Conference Paper for ECPR workshop on Democracy and Political Parties, Granada 2005

After the Partys Over: The Horizontalist Critique of Representation and

Majoritarian Democracy Lessons from the Alter-Globalisation Movement
(AGM).

Simon Tormey
University of Nottingham

This is a draft paper and should be treated accordingly.

It is a truism to note that representation is in crisis and that the institutions and
procedures that underpin the process of representation, principally parties and electoral
processes, are themselves in crisis. As a truism it is unnecessary to say too much in
defence of the thesis, one that has been noted and discussed by those across the political
spectrum. On the other hand it is easy to assume that this crisis is one that only afflicts
liberal-democratic politics. Liberal democracies generally embrace representative
procedures but they are not exclusively representative. There are all manner of
participatory procedures in liberal-democracies as well, such as citizens juries, peoples
assemblies, roadshows, jamborees, Big Conversations and the like. Whatever one thinks
of such devices, we should be cautious about assuming that the crisis of representation is
in and of itself synonymous with any crisis of liberal-democracy. It is not. One of the
ironies in considering the issue is that it afflicts those who are opposed to liberal-
democracy (or more accurately liberal-capitalism) and who seek to displace it with some
other system of governance or post-governance.
As those familiar with the infra-battles of the alter-globalisation movement of
movements (AGM) will know, it is itself racked by an on-going and far-reaching
evaluation of representative structures, particularly the party form (Tormey, 2004a: ch.
5). On one side are those who believe that to be politically effective the AGM needs to
transform itself - or be transformed - into a traditional movement structure and beyond
that a political party that can represent the needs and interests of the movement where
it counts: in places of power. The so-called verticals encompass a wide variety of
positions, from Leninist and Trotskyite sects to global social democrats such ATTAC. On
the other side there are the horizontals.1 They too encompass a range of positions from
anarchists to neo-Zapatistas, direct action activists to global NGO-based professionals.
They argue that party and traditional movement structures should be avoided to
safeguard the AGM as an effective, vibrant and inclusive entity. More than this, they see
party structures as complicit in the maintenance of hierarchy and subordination and thus
at odds with the goals of progressive and transformative politics. For them the party is
over (Robinson and Tormey, 2005).
What I want to explore here is the possible linkage between these two moments
of crisis, the liberal-democratic and the radical-transformative. Specifically, I want to ask
whether the horizontalist critique of verticalism within the AGM can offer something of
more general normative validity for thinking about the future of democracy. Before I can

1
Im unsure where the terminology, verticals and horizontals comes from, though I only noticed
the very explicit use of these terms as self-descriptors in the build-up to the 2004 European Social
Forum (ESF).

ecpr05 Page 1 18/3/05

do this it might be useful to outline why it is that I think that what we are documenting is
a phenomenon that links the fields outlined here. My hypothesis is that we are in the
midst of a crisis of what might be termed the modernist imaginary.2 This is an
imaginary built upon a particular conception of truth and rationality, of legislation and the
political. It is an imaginary that supports and sustains the idea of the party or party-
movement as a machine of transformation and thus of the terrain of the social as what
John Protevi terms a hylomorphic or inert entity to be shaped in accordance with a
specific plan or blueprint (Protevi, 2001: 1). This imaginary has been and is being
countered in radical-transformative politics by a range of different imaginaries that
implicitly and sometimes explicitly challenge the presumptions of modernism in relation
to the field of politics and the social. They emerge and are manifest in different political
projects, and accordingly in different conceptions of utopia of how the world should
look. The modernist imaginary is one of an imagined place a clearly delineated world
that operates in accordance with clear maxims and principles of justice. It offers an
image of how we should live and seeks to transform (or maintain) social life in
accordance with its governing logic. By contrast the new utopianism the utopianism of
the post-representative, post-party social movements is not concerned with generating
a distinct place, but with generating spaces that resist overcoding or incorporation into a
governing ideology - spaces that are open, contingent, and immanent.3 Reminders of
the importance of autonomous space - utopian space - are very evident in the discourse
and practice of the AGM. Subcomandante Marcos characterises the Zapatista project in
terms of the development of an anti-chamber looking into a new world. He declared
that the point is not to create a new world, but a space in which all worlds are possible,
where all may live the dream (Marcos, 2001: 80). Autonomous spaces form the
mainstay of activist initiatives in Italy, Holland and Germany. In the UK DIY or unofficial
politics is focused on social centres, often squatted, housing a plethora of activities,
initiatives on a non-hierarchical, non-partisan basis. In the world of radical theory space
is a key motif in attempts to delineate the radical outside of the present, from David
Harveys spaces of hope, and Foucaults heterotopias to Hakim Beys Temporary
Autonomous Zones and Deleuze and Guattaris description of nomadic or smooth
space in A Thousand Plateaus (Foucault, 1967; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; Harvey,
2000; Bey, 2002). The social forums were themselves constituted by the charter of the
World Social Forum (WSF) as spaces, not as conventions, rallies or assemblies. It was
for this reason that the first WSF was constituted as a non-party and non-militarised
zone, excluding those who would annex the forum for their own ends and purposes.4 We
could go on.

So it seems clear that there is a change of a fundamental kind going on within and
between movements connected to the AGM. What has still to be clarified is the nature of
the critique giving rise to these shifts of practice and perception. To ask the question is
to ask what is the matter with classical approaches to social transformation, mobilization
and governance. From where does the horizontalist critique derive?

