SOCIETY OF THE RHIZOME

Joanne Richardson

“Every human being, every man, woman and child, has the inalienable right to
access information, communication and commerce. To this end the Internet has
evolved to serve mankind … The Internet is the nervous system of this planet.
We are all connected via this system. Any restrictions on the free flow of energy
through this system must be viewed as an impediment to the overall health of the
system and must be remedied. The Internet is an evolutionary force that must be
accommodated. It will continue to revolutionize the way we communicate, do
business and learn. For too long, the primitive systems of governments have
sought to retain power by controlling just these same functions. Those systems
are now obsolete! The Internet is Democracy in its most pure form, without
awkward political processes. The power of the Internet is unlimited.” HIP INC.,
http://www.hippy.com, “The Internet Manifesto”

The Technological Sublime

The new millennium arrived early. The 1990s began with delirious predictions that the
internet would overthrow matter, eliminate scarcity, decentralize hierarchical control and
bring about a new networked democracy. The stories had different heroes and different
plots, depending on the political inclinations of the protagonists, but they shared one
idea – the newest technology of the internet was a cataclysmic rupture of history and
nothing would ever be the same again. The stories on the right side of the political
spectrum focused on the ability of cyberspace to overcome the drudgery of physical
labor and to render industrial production, with its archaic bureaucracies of centralized
command, completely obsolete. A new age of plenty, superabundance and unlimited
freedom was predicted, as everyone would become their own cyberentrepreneur.
Wealth, no longer stored in brute matter, could be digitally reproduced to infinity, and
people, no longer limited by their physical bodies, could go anywhere and do anything.
The stories of the liberals predicted political equality, democratic communication for all,
and the possibility to build new virtual communities. In the networked agora, everyone
could come together and talk with everyone else in an open and transparent fashion. All
distinctions of class, race and gender, all social inequalities, and all forms of censorship
and control over information would inevitably disappear. And the radical left hailed the
internet as the technology that would give rise to a new mode of production and
exchange by laying the necessary foundations for cyber-communism. A gift economy of
sharing and free exchange of information would replace the profit-driven market and the
general equivalent of money would eventually wither away. Alienated labor would
disappear as everyone would produce information, code and sites according to their
ability and consume whatever they desired on the net according to their needs.

A profound ambiguity inhabited some of these stories about the internet, making them
linger on the threshold between myth and ideology. Although theorists as different as
Sorel, Cassirer and Barthes have often collapsed the two, myth and ideology are not
identical and serve different functions. Myth unifies a group and gives it faith in its
collective power to disrupt the order of things. Myth is always personal, it relies on
affective images and it needs an embodied character, not an abstract idea or an
impersonal process. Even the earliest Greek mythologies were stories about the
experiences of individual beings endowed with superhuman powers, not fragments of a
theological abstraction. The hero of the anarcho-syndicalist myth of the turn of the
twentieth century was not the general strike as a process but the multitude of strikers
who would coordinate their refusal and act in unison to bring capitalist production to a
halt. In the 1960s, one of the central characters of new revolutionary myths was the
hijacker of information who jammed and subverted the dominant codes of the spectacle.
At the beginning of the 1990s the heroes of the cyberfrontier were the cowboys seeking
freedom away from the long arm of the law and the homesteaders who seized the
possibility to create new virtual communities. At the dawn of the new millennium a new
cast of characters emerged: net avant-gardes and tricksters, tactical media warriors and
digital multitudes. In all its instances, myth valorizes subjective will and destabilizes
existing power; it symbolically designates and sometimes provokes the moment of
change. But ideology is essentially a conservative story that seeks to consolidate the
present political and economic order and to ensure that any further transformations will
be insignificant and not disrupt the balance of power. To achieve this aim, ideology
needs a reversal that makes the value of collective subjects depend on an abstraction
that stands above them: God, the State, the invisible hand of the market, the sublime
power of technology. Through this ideological reversal individuals are reduced to nothing
- they have power only insofar as they partake of an external sublimity that belongs
essentially to an abstract, self-organizing machine.

