--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781784780968" library_document_id: "391232a1-3a16-47f8-8595-438b898240a2" source_sha256: "6406c4d6b84d37861ca9e03cc6a93f2e23141c4a65bc7e63e26297e5318b2cf9" pdf_physical_page_count: 160 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 20 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/391232a1-3a16-47f8-8595-438b898240a2?start=20&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/391232a1-3a16-47f8-8595-438b898240a2.md?start=20&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/391232a1-3a16-47f8-8595-438b898240a2.md?start=10&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/391232a1-3a16-47f8-8595-438b898240a2.md?start=30&limit=10" --- # InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=20 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Why Aren’t We Winning? A Critique of Today’s Left Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you raise chickens. Jodi Dean A key challenge facing the left today is to reckon with the disappointments and failures of the most recent cycle of struggles. From the anti-globalisation to the Occupy movements, we have seen a high point of folk-political practice. Why, despite a considerable mobilisation of people and passions, did these movements fail to achieve any significant change in the political status quo? Some writers have argued that the incapacity of contemporary leftist movements can be explained by their class basis, such as their alleged lack of a working-class component, or the infiltration of reformist liberal interests.1 Others have argued that the problem lies with the nature of the system and the hurdles placed in front of any transformative project. Yet as we argued last chapter, this only partly explains the recent failures. By contrast, the argument of this chapter is that the problems lie more with the folk-political assumptions that shape the strategic horizon of recent left politics. We seek here to diagnose the limits posed by contemporary folk politics. As was argued in Chapter 1, folk politics emerges at the junction between a generalised reaction to increasing social complexity and a specific history of leftist movements in the twentieth century. This chapter examines how the folk-political intuitions that were formed in the process have come to shape some of the dominant strands of contemporary leftist politics. We make no claim to cover the entire field of social movements here, but simply focus on what have been the most politically popular and significant moments of the radical left in the past fifteen years. We also do not claim that any of the particular political tactics used by these movements are inherently problematic. The merits of particular tactics are only legible when seen in the context of both the broader historical horizon and the strategy aimed at transforming it. It is in our current setting – of a world overwhelmingly determined by the imperatives of global capitalism, combined with folk-political strategies focused on the local and the spontaneous – that we locate the fundamental weakness of the contemporary left. We begin by examining one of the most popular political tendencies of the past fifteen years – horizontalism – before turning to widespread ideas centred on localism, and the general reactive thrust of most mainstream and radical leftist politics. HORIZONTALISM Crystallising in 1970s US social movements and thrust into prominence by the Zapatistas, alterglobalisation activists and the movement of the squares, horizontalism has become the dominant strand of today’s radical left.2 Responding to the twentieth-century failures of state-led political change, horizontalist movements instead advocate changing the world by changing social relations from below.3 They draw upon a long tradition of theory and practice in anarchism, council communism, libertarian communism and autonomism, in order to – in the words of one proponent – ‘change the world without taking power’.4 At the heart of these movements lies a rejection of the state and other formal institutions, and a privileging of society as the space from which radical change will emerge. Horizontalism rejects the project of hegemony as intrinsically domineering, putting forth an affinity-based politics in its stead.5 Rather than advocating an appeal to or takeover of the vertical power of the state, horizontalism argues for freely associating individuals to come together, create their own autonomous communities and govern their own lives. In broad terms, we can summarise these ideas in terms of four major commitments: Chapter 2 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=21 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 1. A rejection of all forms of domination 2. An adherence to direct democracy and/or consensus decision-making6 3. A commitment to prefigurative politics 4. An emphasis on direct action Embedded within this set of commitments is a series of problems that constrain and limit their potential in the struggle against global capitalism. Horizontalism’s focus on domination in all its forms is perhaps its signal contribution.7 Moving beyond the old left’s traditional focus on the state and capital, it emphasises the various ways in which other types of domination continue to structure society (racial, patriarchal, sexual, ableist, and so on). It is a significant advance that many of today’s radical left have adopted these ideas and centred their practice upon the complete removal of all forms of oppression – a commitment that we believe any serious leftist politics must adopt. Yet the means by which horizontalist movements attempt to overcome domination and oppression often end up being bound by the limits of folk politics. In seeking the direct and unmediated cancellation of social relations of domination, these movements either tend to ignore the more subtle forms of domination that persist, or else fail to construct persistent political structures able to maintain the new social