Verticalism, collective action and teleological politics

For the sake of space we can enumerate in brief terms the key elements of modernist
politics and how they support and sustain a verticalist account of political action. Broadly,
it is a politics premised on the necessity for the development of a programme, for the
building of a party to win supporters to the programme and to capture power so as to

2
Im following Castoriadiss use of the term imaginary here, though he talks about the radical
imaginary as opposed to the modernist imaginary. Without getting too bogged down in jargon we
are referring to the totality of what Castoriadis terms significations that a given group share, often
in an unexamined intuitive way.
3
Those interested in the transformation of the discourse of utopia in the AGM could consult my
paper From Utopian Places to Utopian Spaces: Reflections on he Contemporary Radical Imaginary
and the Social forum Process, forthcoming in E p h e m e r a and also available here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.tormey/articles/articles.html
4
The charter of principles of the WSF can be found here: http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br

ecpr05 Page 2 18/3/05

use power to maintain a particular conception of how we should live. The image of
politics in modernist conceptions is war whether as class struggle, competing visions of
the good, or the defence of tradition against the encroachments of modernity. Let us
look at these elements of vertical politics in closer detail.
The programme outlines what it is broadly speaking that a movement or group
stands for, what its vision is that it is trying to realise. The vision is more or less
ideological as that term is usually understood. It can be based on a rigorous
methodologically sophisticated account of the nature of the world and the world to be
created. This is the case for Marxist parties and for those with ready-made doctrines and
philosophies that are awaiting implementation. When they are highly worked out they
resemble fundamentalisms, a doctrine that brooks no argument or reinterpretation or
very little. At the other extreme are groups with shared values or morals who seek to
influence public policy in the direction of those values. Social democratic parties, for
example, are rarely characterised by a particular vision so much as a desire to increase
equality of opportunity and mitigate the damaging effects of the trade cycle. Some
groups contain both kinds of believer. Notoriously green parties are often composed of
fundis or those with clearly mapped notions of how the world should look, and also
realos or those who are guided by green values, but lack the sense of certainty
concerning the exact nature of the world to be created. A programme usually translates
into a manifesto in which otherwise abstract, philosophical or ethical positions are
mapped in terms of a readily digestible formula that will guide the party or group once in
power. The object of the manifesto is to attract new members and also voters where the
group is pursuing an electoral strategy. The manifesto or programme functions as an
ideological centre or core out of which the various subdivisions of the movement are
assumed to grow, and to which in the last instance they all return.
Beyond that the objective it to capture power in order to implement the vision or
to reshape the environment in accordance with the shared values of the group. This idea
is based on an image of power as a macrosocial resource which one can possess, rather
than as a microsocial relation which, as Foucault puts it, circulates in social networks
(Foucault, 2001). There is a centre of power which can be occupied and which, once
occupied, provides the power-holder with the basis for moulding society in a particular
image. It is also, of course, implicitly assumed that such a centre should exist, since
otherwise the problem would be one of its elimination, not its seizure. Once in power the
object is the maintenance of power to ensure that the programme is realised and that
rival visions are held at bay. This is not only the case for Marxist parties, but for political
parties of all kinds. This is what political parties are for. The rationale of radical green
parties is in this sense the same as neo-conservative parties: what unites them is a
shared conception of political effectivity that stems from the possession of a particular
conception of the world. Whether that world is radically green or radically conservative
is irrelevant from the point of view of the criterion of effectiveness. Effectiveness
means capturing power; which in turn means mobilising a majority of people behind the
party whether through the device of election, providing access to parliament as the
centre of power, or through a revolutionary seizure directed at the supposed centres of
power, however defined.
Parties can of course be more or less democratic in the manner by which they
seek to realise their ideals. In this particular respect there is a considerable difference
between, say, the greens and many conservative parties. The former have gone to
considerable sometimes even absurd lengths to engage their own membership, hold
leaderships to account, debate the programme and manifesto. The UK Conservative
Party by contrast only recently introduced elections for the party leader. No doubt an
alter-globalisation party or movement would correspond more closely to the model of
the greens. It would have numerous spokespersons, occasions for discussion of the
programme, a heavily federated structure with the full paraphernalia of democratically
accountable political institutions. It would (as a party) also involve some kind of party
discipline whereby the minority, rather than forming their own bloc, either accepts the
victory of the majority and the alienation of themselves from their own agenda, or move
on to form another party (SDP from Labour; MNR from Le Front Nationale; Veritas from

ecpr05 Page 3 18/3/05

UkiP; Mensheviks from the RSDLP etc). It would involve a singular programme, refusal
of which would mean exclusion from the movement and the world it is to create. Its
focus would be on the centre of power, and would direct the energies of the movement
into struggles to win or seize this centre.
In terms of the effectiveness or otherwise of political action the teleological
character of vertical political organisations is readily apparent, as is the manner by which
parties become exclusionary and alienating to (heterodox) members and non-members
alike. As Robert Michels was to note, the fact that there is a clear end point or vision to
be reached pushes parties and movements in an oligarchical direction (Michels, 1998).
It is easier to effect a coalescence around a programme where there are fewer people
involved, just as it is easier to come to a decision the fewer people are involved in
making it. It is easier to pursue power if the lines of power and accountability are clear
with a single leader able to project the message of the party without contradiction or
mixed messages occluding the minds of potential supporters or voters. It is easier once
in power to maintain power where decision-making is confined to a small numbers of
officials. In this sense the quest for effectiveness makes desirable and necessary the
elaboration of vertical political structures. These are such well-established patterns of
political behaviour that we barely need to look for empirical case studies to back the
argument that verticalism is from this point of view an exclusionary and alienating mode
of politics. The more ideas, people, variables are excluded, the more effective vertical
politics becomes. Such an assumption lies behind well-documented processes of
contemporary party politics: the presidentialisation of the party form as well as of
government more generally; the collapse of internal democracy and accountability in
parties; the evolution of elaborate mechanisms of spin and media-friendliness as
opposed to ideological rigour or consistency.

Going horizontal
In view of the above it should hardly be surprising that there is a serious and far-
reaching debate going on within the AGM over the nature and form of verticalist politics.
Although there are those, principally anarchists, who have always maintained hostility to
the party form associated with Marxist and social democratic politics, the emergence of
the AGM as a broad based and (quasi-)inclusive style of political mobilisation has put the
question of collective agency back on the agenda and forced a reconceptutalisation of
how such a politics might develop without falling back into the familiar scenario painted
by Michels and many others. How does the critique of verticalism prefigure different ways
of imagining politics, political mobilisation, and efficacy?

