Part 2: Emergence

What is Emergence?

Emergence is a concept originally developed in the 19^th century by philosophers looking at the problems of life and change. Today, alterations in our understanding of the living and physical world are spreading its use throughout the sciences. The social world, being a formation of living things, also exhibits emergence, and theories of emergence can help us understand otherwise mysterious social phenomena. Emergence gives us a toolbox to understand and explain complex phenomenon through familiar things from daily life like cities, bodies, and natural phenomena. Because emergence is a feature that is familiar and surrounds us, it can become a means of comprehending and better communicating liberatory critiques and proposals.

Early theorists of emergence began writing about the subject in the 19^th century. They came from the UK primarily, though some US thinkers also wrote on the subject.[51] John Stuart Mill was perhaps one of the first, and with impressive brevity and clarity set out the problem in his A System of Logic in the chapter “On the Composition of Causes.” Mill came to emergence looking at what happens when different forces combine. In many cases, causes simply add. In other situations, the addition of different causes produces totally novel qualities that are not derived from the mere addition of their parts, such as in chemical reactions in which new substances are formed or when substances are heated to the point at which they change states of matter. After exploring various examples in which the combination of chemicals or forces produces novel materials, reactions, or properties, he concludes:

As a general rule, causes in combination produce exactly the same effects as when acting singly: but that this rule, though general, is not universal: that in some instances, at some particular points in the transition from separate to united action, the laws change, and an entirely new set of effects are either added to, or take the place of, those which arise from the separate agency of the same causes: the laws of these new effects being again susceptible of composition, to an indefinite extent, like the laws which they superseded.[52]

Another early theorist of emergence was G.H. Lewes, a nineteenth-century philosopher, who tried to understand the mind and how ultimately thoughts can arise from the physical matter of the brain. He defines emergence in terms of the difference between the parts and the whole, and stresses the difficulty reducing one to the other:

Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same—their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a cooperation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference.[53]

Note the presence of two framings of emergence here that had already arisen in the discussion. There are the ways in which our minds are capable of comprehending the transformation of emergent properties from their parts, and there is the transformation itself. One way to understand the newness or novelty of emergent things (or the more than in the end being more than the sum of its parts) is to look at the thing itself and another is to look at how we come to know it.

There’s a gap between the complex systems as a whole that produce emergence and our experience of our world as organized, predictable, and discernible. In this gap, we see different levels produce different rules and activities. My thoughts are not chemicals, yet chemicals produce my thoughts. A single thought, such as thinking of a goldfish floating in a bowl, is created by the events and substance of the brain, the nerves, and the whole organism of the human being thinking the thought. Yet reducing that thought simply to relationships between sodium, potassium, and chloride in neurons, for example, (if that were possible) does not describe the thought itself. The thought has different properties than its constitutive components. There’s a transformation that occurs that produces thinking out of material and chemical components. The atomic level is distinct from that of thoughts. But where is the gap? Is it in the thinking? In the substance? What are the new things that emerge out of their parts, yet do not resemble or work like the parents that gave birth to them?

Within emergentist thought there has been a variety of positions. Some philosophers have introduced a distinction that classifies different theories as strong or weak emergence. Strong emergence involves commitments to fundamentally new things emerging out of unlike things, something from nothing in a sense. For something to be strongly emergent, it isn’t just that we have trouble understanding how the emergent thing/property/behavior arose out of its producing elements, but also that it’s impossible to reduce it to its parts. Perhaps counterintuitively they still have the power to causally affect lower levels despite being fundamentally distinct. On the other hand, weak emergence is described in terms of the models we use to understand emergent phenomena, and the nature of our ability to follow such processes.[54] Weak emergence is a question of knowledge or epistemology, and strong emergence is a question of the nature of emergent things themselves or metaphysics. Different philosophers of emergence carve out different terrain based on how they define strong versus weak emergence and whether they believe in one or both. Some are committed only to weak or strong; others argue not only for weak emergence, but also for strong emergence while connecting it to physical causes that seek to eliminate the alleged mystery.[55]

A different position argues that these two phenomena are not incompatible. It is possible for fundamentally new things to emerge from unlike components in a way that is still wholly determined by a chain of causes. The issue hinges on reducibility. Does the mind reduce to chemical interactions or not? Ultimately can we follow the path directly from chemical interactions to thoughts? Weak emergentists argue that, yes, we could; we just don’t have the cognitive ability to trace it (except perhaps by modeling artificial life that could show us such paths).[56] Strong emergentists say emphatically no; the mind is produced by chemicals, but there is a leap when the mind is created that is objectively new and irreducible.[57] A third position argues that there are different activities when looking at causes and effects and when comparing the qualities and order of things at different levels.

