marginalised by the countrys great urbanisation, were calling for wages for housework (and abortion rights) as part of their struggle
to achieve recognition for their role in the (re)production of labour-power, and as a first
step towards eventually refusing the role assigned to women in the sexual contract. While
Italys extended 1968 moment ended ultimately in a vicious state crackdown, its history
nevertheless remains a provocative account of the struggle for political subjectivity
(Bologna, cited in Wright 2002: 204).
Such practices influenced various subsequent drives for autonomisation in Europe in
the 1970s and 1980s. The German Autonomen, for example, were not anarchists, but

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their worldview was suffused with anarchist ideals of cultural and political freedom. The
autonomous zones they created, such as the Kreuzberg neighbourhood of Berlin, were
the nodal points of a political culture of immediate activism in which housing, social
centres and entire districts were squatted, transformed and defended. They acted to meet
their own demands, creating a fully-housed society free of the hegemonies of family,
state, nuclear power and the Protestant ethic (Starr 2005: 122). By the end of the 1980s,
movements like these were relatively widespread and familiar to the populations of
Europe. And it was perhaps on the basis of this Europe-wide familiarity that, in 1988,
80,000 people from across Europe could gather in Berlin to protest an International
Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting, explicitly linking IMF policies with the cutting of social
welfare in Europe and with militarism and imperialism (Starr 2005: 20-1).
By 1989, when actually existing socialism crumbled under the weight of its own
contradictions, it seemed like global capital had won the fight and we had indeed reached
the end of history (Fukuyama 1992). What emerged as anti-globalisation, however,
was less a unified movement than a movement of movements (Mertes & Bello 2004),
inspired in equal part by autonomist and anarchist cultures of protest developed in the
Global North and feminist, indigenous and environmental groups struggling against
the despoliation of the Global South. The Zapatista rebellion against the signing of the
NAFTA agreement in 1994, for example, blossomed at a time when the space for anticapitalist revolt seemed incredibly narrow (see Starr 2005: 23-5). Against the efforts of
capital to fracture social bonds, the Zapatistas chose to highlight the shared foundation
of human existence (both ecological and social) and our collective responsibility to shelter it from capital enclosure (see Mentinis 2006). They consciously avoided appealing to
the benevolence of the welfare state, however, or asking for reform. Recognising the
bankruptcy of the capitalist growth imperative, they adopted and adapted already existing democratic practices of indigenous peoples in Mexico to instate a semi-autonomous
space that would explore the very margins of the states patience (Holloway 2004).
The Zapatista uprising sparked the imaginations of many, catalysing a whole new
approach to the very idea of revolution (Graeber 2009: xiii). The result was a mode of
organisation that cannot be naively called structureless or leaderless (see Nunes 2013),
but which nevertheless displayed a kind of networked intelligence. In the same vein, the
historic Battle of Seattle, labeled somewhat inappropriately by the media as an antiglobalisation protest, appealed not so much to an imaginary world government but
rather to a global group of autonomously and horizontally organised communities (Klein
2010). Finding solidarity with each other, it was hoped these groups could change the
world without taking power, as the title of John Holloways (2002) influential book
suggested.
Seattle spurred a dynamic network of horizontalist organising that remained active
throughout the early 2000s, staging direct actions at Republican conventions, G8 and
G20 summits, meetings of the World Bank, IMF, World Trade Organization (WTO)
and the World Economic Forum, along with anti-Iraq War protests. At the same time,
however, the War on Terror ushered in a difficult era for activists, and made anarchist
organising in particular a lot more difficult (Graeber 2002: 69). With the rhetoric of
terrorism at their disposal, police, courts and governments could far more easily detain
and intimidate activists without due process, monitor their daily activities, and raid and

