The Failure of Horizontally Organized Movements
Last week, Elizabeth McKenna, PhD student and guest speaker, explained her research of Brazil’s current protest cycle. She classified hundreds of Brazilian social movements, digitally and conventionally conceived, to see whether one preforms better, in terms of demands achieved, than another.
If I took away something from her scholarly method and academic results it was that, in general, movements run completely through social media didn’t carry the same resilience/success as conventional ones. So, are horizontally organized movements destined to fail?
‘Leaderful’ movements all have no clear chairman, a genuinely participatory culture, and a liberty to join extended for all. Conversely, a vertical organization always contains a definite hierarchy and often has restrictions on who can participate/how much. Very much New Power vs Old Power.
“Occupy, as a movement, is characterized by extreme openness.” A Horizontal movement through and through, Occupy didn’t have a single manager, didn’t restrict participation to anyone, and they reached out to make sure their movement was demographically consistent with the 99%. One of the most popular movements of this millennium, perhaps usurped in recent years by the movement for Black Lives, Occupy was as horizontal a movement as one could conceive.
Occupy even had clear advantages for longevity. More than half of their people already had experience from another movement. They developed excellent methods of reaching out to the community and garnering participation from their members. However, when it comes to a measure of success, what happened?
I don’t recall what the movement even demanded beside the right to camp in uncomfortably urban conditions. We know that the stock market kept climbing, the 1% padded their wallets, and after a lengthy campaign across multiple metropolises over the world all that was left was a hypothesis about an inherent failure present in any horizontal movement.