Corning, for instance, tries to connect emergence to broader synergistic effects of combinations of things throughout the world.[58] The synergy of combinations presents new useful elements not present in the constituting components, and this is true whether or not there are any creatures to use or understand them. The novelty is objective (that is, it exists outside our minds or capability of knowing things). Such properties are measurable and observable, and yet they are still made up of and created by more fundamental causes. The third view in one way or another makes reference to different conceptual modes between causal explanations (following chains of causes and events) and understanding novelty at different levels characterized by emergence. It involves both limits on knowledge based on our minds and fundamentally new physical properties that emerge.

Wherever one stands in the debate, its sufficient to note the limitations of our minds to follow such changes and the novelty of the properties created for the purposes of the arguments here. Because of the way that emergence happens, there is a division between reality and our experience of it.

In one sense this is obvious. We can’t see the microscopic world with our eyes. Artificial tools are necessary to experience or even model the heavens above and the worlds below. While my thoughts evolve from interactions of chemicals, it isn’t necessarily the case that we could ever trace an individual thought to particular chemical reactions. It is likely the case that causal chains are sufficiently complex that we can’t follow how it evolves in particular instances.

There’s no good way to look at the popular revolt in Hungary in 1956, for example, and explain exactly how particular individuals physically and chemically came to the decision to take up arms against the USSR. But they did so for reasons that are built out of that same physical stuff on some level. Everything emergent is made of matter. However, when you put it all together, it’s sufficiently complicated that for any one instance we can’t say exactly how it occurred (except by larger trends, general rules, models, and so on).

When I raise a glass to my lips, no scientific account yet can trace all the physical and chemical reactions to produce an account of my hand rising. More importantly, even with such a list, we wouldn’t learn very much about that act, someone raising an arm. There is therefore a division between our knowledge and the reality of living systems and events therein. This creates a limitation in our knowledge and ability to foresee how particular events may unfold both for upcoming events and our influence on them. We may never know in any exact sense what causes a particular protest, nor how our actions will affect the development or death of social changes.

Likewise, the experience of the taste of salt, the shape of its formations in the earth, the shine of its flats against the sun, and other such emergent properties of sodium chloride are all distinct in some sense from the chemical and physical forces that make it so. There are the forces themselves and then the qualities of those forces in the world. Physical things correspond to these forces and qualities, and living things as well. Reactions occur to the uses things are put to, to their phenomenal experience, and to their role within the actions of living organisms. There is a practical level of explanation here that is distinct from lower ones, and is not identical to how we explain it. The functioning at one level is different from that at another. Salt in my body is on another plane in some way from the electrons and neutrons that make it up.[59]

Emergence isn’t magic; something does not come from nothing. Nor is it random or disorganized. Emergence is systematic. Certain properties of systems produce emergent things in discreet processes. The science of emergence is to understand and model the functioning of such systems, and explain the processes and rules governing emergence. Any deeper understanding of the way that things emerge takes us into the territory of complexity—systems that exhibit very unique properties in the natural world.

The Mystery of Political Events: The Problem of Emergence

Action is at the center of social thought, particularly when viewed through an ethical or political lens. We approach the world as beings that feel, perceive, weigh, decide, and chose courses of action. Likewise, things beyond our choosing act upon us. Society is built from a multiplicity of interwoven forces, events, causes, and responses. Faced with this, we choose how to act while limited by our objective situation. In a messy world with limited possibilities, questions about how to proceed ethically and bring about the best outcomes perpetually arise.