The internet is essentially a social relation, a link or a network between individuals

mediated through computers and cable. But it is often described as if it were a
disembodied machine that arose out of nothingness and continues to produce, multiply
and perpetuate itself out of its own vital energy and living force. These celebrations are a
conspicuous example of what Leo Marx once called the “technological sublime.” Hymns
praising the internet as the last incarnation of the technological sublime are not focused
on the vitality of the actors who use the internet to transform their world, but on the
sublimity of the technology. They project the will to action and the potential for social
transformation onto an inanimate being made of silicone, circuit boards and copper
wires that has suddenly come to life.

During the last decade one of the most striking examples of this kind of machine
fetishism wasKevin Kelly’s book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social
Systems and the Economic World. Kelly argues that nature is becoming man-made as
technology intervenes in biological processes like genetic engineering and cloning, and
technology is becoming a form of natural life as it spawns new synthetic ecosystems,
like the internet, which are capable of self-organizing out of their own creativity, thriving
on nonlinearity, decentralization, disequilibrium and flux. In Kelly’s vision the internet is a
quasi-biological “ascii superorganism,” a mathematically large “mechanical selfhood”
that inspires both awe and fear in those who come into contact with its invisible brain.
And since new technologies are living ecosystems, the most pressing question is not
what do people want from technology but what does the technology itself want. “As
technology becomes more animated and autonomous, I think we should be asking
ourselves where it wants to go, what its biases are and how far it can govern itself.” This
was only one of the many determinist reversals of the early 1990s that portrayed the
internet as an abstract machine possessing its own inherent power to solve social,
political and economic contradictions. Regimes of exploitation and social injustices of
the past were written off as defects stemming from the fact that we didn’t yet have the
right technology. Now that we do, or so the argument goes, it’s sufficient to wait for the
self-organizing, decentralized creativity of the internet to produce its own
transformations.

The hymns to the internet are the latest stage in the history of the technological sublime;
they have been sung many times in the past with each previous “new” technology. In the
1970s the hymns praised the sublimity of cable television, after which nothing would
ever be the same again. Through cable, television would finally transcend itself and
overcome its limitations, becoming something completely different – a two-way
communication channel. Politicians, civil rights activists and hippies euphorically
predicted how the communication superhighway of cable would improve education,
break down social isolation, help people to communicate and enhance participatory
democracy. Mark Surman has analyzed the many similarities between the language of
the “wired nation” and the “information highway” that first surfaced in the 1970s with
cable and the language used in the 1990s by the Wired digerati to talk about the internet
- which reproduced, whether unconsciously or not, all the earlier metaphors. Before the
cable revolution, in the 1960s Marshall McLuhan claimed that industrial society with its
regime of alienating labor had begun to wither away due to the transformations
produced by the invention of the electronic media and computer automation. Before
McLuhan, in the 1940s David Sarnoff had declared that television was “destined to
provide greater knowledge to larger numbers of people, truer perception of the meaning
of current events, more accurate appraisal of men in public life, and a broader
understanding of the needs and aspirations of our fellow human beings.” Before the
electronic media, the hymns to the technological sublime had praised nuclear power, the
railroad, the steam engine, and electricity. In each of these historical moments there was
an active forgetting of the claims of the previous technology to completely transform the
world as we knew it.

Whose Rhizome?

Celebrations of the new technological sublime of computer mediated communication,

and more specifically, the internet, are based on the idea that we’ve entered a new stage
of history (the postindustrial or information or network society) that is no longer
dependent on industrial production and on Fordist hierarchical models but on
information processing through decentralized, networked and flexible labor. This idea
has become a commonplace on all sides of the political spectrum - from Daniel Bell’s
and Manuel Castels’ more critical approaches, to Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George
Keyworth and Alvin Toffler’s neoconservative spin in the “Magna Carta for the
Information Age,” which credits the Third Wave information economy with abolishing
material scarcity and overcoming history - understood as the struggle for power and
scarce resources by competing groups. During the early 1990s the network logic of the
new information technologies became the most pervasive metaphor for describing
horizontality, decentralization of power, deterritorialization of boundaries, heterogeneous
connections, openness, participation, flexibility and innovation. The ubiquity of the
network metaphor was a clear sign that it had become an essential part of the new
dominant language of neoliberalism. Toward the end of the 1990s there was a subtle
shift, a displacement from the “network,” which tended to sound too neutral and too
value-free, to the “rhizome,” always invoked in a celebratory context because of its
deleuzo-guattarian pedigree.