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dismantle their social centres (see documentary If a Tree Falls, 2011). But by no means
did this disband the horizontal left. As Amory Starr writes, the global revolt against neoliberalism didnt start in Seattle and it didnt stop on 9/11 (2005: 19). Anarchist groups
remained active, both the non-violent kind, using cultural subversion tactics and pacifist
direct action (e.g. Reclaim the Streets, Food Not Bombs, Independent Media Centre and
Direct Action Network), and the more militant sort (e.g. Earth Liberation Front, Animal
Liberation Front and the black bloc).
Meanwhile, in the Global South, the economic shocks caused by neoliberal reforms
triggered a parallel wave of horizontal organising. The most prominent examples include
popular movements in Argentina, including the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados
commonly known as piqueteros, which after the country defaulted in 2001 proceeded to
occupy several factories and organised production and exchange through informal channels; the Brazilian and Indian landless workers movement fighting for a just and sustainable distribution of land resources; and the popular movement against water privatisation
in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Perhaps with the exception of Argentina, where anti-capitalist
resistance took an anarcho-syndicalist shape, these were not anarchist movements in the
proper sense (Crane Draper & Shultz 2009; Notes From Nowhere 2003). Compelled by
a general sense of disappointment with established political channels, however, these
movements for social justice strove to bypass political representation, and turned to the
kinds of small-a anarchist modes of organising described by Epstein, above (direct action,
collective decision-making and communities of mutual aid). But even though they gathered annually around events like the World Social Forum, these movements remained on
the fringes of the political landscape, with little by way of media coverage or popular support. It was not until 2011, in the midst of a global financial crisis, that the horizontal left
achieved anything like the kind of global significance predicted for it by Graeber in 2002,
becoming the real locus of historical dynamism (2002: 72).

Horizontalist strategy and contemporary capitalist

power
In the autumn of 2011, after a torrid Middle Eastern Spring and a heated Summer in
Southern Europe, the Occupy movement reached impressive heights when a disparate
group of hippies and hipsters occupied a small, privately owned park in the heart of
Manhattans financial district. Just like the movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Italy and
Spain before them, the protesters in Zucotti Park were outraged by the egregious crimes of
financial and managerial elites, and had lost any faith that elected politicians would rein in
the powers of free markets. Refusing to negotiate with the state, speak the language of the
media, or respect the sanctity of financial markets, they proceeded to construct temporary
autonomous zones in public spaces all over the world. In these spaces, Occupy performatively rebutted the mantra of neoliberal capitalism, that there is no alternative, and demonstrated in no uncertain terms that the dream of commonism, of producing common
goods and living spaces that defy the commodity principle, is very much alive.
The impact of the forms of solidarity with which the Occupy movement experimented is still being debated. However, many point to Mitt Romneys spectacular failure
to win the 2012 US election (Waisbren 2012), the improbable success of Thomas

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Pikettys Capital (Blitzer 2014), and even to the rise of young leftist publications like
Jacobin as lingering indicators of the movements indisputable success. But such achievements indicate only the most modest of cracks in the edifice of late capitalist rationality.
Given this, it is understandable that the movements have frustrated many of even their
most sympathetic critics, drawing accusations that their actions amount to little more
than political theatre (Dean 2010; Henwood 2011). Such criticism misses the point,
however. In refusing to make demands of the political class (you dont represent us was
a dominant slogan at Puerta del SolSquare in Madrid), the occupiers dispensed with the
principles of representative democracy around which modern politics is traditionally
organised. Their tactics, in this sense, did not easily map onto what popularly passes as
politics, or political agency. Acknowledging the existence of the state, and its tremendous
capacity for violence, the movements wagered nevertheless that it is essentially a hollow
and powerless entity, and that real social transformation would have to be achieved
through a transformation of social consciousness. The real enemy, in this sense, would be
neither the state nor capitalism, but rather the interlocking series of socially-distributed
rationalities that made them possible.
At the heart of the Occupy movement, then, was a relatively novel understanding of
political power. Often associated with the methods of scholars like Michel Foucault
(1990), who famously rejected the repressive hypothesis of classical Marxism, this
approach rejects as nave the expectation that the politically mature modern state is in
any way capable of change. On the contrary, real political change starts with cutting off
the kings head in our own minds (Foucault 2001: 122). Horizontalist politics, for this
reason, seeks neither reform nor revolution, neither hegemony nor counter-hegemony
(Day 2005: 9-10). Rather, in an act of protest against modern mass utopias, it defies the
traditionally imagined line of separation between rulers and people, means and ends,
present and future. Prefigurative politics, as it is known in anarchist parlance, assumes
that the political is too important to be delegated onto elites or deferred into the future.
The principles according to which another world should be organised (e.g. self-organisation, voluntary association, mutual aid) should be applied in the here and now, by people
directly involved in the situation. Instead of spending all our time trying to get the critique of state and capital right in the hope that a large number of people will find it
convincing enough to join the revolutionary effort, horizontalist movements prefer to
build the new society within the shell of the old (Epstein 1991: loc. 3467). That is, to
invest their energies in creating, in the here and now, alternative economies and communities within which people might take refuge from dominant structures of power.
However, the mere embrace of a distributed model of how political power really
works does not necessarily make the coercive effects of already-existing capitalism or the
state simply go away. The horizontalist left, too, is clearly still refining its strategies in this
respect. On the one hand, horizontalist direct action tactics, as embodied in the occupations of public squares, are about acting as if we already lived under conditions of freedom; as if neither the problem of state repression nor that of capitalist subsumption
existed; as if police, monetary constraints and structural sources of domination could
never put fetters on peoples dreams (Graeber 2011). On the other, steeped in allusions
to an ongoing antagonism between rich and poor, included and excluded, the 99% and
the 1%, it is clear from the rhetoric of the movements that they share many assumptions