De-programming
Political thought has traditionally striven for some essential definition of our needs,
interests or character as individuals or members of groups. This definition provides the
basis for a (modernist) programme constructed around the promise to restore or uphold
self, class, nation, the universal. A manifesto is the translation of the programme into
readily digestible terms for electoral purposes or for purposes of mobilising individuals in
some other way to support to given cause. To take an example pertinent to the politics of
the AGM, communism was as a doctrine the direct response to the alienation the young
Marx perceived in wage labour. The species-essential character of labour is subordinated
to the task of making a profit. Communism thus represents the restoration of labour and
of lifes prime want through the socialisation of the means of production. The
essentialising of labour is thus a key step towards privileging communism as a
normative ideal and at the same time combating rival conceptions of how the world
should look whether radical or conservative. We should be communists because
communism is in some fundamental sense true. As becomes clear, the horizontal
position represents the rejection of ideological politics cast in these terms. Why?
Invoking Marx allows us in turn to invoke Max Stirners 1845 critique of Marx in
Der Einzig und sein Eigenthum, a work that arguably inaugurated the verticalist critique
of horizontalism. Stirner argues that the identification of a human essence creates a
spook (spuken) that represents a particular ideal of man. This phantasmatic presence

ecpr05 Page 4 18/3/05

is deployed to create Communism, an ideal image of a world that Marx posits as
intrinsic to the unfolding trends and tendencies of the historical itself, hence Marxs
reference to Europe being haunted by the spectre of communism (Stirner, 1993).
Stirners approach was to encourage release from the perceived necessity for spooks,
phantasmatic presences of all kinds and the idea, underpinning ideological thought, of
being haunted by an underlying necessity in this case communism. He insisted that
individuals re-evaluate the terms and conditions of their attachment to projects and
principles on the basis of Einheit, or self-ownership. He wanted us to own ourselves
instead of being in thrall to something that lay outside of ourselves in fixity. His politics
was thus orientated to Einheit - as opposed to Freedom - rejecting Revolution as an
abstraction. He preferred instead an on-going and permanent struggle against the
incorporation of the self by representatives of our own immediate desires, in this case
the Communist Party.
Stirners rebellion set the template for a war against programmes, against the
fixity of all kinds of ideology not least anarchist ideology (May, 1994; Newman, 2001;
Newman, 2003).5 Stirners critique of conceptual representation as a basis for thinking
about the programme in turn anticipates later attempts to uncouple political action from
political ideology. In the wake of 1968 a succession of theorists and movements
stressed the necessity for thinking for oneself instead of becoming enslaved to a
particular line. Thus the Situationists and Immediatists (for example) are both insistent
on the necessity for rejecting ideology as a basis for acting. The anonymous essay The
Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking for Yourself posited a radical self-owning ethic as the
basis for developing an openness to difference, and as a way of resisting incorporation
into the onto-theological vanguardism of Marxist parties (Anon, 1975). Post-Marxist
writers such as Castoriadis, Lyotard, and Agnes Heller emphasised repeatedly in the
aftermath of 1968 (and indeed before it) the limited horizon of the theoretical enterprise
and thus the need to accept responsibility for acting (Castoriadis, 1991; Lyotard, 1993;
Tormey, 2001: ch. 5). Nevertheless the Stirnerian critique poses the question of how
mobilisations can be effected on the basis of something other than regroupment around
ideology or some firmly mapped conception of the true and the good that we associate
with ideological politics. Can there be affirmative politics on the basis of a movement
without programmatic fixity?
To pose such a question is to ask whether or not it is possible to act except on the
basis of a unifying ideology of the kind represented by a traditional ideology, an ideology,
that is, which is able to give a true account of social and historical development and thus
of the nature of the better world to come. How can a movement cohere or be effective
without an ideology to guide its actions? To return to Stirner, the point is not that
individuals should act alone or necessarily in their own interests. Rather they should act
on the basis that they do not surrender their own capacity or facility to review the terms
and conditions of acting. The point is that it is a continual process that emits of collusion
and alliances. It is therefore a praxis of what comes to be termed micro-power, as
opposed to the development of macro-strategies via the party form. The union of
egoists (Der Verein des Egoisten), which Stirner terms the form of interaction made
possible by the emergence of humanity from the world of spooks and phantoms, is a
contingent and negotiable coalition. Individuals are understood as acting in accordance
with their own needs and priorities, as opposed to having to sign up for a vision of the
world or a conception of a better place. Hakim Bey enlarges on this notion by stressing
the causally complex (chaotic) nature of action, and the multiplicity of different
intensities and effects that underpin it (Bey, 2002).
What is common to this approach is that the terms and conditions of collective
action should reflect the different desires and affects that motivate people even
confronted by the same injustices or by the hope of constructing something similar.
Difference of affect, of emotion, of perception elicits differences in terms of the way in
which we perceive the need or otherwise to act. In the wake of the 1968 we have, as we

5
It is for this reason that those following self-consciously in Stirners wake often call themselves
postanarchist.

ecpr05 Page 5 18/3/05

noted above, seen the abandonment of the idea of programmatic orthodoxy in favour of
a spatial politics based on the need to provide linkages or nodal points for the various
ways in which people want to act. The point is to create and sustain a network dedicated
to resisting and confronting injustices as opposed to a party that promises to displace an
unjust world with a just world, a model that of necessity presupposes the possibility of a
final definition of justice notwithstanding any difference of affect, need, want and desire
that representatives suppose to be pertinent to such a question.
A network model points to the need to generate spaces in which people can
interact to mutual benefit - as opposed to the annual congress mechanism of traditional
parties designed to create a line to which members will adhere. It is clear for example
that one of the reasons why many activists are enthusiastic about the World Social
Forum is that they see the forums as providing such spaces spaces of discussion, of
comparison, of affinity and affiliation. What they are not geared up for is the generation
of a party line, orthodoxy or programme. The social forums facilitate ways in which
networks can coalesce, develop, multiply and re-multiply or they would do if the
horizontalist vision of social forums held sway (McLeish, 2004; Sen, 2004; Tormey,
2004b). A network unlike a political party does not have a programme, nor does it need
one. What it needs are zones of encounter, shared learning, solidarity and affiliation.