Within the political realm, a number of cases are troubling. For instance, many movements for human liberation contribute to catastrophic disasters and, worse, end up setting back freedom and wellbeing for decades. As discussed in the preceding chapter, struggles against hierarchy can produce new hierarchies; libertarian methods can produce authoritarian structures. Many of the 20^th century’s revolutions (at certain points in their trajectories) seem to have had this character. Whole sections of the socialist movement helped mobilize Europe for the First World War and popular revolts contributed to creating the repressive world of the official Marxist-Leninist countries (Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and so on) that strangled their peoples for nearly a century (and a few still continue to do so today). Oppressive hierarchies and injustices repeatedly emerge from otherwise liberatory and non-hierarchical efforts.

Indeed, many dramatic political events appear to have come out of nowhere, even when we know they do not. Riots, revolutions, crises, and coups are clearly the product of countless actions of individuals. But when they occur, they often don’t seem that way. The singularity of historical events, their apparent uniqueness, can make the actions of individuals and groups appear strange and almost magical. This is more acute with dramatic events, but equally present in our daily lives and social existence. From the perspectives of people committed to changing society, such quandaries are even more troubling. Actions have force; they change things. Yet it is nearly impossible to trace the force of those acts in practice. History rolls along either in spite of our actions or disproportionately explodes because of them.

It is here that the structure of the most fundamental political disputes gets laid. There is a gulf between behavior on a gross social level (with associated forces, structures, powers, and entities) and the actions of agents within those systems. Our experiences and ideas about how our actions affect the world seem to depart from how political events often unfold and respond to our actions. Strangely, political thought has often been only glancing, or worse silent, on these issues.

There’s a gap that needs to be fleshed out. The world of agents is connected physically and conceptually to the world of social forces. Yet how? Where do the reasoning, problems, and interventions of people come into contact and separate from, or where are they even born within those large scale social forces that are so evident in our lives? Such a gap lies beneath political theory in its philosophical and metatheoretical groundings—the structures upon which all of our social thinking rests. This problem, connecting the worlds of agency and emergent social forces, is a political question because it speaks to the attempts of individuals and groups to find ways to alter the course of history through their actions. Looking at it another way, it is simply to explore how our actions can positively affect efforts towards a liberatory society given the immense and unpredictable powers that seem beyond our grasp and defy prediction.

How does a riot happen? Or how did the financial crisis which began at the end of the first decade of the millennium come to be? What reality is there behind the mythology of the Great Men of history? Did a small handful of armed guerrillas in the mountains really overtake Cuba? Did Hitler conquer Germany? How was Russia brought under the tyranny of the Stalinist bureaucracy? Hierarchy emerging from non-hierarchy, apparently spontaneous events, disproportionate influences of actions on the course of history, the impossibly complex ping-ponging of individuals’ actions in creating riots and revolts, and power which takes on a life of its own, these phenomena need explanations and interventions. If we were able to connect societal functioning to the world of actors systematically, a foundation could be constructed to approach these problems. In our new century such issues have become too present to not take up in light of the events of Egypt, Tunisia, Latin America, and Occupy, the disruptions in China and India, or even worker unrest in the United States. Each month the political landscape shifts, revealing slowly a changing world and unfamiliar environment for those who seek the transformation of society.

This series of problems is connected by key characteristics and relationships. The events are more than the sum of their parts. New things appear that do not share the traits of the actions, parts, and structures that produced them. It is this coming out from that will take up the course of this work and lead us through biology, power, agency, and cognition. This is the problem of emergence.

Living Systems

Emergence is a product of systems that exhibit forms of complexity. In fact, one definition of complex systems is that they are systems in which agents or elements interact in a way that produces emergence. Complexity itself, and the systems that exhibit it, would require a whole book for full exploration. Instead, we will look at what some of the notable features of complex systems are, and specifically those that contribute to our understanding of agency and events in the political world of societies. Such systems exist in a range of domains: raw physical forces, astronomy, biology, and psychological, chemical, and social systems. We find emergent behavior in the interaction of forces within subatomic particles, large scale interactions of planetary systems and galaxies; we also find emergent forces within weather like hurricanes, geologic phenomena like earthquakes, and so on. Non-living non-rational systems can produce emergent forces as real as the fury of a tornado, and out of chaos produce reliable orderly large-scale emergent events.