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with the Marxist critique of capital. Their strategic challenge, therefore, is bound up with
the question of how to marshal these prefigurative energies, converting them into an
effective revolutionary force while shielding them from the disciplinary machinations of
the capitalist state.
One difficulty with this strategy, however, is that capitalist power has itself transformed. In Jason Reads terms, domination today is no longer solely a question of the
production of a certain type of subject, but rather a question of a mode of exploitation
based on the productive power of subjectivity (Read 2003: 153). Power relations in the
contemporary moment are thus configured not simply through the solicitation of a confessional subject, but through a solicitation that happens in an increasingly immanent
fashion, as modern management techniques deliberately target the desires of workers.
Such techniques align the wills of employees with the goals of capitalist valorisation
through intimate confessional techniques, even as the arrival of austerity shatters any
illusions we might harbour about the democratic possibilities of our time (Lordon 2014).
But there is cause for hope. The processes of production in contemporary capitalism
presuppose a form of labour that is communicative, cooperative and affective. To the
extent that this is true, the worker appears as a figure that is self-governed, while capital
itself is relegated to a purely reactive, parasitical position (Hardt & Negri 2005, 2009).
An empty vessel, then, post-Fordist capital sustains itself in vampire-like fashion through
the capture and privatisation of productive capacities and energies which have themselves been produced in common, outside capital, in the domain of community, sociality
and creativity.
Recognising this, autonomist Marxist theory eschews the vanguard Marxist strategy
of merely waiting for the unfolding of some dialectic process of working-class transformation. Rather, it asks us to accept that the common is the ultimate source of contemporary value, and that we have the skills and capacities to start re-organising it in ways
that would curb our dependency on capitalist relations and state domination today. The
development of such capacities thus helps to solve a great paradox confronting the modern left. On the one hand, anti-capitalist revolt cannot be achieved politically, at least not
in the traditionally conceived sense of that term, until political consciousness is itself
transformed. On the other, as the 68 movements declared, efforts to hurry or force such
transformation from the outside have proven historically disastrous. The new powers of
social labour obviate this paradox by making possible a whole new strategy: that of exodus from work-based society (Groz 1999: 1).
The concept of exodus, or the creation of a line of flight from the world which forecloses on the possibility of democratic life, is inspired largely by autonomist Marxist literature. Its guiding assumption is that workers today are not passive victims of capitalist
exploitation, but rather are fundamentally autonomous from the structures of state and
capital. Workers, here defined in the broadest sense of the word, as people engaged in
reproducing the conditions for collective social life, are the real force behind capital
innovation (Cleaver 1979: 65). Capital only comes later to enclose the products and
energies of labour. Acting in complicity with this arrangement, the state may extend
concessions to workers through labour unions and social-democratic parties, but only in
order to guarantee that workers will continue to operate as the willing slaves of capital
(Lordon 2014). Higher wages and improved working conditions, thus construed, are

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insufficient to the task of subverting capitalist relations of production or their parasitical

feeding upon the creative energies of its subject populations.
As we will see in the next section, however, such flight is more than just a politics of
mere departure, or walking away. For Paulo Virno, it is anengaged withdrawal from
capitalist relations, a collective and self-governed effort to create new forms of production and value (1996: 197). For Michael Hardt, similarly, it is an active and insurgent
form of life, involving a time-consuming practice of self-transformation, measured in
terms of desire (Hardt 1996: 7). This flight is thus an affirmative one and very different,
for example, from the nihilistic refusal of Melvilles Bartleby to participate in modern
life. Problematically, however, autonomist thinkers appear unwilling to explain the precise terms of what such a transformation might entail. Hardt and Negri, for their part,
seem to suggest that the multitude, this revolutionary counter-force to Empire that cannot be bound by representation, will rise up spontaneously for no other reason than
intensified levels of immiseration. For this reason, autonomists have been criticised for
systematically neglecting the time-consuming, yet indispensable, work needed for organising and reproducing what can otherwise be short-lived, sensational instances of struggle (Federici 2006).