relations in the long term. The commitment to avoiding all forms of domination is closely tied to a critique of representation – both conceptual and political. In practice, this has led to a rejection of the more hierarchical structures that characterise representative politics.8 Having experienced the history of corrupt trade unions and rapidly eroded liberal democracies, representation is seen as inevitably leading to selfserving and dominant elites. These structures are to be replaced by direct forms of democracy that privilege immediacy over mediation, invoking a more personal sense of politics.9 The idea here is that a ‘face-to-face democracy’ is presumably more natural and authentic, and less prone to the emergence of hierarchies.10 Political decisions are to be made not by representatives, but instead by individuals representing themselves in person.11 Direct democracy ends up being taken as a basic value, underpinned by the folk-political intuition that what is immediate is better than what is mediated. Rather than majority rule, parliamentary procedure, or dictates from a central committee, it is consensus that is often the major aim of discussions.12 Debate and governance should therefore be maximally inclusive, and the process of deliberation itself, as opposed to just its outcomes, is something to be valued.13 Participatory democracy is understandably a major attraction for many people, particularly in light of the empty, ritualistic gestures of contemporary representative democracies.14 Many participants speak of the feelings of empowerment they derive from participating in consensus decision-making processes.15 Maximal inclusivity and consensus are therefore valorised, and the importance of tactics and process is placed above strategic objectives. Direct democracy, consensus and inclusivity all form part of horizontalism’s commitments to prefigurative politics, which aims to create in the here-and-now the world they would like to see. Prefigurative politics is a longstanding tradition on the left, from the anarchism of Kropotkin and Bakunin onwards, but it has only recently come to characterise the leading edges of left-wing politics. The earlier promise that, after the revolution, hierarchies and exclusions would evaporate was little consolation to the women and people of colour whose concerns were ignored by yet another white male leader. Rather than wait for a purported revolution, prefigurative politics attempts to instantiate a new world immediately – again relying on an implicit sense that immediacy is inherently superior to more mediated approaches. At its best, prefigurative politics attempts to embody utopian impulses in bringing the future into concrete existence today.16 Yet at its worst, an insistence on prefiguration becomes a dogmatic assertion that the means must match the ends, accompanied by ignorance of the structural forces set against it.17 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=22 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED If the aim is to create the world we want in the here-and-now, and if recourse to mediating institutions is forbidden (or at least disavowed), then the appropriate form of practice has to be direct action. This is a form of practice that encompasses a wide range of possible tactics, ranging from theatrical protests in the vein of the Situationists, to wildcat strikes, to blockading ports, to burning down luxury housing developments. In these practices we can again see hints of folk politics – the privileging of the direct, the immediate and the intuitive. To be sure, direct action can sometimes be more effective and useful than protests – such as pouring concrete to destroy anti-homeless spikes, or using slow-down methods in workplace struggles.18 Yet, as we will see, direct action often remains insufficient to secure longstanding change, and in isolation, is typically only a temporary impediment to the powers of state and capital. Direct democracy, prefigurative politics and direct action are not, we hasten to add, intrinsically flawed.19 Rather than being denounced in themselves, their utility needs to be judged relative to particular historical situations and particular strategic objectives – in terms of their ability to exert real power to create genuine lasting transformation. The reality of complex, globalised capitalism is that small interventions consisting of relatively non-scalable actions are highly unlikely to ever be able to reorganise our socioeconomic system. As we suggest in the second half of this book, the tactical repertoire of horizontalism can have some use, but only when coupled with other more mediated forms of political organisation and action. Following this broad overview of horizontalism’s theoretical commitments and the general issues associated with them, we can now turn to two important sequences in twenty-first-century politics to highlight both the practical possibilities and the strong folk-political limits built into these models. In what follows, we examine two of the strongest cases for horizontalism: the Occupy movement emerging after the 2008 financial crisis and the Argentinean experience in the wake of the country’s 2001 default. In each case, we can see both the real successes and the palpable limits of these approaches. Occupy The most significant recent embodiment of horizontalist principles occurred in the ‘movement of the squares’. While occupations do not require horizontalist governance (indeed, the precursors to the tactic originally came from the military),20 the vast majority of post-2008 occupations have been organised along such lines. This wave of occupations of public spaces spread rapidly to over 950 cities worldwide in 2011, each inflected with local political, economic, cultural and class concerns. Here we want to examine the failure of the Occupy movement in the Western world, in particular because it highlights the deficiencies of folk-political thinking in the core capitalist countries.21 Notably, this failure occurred despite the vast range of approaches subsumed under the name of Occupy. In the United States, for example, from Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Oakland, this movement ranged from the dogmatically non-violent to the openly antagonistic, between an often confused liberalism and a militant libertarian communism.22 Adding to this regional variation was the mixed ideological make-up of the participants, which spanned the political spectrum and included reformist liberals, anti-capitalists, insurrectionist anarchists, anti-state communists and union activists, along with a smattering of anti–Federal Reserve libertarians. In addition to this diversity, there was widespread resistance to the articulation of political demands, making the unity of the movement even more difficult to discern. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=23 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED It is relatively easy to see why so many were motivated to join the movement. The horizontalist nature of Occupy gave people a means to express themselves in the face of societies that barely registered their voices.23 Particularly in America, the structure of electoral democracy around two large parties has meant the window of political discourse has become incredibly narrow. The assortment of slogans and causes associated with Occupy testifies to an explosion of suppressed anger and a proliferation of political demands that otherwise went unheard. Even among those who did not directly participate in the occupations, Occupy provided a platform for the excluded in websites such as the ‘We are the 99 Percent’ Tumblr, with a chorus of voices protesting against economic immiseration and social exclusion.24 Beyond any direct political result, the opportunity for the frustrations of the excluded to be publicly aired was inspiring and empowering for many. Occupy also worked to disrupt the ordinary lives of both participants and observers, and allowed people to participate together in a shared political project. In the words of one observer, ‘the practice of autonomy provides a lesson in one’s own power’.25 In places such as Oakland, activists frequently pushed towards more radical politics than the usual mediating organisations (such as non-profits) would have allowed. Occupy functioned, like many protest movements, as a way to radicalise those who were involved, especially when they were faced with disproportionately brutal police responses. Occupations were purported to prefigure a new world; but even if that new world has yet to emerge, the movements certainly showed participants what was possible with political solidarity.26 Beyond these internal benefits, occupied spaces functioned as bases for actions against the political system (as in protest camps against the G8).27 The majority of these actions consisted of protest marches and rallies, with the spaces also operating as physical locations for collective decision-making. In relation to external actions, occupied spaces also worked as headquarters for skills training – for example, carrying out acts of civil disobedience, dealing with police repression or providing information on legal rights.28 In a general sense, occupations worked as the most obvious real-world manifestation of the infrastructure for the overall movement. The occupations were also (though not always) a place for supporting the most marginal sections of society, particularly the homeless.29 Perhaps most importantly, the occupations provided an insistent focal point for media attention – particularly the Zuccotti Park occupation in New York – and brought many otherwise sidelined issues to the attention of the government and the wider public.30 At least for a limited time, Occupy was able to draw significant mainstream press and television news attention to issues of economic justice – a real achievement in a heavily neoliberalised media environment. But despite these successes, there are important ways in which the occupations failed. Numerous commentators from within the movement have already noted a number of these, including the ways in which Occupy’s rhetoric of inclusivity hid a series of exclusions based on race, gender, income and free time.31 Folk-political constraints were contained in the practices and ideas of the movement, and it was these tendencies that ultimately left it incapable of expanding spatially, consolidating temporally or universalising itself. To be sure, some of the movements that made up Occupy had no intention of scaling up, persisting in time or universalising themselves. Many (though not all) horizontalist thinkers place an emphasis on the particular dynamism of relatively short-lived, spontaneous politics, holding that ‘relative permanence is not necessarily a virtue’.32 But whether intended or not, the movement’s tendency in practice to prioritise spatial, temporal and conceptual immediacy weakened it collectively, leaving it unable to persist long enough to have a chance of seriously pursuing its basic objectives. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=24 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Drawing upon horizontalist principles, the Occupy movement was characterised chiefly by its adherence to direct democracy. While direct democracy can exist in a variety of different forms – from workers’ councils to Swiss-style canton democracy – under Occupy it took the general assembly as the dominant organisational form.33 In an era of declining democratic effectiveness, a new way of doing democracy was one of the most common aspirations articulated by participants in these protests.34 Still, when fetishised as an end in itself, direct democracy inexorably imposes significant constraints. In the first place, the level of effort and involvement in politics that direct democracy demands leads to problems of sustainability. The participatory economics (Parecon) project, for instance, envisions direct democracy at every level of society; but