Horizontals vs. verticals

I’ve just got back from the Radical Theory Forum at the 491 , a squatted gallery in East London, leaving behind me the sound of some excellent performance poets like Yap and the global beats of DJ Nikki Lewis. A few hundred people had made the trek to Leytonstone to hear an array of workshops on radical theory and how it informs political action. I only made it for the last session of the all day event, a workshop on ‘the politics and organisation of the ESF’.

The main point of discussion centred on the politics of ‘horizontal’ (non-hierarchical) as opposed to ‘vertical’ (hierarchical) political organising, which has been one of the major points of dispute during the ESF process in London this year. The ‘horizontals’ are not a movement or an organisation, but people who identify with a way of doing politics that respects difference, non-hierarchical decision making power and participatory democracy. Horizontality of this sort is built into the ‘Charter of Principles’ of the European Social Forum, if not into its actual practices. In particular, the Greater London Authority (and Socialist Action, a small and secretive grouping of ex-Trotskyites who work in Ken Livingstone’s office) and the SWP have been criticised for their attempts to control the ESF in London – which has led many activists to exit the process and set up ‘autonomous spaces’ around it.

The virtue of these autonomous spaces is that they offer a prefigurative politics, ie. they try to operate according to the principles of the world (despite, or after) capitalism that they hope eventually to create – emphasising autonomy, self-organisation, solidarity and sustainability. In this way, the autonomous spaces enrich the Forum by offering a more diverse range of perspectives and acting as laboratories for experimenting with new ways of political organising (a number of which will eventually be taken up by the main Forum itself, if past experience is anything to go by). They also put pressure on the ESF to live up to what it promises to be: an open space for thinking about creative and practical alternatives to corporate globalisation and empire.

Like other participants in this discussion, I am supportive of the autonomous spaces and think they hold vital lessons for how ‘alter-globalisation’ activists can engage with each other. However, I have some reservations about the notion of ‘horizontality’, which presents itself as an ideal - a dream of non-hierarchical organisation in which the Forum matches up to its promise and creates an ‘open space’. It seems to me that this ideal necessarily fails, because power and conflict always rear their ugly heads. Even the autonomous spaces have their de facto leaders, the people who give voice to the conception of ‘horizontality’ and so define the meaning of the interventions that take place there. So rather than dreaming about a power-free utopia, I think it would be more productive to think of how we can manage conflicts so that they can be channeled in a more productive direction.

The ‘politics and organisation of the ESF’ discussion also clarified for me one other point. This year, it has been very apparent that there are several organisations involved in the ESF process (‘verticals’) who think that they can control the space of the Forum by controlling its organising processes. But if we assume that they have actually rested control of the Forum process by these maneuvers then we are using exactly the same conception of power as them. But if the horizontals hold to their own conception of power – as a productive force that shapes our relationships, rather than as the mere capacity to dominate and control – then the rationale for withdrawing from the process looks a little weaker. For my own part, I think that the ESF (more by accident than by design) is an innovative space for political networking because self-organised events lie at its heart. For that reason I stuck with the ‘mainstream’ ESF process, working in the ESF office and co-ordinating some of the programme. In the next few days I hope to see whether that faith in the ESF as a process – despite the many flaws and difficulties we have encountered in London this year – can be repaid.

Oscar Reyes