For many years critics on the left, radical artists and cultural jammers had anchored
themselves to the Situationist critique of the society of the spectacle, either by simply
recycling it as a catechism learned by heart, or by showing how the society of the
spectacle had evolved into a more developed stage, or by devising new techniques of
detournement and contestation on the net. The critique of the Spectacle was based on
the idea that in the hypercommodified society of television and the advertising industry,
images had reached such a level of saturation that all of daily life had become mediated
through them. The effects of this opium war were the separation of people from each
other, the alienation of subjects from their true desires through a chain of substitutions,
and a culture of passivity and complacency in which people became mere spectators
and consumers of a life that was already predetermined in all of its aspects. The
Situationists called for an end to the hierarchical control that led to separation, and
demanded active participation in the construction of life through the creation of situations
– especially oppositional interventions that turned the false world of the spectacle upside
down and revealed the authenticity and intensity of lived experience hidden beneath it.

Although it can be said that the spectacle has become even more pervasive today – in
the age of mega media mergers, the telenovelizing of politics, and the exhibitionism of
reality shows - there is something inescapably different about our own time. There is the
idea that underneath it all, there is a hidden possibility, a revolutionary line of flight that
has abolished representation and mediation through images, and has attained pure
immediacy, direct expression and unrestrained participation. And all we need to do is to
get off the television and get on the internet. The old world maintained separation
through hierarchical power and bureaucratic command. This new world is rhizomatic,
headless and decentralized; power has been dispersed and broken into a thousand
pieces that can now be shared by everyone. According to the hype, the rhizomatic
internet dissolves old hierarchies of command - information flows in all directions,
connecting everything to everything else. The internet links together heterogeneous
elements - personal home pages, government sites, library catalogues, anarchist
mailing lists, transnational corporations, non-governmental organizations. It blurs
boundaries between fixed points - the territorial borders of nations, the dividing line
between work and leisure, the distinction between public and private - and it gives rise to
countless technological becomings – the typewriter and cathode ray tube couple with
transcontinental cable links and become a many-to-many channel for immediate
communication. The internet is beginningless, endless and boundless, changing size
and scope with every new connection. The lack of an underlying structure makes it
impossible to form a mental representation or to trace preexisting lines. The maps we
construct of the internet don’t represent anything; they are creative experiments that
build possible worlds.

