Introduction

It’s a jarring experience to be confronted with the reality of the great and overwhelming wrongs that exist today. Our history is filled with avoidable evils like the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the centuries of barbarity against African peoples, global environmental degradation, and the misery of people torn from their land to become propertyless workers whose generations were murdered, abused, raped, and wasted by successive rulers. The initial shock of discovering these crimes sticks with you, and today the horrors constantly fill our senses through an unending barrage of information that keeps those experiences close. For those who do not withdraw or shut down in despair, an old question lingers: What can we do about it all?

With all the years of resistance across the planet, it is surprising how few answers there are to some very basic problems. If the problems of the world are not permanent, inherent, and natural to humanity, but are in fact contingent, changeable, and driven by specific causes, then there are specific things that can be done to correct injustice. Yet the number of people both aware of these issues and willing to commit themselves to a process of social change is generally small. That minority of people must find ways to act against the weight of the dominating system to create a better world. In the process people who are not yet active have to somehow shift from otherwise going about their lives to become thinking and acting agents of social change and join the effort to liberate humanity. The goal is a better possible world brought about from a society with the forces of domination in control.

Perhaps surprisingly, the traditions that tried to dismantle domination and exploitation have provided few answers for basic elements of radical social change. It is a frequent and frustrating experience to discover the lack of responses to fundamental questions, such as: How is revolution possible? How can someone become radicalized? What means allows a revolutionary minority to because a majority? How is the rule of all people possible?

Paradoxes of Struggle

Years ago, I was involved in the union at my job where we organized a strike in a social service facility. In the lead-up to the strike there was a series of fairly brutal workplace injuries that happened largely because of unsafe staffing with a patient population suffering from severe mental health issues. Management claimed they had no money to pay for more staff, while at the same time they were giving out raises to administrators of over 25% at a nonprofit serving children who were largely victims of abuse. The staff, battered and ignored, overall were withdrawn. A majority of the workers didn’t even bother turning up to the strike vote. The organizing committee, which I was a member of, was pretty worried, but things had come to a head and we were resolved to move forward and stop work. I expected a real fight to build support and for many to cross the picket line.

The day of the strike the vast majority of all the workers walked out while half the organizing committee of longtime union activists crossed the picket line and became entrenched scabs for the life of the strike. Once on the picket line, workers who had previously been cold, shut down, and abused were literally crying with joy and outpacing the union bureaucracy’s plans by attacking the vehicles of the bosses driving into the job site. Virtual strangers began not only fighting for themselves, but also questioning the class divisions at work, the role of the government in their work and lives, and even the system itself. Conversations on the picket line went much further than the union wanted and that any of the few radicals involved had imagined.

That transformation stuck with me. The opening that came with taking action altered the way I thought about social change and ultimately shifted the course of my life. It was puzzling. How did it happen? How does a fighting force come together to stay planted on sidewalks for three months in the winter without much money or support from the outside world? Why did the organizers so quickly betray the strike, while those who ignored the union became its staunchest supporters? After the strike people largely went their own ways and returned to their daily lives, though a minority carried their experiences into new activities and activism. Those events and tensions were far from rare. Similar dynamics play out in all conflicts where the agency of people struggling is shifted in ways that don’t neatly line up with how they or their leaders think about it.

Throughout the history of workers’ movements new struggles emerged and forms innovated that went beyond the norms of their days and generally in opposition to the unions and political parties that drew their strength from the support of the working class. During World War II US workers at the same time voted for unprecedented (at the time) pledges for labor peace with no-strike agreements, and then unleashed one of the largest and most militant strike waves in our history. They did so against the leadership of the unions and the Democratic Party drumming up nationalist support for the “good war”, and even against the Communist Party who sought to rally support to save Soviet Russia under attack.[8]

Workers similarly shook things up for the Unidad Popular (UP), or Popular Unity, government in Allende’s Chili. The UP had sought to nationalize industries slowly and strategically and coordinate workers’ activity via structures of the State as part of populist reforms. The workers interpreted the victory of the left-wing parties differently, seeing it as a green light to take on directly the deepest problems affecting them. Land seizures, factory occupations, and selfdefense structures against police, employers, and the right sprung up that were organized by the workers in opposition to the directions of the UP functionaries. While the vision of socialist policy makers was limited to social welfare and State ownership, the workers began to take matters into their own hands by taking over their workplaces and neighborhoods to be used to their own ends.[9] These initiatives outside the officialdom would provide the only serious resistance to the horrific coup and tragedy that would come as the UP systematically disarmed itself against an open and immanent threat from the military and radical right which ultimately led to indiscriminate killing, torture, and immiseration for decades thereafter.