If we look ahead to the exploration of social emergence, the treatment of these non-living systems will be limited. Though they are no less examples of emergence and there is a great deal to learn from there, the primary task will be understanding the living systems that produce emergence. This is because living systems are most closely linked to social systems to the point that one could reasonably ask whether a distinction between living and social systems is even worthwhile. More importantly as politics agents, we have a setting off point within the living world. Our perspective and framework derive from such systems, and it is the characteristics of those systems that give us the tools to gain deeper insights into the politics of emergence.

A Living World

We inhabit a living biological world. Our bodies, environment, social world, and cities all exist and evolve either as or because of living organisms. There’s something special about the way living things work. Living organisms and systems change and develop new capabilities over time (evolution and adaptation). Through the march of time, life takes on new properties to survive and adapt to its environment. Our planet has some amazing examples of this like bacteria that developed to live within volcanoes or that survive within nuclear waste, or even the coconut palm, which developed the ability to travel across the seas with its seeds to find new shores to grow upon. Living things and systems are able to respond to and create new situations based on their environment and neighboring life. Trees shed leaves to survive the winter; people gain immunity to diseases through exposure; and streams of traffic keep moving around accidents that block their course.

Most importantly, living things are emergent. New properties emerge out of the organization of their parts (organs, cells, and units). In a basic sense, a living adapting organism is the most obvious example of emergence. Out of countless chemical/physical events and reactions, a more highly organized entity emerges—life. Life constructs larger structures though; organisms join together; they struggle, co-evolve, form ecosystems, make war, and cooperate. Life selforganizes forests, cities, and our whole planet. Living organisms are systems, but they also build larger scale systems through their actions. The world itself as we experience it is an emergent product of the interaction of countless living organisms bound together in vast networks of systems.

The connection between biology and emergence traces back to at least to Darwin, who proposed a process of natural selection in which traits were (somehow) promoted or inhibited across time, which led to adaptations to increase survival or the flourishing of a species. It’s easy to misunderstand how this works in practice. Darwin did not mean to imply that this principle applied to individuals per se. Given the complexity of biological systems, many living things may happen to survive while others more adapted to survival can die. Darwin wrote:

It may be well here to remark that with all beings there must be much fortuitous destruction, which can have little or no influence on the course of natural selection. For instance, a vast number of eggs or seeds are annually devoured, and these could be modified through natural selection only if they varied in some manner which protected them from their enemies. Yet many of these eggs or seeds would perhaps, if not destroyed, have yielded individuals better adapted to their conditions of life than any of those which happened to survive. So again a vast number of mature animals and plants, whether or not they be the best adapted to their conditions, must be annually destroyed by accidental causes, which would not be in the least degree mitigated by certain changes of structure or constitution which would in other ways be beneficial to the species.[60]

It is only when we look at broader statistical trends that the evolution of the species can be said to take place.[61] Within the lives of particular individuals, a number of other factors (being in the right time or the right place for instance) may end up determining their personal circumstances of survival, health, and proliferation. At a higher level of biologic organization and over time, patterns of emergent biological orders evolve.

From the Biological World to Emergence

To understand a living systems approach to anything social (let alone struggles and movements), we must first understand the nature and functioning of such systems. First, those things are living or have life, and second they exist in systems. A definition of life itself is a well-worn philosophical battleground. Whatever it is that makes something alive versus inanimate, living things are more than a list of their chemical facts. They are higher-level organizations of chemical components that exhibit all the things we know living things to do.[62] Defining a system is equally treacherous and would represent another detour from our road. Roughly, living systems are organized; they have things (living and non-living) in interconnected relationships; and they have properties and behavior specific to their arrangement. Apart from the philosophical and scientific jargon, living systems are organized groupings of a particular kind. In the following discussion, we’ll get a sense of the types of things that living systems do, and in the process better understand life and systems.

One of the hallmarks of our experience as humans is that our world is ordered, organized into levels. This is to say that biological and social reality isn’t flat like a plate where everything is laid out next to each other. Instead there are worlds of atoms, worlds of chemicals, worlds of cells, creatures, eco-systems, and galaxies. There is the level of the creatures and plants in an area, and then the level of the forest itself. There is our settlement, and then the mountain range we live in. The body has organs. Within organs are cells, organelles, enzymes, chemicals, and so on. Society has individuals, groups, formations, structures, etc. As time rolls on, the levels change and affect one another; new levels emerge and others crumble. The world of living systems is the world of organisms, bodies, minds, ecosystems, bioregions, and societies.