The deterittorialized logic of the internet and the new mode of organization of the
“movement of movements” have often been invoked together as if there is some secret
alchemy between them. The argument is that since the internet creates the condition of
possibility for direct expression without intermediaries, peer-to-peer communication, and
multi-directional flows, it will transform the way groups organize by preventing
hierarchies and encouraging the formation of molecular nodes that are not tied to any
unitary purpose. Naomi Klein claims “the communication technology that facilitates these
campaigns is shaping the movement in its own image. What emerged on the streets of
Seattle and Washington was an activist model that mirrors the organic, decentralized,
interlinked pathways of the Internet - the Internet come to life.” But the problem is that
this rhizomatic universe is not specific to the organizational logic of the alterglobalization
movements - it is also an essential element of global capitalism. Old models of
hierarchical, formal, rule-governed corporations are useless in a speculative economy
based on the circulation of flows and the exchange of intangibles such as information
and affects. The new management literature of the 1990s realized this and categorically
rejected anything that smacked of hierarchy and top-down control. The rhizomatic
corporation is nomadic and flexible, always on the move, networking with other
corporations in decentralized joint ventures, mergers, and acquisitions; its boundaries
have disappeared and it is impossible to distinguish between inside and outside,
between employees, temporal workers and consultants. As Boltanski and Chiapello
argued, this new spirit of capitalism appropriated the nomadic rebellions of the sixties
and put them to use in the service of profit, simultaneously passing itself off as
progressive because it had abolished totalitarian patterns of centralized command. But if
central command has withered away, the new forms of mobile, deterritorialized control
that have replaced it only mean that discipline is now dispersed through the entire social
field, and is all the more effective since it has been freed from territorial and institutional
constraints.
It is naïve to invoke a rhizomatic mode of organization as a means of contestation and
as an alternative to global capitalism since it has become what they have in common
rather than what holds them apart. The rhizome is the logic of that which oppresses us
and, simultaneously, the promise of liberation and the glimpse of another possible world.
Of course it is possible to argue that the decentralization, horizontality and participation
promised by the networked information society is a sham, and to try to distinguish true
forms of horizontality and participation from the false semblances that are sold to us. But
there is a high degree of truth to the claims that the information society involves higher
degrees of decentralization and participation. It’s not simply that decentralization is but a
pretext or a detour to a higher order of centralization. Nor is it the case that participation
is merely an interactive spectacle in which people can choose or vote among
alternatives that are predetermined in advance – participation really does include
elements of creativity, innovation and unexpected moves. The more important question
is whether decentralization and participation are necessarily progressive and
emancipatory.

New antiauthoritarians now fetishize ideas of rhizomatic structures (vs. trees) and
horizontality (vs. verticality), just as older anarchists during the nineteenth century sang
the praises of decentralization and attempted to reduce questions of liberation to
debates about decentralization vs. centralization. The opposition presupposed that
centralization was a repressive form of organization from above that stifles capacities for
individual and collective self-organization and that decentralization, through a
mathematical operation of inversion, must be synonymous with freedom. Since
Proudhon, anarchism has been associated with the establishment of freely federated
associations that were not subordinate to centralized state authority. Yet the fact that
Proudhon could hold up Switzerland and the United States as imitable models of
decentralized government should immediately cast suspicion on the idea of
“decentralization.” The political decentralization of power, the dispersal of its visible
center, can often create an internalization of the values of the dominant power that is all
the more total as subjects police their own desires. And insubordination to a central
authority need not always be on the side of freedom. Proudhon’s dogmatic insistence on
the libertarian character of decentralization led him to support the most absurd causes,
like siding with the Confederate slave-South during the American civil war because it
was carrying out a noble battle against the evils of centralization. Today neoliberals and
neofascists are equally against the centralization and regulation imposed by the state –
the first because it can interfere with the globalization of capital, the second because the
state (as well as the globalization of capital) has corrupted the spiritual unity of the
nation.

And participation is too vague and meaningless a concept to become a measure of

democratic transformation unless it is elaborated according to another logic and a
coherent set of principles. For instance, fascism is also about molecular participation. It
is based on immediate involvement, direct expression, immanence, contagion,
celebration and festival. In a sense, this is why it can easily coopt the desire for
liberation. As Deleuze and Guattari recognized (and Bataille before them): “What makes
fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a
cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism.” Totalitarianism relies on fear and
rule from above through central command, fascism works through exhuberance and
rhizomatic proliferation from below. It skips from point to point out of its own momentum,
multiplying into “rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war
veteran’s fascism … every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its
own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great … black hole.”
Contemporary forms of fascism have become adept at using information technologies to
improve rhizomatic coordination, proliferating along different nodes - neonazi chatrooms,
newsgroups for aryan nations, sites for holocaust deniers, networks of dispersed patriot
militias, and decentralized war machines of religious fundamentalism. While molecular
fascism depends on a certain structure of authority, it is an authority that doesn’t function
by command and repression but through affect. The Romanian Noua Dreapta may
invoke C. Z. Codreanu (the “chief” of the interwar legionnaire movement) as their
spiritual leader, but precisely because when he was alive he was a leader who was
unelected and did not rule but lived in the hearts of his followers. The authority is an
authority of contagion, not a hierarchical rule by directives. The neofascist media – like
the Altermedia network of sites, which are modeled on Indymedia but without open
publishing, decisions by consensus, transparency or public archives - is all about
participation. Altermedia claims to be “the voice of the people” and its editors actively
seek collaborations; they want newcomers to become involved in the movement and in
the production of its discourse - but up to a certain limit. Without asking questions,
without arguing, debating or deliberating, and without internal critique. Critique can jam a
stick in the wheel of psychological identification, it can shatter the effect of contagion.
These movements may be made up of horizontal nodes that proliferate rhizomatically
and are not subject to central command, but they are bound together by doctrine - the
word of spiritual leaders, the idea of the noble destiny of a people bound by blood and
soil - and this doctrine cannot be questioned because it would dissolve the ideological
pact that links the molecular groups together.