this vision for a postcapitalist world translates into endlessly ramifying staff meetings over every detail of life – hardly the inspiring stuff of utopian visions.35 Under Occupy, many general assemblies devolved into similar situations in which even the most mundane of issues had to be painstakingly addressed by a collective.36 The acrimonious debates over drummers making too much noise in the Zuccotti Park occupation are just one particularly farcical example of this. The more general point is that direct democracy requires a significant amount of participation and effort – in other words, it entails increasing amounts of work. During brief moments of revolutionary enthusiasm, this extra work can become inconsequential; yet after the return to normality it is simply added to the ordinary pressures of everyday life.37 The extra work of direct democracy is problematic especially because of the constitutive exclusions it entails – particularly for those who are unable to attend physically, those who do not feel comfortable in large groups and those who lack public speaking skills (with all the gendered and racialised biases inherent to these factors).38 As the Occupy movement went on, the general assemblies simply collapsed, often under the weight of exhaustion and boredom. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the problem of democracy today is not that people want a say over every single aspect of their lives. The real issue of democratic deficit is that the most significant decisions of society are out of the hands of the average person.39 Direct democracy responds to this problem, but attempts to solve it by making democracy an immediate and bodily experience that rejects mediation. Similar preferences for immediacy in democracy also hold back its spatial scalability. To put it simply, direct democracy requires small communities. It is notable that the hundreds of thousands in Tahrir Square in Egypt did not have a general assembly, and that even at Occupy Wall Street, the general assembly consisted of only a small proportion of the total number of participants.40 The very mechanisms and ideals of direct democracy (face-to-face discussion) make it difficult for it to exist beyond small communities, and make it virtually impossible to respond to problems of national, regional and global democracy. The spatial constraints of direct democracy also overlook the regressive aspects of small communities. These ‘intimate’ communities are often home to the most virulent forms of xenophobia, homophobia, racism, pernicious gossip, and all other varieties of backward thinking. Small communities of the kind required by direct democracy are not a suitable goal for a modern left movement. Moreover, participative democracy might well be constructed without them, particularly using the communications technologies available today. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=25 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Another folk-political constraint emerged with the emphasis on consensus as a basic goal of the process. The aim of consensus is to reach a decision that is acceptable to everyone, again reliant upon spatial immediacy. As anarchist David Graeber notes, ‘It is much easier, in a face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community want to do, than to figure out how to convince those who do not to go along with it.’41 Yet what works well on one scale (the face-to-face community) is much more difficult to make work on larger ones. Perhaps inevitably in the case of a relatively diffuse movement such as Occupy, consensus decision-making led to a lowest-commondenominator set of demands, where they emerged at all. There was also much rhetoric glorifying the absence of determinate demands as somehow radical. These arguments from within the movement identified the making of demands as alienating and divisive, as potentially reducing the role of the movement by appealing to outside powers – such as the state – and hence liable to lead towards the co-optation of the movement.42 As critics of such views have argued, however, the divisive nature of demands is also a positive: while putting some participants off, they may equally mobilise those committed to achieving the demand in question. Moreover, they work to clarify the real political differences contained in the movement – differences often elided in practice, even where they might prove to be insurmountable.43 Further problems with Occupy emerged with its nominal rejection of any forms of organisational verticality. Most notably, this led to problems emerging in the relations between the movement and other similarly minded groups. Whereas the movement of the squares in Egypt and Tunisia built strong connections with existing labour movements, the Western world’s Occupy movement largely rejected such associations.44 This led to three tendencies. The first was a frequently paralysing decisional structure. When actions were taken by Occupy, they often came from a sub-group acting on their own, rather than from the general assembly making a consensus decision.45 Actions, in other words, did not come from horizontalism. Second, evidence shows that hierarchical organisations are crucial in defending movements against the state. In Occupy, the maintenance of the occupied space against police repression was the result, not of horizontalism, but of vertical institutions that mobilised their members to support the occupation.46 Similarly, in Egypt, football supporters and religious organisations were central to the defence of Tahrir Square against the violence of the state and reactionaries.47 Finally, the rejection of verticality in all its forms meant a key mechanism for spatially and temporally expanding the movement was abandoned. Links to labour, social justice, and even political parties would have provided an infrastructure for Occupy to move beyond folkpolitical parameters. Organised workers, for instance, were crucial in Egypt for turning the general