Space, time, and left strategy

The tactics of the horizontal movements thus belie the ontology of what is essentially a
democratic, process-oriented struggle for a life in common beyond capitalist relations. In
this sense, anarchist and post-Marxist thinkers alike can claim to be able to identify elements of their thinking in these movements. In the final instance, however, it is Marxist
analysis that seems to sound a subtle but important note of caution in the debate. Here,
we find Rosa Luxemburgs (2007) reflections on the Mass Strike to be a helpful guide.
Writing against the current of her Marxist contemporaries, Luxemburg endorses the
general strike as a meaningful strategy for social change. Understood at the time as an
anarchist stratagem, Marxists lambasted the practice as an impossibility in the face of an
organised statecapital alliance which would inevitably contrive to disrupt the ability of
the workers to organise and fund any such activity. For Luxemburg, however, both sides
were missing the point. Reflecting specifically on the events of the 1905 Russian
Revolution, she accused anarchists of reducing the strike to a sort of starry-eyed instrumentality. Marxists, for their part, mirrored the error, seeing the strike only in terms of
its meek, reformist accomplishments. What both missed, she argued, was the historical
significance of the strike as a training ground for revolutionary subjectivity. After all, she
noted, the bourgeoisie of the French revolution were a confident and organised lot. To
achieve the same level of consciousness, the proletariat would have to steep itself in its
own living political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the
revolution (2007: 130).
In this way, we see that what interests Luxemburg about the General Strike is less its use
as an immediate strategy of resistance. She admires the faith and trust that anarchists are
willing to invest in the masses. But like any good Marxist, she accepts that the plausibility
of any meaningful strategy of anti-capitalist resistance is necessarily indexed to its ability to
overcome a certain amount of congealed intersubjectivity. As Hardt and Negri explain, we

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have been trained by power in post-political apathy and ignorance (2012: loc. 926). But
this does not mean we should lose hope. For the struggle for a democratic governance of
the common is a long one, and demonstrates a tendency toward increasingly democratic
organization, from centralized forms of revolutionary dictatorship and command to network organizations that displace authority in collaborative relationships (2005: xvi).
Situating the movements within this historical tendency, Hardt and Negri hint at their
faith in Luxemburgs proposition. The camps of the Occupy movement, they claim, created space for plural encounters, facilitating the encounter of singularities, and effecting a
political transformation over their participants. In this sense, what was vital about the 2011
movements was not so much their relation to space, or that they made encampments, but
rather that in the act of camping they also seized their own time (2012).
For Hardt and Negri, this point about time and political transformation is crucial.
Most of us, when we think about time, think in terms of chronological units: seconds,
minutes, hours. For social movements, however, time is perhaps better understood in
terms of the subjectively experienced events in which its participants undergo a kind of
collective self-transformation, making them into something more than a group of mere
individuals. For Hardt and Negri, such is the time of kairos, the time that permits a
being with and a doing with which spreads and teaches people how to make decisions
(2012: loc. 872). The campers had to devise ways for collectively deciding how they
would relate to their resources and how they were to be distributed. What made these
processes remarkable was the subjective change the campers experienced in deliberating
over them, and putting them into action. The experience of physical proximity with others of like mind and purpose, in this sense, is as much an emotional phenomenon as a
logical or rational one, and so the camps were animated and permeated by flows of
affects and indeed great joy (2012: loc. 711). The campers then, in all their diversity, in
confrontation with the problem of managing their life in common, posited the camp as
a kind of communicative laboratory for the composition of militant subjectivities (loc.
853-872). And these concrete subjectivities, it is hoped, will endure as a repository of
knowledge and feeling upon which future instances of horizontal struggle may draw,
regardless of any defeat they might suffer in the shorter term.
If this all seems somewhat overly poetic, it would be unfair to conclude that Hardt
and Negri are under any illusions that these militant potentialities are likely to become a
tangible political force, a multitude that is, any time soon. In Commonwealth, they note
that the becoming-prince of the multitude will be delayed until it can master the art of
self-rule (Hardt & Negri 2009: viii). Achieving this goal is no easy task, however, requiring time and experimentation, both in order to imagine the kinds of new practices and
institutions upon which the world to come might be based, and to constitute new subjectivities that desire and are capable of democratic relations (2012: loc. 1352). Only
through these tasks, they argue, will we ever be able to recognize what we have become
(2012: loc. 1352). However, Hardt and Negri forswear any responsibility for explaining
how these experiments are to be carried out, suggesting that the multitude must figure
this out on its own (2000: 400). We find this problematic because, while it makes sense
to a certain extent that advocates for horizontalist democracy might wish to avoid imposing any kind of telos on what are, after all, supposed to be immanent movements, it
seems neglectful to abandon the question of strategy tout court.