There have been many debates about whether the internet is really a rhizomatic
technology or not. For all the arguments that attempted to show how perfectly the
internet mirrors Deleuze and Guattari’s criteria for rhizomatic structures like connection,
heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography and decalcomania (Robin
Hamman), there have been counter-arguments pointing out that the net is heavily
striated with hierarchical file servers and centralized tree-trunks (nameservers,
protocols, firewalls, passwords) that enable rhizomatic connections in the first place.
More conservative pundits have taken a middle ground, arguing that the internet is
rhizomorphic rather than rhizomatic because it exhibits many rhizomatic tendencies but
it does not exclude arborescent attributes (Chuen-Ferng Koh). The more moderate
conclusions is that the technology itself is not rhizomatic, but that rhizomatic smoothness
has to be created and that it depends on whether an open architecture is deliberately
constructed by the users. Whether the internet is a promise of something new or a
theater for rehearsing old plays is a matter of the collectivities that inhabit it and what
ideas, desires or neuroses they bring to it.

Focusing on the pragmatics of the technology rather than its ontology follows Deleuze
and Guattari, but only part of the way. Guattari, when he was involved in the free radio
movement, emphasized that technologies could either extend the “machinic
enslavement” of capitalism or be used for liberation, depending on the group formations
they were tied to. But deleuzo-guattarian discourses about the internet rarely follow the
argument all the way since Deleuze and Guattari also claimed that rhizomatic
smoothness and nomadism are not inherently liberatory and do not have an irresistible
revolutionary calling. Rhizomes can change meaning depending on the context – they
can support different types of politics, promoting autonomy and a more democratic
inclusion or becoming a means of division and discrimination. If there is a positive
connotation that can be extracted from rhizomatic structures, it must come through
another articulation and another set of definitions. It’s useful to recall that a rhizome is a
plant-life. When googling it, more than half the results will point to sites that offer
gardening tips. And that might not be the most useful information to have for theorizing
social relations. The question about whether the net is or is not rhizomatic should be
replaced by other questions about whether and in what ways the internet can promote
the autonomy and self-determination of those who use it. It is not a question of rhizomes
but democratic structures. This means asking in what sense one of today’s most abused
words - democracy - can still retain a liberatory sense.

Redefining Democracy

Democracy in the Greek city-states meant the direct participation of citizens in public
assemblies to debate, deliberate and decide collectively about laws and affairs in their
common interest. The link between citizens was direct; they were connected to the other
members of the city-community because of real social bonds. When the modern
revolutions in America and France abolished monarchical sovereignty and resurrected
the citizen, it was a different type of creature. Modernity’s liberal notions of citizenship
leaned toward the legalistic, constitutional framework of the Roman Republic rather than
the Athenian model of deliberative democracy. The authors of the American Constitution
distinguished republicanism, understood as a government of majority rule through
elected representatives, from “pure democracy,” understood as “a society consisting of a
small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.”
They considered a pure democracy to be both impractical in a large society and
politically dangerous. And so democracy came to be defined primarily in legal and
administrative terms, as the equal rights of citizens before the law and as the freedom of
individuals to choose their representatives.