The dominant script of history is colored by the habit of viewing things through the lens of those in charge; a perspective that systematically misses exactly the dynamic that bursts open on picket lines, barricades, and protests. These days there’s a fair deal of debate around the Spanish Civil War (largely because of the growing influence of anarchist ideas broadly), and the various positions and moves by heads of the different factions. Augustin Guillamón, in his detailed study of the neighborhood defense committees of the Spanish anarchist union the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), or National Confederation of Labor, reminds us how the insurrection and following war almost was not a thing at all. The Republican government, socialists, communists, and trade union leaders were nearly ready to abdicate after Franco’s coup emerged. The militants of the anarchist CNT on the other hand had prepared in the years leading up to the events. Worker militants organized by their districts studied their areas and sought to find what would be necessary to disarm the military and begin creating anarchist society should a revolution occur. Decades of urban class warfare (which saw workers and union activists frequently assassinated, tortured, and abused by paramilitary forces of the State and employers) and aborted insurrections (dubbed “revolutionary gymnastics” by the CNT) provided collective memory and skills for the workers who lived through an institutionalized culture of resistance to violent repression and poverty. At a critical moment at the outset of the coup, a generalized workingclass force rallied behind the defense committees, which represented one of the only real bodies organized to oppose the fascist revolt. Only thereafter did the civil war become possible and did the vying factions step back into the fray saved by the popular response that moved into the opening that had developed.[10]

Agency and Emergence

There are two central problems embedded within these examples: the problem of agency and the problem of emergence. Emergence is a concept that originally came from philosophy dating at least to the 19^th century, but has been taken up by various sciences in the past fifty years to look at complex systems like living organisms, ecosystems, societies, and weather patterns. In these systems new things emerge out of the interaction of vast numbers of components that together produce something novel that is greater than the sum of its parts. Ants produce emergent hive behavior with intelligence that doesn’t exist in any individual colony member; neurons create conscious thought that does not share properties of the chemical reactions inside our cells; and cities create systematic patterns of growth and decay created by people merely going about their days. The second section of this text takes on emergence and its related issues.

People by their nature are agents. We take action and think about what to do or what not to do. Seeking social change is one kind of agency. One aspect of the struggle for a better world is choosing what we do as individuals and coordinating with others. The change itself happens on another level of organization. Like all social things, it arises out of the actions of millions and a larger context. What can be a surprise is how these two elements often do not match up. Based on everything we knew as organizers, we did not expect for our co-organizers to become scabs and the silent majority to become militants. Since then, there’s been a number of other surprises like the Arab Spring, Madison, Occupy, Brazil’s anti-World Cup and Olympics protests, and Black Lives Matter responses in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Chicago, among others. The complexities of social movements within a globalized world keep expanding. Since 2001 at least a series of financial crises have plagued the advanced capitalist countries, international relations have been rocked by the breakdown of the Washington Consensus and the rise of competitive powers of the BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) countries among others; previously stable lines of political division have gradually blurred.

The second factor in my exploration of agency and emergence was my introduction to the life sciences through professional training as a nurse. Biology explores causality in a fundamentally different manner from what I had been used to. The life sciences and medicine study adaptive living systems with staggering complexity organized into different levels, each with their own logic, properties, and issues. Working in hospitals brings health care practitioners into contact with that reality as they try to navigate individuals in front of them with their own composition and reality, and connect that to the more abstract science of populations, diseases, and treatments. It’s one thing to understand statistical trends from data of populations; it’s another thing altogether to apply that knowledge to people who as individuals can vary substantially.

From the outset parallels between the biological world and the political world were obvious. Biology provides fodder for political metaphors, such as the spread of cancers, how the immune system uses memory and exposure to evolve defenses to unknown dangers, and the self-organized order that emerges out of reproduction. Health care is not only a source of analogies, but is viscerally political. Attempts to solve social problems of health through individual initiative and agent-level change are notoriously inefficient. The greatest public health victories utilized collective intervention through the community and the restructuring of urban space in a holistic way. The reduction of tuberculosis was largely won before antibiotics were discovered due to public health campaigners’ understanding of social organization and emergent disease. The ridiculous state of American health care makes any tensions between the biological and political more acute for health care workers. Recontextualized away from disease, the issues and potential solutions to social problems have at least a parallel to the social nature of disease, its reproduction, and treatment.