protest into a near general strike, shutting down the country as a result and providing the final blow to the Mubarak regime.48 Links to political parties have also helped occupations in Iceland, Greece and Spain produce much broader successes. In the end, despite the clear desire to spread Occupy’s ideas – and the real success in garnering public attention – the moves necessary to transform the social fabric were never taken. More fundamentally, though, Occupy constrained itself by enforcing a rigidly prefigurative politics. The basic prefigurative gesture is to embody the future world immediately – to change our ways of relating to each other in order to live the postcapitalist future in the present. The role of occupations is a classic example of this: they often self-consciously aim to enact the space of a noncapitalist world through mutual aid, rejections of hierarchy and rigorous direct democracy. Yet these spaces are understood and built as explicitly temporary – not spaces for sustained change or the working-out of concrete alternatives, let alone ambitious competitors to global capitalism. Instead they are short-term spaces containing the transitory experiences of an immediate community.49 A pamphlet from a precursor to the Occupy movement makes this particularly clear: ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=26 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED [Students who insisted on no demands] saw the point of occupation as the creation of a momentary opening in capitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketched the contours of a new society. We side with this anti-reformist position. While we know these free zones will be partial and transitory, the tensions they expose between the real and the possible can push the struggle in a more radical direction.50 The acknowledgement that the occupation will be temporary is here combined with a naive belief that maybe this time it will spark a radical change. Prefigurative spaces face a continuous struggle against dissolution for good reasons. First, they require a variety of logistical supports, including housing, food, sanitation, healthcare, defence and legal advice. Most of this does not come from within the prefigurative community, but instead relies upon existing capitalist networks.51 The social reproduction of encampments is difficult even under the most favourable conditions, and even established utopian communities (often religious in nature) typically find it impossible to remain independent and self-sustaining.52 Second, prefigurative spaces are often subject to state and corporate repression – and if they are not, it is typically because they pose no threat to the existing social order. The Zapatistas, for example, are permitted to exist in relative freedom simply because the state and capital do not see them as a threat.53 The moment a prefigurative space becomes a threat is the moment when repression weighs down on it, and when its fetishisation of horizontalism becomes a serious liability. Prefigurative politics, at its worst, therefore ignores the forces aligned against the creation and expansion of a new world. The simple positing and practising of a new world is insufficient to overcome these forces, as the repression faced by Occupy demonstrated.54 The immediate question that must be asked of any prefigurative politics is therefore: How can it be expanded and scaled up?55 Even granting the problematic assumption that most people would want to live as the Occupy camps did, what efforts might be possible to physically and socially expand these spaces? When theorists face up to this question, vague hand-waving usually ensues: moments will purportedly ‘resonate’ with each other; small everyday actions will somehow make a qualitative shift to ‘crack open’ society; riots and blockades will ‘spread and multiply’; experiences will ‘contaminate’ participants and expand; pockets of prefigurative resistance will just ‘spontaneously erupt’.56 In any case, the difficult task of traversing from the particular to the universal, from the local to the global, from the temporary to the permanent, is elided by wishful thinking. The strategic imperatives to expand, extend and universalise are left unfulfilled. If Occupy was unsuccessful in expanding prefigurative spaces beyond the margins of society, these protest camps could still be useful as launching pads for direct action. Indeed, one of the most notable achievements of the Occupy movement was to establish a social and physical infrastructure that could act as a foundation for direct actions. In countries like Greece and Spain, debt strikes have been organised and picket lines formed for workers without the right to strike. Other Occupy movements supported squatters, provided food for the homeless, set up pirate media, mobilised to prevent evictions, protested against government cuts and provided humanitarian relief after natural disasters. But the influence of Occupy should not be overstated. For instance, many of the successful eviction and foreclosure movements have been extensions of pre-existing work done by movements such as the black activist–led Take Back the Land.57 More broadly, the problem is that direct actions generally act on surface effects, patching the wounds of capitalism but leaving the underlying problems and structures intact. Foreclosures continue apace, consumer debt rises to new heights, workers are thrown out into the streets, and the homeless population surges. In the case of Occupy, what became apparent was the limits of a propaganda of the deed.58 While direct action can have real successes, it remains localised and temporary, and in this it remains folk-political. Direct action can be effective in mitigating the worst excesses of capitalism, but it can never address the difficult problem of attacking a globally dispersed abstraction, often focusing instead on intuitive targets.59 The project of an expansive left – a left aiming to transform capitalism in fundamental ways – remains absent. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=27 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED The image of Occupy that emerges here is of a movement that was wedded to certain assumptions about the benefits of local spaces, small communities, direct democracy and temporary autonomy at the margins of society. In turn, these beliefs rendered the movement incapable of expanding spatially, establishing sustainable transformations and universalising itself. The Occupy movements achieved real victories in creating solidarity, giving a voice to disenchanted and marginalised people, and raising public awareness. But they nevertheless remained an archipelago of prefigurative islands, surrounded by an implacably hostile capitalist environment. The proximate cause for the movement’s failure was state repression, in the form of police clad in riot gear ruthlessly clearing the occupied spaces across the United States. But the structural causes were built into the assumptions and practices of the movement. Without the central focus of the occupied spaces, the movement dispersed and fragmented. Ultimately, the organisational form of these movements could not overcome the problems of scalability and construct a form of persistent power capable of effectively resisting the inevitable reaction from the state. What may work quite well on one scale – perhaps up to a hundred people – becomes increasingly difficult to operate effectively when extended beyond that.60 If a truly ambitious left politics is to take on global actors – the neoliberal capitalist system and its governing institutions, leading governments and their armies and police forces, and an entire planet’s worth of corporations and financial entities – then operating beyond the merely local is essential. While there is certainly much to learn from these movements, it is our contention that, on their own, they will remain ineffective at bringing about large-scale change. Argentina If any case from recent history offers hope for the sufficiency of horizontalism, it would appear to be Argentina, which achieved a large-scale national turn towards horizontalism and expansive worker control over factories. Yet a brief look at the Argentinean experience actually reveals new dimensions to the limits of folk-political approaches. In Argentina’s circumstances, the immediate imperative for new social organisations came from the collapse of the national economy. Struck by a massive recession in 1998, the economy buckled and lost over a quarter of its GDP by 2002. Tensions reached a peak in December 2001, with government restrictions and financial chaos provoking the people into mass protests. The result was the collapse of the government and an eventual default on their debts. With the government both unable and unwilling to help its population, people were forced to find new ways to provide for themselves. In the wake of these challenges, many of the Argentinean people took it upon themselves to self- ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=28 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED organise and create new political and economic structures. To a significant degree, these responses were organised around explicitly horizontalist principles.61 As with Occupy, there are a variety of benefits that can be identified in the horizontalist organising of Argentina. Perhaps most importantly, these movements were able to disrupt the common-sense norms of neoliberal society, moving beyond market individualism and negative solidarity. The fostering of bonds between individuals helped to overcome the antagonism that most protests and strikes often face from other parts of society. Like Occupy, but on a broader scale, Argentina’s horizontal movements were also quickly able to provide 62 the means for social reproduction under crisis conditions But while these experiments with horizontalism brought about a number of achievements, its experience also revealed several further problems. Principal among these is the limitations faced by neighbourhood assemblies as an organisational form. Modelled on horizontalist principles, the neighbourhood assemblies arose in response to the immediate needs and possibilities opened up by the crisis. Like the general assembly of Occupy, they enabled people to have a newfound voice. But even when joined together in inter-neighbourhood assemblies, they never approached the point of replacing the state, or of being able to present themselves as a viable alternative. The functions of the state – welfare, healthcare, redistribution, education, and so on – were not about to be replaced by the horizontalist movement, even at its height of participation. It thus remained a localised response to the crisis. Further limitations surfaced as these assemblies could only function by either rejecting organised – which is to say, collective – interests, or incorporating them, and thus being overwhelmed.63 Collective interests were incapable of being brought into the decision-making process without breaking it, since they often took control over discussion and debate. Problematically, these assemblies operated best on an individualistic basis. Other organisational experiments in Argentina involved the spread of worker-controlled factories. In the wake of the economic crisis, some shuttered businesses were taken over and maintained by their employees. These factories helped to keep workers in jobs, and there is some evidence that they provided better pay for their workers. Unfortunately, despite the attention given to them, the total number of people involved was relatively small: in the most optimistic estimates, there were around 250 factories incorporating just under 10,000 workers.64 With a labour force of over 18 million, this means far less than 0.1 per cent of the economy was participating in worker-controlled factories. Not only were these factories a minor part of the overall economy, but they also remained necessarily