Party time?
As we have noted above, the party is the vehicle for modernist radical politics. There
are of course many variations of the party, but also some constants. The party is the
arbiter of the line to be pursued by members and activists in their dealings among
themselves and with others they seek to mobilise. It is the point of reference for matters
of conflict between members; it is responsible for discipline within the ranks; it has an
inside and an outside; one either is or is not a member; it provides the locus for the
formulation of strategy and tactics. It provides the political leadership without which the
ensemble will fail to be effective. It provides leaders for the next administration. The
party is a government in waiting, and as such it mirrors the apparatus of the state itself.
It is hierarchical (leaders/cadres/masses), based on a division of labour and a teleological
notion of effectivity. It is, to invoke Foucault, a war machine designed and built with the
aim of capturing state power (Foucault, 2003). Nor, we can add, do parties avoid such
connotations in their self-image. Elections are quite explicitly posited by parties as
battlegrounds in which the best equipped and manned will win. Parties develop war
rooms for organising campaigns and strategies. The entire vocabulary of party politics
is designed to invoke battle in its mobilising rhetoric. An election is, to invoke Zizek, a
carving of the field at the end of which there are victors and vanquished, winners and,
of course, losers (Zizek, 2000).
For those developing horizontal, which is to say inclusive, forms of political
engagement the party cannot be a basis for thinking about how mobilisations are to be
effected. Yet this still leaves the question of what kind of ensemble is appropriate for
thinking about advancing the myriad aims and goals encompassed within the AGM. If
not the party, what else? Again we find a certain tradition of theorising outside the party
that has resonances in the movement. We have already mentioned Stirner and the union
of egoists a concept that maps onto what after 1968 is termed the idea of
transformation in everyday life a succession of resistances and rebellions tied together
through bonds of empathy and affinity (Vaneigem, 1994). We can mention in this context
accounts of the concrete resistances discussed by a number of authors studying
unofficial collective action. James Scott memorably recounts how peasants act in
effective and concerted fashion against powerful forces without formal organisation of the
party kind (Scott, 1987; Scott, 1992). Rick Fantasia demonstrates how unionised and
non-unionised worker resistances operate on the basis of informal alliances and
associations (Fantasia, 1988). Piven and Cloward in their classic treatment note with
respect to poor peoples movements how informal networks are often capable of
generating more effective forms of collective action than political parties seeking to
represent the poor and needy (Piven and Cloward, 1988). Nonetheless in theoretical
terms, the work of Sartre is the key reference point, not least for Deleuze and Guattari,

ecpr05 Page 6 18/3/05

the two thinkers who in turn gave the most sustained thought to the nature of activist
combination after 1968. It is worth briefly enumerating their account to give a sense of
how radical theorists have sought to rethink collective action on non-hierarchical terms
as opposed to the passive hierarchical basis that characterises most political parties.
In book two of the first volume of The Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre
famously draws a distinction between pledge groups and groups-in-fusion (GIFs)
(Sartre, 1976 [1960]). Pledge groups are passive groups of individuals united by an
oath of allegiance to a particular leader, ideology or party line. GIFs on the other hand
are groups united for a particular purpose and characterised by the active involvement of
all in the setting of goals, campaigning and deliberation. Pledge groups are
representative in structure. The leadership represents the interests, needs and wishes of
the membership and beyond that of the people, class or nation. Leaders speak for others
the others listen, and if they speak they are rarely heard. GIFs are characterised by the
rejection of the discourse and practice of representing viewpoints, interests, needs in
favour of the active involvement of each in the affairs of the group. They are built
around the desirability of listening as a prelude to acting. In the terms used by Deleuze
and Guattari pledge groups (or subjected groups as they call them) are majoritarian:
they speak for everyone or for some denumerable set (the majority, decent law
abiding citizens, the Irish community etc.). GIFs translate as subject groups (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1984: 277 ff). Subject groups are minoritarian and non-denumerable,
which is to say that they do not seek to speak for a molar subject such as a particular
community, class or other category. A minoritarian collective politics exceeds and
overflows representation by maintaining the integrity of the constituent parts and by
avoiding homogenising voices on grounds of political effectivity.
A post-representative politics of the kind articulated by horizontals is premised on
the contention that there are only minorities and thus that there is no denumerable set
which can or should be spoken for. Given the nondenumerable nature of the group it
cannot speak for others. This equates to what Deleuze terms univocity, which is to say
the recognition of difference as constitutive of each singularity within the group itself
(Deleuze, 1994). It is a molecular as opposed to molar entity. Each singularity retains its
own autonomy, its own voice, its own presence within the larger aggregate of which it is
a part. This is not to say that the group cannot act as an agent that it has no agentic
properties. Far from it. The point - we should remind ourselves - is not to dissolve
agency, but to make it more substantial and effective by drawing actively on the needs,
wants and desires of the singularities that compose it. The singularity does not submit to
the authority of the group, it creates and underwrites the groups existence as part of its
molecular structure. The singularity does not pledge an oath of allegiance, promise to
obey, carry out commands. It is not a matter of duties or obligations of submitting to
something that has extrinsic validity (my party right or wrong). It is an allying of
oneself to that which represents a challenge to the axiomatics of representation, of fixed
identities, of molar subjects, of hierarchy, oppression, denumerability, alienation.
Horizontality is from this point of view not a question of joining a party, but of dissolving
the axiomatic of parties in the quest for combinations that fully express the availability of
autonomy and authentic modes of univocal engagement with and alongside others.
If all this sounds other-worldly, then we need to remind ourselves of the on-going
process of negotiation and re-negotiation that characterise activist combination within
and indeed outside the AGM, itself posited as a movement of movements and thus as
something unstable, decentered and ambivalent. At one level the AGM is a gigantic
affinity group a term coined in the 1970s in the US to describe the horizontal structures
mobilised against the building of nuclear power stations.6 With regard to the AGM we
can note the almost complete absence of formal leadership structures, permanent
standing bureaucracies or offices to effect mobilisations. There is no governing text,
ideology or even rubric giving observers an orientation to its politics. Whilst the AGM has
its share of well-known public figures (Naomi Klein, Susan George, Lula da Silva etc)