This work is primarily a work of philosophy and metapolitics. Its contents spell out a general philosophical picture of the world, specifically about the lives of individuals and social systems, but particularly from the perspective of developing further tools for understanding and engaging in political struggles. Although the inquiry is philosophical in nature, the approach arises from issues in the biological sciences, history, and real problems in our lives as thinking, desiring, and intentional beings in societies of solidarity, conflict, and injustice. Though it draws on biological and complexity science, I am not a scientific researcher and this is not a work of empirical scientific research or hypotheses. The goal is to use lessons from the discussion to further our capacity for social change and thought.

Politics of Liberation

There are basic assumptions for this project that won’t be explored: a critique of existing society as unjust and unnecessarily oppressive, as well as a belief in the possibility of a fundamentally better world. This is to say that things have been different, they can be changed, and it is worth working for a different way to live. Social problems like crime, violence, war, poverty, abuse, and alienation are not eternal or inevitable, but rather are specific products of our society. For example, before modern capitalism, work was limited by the cycles of agriculture or hunting. Societies were structured on these rhythms and allocated downtime for personal and cultural uses. With the growth of capitalism, potential work time exploded. Long hours, overtime, and the consumption of life by stupefying work is not a permanent fixture of human life, but rather they are recent and avoidable symptoms of modern capitalism. Nor are they merely incidental or sorted out by a minor fix, but instead they are systematically produced by a system built to maintain wealth and power in the hands of certain minorities and out of reach of the bulk of the population. This perspective is built into the project. The questions of agency, living systems, and emergence are explored in the service of a politics of liberation.

Part of the historical shifts in our era have been driven by a loss in faith in many political traditions globally. For nearly a century the dominant leftist tendencies centered on a methodological and theoretical framework that has suffered from a significant loss of credibility worldwide. Marxism went unchallenged in its dominance in liberatory thinking from perhaps the Second World War until recently. The pillars of this thought centered on a number of variants on dialectics, historical materialism, and Marxist visions for obtaining communist society. Each of these pieces has since suffered a crisis of legitimacy. Marxism’s main competitor was a liberalism that sought to improve capitalism and expand the powers of the State in the service of an abstract conception of rights and property, while defending the central institutions of power through seeking to minimize their damage.

Prior to the Second World War anarchism was a global revolutionary movement, largely of the laboring classes, that stretched from the Americas to East Asia. In many areas outside Europe, anarchist movements obtained dominance as the leading light for generations of revolutionaries. A number of factors shifted the field for anarchist movements including the rise of the USSR and Soviet-allied movements, changed patterns of migration and assimilation, nationalism, revolutions in capitalist production in industries dominated by anarchists, and the spread of fascism and dictatorships in its strongholds in the 1920s-30s. Anarchism in most of the West (with some notable exceptions like Bulgaria and Spain for example) became a shadow of its former self and too often retreated into a more passive role as the mere moral conscience of the left when eclipsed by the Marxist-state-building project earlier in the century. Anarchism lived on however as an active practice through the Second World War especially in Korea, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and the Southern Cone of South America.[11] In Uruguay, Argentina, Chili, and Brazil anarchists retained key influences over struggles and revolutionary thinking up to the dictatorships in the 1970s. In some cases, there is continuity through to the present.[12]

As thinking has shifted away from the Marxism of the previous generation towards libertarian alternatives, gaps remain. One way to look at the approach in this text is as an anarchist framework for revolutionary thought and action once we have left dialectics, the Marxist vision of revolution, and historical materialism behind. This isn’t to say there aren’t things to learn from Marxism. In fact, the case is quite the opposite. The focus here, however, is to put forward new foundations rather than to discuss the failures of those traditions, produce more exegesis of texts, or try to renovate or explore critiques of Marxism in depth. A book critiquing interpretations of texts is much less valuable than independent arguments aimed at our own time, especially given how rare that is for these topics in spite of the popularity of libertarian thought today.