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This criticism notwithstanding, by framing the work of the movements in terms of

kairotic time, as opposed to space, Hardt and Negri give us a helpful starting point for
understanding the dilemma facing the movements. In an essay comparing the attitudes
to social transformation of Lenin and Thomas Jefferson, Hardt laments the position of
the former, labeling him an advocate of change guided from above, from outside the
people (Hardt 2007: xvi). That is, namely through the means of a state apparatus
(although for Lenin the idea was that this would eventually wither away, as a new militant subjectivity takes root). This view, for Hardt, contrasts starkly with that of anarchism, which holds that humanity is always already fully capable of self-government, and
that the cause of liberation does not have to wait for the eventual dissolution or withering away of the state. But if Leninism and anarchism are two poles on a spectrum of
optimism for the possibility of autonomous political change, Hardt suggests that between
them we find Jefferson, who insists human nature is neither good nor bad, but that it
can, over time, recreate itself and lead itself into an historical break that opens a new
historical process (2007: xi). Here, as in Lenin, it is expected that the state will wither
away over time, but the process is now self-led, incremental and without a final
destination.
Of course, the genealogy of anarchism as a conscious ideology is quite diverse, its
sources including the social utopianism of William Godwin, the political economy of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and the revolutionary activities of Mikhail Bakunin (for discussion of this point, see Day 2005, Ch. 4). The street-based, small-a anarchism of todays
horizontal political movements is a somewhat different beast, however. Hardts warning
about the idealism of anarchism notwithstanding, we should recognise that actuallyexisting movements have proven themselves historically to be quite capable of advanced
forms of constituent development. German squatters and punks invented the infamous
black bloc tactic of wearing leather jackets, and later hoodies and masks, as a sign of
anonymity and solidarity in confrontation with the police (Graeber 2012). Affinity
groups were borrowed from Spanish anarcho-syndicalists in the 1930s (Bray 2013).
Consensus decision-making was inspired by Quakers and many indigenous groups, and
later popularised by women and minorities who felt marginalised in bureaucratic leftist
organisations of the 1960s and 70s (Lilley & Soong 2012). Given the dispersed and decentralised nature of horizontalist movements, the coagulant potential of such tactics
cannot be gainsaid.
The success of these small-a movements notwithstanding, there remains a sense in
which formal anarchist literature seems to reflect on horizontal activism in spatial terms.
Springer (2010), for example, addresses the fact that neoliberal capitalism has shuttered
the essentially open nature of public space. Building on Lefebvre, Springer argues that
true public space is representational, as opposed to merely representative, and that the
values embedded in public space are those with which the demos endows it (2010: 543).
An authentic democracy in this sense is one in which the criteria for entry into public
space is ever-open for question and revision, whereas politics under neoliberalism has
been arrested and siloed into a combative electoral authoritarianism (2010: 530). In this
time of crisis, the real nature of this non-politics is revealed in its propensity to resort to
the securitising logic of spatial management, casting democratic voices out from the
public square. And there can be no doubt of the risks of such desperate measures in terms

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of their propensity to encourage more extreme kinds of popular identification, including nationalism and religious fanaticism.
Thus, if the genealogy of the movements permits us to speak of something like a
left-wing convergence, it is one that appears to be bound up in a strategic dilemma.
Hardt and Negri recognised this in drawing a clear distinction between counterpowers
that take immediate action in areas of social and environmental need and danger, and
the longer-term task of what they regard as constituent work (2012: loc. 722). As an
anarchist, Springer (2010) focuses on the former mode, arguing for the importance of
civil disobedience. Here, the dimensions of time and subjectivity are set aside to focus
on winning ground from the forces of reaction: conquering public spaces, buildings,
pushing back police lines, and creating temporary autonomous zones. Such action is
vital, Springer argues, insofar as it puts the powers that be on notice, increasing the
costs of suppression and thereby making it harder for the state to justify the use of
violence (2010: 554). But also because it tends to inspire those below who, displaced
by economic misfortune, might otherwise be tempted to mimic the power-over axiom
of the state.
Against this focus on the terrain of immediate action, however, commentators of a
more vanguard Marxist persuasion have been critical of the chaotic nature of the horizontal approach. Not only are anti-hierarchical tactics ripe with totalitarian traps (consensus-based decision-making stifles individual leadership, conceals hierarchies, and
invites a tyranny of structurelessness), but also the ideology of radical inclusiveness and
autonomous cooperation immanent in these tactics is politically disabling. In Worths
terms, while cultural strategies may have their merits (as a tool in the war of position, to
use a Gramscian idiom), without a wider Marxist analysis of hegemony/counter-hegemony, singling out the working class as the quintessential subject of revolutionary struggle, the movements cannot hope to offer an image of the enemy against which radical
action should be channeled (Worth 2013: 40). Without this ontological anchor, the
horizontalist left has no politics to offer, only an ethics (tactics as brand) which neoliberal capital has no trouble coopting (Dean 2012a). ieks Marxist-Leninist stance,
expressed originally as a critique of Hardt and Negri, encapsulates this criticism thusly:
Politics without the organizational form of the party is politics without politics, so the answer
to those who want just the (quite adequately named) new social movements is the same as the
answer of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: You want revolution without a
revolution! (Zizek 2001: 193)