6
A brief overview of the history and meaning of affinity group can be found at:
http://www.globalizethis.org/article.php?id=12

ecpr05 Page 7 18/3/05

they do not speak for or represent the AGM in relevant bodies, institutions and processes
and were they to try they would quickly be disowned. Nonetheless, and
notwithstanding the above, major carnivals and events are organised including the
annual Peoples Global Action assembly, myriad Encuentro (Encounters) and of course
the World Social Forum and its various continental, regional and local off-shoots. This is
to say nothing about the thousands of actions organised locally and globally by loosely
affiliated networks of activists who consider themselves part of the AGM. As Deleuze and
Guattari pose the matter, what we are describing is a rhizomatic construct as opposed
to an arborescent one (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 3-24). This is to say that it is one
characterised by flow, multi-dimensionality, varying intensities of affect and affiliation,
unpredictability, contingency - as opposed to stasis, hierarchy, loyalty, obligation,
predictability of the kind we find in representative structures.

The state of statism

But then what? As we know the task of the party is to capture power in order to cement
its particular vision of how matters should look. Here again there is little doubt
concerning the nature of the verticalist project. The task is to elect those will act on our
behalf. The call is not to empower as such, but to empower agents or representatives
charged with a particular conception of public good. It is on a horizontalist view typical of
vertical approaches that the assumption is that change is produced for the people by an
agent that is not itself the people. It is the state that acts as opposed to individuals,
groups, movements and collectivities acting in combination. Moreover in classic
verticalist accounts the state acts upon something that is itself inert and passive in
relation to it (Protevi, 2001; Foucault, 2003). The material substance is hylomorphic
meaning that it is regarded as a substance to be moulded or shaped in accordance with a
certain logic, imperative or axiom. Of course this is much clearer in the case of radical
politics than liberal or social democratic politics where often it is the defence of an
existing axiom of social organisation (liberal-capitalism; welfare social democracy etc))
that is the object of a governing party. In this sense what characterises modernist
politics is not its radicalism or otherwise, but the insistence that society be made to
conform to a given logic or axiom. Marxist and revolutionary groups seek to transform
existing society in accordance with a radically different axiom (socialised production,
distribution according to need etc.). By contrast, horizontal politics seek the dissolution
of axioms of organisation mechanisms of over-coding the social from above. The
substance of the political is regarded as in some key sense self-ordering or capable of
self-ordering. This is to say that individuals, groups, collectives are seen as having the
capacity to order their own affairs in accordance with an on-going assessment of their
own needs and priorities.
Horizontalist strategies not merely avoid the state as a means or instrument of
political transformation, they are anti-statist, that is they self-consciously eschew the
capturing of power in favour of alternative strategies that maintain the integrity and
autonomy of constituent singularities. Stirners union of egoists is not a state the term
union from Eigenheit was intended to convey the horizontal nature of the bonds to be
created by autonomous individuals. What Stirner was concerned to demonstrate (and
which continues in the work of later anarchists and libertarians) is the necessarily
continuous nature of the transformation of social relations. This is a transformation in
and of everyday life as opposed to a revolution from above. In this sense they wanted
to query the attachment to stages or transitions on the way to something that is such a
feature of Marxist thinking about change. There is no split temporally, conceptually and
politically between Today and Tomorrow. It is on such a basis that it would be more
accurate to describe horizontalist strategies not as a process of capture and subsequent
transformation but as continual unfolding, extension and enlargement of existing
networks, affiliations and resistances. This in turn entails the undermining, emptying
out, draining, curtailing the power of states, indeed of every molar representational
entity outside the multiplicity of networks. This would be a literal disarming of the state
as war machine.

ecpr05 Page 8 18/3/05

 Again the figure of the rhizome in Deleuze and Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus has
been a useful reference point for those seeking to think through how a post-statist
world might look (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 3-23). The rhizome represents non-linear
continuity and fuzzy aggregates that are interlinked or interwoven but on the basis of
horizontal or transversal connection as opposed to the stasis of arborescent structures
built on segmentation and hierarchy. The world of nomadic combination is a world of
smooth space, which is to say of ungoverned space. It is a space of combination and
recombination on a minoritarian, nondenumerable basis, again undermining the
(modernist) idea of the state as basis for horizontal relations. In such a space possibility
and contingency are held open by virtue of the immanence of the relations into which we
as singularities enter. Such a politics is not sustained by the fiction of an imagined
community, ancient ties that bind, social contracts joining our fates together in some
phantasmatic act of communal obligation. There is nothing above or beyond the terms
of combination and recombination itself. A horizontal world is, as Marcos puts it, a world
of many worlds. It is a world beyond representatives, fixed and known identities,
obligations and duties of a permanent or transcendental kind. It is a world beyond the
dialectics of historical progression, utilitarianism and the hard choices that characterise
conventional politics.
Again what is striking here is the other worldly quality of what is being suggested
in the horizontalist critique. But (again) there are concrete models to draw upon to
illustrate how such an understanding operates in practice as well as theory. The most
remarked upon of these is the operation of the autonomous zones of the Chiapas region
in Mexico (Holloway and Pelaez, 1998; Collier, 1999). Here we find communities that
operate on the basis of governing obeying. This is to say that they are based on
principles of consensus, as opposed to representation; of inclusivity of all members of all
communities in decision-making; of permanent and on-going negotiation over all aspects
of communal-collective interest. There are no leaders of the communes and no
permanent standing official bodies except for the Clandestine Revolutionary Committees
(CCRIs) or assemblies whose purpose is to facilitate the participation of all in decision-
making. There is no constitution or basic law governing the communities and nor are
they subject to the wishes of some agency or body outside the communities, least of all
the Zapatistas, whose existence and activity are subject to regular communal review.
This is a form of immanent structuring of the kind that is intrinsic to the horizontalist
critique of mechanisms of representation and decision-making. It is other worldly and
utopian. But that, it seems, is the point (Olesen, 2004).