The core argument of this text is that those seeking liberation face particular challenges as agents. We are tasked with moving from minorities committed to acting against powerful forces stacked against us, while seeking to spread and propagate revolutionary ideas and actions in a society built to contain and diffuse them. To do so involves wrestling with large-scale social powers that are beyond our grasp, difficult to anticipate, and yet crucial for our actions to have an effect. A path forward can be found in adopting an analysis of our context in terms of emergence, societies as exhibiting behaviors characteristic of living systems, and a concept of power that links our agency to the world of social relationships. These elements taken together provide tools for interpreting our world and guiding our actions that may open up new possibilities.

There are four sections in this book. The first part states the case for the universality and use of philosophy, and explores broad issues around the theoretical foundations of revolutionary politics. The second section is the bulk of the work and lays out the theory of emergence, its life in the sciences, and its application to social and political thought. In the third section, those ideas are applied to power as a central aspect of our mental lives and a unique concept that bridges the world of agency and social emergence. In the fourth section, power and emergence are used to understand the possibility of revolutionary action and the problem of agency.

In the past few decades understanding of complex systems has exploded. Advances in mathematical modeling of complex systems established the foundations for modeling emergence. Computer scientists used these tools to help physicists test theories of weather, friction, and electrical networks. Biologists began describing swarms, hives, and evolution in terms of complexity and emergence.[13] Social scientists developed new concepts of the behavior of economic markets, internet communication networks, self-organization in cities, and the evolution of language norms through emergence.[14]

The growth of complexity science has led to the creation of tools to analyze societies that previously were ignored. This work is quite new and there’s much less exploration of the political implications of understanding societies as living systems than you would imagine. This is particularly true for revolutionary politics. Recently, the media has reported on scientists and think-tanks using complex adaptive systems modeling to predict riots from food prices,[15] national security threats from climate change,[16] and regional conflicts in a multi-polar world.[17] Strange results have emerged with scientists calling for revolution,[18] IT gurus proposing stateless societies, and capitalist managers questioning the need for managing workers.[19] This is not accidental. Emergence confronts us with a change in thinking from what we are used to—and one that has not yet fully played out. It is not simply a new theory, but rather sets of theories describing new phenomena. This carries with it the potential for changes in our behavior, interpretations of events, and thoughts on political reality. The framework of emergence is an attempt to give us tools to describe the world then; but more importantly it is theory with implications for transforming our situation.

What impact on our actions does emergence have? Theories surrounding collective liberation specifically hinge on relationships of individual agents to collectivities, yet theories around the individual’s world and society have been disjointed. Too often individuals get treated as gods, directly causing changes in society or society mysteriously moving along aloof from the individuals within. The Great Man theory of history popularized in the 19^th century has managed to hang on despite early damning criticisms that undermined its intellectual foundations. The theory sought to explain historical periods and events in terms of exceptional individuals who altered the course of their days, and was elaborated famously by Thomas Carlyle in his work On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History.[20] Herbert Spencer famously critiqued this view arguing that notable figures of different periods were mere productions of the whole social environment that produced them, drawing from his interpretations of Darwin.[21]

Interestingly William James, one of the pioneers of the concept of emergence, along with other pragmatist philosophers such as John Dewey, expressed a critique of both Carlyle’s and Spencer’s theories of the role of individuals in history in favor of a complex interaction between the actor and their environment. James argued that individuals are both influenced by and influence their environment in a complex interaction across the vast web of causes and reactions throughout society.[22] This starting point demonstrates a basic emergence approach to understanding what role individuals can play within social networks of immense complexity, and takes us beyond turning actors into mere puppets or superheroes who have mysterious powers. It changes the landscape as we know it through opening up the possibility of explaining both the contribution of countless individuals and the separation of society from them. It is a potentially unifying framework for people who want to change the world through their actions and understand the social forces beyond their reach.

The existing literature on emergence from the perspective of a politics of social change and critique is scanter than one might imagine. It should be said that since I am not a scholar, there are likely to be gaps in my own knowledge and research capacity to dig for sources. In fact, the bulk of this book was written before I discovered thinkers who had engaged this issue. The sources and historical references were included at the frequent requests of different readers over the years to try and situate the ideas better for readers unfamiliar with the territory. A historian or social scientist by trade could likely produce something more systematic and encompassing than I have done here (with the limitations of my abilities and restrictions due to my aims to blame). In general, the bulk of work on the social aspects of emergence have been purely academic and descriptive in nature. Contemporary sociologists seek to use new perspectives on emergence as a means to better model and explain social phenomena in their studies. One of the most famous systems theorists, Niklas Luhmann, was notoriously morally agnostic about the impact of his theories and clung to observation distanced from any practical lessons for action.