Given the modest achievements of the Occupy movement, this kind of criticism bears
scrutiny. Many have lamented the lack of strategic awareness on the part of the camps.
The Not An Alternative collective, for example, speaks of a hard core of US-based
Occupy organisers, a secret vanguard directing the movement from within (Not an
Alternative 2014). Others, looking at the case of Irelands Occupy Dame Street, identify
a core group of activists who made securing the apolitical nature of the camp their first
priority, often blocking initiatives to reach out other groups (see Kiersey 2014; Sheehan
2012). Moreover, as anyone with experience participating in the camps will attest, there
was no necessary congruence between the values of this core and those of autonomist

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Marxism, or even anarchism for that matter. For Jodi Dean (2012a), Occupy failed to
create a meaningful counter-power, and blame for this must be attributed primarily to its
irrational obsession with form over content. A lot has been written in response to these
criticisms, and we shall not attempt to summarise those accounts here. Rather than dwell
on the movements failure, we wish instead to offer some parting remarks on the dichotomy just identified between the work of immediate counter-powers and the longer-term
task of exodus, and offer a brief analysis of recent developments which speak to its continued relevance, even in a post-Occupy world.

Conclusion: From Oxi to Exodus?

It has been said that people hunker down in times of austerity, eschewing the risky world
of politics (Davies 2012). A strategy of horizontalist emancipation under such conditions thus must necessarily address the question of how best to provision for the movements. And it is here, perhaps, that we find the greatest evidence for a meaningful
left-wing convergence. For if our earlier arguments present horizontalism as the result of
a productive alliance between the more immediate, spatial strategy of anarchist activism
and the slower, constituent strategy of autonomist Marxism, the recent electoral successes of leftist parties, in Greece and Spain especially, make for a curious twist in the tale.
If, as noted, Occupy must now be deemed a failure, these parties seem to embody a more
traditional, vertically-integrated leftist strategy, satisfying Jodi Deans definition of the
party form, an explicit assertion of collectivity, a structure of accountability, an acknowledgement of differential capabilities, and a vehicle for solidarity (2012b: 239). However,
as we will now argue, there is a danger in jumping to conclusions. For while these new
movements certainly resemble traditional leftist structures, their supporting infrastructure remains horizontalist in nature. In Spain, for example, despite the ostensible collapse of the 15-M movement, indignado assemblies, or circles, remain as an important
source of legitimacy for Podemos (Tremlett 2015). Whereas in Greece, even in the aftermath of what many now see as Tsiprass betrayal of the movements in capitulating to the
Eurogroups demands, there remains a furious debate as to whether the country should
embrace Plan B, and depart from the Eurozone in order to save its sovereignty, or accept
that the future of the nations democracy is bound to its economic survival, and that
buying some time must be the order of the day (see Duggan 2015).
Navigating the tension between these two courses in a non-contradictory manner has
been a central challenge for Syriza and Podemos. On one hand, vertically-integrated
strategies can overcome the dispersed and transitory nature of horizontalist power, giving
institutional integrity to the memory of the movements, thereby allowing them to plan
ahead and to take on much bigger structural forces. Pablo Iglesias of Podemos, for example, has been openly critical of the complacency of pure horizontalism in this respect:
Our aim today is not the withering away of the state, or the disappearance of prisons, or that
Earth become a paradise. But we do aim, as I said, to make it so that all children go to public
schools clean and well-fed. (Iglesias 2015)