Elements towards a minoritarian democratic practice

As is obvious, the form of critique associated with the horizontal critique of vertical
structures and procedures is animated by the very particular needs, interests and desires
of those involved in the AGM or more accurately, a part of the AGM the horizontalist,
decentred, anti-vanguardist wing of it. But what may be of interest in the context of this
discussion is the way in which this critique problematises and challenges the logic of
modernist politics generally. In this concluding section I want to try to tease out what in
more general terms is to be learned from this critique and how efforts to deepen
democracy, to resolve the democratic deficit and strengthen civic engagement which
are at the heart of the problem of contemporary democratic theory might learn from
them. Could the critique of majoritarian democratic politics be used to develop a
minoritarian democratic practice? Let us engage in some speculation

Reflexive individualisation and the critical citizen

A persistent theme of the critique offered here has been the idea of the exhaustion of
ideological metanarratives and thus the idea of politics as a war involving combat
between different visions of the true and the good. It is only normative political
philosophers who now care about establishing such claims on solid foundations. Much
of the world has evidently tired of fundamentalism, whether secular or religious. The
difficulty is the assumption that is implicit much commentary that the death of macro-
ideological struggle represents at the same time the embrace of a pragmatic politics of

ecpr05 Page 9 18/3/05

smooth capitalism (to paraphrase Bill Gates). Value rational debate has not, contra
Fukuyama, Giddens et al, been supplanted by the goal rational concern to improve the
administration and steering of liberal-capitalism. Far from it: politics is alive and well. It
has merely gone underground, that is beyond the purview of the metropolitan media
who interpret reluctance to engage in official processes as tantamount to the death of
politics. Hence their continued surprise by the size and passion of the many protests and
carnivals that punctuate contemporary political existence (the Rio Earth Summit, the
Zapatista uprising, J18, Seattle, the anti-War Protests, the demonstrations outside the
RNC etc.).
What we are witnessing is the displacement of the politics of collective identity
and identification with a politics of affect and affinity. It is a micro-political politics, a
politics of discrete causes, passions, desires and resistances. It is the politics of what
sociologists call reflexive individualisation. Protest and DIY politics is now mainstream;
ideology is peripheral. Politics is becoming avowedly minoritarian. The gap between
politicised individuals and party machines grows daily. This in turn suggests the need to
recognise the existence of new agents and new forms of agency in democratic
contestation, and also new sites of democratic exchange. It suggests the need to
broaden the sense that politics has so that we can see those who otherwise remain
invisible. This means encouraging a redefinition of the political for media, academic,
literary, and intellectual purposes. Of course the riposte is often that politics is now part
of the entertainment business; politicians are celebrities and in our celebrity fixated
culture we need politicians to make sense of the political landscape. Such a prognosis is
to confuse symptom with cure. The problem of representative politics is precisely its
spectacular nature: the fact that it is literally as well as figuratively far removed from
the lives of ordinary people. It is an alienating spectacle. Making it less alienating means
breaking through the spectacle so that politics becomes a feature of the everyday, a
feature of the making and re-making of lives under open, accessible conditions.
This in turn implies transforming the meaning of power from being a tool which
some are fit or allowed to use, to being a common resource of groups, collectives and
individuals. At present citizenship education in the UK is focused on the creating of a
subject type (the decent law abiding citizen) that understands her duties and
obligations, that sees herself as passively active in relation to political processes (dont
forget to vote!), that understands the vital role of Parliament.7 Does this education
prepare the student to be a critical fully involved autonomous individual able to
participate in the myriad processes of micro-politics? Does it encourage the questioning
of the ways in which power operates at local and global level? Does it attempt to
stimulate the sense in which choices and preferences in everyday life can be made to
empower and transform everyday life itself? Hardly. It is a machine for the creation of
subjectivities that meet the needs of this world not other possible worlds. A first step
on the road to a minoritarian democratic politics would be to recognise that such a
subject type is an anachronism, albeit one with useful hegemonic properties. A critical
citizenship education would on the contrary insist on the necessarily contingent and
impermanent character of the political, indeed of the social field more generally. It would
challenge the notion that involvement in communities means accepting these
communities (including the nation) as pre-given, natural or eternal, as opposed to being
constituted agglomerations of conscious, choosing individuals. It would see citizenship
not as a preparation for entry into this world with its fixed and known needs, but as a
means of equipping the individual for ensuring that his or her needs become the basis for
the generation of new worlds. In short it would see the citizen as a partner in a process
of collective invention and re-invention not a hylomorphic material to be shaped in
accordance with officially sanctioned needs and priorities.