In fact, Luhmann’s ideas were an attack on the notion of agency and any kind of predictability in trying to make change. His framework was largely conservative and attempted to justify law, governance, and existing social relationships, while the theory itself called into question the ability of the State and law to cleanly impose an order on the world.[23] The questioning ends there, however, and does not investigate or propose further critiques of the State or institutionalized forms of hierarchy despite the weaknesses that Luhmann and systems theorists identified in its attempt to enforce its order. Likewise, he fails to propose alternatives—natural lines of questioning arising from the inherent weaknesses Luhmann and systems theorists demonstrate in the ability of centralized structures to impose their will directly.

Contemporary critical political thought in general has not shifted significantly from more traditional liberal and dialectic narratives towards emergence. The few theorists who uphold radical critique and emergence at the same time have tended to use it as an explanatory tool for traditional left ideologies rather than an approach in its own right. Biological theorists Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, for example, have used emergence as a way to explore dialectics. Emergence is a tool for the authors to explore political concepts and events without opening up the implications of those theories to their underlying basic frameworks and political models.[24] Dialectics, however, is fundamentally about contradiction between opposites— theses and anti-theses which oppose each other until transformed through synthesis. This has no parallel in the world of social emergence and complexity in which social causes are numerous or multi-polar and can’t be reduced to the abstract binary opposites. Thus even for radical critics of present society, emergence has provided an instrument for explanation, but has not received an in depth attempt at extracting its own unique implications for revolutionary theory, nor to assess its potential to replace prior political starting points including Luhmann’s conservative anti-humanism, liberal free agency, and Marxian dialectics.

There is then a distinct absence of proposals or debates about the potential or effect of emergence on how we do politics, or its implications for our basic views about the social world: power, the State, social change, and the role of organized individuals in mass action. This isn’t to say that emergence hasn’t played a subtler and more hidden role within thought about social change. As an undercurrent, emergentist ideas get frequent play in justifying shifts in political discourse from participatory democratic experiments to revolts.[25]

Within the anarchist tradition there remains an untapped current of emergence. Anarchist ideas and methods operate with an understanding of the world in which the decentralized order constructed by individuals in cooperation produces new powers and possibilities simultaneously harnessed and repressed by the society of the State. Anarchism, as a broad tradition spread across the globe, has adherents who have adopted many different approaches including utopian, liberal, and dialectical interpretations of anarchist thought. Still within the core of the tradition anarchist thinkers have often made use of emergence to develop their politics.

Peter Kropotkin, famed Russian evolutionary biologist and anarchist theorist, and Elisée Reclus, a radical anarchist thinker and foundational geographer, both wrote about natural phenomena in terms that today we would call ecological and complexity based. Their views of the world were complex and adaptive with emergent order produced by the interaction from the bottom up forming their biology and geography, respectively, yet leaving a mark on their anarchist thinking that was distinct from the dialectics, humanist, and liberal thought of their day.[26] Other thinkers, such as Australian anarchosyndicalist and ecologist Graham Purchase, have looked to complexity and emergence to provide critiques of the State and capital and a scientific description of how anarchist society could produce better human organization.[27] Noam Chomsky perhaps implicitly uses similar ideas in his critique of media in Manufacturing Consent. One way to read those arguments is that they provide a model in which unified propaganda is produced throughout media organizations without having overt censorship. Chomsky charts how power flows through these organizations as a complex and dynamic system producing emergent propaganda.[28]

As much as these ideas were present as an undercurrent there is a lack of explicit work to explore emergence on its own and put it at the core of a libertarian approach to social transformation. Likewise, there’s a parallel with power when the anarchist tradition innovated by making power central, distinguishing it from other revolutionary traditions of its time, and yet direct discussion of theories of power can sometimes be difficult to find.[29] This is an attempt to lay out the groundwork for such a politics, rather than to give immediate solutions. To address that lacuna, the focus here is developing bases for social transformation—drawing out the connections between agency, cognition, power, and emergence for a broad theory of a revolutionary process and action. These chapters are a stepping off in that unfinished direction.