embedded within capitalist social relations. The dream of escape is just that: a dream. Tied to the imperative to create a profit, worker-controlled businesses can be just as oppressive and environmentally damaging as any large-scale business, but without the efficiencies of scale. Such problems are widespread across the worker-cooperative experience, having arisen not only in Argentina, but also in the Zapatista model and across America 65 Beyond these organisational limits, the key problem with Argentina as a model for postcapitalism is that it was simply a salve for the problems of capitalism, not an alternative to it. As the economy started to improve, participation in the neighbourhood assemblies and alternative economies drastically declined.66 The post-crisis horizontalist movements in Argentina were built as an emergency response to the collapse of the existing order, not as a competitor to a relatively wellfunctioning order. Indeed, the more widespread problem with contemporary horizontalism is that it often sees emergency situations – in the wake of a hurricane, earthquake or economic meltdown – as representative of a better world.67 It is a struggle, to say the least, to see how post-disaster conditions are an improvement for the vast majority of the world’s population. A politics that finds its best expression in the breakdown of social and economic order is not an alternative, so much as a kneejerk survival instinct. Equally problematic is the tendency for horizontalists to find political potential in the mundane ways we organise horizontally in everyday life – friends gathering together, parties, festivals, and so on.68 The problem is that such modes of organising are not scalable beyond a small community – and, more to the point, are not useful for certain political goals. As the Argentinean example shows, these modes of organising can be valuable for basic neighbourhood survival and for creating a sense of solidarity between people. But horizontalism struggles to compete against more organised interests, to sustain itself once a base level of normality returns, and to achieve long-term and large-scale political goals such as providing universal healthcare, high-level education and social security. These approaches remain useful in exceptional circumstances and for a small range of goals, but they will neither revolutionise society nor genuinely threaten global capitalism. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=29 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED In the case of both neighbourhood assemblies and worker-controlled factories, we see that the primary organisational models of horizontalism are insufficient. They are often reactive tactics that fail to compete in the antagonistic environment of global capitalism. On a theoretical level, and in the actual experiences of Occupy and Argentina, the limits of horizontalism have repeatedly been made clear over the past decade. While recognising the important capacity of horizontalist tactics to provide small-scale support to communities and to temporarily disrupt certain exploitative practices, the commitment to fetishised versions of consensus, direct action, and particularly prefigurative politics, constrains the possibilities of expanding and overtaking existing social systems. LOCALISM Less politically radical than horizontalism, though no less ubiquitous, is localism. As an ideology, localism extends far beyond the left, inflecting the politics of pro-capitalists, anti-capitalists, radicals and mainstream culture alike, as a new kind of political common sense. Shared between all of these is a belief that the abstraction and sheer scale of the modern world is at the root of our present political, ecological and economic problems, and that the solution therefore lies in adopting a ‘small is beautiful’ approach to the world.69 Small-scale actions, local economies, immediate communities, face-to-face interaction – all of these responses characterise the localist worldview. In a time when most of the political strategies and tactics developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear blunted and ineffectual, localism has a seductive logic to it. In all its diverse variants, from centreright communitarianism70 to ethical consumerism,71 developmental microloans, and contemporary anarchist practice,72 the promise it offers to do something concrete, enabling political action with immediately noticeable effects, is empowering on an individual level. But this sense of empowerment can be misleading. The problem with localism is that, in attempting to reduce large-scale systemic problems to the more manageable sphere of the local community, it effectively denies the systemically interconnected nature of today’s world. Problems such as global exploitation, planetary climate change, rising surplus populations, and the repeated crises of capitalism are abstract in appearance, complex in structure, and non-localised. Though they touch upon every locality, they are never fully manifested in any particular region. Fundamentally, these are systemic and abstract problems, requiring systemic and abstract responses. While much of the populist localism on the right can easily be dismissed as regressive macho fantasy (for example, secessionist libertarianism), sinister ideological cover for austerity economics (the UK Conservative Party’s ‘Big Society’) or downright racist (the nationalist or fascist blaming of immigrants for structural economic problems), the localism of the left has been less thoroughly scrutinised. Though undoubtedly well-meaning, both the radical and mainstream left partake in localist politics and economics to their detriment. In what follows we will critically examine two of the more popular variants – local food and economic localism – which in very different areas exemplify the problematic dynamics of localism in general. 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/391232a1-3a16-47f8-8595-438b898240a2.md?start=30&limit=10)