We are in agreement here on the premises. The work of Nunes is the most rigorous critique of contemporary "spontaneism" (you call it organic growth, but it's the same in this context). If We Burn is the more pop version of it, but the idea is the same. I'm also very hostile to prefigurative politics and any kind of escapism. The politics must be done rooted in the here and now. There's no outside. Nunes says "the history with the subject inside".
We disagree on the conclusions though and that's what gives the title to the book. "Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal" means that a lot of people, to escape the failures of spontaneism and horizontalism (or the trauma of the '68) take refuge in older forms of vertical rigidity, like the traditional party form. This is a false dichotomy, that is paralyzing the left. They are just different, ineffective, coping mechanisms. The failures of one doesn't justify the other, and vice-versa.
The party justifies itself by being a conscious organ
Here we go into metaphysics of organizational theory, but I would argue that a party is conscious on the same level of any assemblage of more than two humans. They just perform their consciousness differently. Nunes takes like two chapters to make this argument, so I won't repeat it here. See it as like the same difference there is between human intelligence, action and decision-making compared to the intelligence of mycelium networks, forests or other forms of non-human agency.
collect knowledge, theory, and practice under one roof
In today's world, this is a weakness, not a strength. Centralized knowledge is slow and world around us is slow. This was less true in 1917 or it is less true at the periphery of the empire, where party forms still deliver the goods. Being slower than your environment means not only that you can't act effectively within your environment, but that you also lack the tools to observe that this is happening. That is one of the arguments for which I said before "the party form is unfit". Decentralization and localism is for sure fetishized by many as "more democratic", and I don't necessarily believe that's true, but decentralization is necessary because it creates faster and more flexible systems, that can match capitalistic structures in speed.
That said, you also see it as complementary to what happens outside the party, and that's already good ecological thinking in Nunes terms.
We are in agreement here on the premises. The work of Nunes is the most rigorous critique of contemporary "spontaneism" (you call it organic growth, but it's the same in this context). If We Burn is the more pop version of it, but the idea is the same. I'm also very hostile to prefigurative politics and any kind of escapism. The politics must be done rooted in the here and now. There's no outside. Nunes says "the history with the subject inside".
We disagree on the conclusions though and that's what gives the title to the book. "Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal" means that a lot of people, to escape the failures of spontaneism and horizontalism (or the trauma of the '68) take refuge in older forms of vertical rigidity, like the traditional party form. This is a false dichotomy, that is paralyzing the left. They are just different, ineffective, coping mechanisms. The failures of one doesn't justify the other, and vice-versa.
In today's world, this is a weakness, not a strength. Centralized knowledge is slow and world around us is slow. This was less true in 1917 or it is less true at the periphery of the empire, where party forms still deliver the goods. Being slower than your environment means not only that you can't act effectively within your environment, but that you also lack the tools to observe that this is happening. That is one of the arguments for which I said before "the party form is unfit". Decentralization and localism is for sure fetishized by many as "more democratic", and I don't necessarily believe that's true, but decentralization is necessary because it creates faster and more flexible systems, that can match capitalistic structures in speed.
That said, you also see it as complementary to what happens outside the party, and that's already good ecological thinking in Nunes terms.