Here, activism is recognised as an activity pursued under conditions of perpetual

insecurity, and especially so in the context of a financial crisis. Acquiring a more vertical
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form, then, a major goal of Podemos is to mitigate such insecurity and provide for the
continuity of the movements, raising funds in order to create various online resources,
including various Web-TV media streams, online forums (principally, the so-called
Plaza Podemos), and transparency websites (opening its expenses to public scrutiny),
but also funding candidates and campaign workers for elections.
Yet if pragmatism is the order of the day in its electoral strategies, the party is equally
aware of the role of the movements as its political engine, the source of its values, holding it accountable, and pushing it to go even further. As much is reflected in Podemoss
Constituent Process, a two-month nationwide debate that occurred in the autumn of
2014, wherein the partys ethical, political, and organizational framework was established. Critical to this process was the careful study by Iglesias, among others, of the various congresses supporting electoral reform over the last two decades in Venezuela,
Ecuador, and Bolivia. According to German Cano of Podemoss Latin American relations team, the most important lesson the party has learned from these studies is how to
articulate demands that in the first instance dont appear to fit with already constituted
identities (Seguin 2015). Bringing this model home to Spain, Podemos relied on some
900 nationally distributed circles to create a participative election manifesto, which was
then voted for online.
What is important here, therefore, is that Podemos, by contrast with more hardline,
revolutionary positions, is in some ways ambivalent about the state. As real change must
come from below, through exodus, the embrace of elements of reformist strategy is
deemed a necessary evil, recognising both the fundamental limitations any government
under capitalism must suffer, but also the urgency of supporting the movements now,
lest the opportunity to forestall the threatening rise of right-wing sentiment be missed.
Indeed, the 2015 general election presented Greek voters with just such a tradeoff, with
the revolutionary Antarsya coalition performing relatively poorly (just 0.6%), compared
to the victorious Syriza. Refusing calls from Antarysa, and even from within the ranks of
its own so-called Left Platform, for an immediate, all or nothing Grexit from the
Eurozone, Tsipras attempted instead to use his electoral victory, and the results of a positive Oxi referendum in June, as leverage for a better deal in his negotiations with the
Eurogroup. Understandably, many Plan B supporters decried this tack as capitulation
or, worse, betrayal (Lordon 2015; Ali 2015). For others, however, such declarations were
far too simplistic, ignoring the considerable political and technical problems that a
Grexit would raise, at least in the immediate term.
Politically, and perhaps most importantly, the fact is that polls continue to show an
overwhelming degree of support, including on the parts of 66 per cent of Syriza supporters, for remaining in the euro even after the signing of the memorandum (Gindin &
Panitch 2015). But even just at the level of its technical feasibility, limitations on an
actual strategy of Grexit would necessarily include the fact that the countrys bank deposits remain very weak and, moreover, that outside of the Eurozone, a Greek government
in default would not be able to expect much by way of help from Europes already wrathful elites. Thus, given the likelihood of national economic obliteration, the great pain
this would inflict on the very subjects the party is sworn to defend, and the possibility
that these same subjects might in turn come to rationalise a rightward political turn,
capitulation was really the only viable strategy (Panitch 2015). As Gourgouris (2015b)
observes, the desire under such circumstances to pursue a strategy of abandoning the
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Euro no matter the cost, a strategy ultimately no more guaranteed to succeed than the
strategy of remaining within it, amounted to little more than an inverted fetishism of
the euro. Faced with such a false choice, then, Tsipras chose finally to respect the wishes
of the Greek electorate.
The Greek situation is thus a highly idiosyncratic one, and one not easily addressed
by a technical or economic fix. Rather, as Gourgouris characterises it, it is a situation in
which the field of historical action exceed[s] the theoretical armory. Ultimately, in
deciding not to press for Grexit, it appears that Tsipras was guided by this sense of the
impossibility of the choices before him. But it is perhaps precisely here that the Greek
situation provides lessons for us, as to both the potential of the movements, and their
limits. Now, obviously enough, concepts like the party and party leadership, and the
very notion of wielding state power, sit uneasily with the genealogy of horizontalism we
have outlined in this paper. However, ultimately, as Bratsis (2015) argues, the Greek
social movements proved ill-suited to the task of exerting pressure on Europes financial
institutions. While they achieved phenomenal success in organising 30-plus general
strikes and many more demonstrations, they were ultimately unable to prevent passage
of the Eurogroups third memorandum. Tsiprass decision was therefore not only the
more democratic one; it also contained a two-fold element of realism. Balibar and
Mezzadra (2015) express the logic of this realism succinctly, declaring the decision a victory in terms of time and space. Time, that is, for anti-austerity forces to emerge elsewhere in Europe and, hopefully, to win electoral victories of their own. But space, too,
for the movements to continue not only their work of self-development and capacity
building, but for a broader political engagement with Greeces public institutions, where
clientelism and corruption remain rampant.
In this sense, then, the story of Greeces encounter with the neoliberal order raises a
difficult paradox for our genealogy of horizontal politics. On the one hand, as we noted
earlier, cutting off the kings head in our own minds is one of the most cherished values
of the horizontal tradition. On the other, however, it is clear that the anti-austerity movements in Europe have thus far not been quite up to the task. The upshot is that the task
of exodus might best be served by a project of reforming Greek government, so that what
Surin terms a minimally functioning state apparatus (2014: 9) can be hitched to the
movements interests. But how minimal, exactly? And how might one advocate such a
realism in this context, without effectively re-attaching the kings head? That is, without
becoming trapped in a left-rationalisation of what is really the logic of sovereign exceptionalism? Breaking with writers like Agamben and Badiou, for whom the political is
always necessarily exceptional, Gourgouris answers these questions with a call for what
he terms left governmentality (2015b). Of course, Foucault once famously argued, I do
not think there is an autonomous socialist governmentality (2008: 92). By this, he
meant that socialism, while it expresses clear historical and economic rationalities, has no
theory of its own way of governing (2008: 94). Actual socialisms, he pointed out, have
always had to borrow their vision of governance from other, more explicitly political
governmentalities, like liberalism or totalitarianism. For this reason, he concluded, a real
left governmentality has yet to be invented (2008: 94).
Taking up this challenge in the Greek context, Gourgouris (2015a) argues that the
first step in inventing a leftist governmentality is to draw a distinction between the

