This project has been slowly fermenting in my head for quite a while and it is time to give it some shape.

there is only one scientific question left in the world: how do we stop the self-annihilation of humanity? (Holloway 2002)

It is of course deeply ironic to start this project off with a quote from exactly that book (and if you don’t get why, I hope over the course of my writings it will get a little clearer). Still, the sentiment rings true, perhaps more so than back in 2002. After all, we are hurtling toward 2.8° C above pre-industrial levels.

In any case, stopping this self-annihilation¹ would require a societal state shift, that is, a deep change in the structure and function of society. Such shifts have happened before, and there is no good reason to believe they won’t happen again. My question is, how can they be induced? Or rather, I want to take a step back and ask: how are the collectives formed and composed that are able to induce such a state shift?

Over the past years, we have seen collectives come together again and again, trying to induce such a state shift. But these have all been without any success on the scale we would need. There’s been the Arab Spring, the Indignados anti-austerity movement in Spain, the broader Occupy-Movement born from this. All of these were deeply inspiring, but still falling short of their goals. And after these “horizontal” waves of struggle, well, failed, there has been a turn towards more “electoralist” experiments, like the Sanders- and Corbyn-Campaigns, a more general turn towards forms of institutionalized leftism (DSA, Die Linke, …). And of course, there has been the climate movement that has been highly visible on the streets, but seems to have imploded with the global Covid-19 pandemic. 

Quite a while back, Slavoj Zizek, a man who may be appreciated for some choice insights, and equally dismissed for countless idiotic takes, said that in these chaotic times, it is especially important to not just act, but to think. 

I appreciate this sentiment. After seeing progressive movements fail again and again for the past two decades or so, we should seriously investigate why we’re not winning.

So I guess, this is what this blog will be about. I want to address the current very long moment by focusing on the question of organisation. What is an organisation? What does it mean to be organized? And so on. 

It should be obvious that such a focus on form will give us an incomplete picture, and surely the question of organisation is probably not the only question worth asking today, if you’re in the game for some (positive) societal change.

What follows is a rough inventory of what I want to do in the next few months. For the start I want to discuss three texts, each in one or more separate posts, and then in another separate post take a quick inventory of what we’ve learned, before then tackling the next sequence of texts.

We will start with a classic: Rosa Luxemburg’s 1906 pamphlet The Mass Strike, The Political Party and the Trade Unions. Written as both a commentary on the Russian Revolution of 1905 and as a major intervention into a strategic debate over the future trajectory of the German Social Democratic Party, this text will give us a chance to meet three of our “organizational protagonists”: masses, parties and trade unions. So, all in all a great way to start. And this text is obviously not just of historical interest to us. For example, it has been put to some use to understand the Arab Spring, as well as current mass strikes in India, or the wave of teacher’s strikes in the USA.² Of course, care has to be taken to properly appreciate Luxemburg’s insights and not to draw the wrong conclusions from a text that was written for a very specific purpose (influencing the outcome of the 1906 Mannheim congress). So, historical context is, as always, important.

Next we will skip a few decades into the future and dig into Jo Freeman’s The Tyranny of Structurelessness, a classic essay born from the experiences with the 60s women’s liberation movement. Freeman examines how informal hierarchies emerge in groups that claim to be structureless, the problems this creates and how to deal with them. It should come as no surprise that this text had a renaissance after the horizontalism of the Occupy Movement failed to produce any meaningful results. 

Then we will jump into the present and read the introductory chapter to Rodrigo Nunes’ 2021 Neither Vertical nor Horizontal to get a feel for the current state of the debate around the “Organisationsfrage”. Having done so, it will be time to take a first look back and reflect on what we have learned so far, to close this first sequence of our project. 

I haven’t completely mapped out the trajectory following this, but I have a few rough ideas that I will probably sketch out in a future post. See you then!

Sources

• Holloway, J. (2002). Change the World Without Taking Power
• Nunes, R. (2021). Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal
• Zemni, S. et al. (2013). Luxemburg on Tahrir Square: Reading the Arab Revolutions With Rosa Luxemburg’s the Mass Strike
• Gallas, A. (2020). Mass Strikes in a Global Conjuncture of Crisis: A Luxemburgian Analysis
• Freeman, J. (1972). The Tyranny of Structurelessness