What happens at different levels is organized. For example, DNA is the hallmark of life as we know it. Biologists now have sophisticated knowledge of how DNA is transcribed and replicated, and how it produces proteins within the cells that make most of the behavior of living organisms possible. When we talk about cells, we can talk about the order of DNA, proteins, membranes, and so on. There are rules of how DNA functions in cells, how cells work, the role of the specific enzymes or proteins, and so on. These rules and behaviors are consistent, regulated, and predictable. But these are not identical universal rules that apply willy-nilly everywhere at all levels and at any time. Though my arm runs on the power of DNA, we have different concepts and order for my arm than for one cell in my arm. We could look at DNA forever, but it would not tell you about why dancers move the way they do. Dance is made possible by the activity of DNA, yet DNA’s organization and that of dancing are different. The rules in each domain are distinct.

A Single Spark Can Light a Prairie Fire

Higher levels are generated by lower levels, and yet the path is not evident. This is because the individual pieces are hard to separate, and because of the complexity of interactions among the pieces. How do all the cells in the arm of a dancer add up to a graceful or clumsy maneuver? Feedback is an integral concept to understanding living systems. Things don’t happen in isolation in bodies, ecosystems, societies, or worlds. They occur in the context of infinite other acting entities that are all responding to the changes around them.

For example, for every chemical reaction in each individual cell, nearly every other cell responds in one way or another through hormones, intercellular signaling, consumption and generation of energy, and so on. Take oxygen. Cells use oxygen in their basic functioning. Cells use up oxygen in making energy, and produce carbon dioxide as a byproduct. Oxygen is breathed in; carbon dioxide is breathed out. Oxygen and carbon dioxide can build up in the bloodstream of animals in various proportions. As each cell is consuming and producing oxygen and carbon dioxide, there is a balance in the blood. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood causes a chain of reactions telling the cells to slow down, use less oxygen, and produce less carbon dioxide. With each change in direction, every other cell in the body is affected in one way or another, though obviously some more than others. The actions of each cell resonates with all others in essence. It is like a web in which pulling one strand pulls on every other strand.

For even the simplest event like lifting a can with my hand, the sheer number of chemical reactions and atomic movements, as well as all the physical forces involved, are overwhelming. Imagine that I could name every chemical and every event in all the cells of my arm (which would be in effect infeasible because of the sheer number of cells, reactions, complexity, and so on). It would be impossible in practice to trace exactly how my arm moved. A full explanation of a single movement would involve all the reactions and occurrences in cells and components that play a role. Yet, if all cells are being inherently affected by each other, responding to each other, and sending signals to one another, then in every event, such as a motion, countless cells and causes would be involved. Looking to the oxygen example, we see that in living systems causes are tied together. Individual units are inherently bound up to the goings on of all the other units linked to them in systems. All their actions are in feedback with one another. The contribution of individuals must be described in relation to others because all causes are inherently linked. They refer to one another to the point that their actions are mutually referential.

Think about a crowd in a frenzy, perhaps if there’s a fire in a building. If we want to trace the paths of all individuals trying to escape, we can simply look at how they move (their intentions, paths, abilities, and so on). As each person moves (causes motion), every other person in the crowd reacts to a degree and moves as well, though to greater or lesser degrees based on their distances to one and another, the chairs and exits in their way, and so on). That movement influences everyone else around: if someone turns in front of me my path is blocked and I move right, thereby altering the course of those behind and to the right of me, and so on. This is feedback—the echoing, amplification, and mutual resonance of causes in a complex system. One special hallmark of living systems then is that the behavior of any individual or component cannot easily be understood to act without looking to a greater system of causes. Though this seems intuitive in a sense, it goes against our experience of the world. As individuals in crowds, we often do not perceive our own path as inherently intertwined with that of the crowd as a system. We perceive it as arising from our will, and perhaps feel frustrated by people who stand in our way.