Clearing up after the party

7
I am paraphrasing (but only just) from the QCAs citizenship curriculum materials which can be
found at: http://www.qca.org.uk/7907.html.

ecpr05 Page 10 18/3/05

Political parties are in crisis. So much is clear. What seems less clear (but just as
important to understanding the new configuration) is that politics is alive and well. It is
just increasingly found outside mainstream official processes of which the political party
is a part. The difficulty is that when commentators think of the crisis of politics they tend
(again) to confuse problem with cure. Political parties are part of the problem to be
overcome. They speak to the politics of an increasingly redundant modernist imaginary.
Those concerned with harnessing the energy of the newer unofficial politics for the
project of deepening and strengthening democracy should therefore be looking elsewhere
to invest. And we should use the term invest advisedly here. Many electoral systems
give financial support to political parties to prop up viewpoints and positions that
otherwise be in danger of not being heard. This is a laudable objective, but one that
needs to be extended rhizomatically as well as to the usual targets, i.e. to approved
positions and political groupings.
Here in Nottingham the most vibrant political forum is a social centre, the
SUMAC (http://www.veggies.org.uk/rainbow/), which hosts a plethora of activist
groupings and initiatives involving several hundred of the most politicised individuals in
the city. Most of their activities are firmly within the bounds of what even the most
grudging political scientist would regard as legitimate democratic concern: environmental
degradation; closure of public services; attacks on immigrant and asylum groups; access
to resources, and so forth. The SUMAC receives no public funding at all, and is so far off
the radar of the local media and political class that it would come as a surprise to find
that many had heard of it. Yet here we find a hive of imaginative and challenging forms
of active participation of the kind that politicians and political scientists pass over in their
critique of public apathy. We also find a sense of public concern that at some other
time would have been regarded as the very essence of good citizenship. And yet the
SUMAC and most such activist initiatives are clearly on the outside looking in.
The issue for those concerned with deepening and broadening democracy is
starkly drawn. Does the political class continue to see that which is currently
underground, outside or opposed to official political processes as a threat to democracy
or as an intrinsic element of a redrawn democratic process? If the former then we can
expect the current malaise to continue, with official politics becoming ever more denuded
of relevance. If the latter then it needs to be recognised that the political party is not the
only or sole organisation of relevance for democratic politics. Social centres are intrinsic
to this purpose. So is the alt-media, the proliferating Social Forum movement; discrete
campaigns and initiatives such as No Sweat and Fairtrade. So are NGOs such as
Greenpeace and WWF. Although such groups are sometimes regarded as part of the
policy process, they are mostly treated as outsiders to be heard on those occasions
when it suits the political class to give the appearance of listening. They are
occasionally invited to public debates or enquiries they are not entitled or expected to
be part of them. When it does not suit elites to recognise their existence, they are not
merely ignored but actively excluded, threatened and subject to covert and overt
surveillance.8 Invitation and entitlement is perhaps a subtle distinction. Nonetheless, if
entitlements were added up and amplified by multiplication, they may encourage a
remodelling of democratic deliberation along minor lines and thus towards a more
complex appreciation of the voices and positions extant in the contemporary world. Of
course a democratic politics that was genuinely concerned to listen to people as opposed
to speaking for them would go well beyond these measures towards the creation and
funding of activist spaces (let us call them citizenship spaces why not?). They would

8
This point always raises highbrows. According to reports in T h e Times
9http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1529490,00.html) the UK G8 ministerial taking place
on 17 March 2005 involved a mobilisation of 1600 police officers and the banning of public
meetings within a five mile radius of Breadsall Priory. In the event the most generous reports
(Indymedia) put the total numbers of activists present on the day at 150. Those who turned up to
see some alternative street theatre in Derby and hear some speeches by Friends of the Earth
were filmed and photographed by a battery of uniformed spotters. One Indymedia reporter asked
why the overkill? and was told by a police officer that it was to harass people. See the reports,
photos and links here: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2005/g8/.

ecpr05 Page 11 18/3/05

be spaces in which the full paraphernalia of political mobilisation would be readily
available: photocopying and printing facilities, directories and critical literatures, web site
training, reading groups, social spaces, guest debates and lectures. Activists - sorry
citizens - would be funded to present reports, critiques, counter-blasts to official
literature. We could of course go on

The state of post-statism

Ultimately the shift to a more complex, variegated, multi-form political process has to be
reflected in a similar shift in the ground of political authority itself. Again the exhaustion
of the political party is itself merely symptomatic of the exhaustion of the nation-state
under conditions of globalisation, transnational flows, the hybridisation of identities and
subject positions; the fragmentation of traditions, cultures, viewpoints. It goes without
saying that unless such shifts and flows are able to be expressed in policy that
disengagement and alienation will continue to accelerate. Part of the difficulty here is the
discourse used to confront the new on these terms. We seem caught between the Third
Way insistence that the answer is one of governance and economic growth (as if
increasing the standard of living were a panacea for dislocation and anomie) and
multiculturalism. Here the conceit is well-meaning, if misplaced. The assumption is that
the main source of instability and disaffection can be understood within categories of
race and ethnicity. The problem of minority and the minor is more far-ranging than
this. As we touched upon above, the category of minority does not pertain to pre-
existing identities of the kind encompassed by clear ethnic and racial categories of
description as if these were easily defined (Tiger Woods? Easy, hes a Cablinasian ).
It means that which cannot be denumerated, that which falls outside the norm, the
majority. We are losing the bonds of common identity: the people, the British,
Europeans, the West, in turn exposed as empty signifiers in every sense. This in turn
necessitates moving from an idea of the state as the guardian of an immutable or
transcendent interest (the nation, majority, tradition, the universal) to forms of post-
statism that embrace indeterminacy, contingency and self-structuring as intrinsic to a
fully democratic order. How does this play out in the context of this discussion?
At one level this involves the immanent critique of liberal-democratic theory and
its logic of governance. Deleuze once suggested, much to the irritation of fellow
Gauchistes, that democrats should prefer jurisprudence over constitutional law
everyday rights over the abstract, universal or fictive rights fully respecting of our needs
as individuals.9 In doing so he invokes the spectre not of Paine and The Rights of Man,
but of course Burke. It was Burkes point that healthy societies are those that
continually reform, that self-structure so as to maintain in organic terms the health of
the community. Of course to Burke it was our representatives who were best able to
carry out this restructuring and renewal. Burkes vision belonged to an age of majorities,
an age when he could have confidence that the appellation Englishman would not be
regarded with suspicion or hostility. The task of the representative was to be true to this
majoritarian vision. In an age of minorities, we have out-stripped the capacity of
representatives to represent. They cannot represent. We are the unrepresentable
outside. The task of a properly democratic theory is to bring the outside in. In the
provocative terms offered by Deleuze this would involve a creative destruction of the
conceptual apparatus of the political itself with its appeal to order, rationality, identity,
permanent interests and universal needs (Deleuze, 1994: 53). Outside and inside
become like a Moebius Strip, an indistinguishable loop. As Castoriadis suggests, we are