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constitutive power of the movements, which are self-organising, on the basis of their
autonomous critical imagination, and the instrumental power of government, which is
bound to make clear and timely decisions in particular historico-political conditions and
limitations it inherits. Under left governmentality, then, the two remain heterogeneous
to each other, neither subservient to the other, but each nevertheless responsible for each
other (2015b). Syrizas first obligation in this sense is to represent its voters and, so far as
it is able, to act on the international stage to preserve the conditions of existence of the
movements from which it derives its primary strength. For the movements, on the other
hand, the task is to hold Syriza to its values. To demand, for example, that it becomes a
force for democratising the countrys flawed institutions, from the municipal level and
up. Or, equally, that it should engage with the nations impressively capable volunteer
economy, to strengthen it so that it might better be able to help those who are suffering
under austerity.
How successful this alignment of the vertical and the horizontal will be, or how long
it can sustain, only time will tell. For now, however, to borrow from Negri and Mezzadra
(2014), we draw the tentative conclusion that, for Podemos and Syriza at least, the war
of position against European austerity continues to be underwritten by the collective
writing of the movements. The lesson is that a partial, selective turning towards the
state apparatus can be an essential counter-power of the horizontalist toolbox. Such talk
does not call into doubt the successes of the movements to date, the index of which is
the long history of meaningful, constitutive moments they have produced, creating the
new in the shell of the old. They are singular, non-representational events in which
alienation and mediation, those eternal modern afflictions, stand as concrete historical
demonstrations of the potential of horizontal life, overcoming difference and inspiring
future such alliances. Yet without endorsing or expressing nostalgia for vertical socialism, the principle of exodus is served only when the multitude has the time and resources
to experiment. Up against a vicious regime of austerity, left governmentality represents
a necessary convergence of horizontal and vertical forms of resistance. So long as these
new, tentative moves to embrace verticality remain faithful to horizontalist principles,
there is no reason to doubt they will continue to provide opportunities for experimentation in non-hierarchical forms of government, and strengthen the promise that a different world is possible.
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Author biographies
Nicholas Kiersey is an associate professor of political science at Ohio University. His work
focuses on the place of crisis and subjectivity in the reproduction of capitalist power. Articles of
his can be found in Global Society, Global Discourse, and the Journal of Critical Globalization
Studies. He co-edited the volume
Battlestar Galactica and International Relationswith
IverNeumann (Routledge,2013). His book, Negotiating Crisis: Neoliberal Power in Austerity
Ireland, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2016.
Wanda Vrasti is a lecturer at the Institute for Social Sciences at Humboldt University. She is the
author of How to be Good in Neoliberal Times: Volunteer Tourism in the Global South (Routledge,
2012). Articles of hers have appeared in the journals Millennium, Theory & Event, and Global
Society. Her current research interests include political economy, Marxist political theory, and the
philosophy of work. She is also active in migrant justice activism in Berlin.

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