The modern concept of citizenship was born as a counter-desire to the aristocratic order
of things, with its hierarchies of hereditary power and extravagant prestige. The citizen
was a sign of equality and a symbolic leveling of social distinctions. But this was an
abstract, empty and formal equality. Each citizen was equal insofar as each was
subordinate to the same law and to the same nation-state. The equality of citizenship is
a serial relationship, somewhat like a group of people standing in line before a door at
the top of a staircase. The group is linked indirectly in virtue of their identical position
before the legal-administrative apparatus that stands above them; they are not directly
connected to each other in terms of concrete relations, similar subjective desires or
common interests. Citizenship is a relationship of substitutions and proxies, always
mediated and indefinitely deferred. For a citizen to be recognized as such, it is
necessary for the sovereignty of the state to pass judgment; the citizen has to have
proper papers and documents of legitimation – that’s why there was such an obsession
at the onset of the French Revolution for citizens to make public declarations, to exhibit
papers on houses declaring the legal inhabitants, and show proper documents (called
“certificates of good citizenship”) to cross from one city to another.

It is necessary for any definition of democracy to go beyond the abstract idea of

citizenship, the formal equality of legal rights, and definitions that reduce freedom of
choice to political representation and administration. Democracy is neither a serial
relationship of good citizenship nor can it be synonymous with the gregariousness of
conversation, voluntary social and cultural associations, or proper codes of bourgeois
civility, as civil society advocates try to persuade us. In the simplest possible terms
democracy means to affirm the right of the more numerous and less privileged for self-
determination - in the economy, politics, culture and all other aspects of life - and to
criticize the economic privilege and political power of an elite minority. A real
democratization of the economy means that the people who produce and consume
goods should set the rules of production and the terms of the exchange. This is
impossible in a global capitalist market, which is not a “free” market but a cartel of
transnational monopolies that manipulate the laws of supply and demand and use
advertising to create false desires. Free markets would be good - unfortunately they
exist in very few places, as anachronistic exceptions to the dominant rule. When the
producers of free software go to meetings to show their products and exchange them
with each other, without money as a general equivalent or advertising and manipulation,
offering practical information about which software corresponds to which needs, this is a
free market. And this is very different from buying a Microsoft operating system that
forces us to use their browser and their media player and prevents us from choosing any
alternative. There are many economic alternatives that promote non-coercive modes of
production and free exchange, from non-profit cooperatives, to solidarity based
economies, factories occupied and managed by workers, fair trade initiatives, and local
area trading systems.

But it is not enough to create isolated economic alternatives; it is also necessary to

break the current monopoly by corporations and governments over the political power of
decision-making. It has already become a cynical truism that elections are not in the
hands of individual voters but are controlled by the huge corporate sponsors of political
campaigns and by the mass-media, which, instead of being an independent “fourth
estate” that safeguards the public interest, is using its broadcasting platform to protect
its own pockets. When the market is ruled by monopolies, the government is auctioned
at the highest bidder, and the media exists to stifle free expression and the free flow of
information to its own advantage, it’s normal for most people to feel alienated from a
process of political decision-making that has nothing to do with their interests. A real
democratization of politics would mean a politics of direct expression in which we can
voice our opinions and choices every day instead of electing proxies and
representatives who claim to speak in our names once every 4 or 5 years. Non-
hierarchical communities and neighborhood assemblies around the world, which make
all their decisions by gathering in physical space or on the internet in order to discuss
their interests, debate competing proposals, and reach agreement by consensus, have
already shown that direct democracy is not a utopian fantasy.

A real democratization of culture means first of all that the flow of information (news,
public archives and documents) and the production of creative works (literature, film,
music, software) should not be controlled by any political authority or economic
monopoly. But since a culture of consumption can neutralize dissent just as much as
totalitarianism, a real democratization would also mean that the production of culture
should not be the exclusive privilege of a caste of “experts” for a multitude of spectators,
but something that can be created by everyone. During the revolts against consumer
culture in the 1960s, the most radical slogan of the social movements became that
everyone can be an artist. In the different landscape at the turn of the millennium the
new slogan has become the familiar Indymedia banner that everyone can be the media.
Indymedia was born from the recognition that mass-media is controlled by powerful
elites and that although it claims to serve the democratic interest of the public to be
informed, its real interests, sources of financial support, leadership structure and
decision making processes are all hidden behind closed doors. The idea was to provoke
social change by eliminating the difference between producers and consumers of media
(anyone can post on the open publishing newswire) and by making the production and
decision making process entirely transparent (everything is publicly archived on the
internet).