9
The clearest statement of this kind is offered in response to the G comme Gauche section of the
Abecedaire interviews filmed with Claire Parnet. Deleuze complains about the lefts fascination
with the rights of man which he regards as abstract and irrelevant to progressive struggles. As
he explains, fighting for freedom is to engage in jurisprudence meaning to change specific laws,
practices, procedures not to invoke one conception of law against another. For an English
transcript of the interviews see http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/.

ecpr05 Page 12 18/3/05

in the realm of politics as auto-poiesis reimagining and reinvention as the art of
collective being-together (Castoriadis, 1987).
Of course such vision comes up against the fact that majoritarian representative
democracy was devised quite explicitly as a mechanism for keeping the unrepresentable
mob outside for fear that it would bring with it a destabilising propensity to divest elites
of their power and privilege (as tyranny of the majority). Democrats have been happy
to be, on these terms, undemocratic, keeping power from the people so that they not
misgovern (to paraphrase Mill). The barely concealed project of majoritarian
representative democracy was elite rule in the name of the People. Movement towards a
minoritarian democracy would involve a progressive reversal of these terms so that the
axiom of democratic self-governance gains substance and meaning. But it can only do
so in a context where there are spaces for democratic self-governance, which in turn
means spaces in which communities, collectives, groups can govern themselves in
accordance with their own needs, wants, desires. If this sounds utopian we need (yet
again) to remind ourselves of the myriad and proliferating examples of such spaces, from
social centres, autonomous zones, (neo-)Zapatistas, indigenous territories, co-ops, self-
help groups, LETS schemes to intentional communities, nomadic or self-reflexive
settlements and participatory experiments in cities such as Porto Alegre. The reality of
such schemes and experiments does not of course obviate their utopian nature or the
utopian ideal that self-governance represents in a world of cynics, realists and politicians.
They just make concrete the image of other worlds and the possibility - if not actuality -
of minoritarian self-governance.

References

Anon (1975). 'The Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking for Yourself'.

http://deoxy.org/rst.htm
Bey, Hakim (2002) The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic
Terrorism, New York: Semiotext(e).
Castoriadis, Cornelius. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society (K. Blamey),
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. (1991) Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political
Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Collier, G. A. (1999) Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, London: Food
First Books.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. (1994) Difference and Repetition, London: Athlone Press.
Fantasia, Rick (1988) Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action and Contemporary
American Workers, Stanford: University of California Press.
Foucault, Michel (1967). 'Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias'.
http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html
[accessed 4 March 2005]
Foucault, Michel (2001) Power (R. Hurley), London: Penguin Books.
Foucault, Michel (2003) Society Must be Defended (D. Macey), London: Penguin.
Harvey, David (2000) Spaces of Hope, Berkely: University of California Press.
Holloway, John and Elena Pelaez, Eds. (1998). Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in
Mexico. London, Pluto.
Lyotard, Jean Francois. (1993) Political Writings (B. R. w. K. P. Geiman), Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.

ecpr05 Page 13 18/3/05

Marcos, Subcomandante Insurgente (2001) Our Word is Our Weapon:Selected Writings,
London: Serpent's Tail.
May, Todd (1994) The Political Philosophy of Post-Structuralist Anarchism, Pennsylvania,
PN: Penn State University Press.
McLeish, Phil (2004) "The promise of the European Social Forum" The Commoner (8).
Michels, Robert (1998) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical
Tendencies of Modern Democracy, New York: Transaction.
Newman, S. (2003) "Empiricism, Pluralism, and Politics in Deleuze and Stirner" Idealistic
Studies 33(1): 9-24.
Newman, Saul (2001) From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation
of Power, Oxford: Lexington Books.
Olesen, Thomas (2004) International Zapatismo: The Construction of Solidarity in the
Age of Globalization, London: Zed Books.
Piven, Francis Fox and Richard A. Cloward (1988) Poor People's Movements: Why They
Succeed, How They Fail, New York: Random House.
Protevi, John (2001) Political Physics, London: Athlone.
Robinson, Andrew and Simon Tormey (2005). 'Horizontals, Verticals and the Conflicting
Logics of Transformative Politics'. Confronting Globalization. C. el-Ojeili and P.
Hayden. London, Palgrave.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1976 [1960]) The Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol 1 (A. Sheridan-
Smith), London: Verso.
Scott, James (1987) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New
Haven CN: Yale UP.
Scott, James C. (1992) Domination and the Arts of Resistance, New Haven CT: Yale
University Press.
Sen, Jai, Ed. (2004). World Social Forum: Challenging Empires. New Delhi, Viveka.
Stirner, Max (1993) The Ego and Its Own (S. Byington), London: Rebel Press.
Tormey, Simon (2001) Agnes Heller: Socialism, Autonomy and the Postmodern,
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Tormey, Simon (2004a) Anti-Capitalism: A Beginner's Guide, Oxford: Oneworld.
Tormey, Simon (2004b) "The 2003 European Social Forum: Where next for the anti-
capitalist movement?" Capital & Class (84): 151-60.
Vaneigem, Raoul (1994) The Revolution of Everyday Life, London: Rebel Press.
Zizek, Slavoj (2000) The Fragile Absolute - or, why is the Christian Legacy Worth
Fighting for?, London: Verso.

ecpr05 Page 14 18/3/05