The problem with many understandings of democracy, especially by the revolutionary

traditions of the past, is their definition on the level of content, in terms of a
comprehensive world vision, homogenous practices and forms of behavior, or sharing
an identical historical goal. Real democratization cannot be synonymous with a dogma,
a single model of the good society, or a unified goal towards which all beings converge.
It can only be understood in terms of background principles that give particular actions a
sense of coherence without requiring that people think or act alike. This means that any
definition of democracy is essentially empty of content and is more like Kant’s
categorical imperative, which, by analyzing whether a particular action could be willed by
everyone without contradiction, provides a criterion of reciprocity and respect for other
people. A background principle expressed in the most simple terms would be based on
autonomy and self-determination: “act as if you - and by extension everyone else - have
an equal right and responsibility to determine your own life in all its aspects.” Autonomy
may mean “self-law” but it is not synonymous with the adolescent understanding of free-
market libertarianism which judges that each individual is a sovereign law unto himself,
a monad whose isolated self-interest dictates that he has a right to exploit all the natural
and man-made resources he desires, including other people. Autonomy is necessarily a
social and collective principle; logically, it cannot exist if it interferes with or violates other
people’s autonomy and desire for self-determination.

One of the movements that has recognized the need for defining itself through shared
principles rather than in terms of content or goals is Indymedia. Despite some vague
and inconsistent formulations in the draft document of the ten principles of unity
(http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/PrinciplesOfUnity), it’s possible to discern a few
core principles, which are all elaborations on the meaning of democracy as self-
organization: (1) Individuals and the links between individuals through cooperation and
solidarity are primary values that override the utilitarian logic of profit, which treats
people as a mere means to an end; (2) The process of production (in this case of
discourse, information and events) and decision-making (about how the group functions
and what is produced) should be open to the participation of everyone who is interested,
without any discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, age, level of education (or
appearances, subjective idiosyncrasies, personality traits). The only limit to democratic
inclusion are those whose ideas, goals or tactics are antidemocratic or discriminatory
because they interfere with the self-determination of others; (3) Participating in the
process of production and decision-making should be equal and horizontal, which
means that everyone’s opinions and choices have equal weight and there are no leaders
or spokespersons who can claim to speak in other people’s names or make decisions on
their behalf; and (4) The process of production and decision-making should be
transparent (ideally, in the form of public archives on the internet), which would allow
everyone, including outside observers, to enter at any point along the way and criticize
what they disagree with.

Understanding democracy to be based on principles has some important consequences:

(1) It means that the content and goal of any project of democratization is indeterminate
and must be decided in each local context by interpreting which course of action would
best actualize the shared principles. This goes beyond a definition of decentralization or
horizontality, it rejects the idea of a preordained theory or of a “coherent critique” that
becomes the measure of action. A group like SI, which demanded “participation on the
part of everyone” and deliberately refused “to reproduce within itself any of the
hierarchical conditions of the dominant world” became infamous for excluding more than
half its members. Inside the SI there was no hierarchy, everyone was equal, there were
no ascending or descending lines, experiments were collective, texts were produced
together, often unsigned. As Vaneigem himself claimed about the SI, “The only limit to
participating in its total democracy is that each member must have recognized and
appropriated the coherence of its critique.” Since the SI possessed the correct theory, all
the imperfections that were grounds for exclusion from the group were projected as the
failure of particular individuals to measure up to the coherence of the theory. It is too
easy to condemn previous revolutionary politics for being centralist, hierarchical and
based on bureaucratic substitutionism and to affirm that we have moved beyond the
errors of the past since the politics of the day is decentralized, horizontal and
participatory. The most horizontal groups can advocate total equality and participation
among its members and become the most rabid examples of absolutism – convinced of
the correctness of their theory and incapable of admitting any contradictory ideas or
criticism. If a movement constructs a theory, it can only be secondary, something pieced
together as a consequence, a way of asking questions while walking rather than
providing definitive answers and precise directions.

(2) Shifting the focus from content to principles makes it possible to analyze practices
based on the axioms that inspire them, instead of utilitarian considerations of their goals
or effects. This is analogous to saying that the means do not justify the ends – which
was the point of Kant’s test of universalizability. Kant’s focus on the underlying principles
of actions rather than their final justifications, and his insistence on principles that could
be logically affirmed by everyone, has influenced both liberal theories of human rights
and anarchist ideas of prefigurative politics, which require that the goal of a radically
democratic society of the future should be prefigured on the level of the particular
actions and means that are used to build it in the present. By contrast, Hegel’s emphasis
on the end point of the entire historical process meant that particular actions like slavery,
despotism, or engaging in war could be justified as necessary steps leading to the final
moment of reconciliation. This dialectical utilitarianism has inspired the revolutionary
descendants of Marx, from Lenin to Mao, and even Negri, who affirms a neoliberal
Empire as a necessary sign of progress and supports the constitution of the European
Union as a transitional stage that will ultimately lead to the absolute democracy of
communism.

(3) Since autonomy is collective, it is actualized through links with others - links that are
local as well as global. A common basis for collaboration and for forming alliances and
networks cannot start from negative definitions of resistance or opposition; it has to
begin from positive principles. For instance, there are many reasons why different
groups may oppose global capitalism or the logic of profit - church activists are against
profit not because they affirm people’s capacity for self-determination, but because they
believe everyone is subordinate to the will of God, whose true domain is beyond the
material world. Starting from positive principles makes it possible to distinguish
movements that are based on democratic principles and to refuse alliances with those
that are not. These include not only neofascist extremists who dream nightmares of
ethnic purity, but also religious groups who anchor their resistance to neoliberalism on a
hierarchical chain of being and on the ultimate authority of a divine power in everyone’s
lives, and authoritarian communists who still talk of vanguards and transitional stages of
unfreedom, even if they’ve learned to do it in an updated jargon of political correctness.
This refusal is not an expression of sectarianism, but of a desire for an all-inclusive
democracy, which applies to everyone without exception, and without any intermediary
steps that would sacrifice the present on the altar of the future.
It is true that information technologies have allowed the alterglobalization movements to
disseminate information to wider publics and to form alliances with each other and
organize campaigns to an extent that was not possible before. Without the proliferation
of Zapatista communiqués from point to point through the internet, their struggle might
have been a footnote of history rather than the poetry inspiring a global imagination. But
it is also true that the proliferation of neofascist groups and their “alternative” media has
been strengthened by the internet, multiplying along different nodes to an extent that
was not possible before. The organization of these movements are not effects of the
sublimity of the technology but of the ideas, values and desires of the users. Any
discussion about how the internet can be used to promote democratic transformation -
of production, political decision-making and the entire social field - has to start from a
definition of democratic principles, not from simplistic slogans about rhizomes or
networks. It is these principles that ultimately distinguish modes of decentralization and
horizontality that are based on autonomy and social solidarity rather than on economic
interests and profit; types of molecular participation that are based on a desire for
openness and transparency rather than opaqueness and secrecy; and movements that
proliferate rhizomatically but in a way that is self-critical and open to questions and
debates rather than anchored on answers, readymade theories or self-evident doctrines.
These principles are not specific to the Indymedia network but are common to many
projects based on collective self-determination, open and equal participation, the
promotion of debate and dissent, and transparency - including not only well known
examples like the free software movement and Wikipedia but also countless other
initiatives that rely on the free production and circulation of knowledge, the possibility for
all participants to publish and contribute, transparent modes of organization and
decision-making, and archives that are in the public domain.

Cluj, 2005. Written for the RE:activism conference, Oct 13-15, 2005 at CEU in Budapest
(http://www.re-activism.net).

Source - http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/richardsontext1.html