The Identity of Individuals

Looking at the complex web of causes behind my arm moving raises additional problems. What causes are my own causes that make my arm move? Is it merely my will or my muscles, or does it include the gases and forces that my arm moves through, or the compounds that fuel its movement? We cannot only look at people to understand their actions, but rather we also need to see the complete environment in which actions take place. In the world of individuals and causes, separating the agent out is, in practice, difficult. This is because biological entities are historical, and have both an individual developmental story and a collective one connected to countless other life forms.[63]

That history is not monodirectional. The story of each living thing is constantly itself contributing to the vast changes swirling around us at all time, and being redefined by all the others it is in constant connection with, and which indeed make up its being despite being in some sense separate. There are all the living organisms inside me, on my skin, and in the air, the energy around me, the forces of physics, the energy my body creates and absorbs, and so on. Bacteria live on my skin, in my gut, and throughout my body. Without them I could not survive, even while we normally would not include them as a part of ourselves. When the food I eat is digested and sustains me—we tend to think that we do it. What about the myriad of organisms involved? Is the bacteria part of me? Is it separate? In what sense is the digestion mine? Two things are true: there is something that is me that is digesting, and there is a whole world of causes and effects apart from me occurring. In living systems those relationships are nearly impossible to pull apart.

Take the example of mitochondria, the energy factory of cells. Mitochondria exist within cells and help them do what they need to do. Mitochondria have distinct DNA from the rest of your cells (i.e. nuclear DNA, what most people mean by saying DNA). The striking resemblance of mitochondria (in terms of their DNA and organization) to bacteria led scientists to hypothesize that they are an adaptation of internalized bacteria (to simplify things) that was beneficial along the way. At some stage in evolution, bacteria likely made it inside the cell and co-evolved to play a functional role within the cell. We now consider mitochondria to be a part of us, a component of our cells.

The divisions between our environment, things alongside us, things in cohabitation with us, and parts of us are much blurrier than we believe. Rather than discovering clear lines of what is internal versus external, part of us versus environmental, in reality we are finding changing and adapting interactions between individual components and environment. The degree of interaction is so vast and complex that distinguishing among the contributions of individual components and their effects, as well as borders between elements that are neither fixed nor easily identifiable, becomes for practical purposes impossible. That is, not only does complexity make it difficult to trace the path of causation between lower and higher levels in living systems (like our bodies), but also the divisions between the components themselves are often unclear.

Disproportionate Effect

This state of feedback is not only characterized by mutual influences, but also by dramatic causes. Normally, when we combine things, you can say that we add them. Simplifying for the purpose of argument, if I use 5 lbs. of strength, I could push a 1-lb. object a given distance. If I use 10 lbs. of strength, I could push the same object double the distance. The relationship between the increase of force I use produces a proportional increase in effect; the distance is increased by the same measure. In emergence, it doesn’t work like that.[64]

A popular metaphor for this is a butterfly flapping its wings in South America, causing a tsunami in Japan. The butterfly’s wings do this because they help initiate a series of events that have much greater power than itself. The example of the butterfly is actually a distortion because it abstracts the way in which the butterfly is merely a single link in a chain. The butterfly flaps its wings and flies upon the winds caused by temperatures, lakes, oceans, and currents. Other wings, machinery, factories, mountains, and so on shape the air that moves the butterfly. In turn the butterfly has an effect upon the air it flies upon. The air is systematically connected to waters, such as seas, which respond to temperature, force, and shifts in the airs above. Butterflies flying cannot be extracted from all the forces of nature, living things, and interactions of the systems they exist in. In this way then in theory the flapping of the butterfly’s wings could initiate a series of events that cause a tsunami.

Taking another example, think of someone applying force on a bicycle. Weather is a complex system that can produce unpredictable events like large gusts. In the broader system including the environment and all the forces moving a cyclist, a random rapid gust can make the cyclist’s application of force to the pedals have a disproportionate effect by changing the action’s relationship to motion through air. This is an extreme example, but it illustrates the ways in which in such systems causes can be amplified dramatically, and even take on new characteristics in light of the strength of response.

Like the disproportionate power of the butterfly’s wings flapping, complex (living) systems exhibit what can be called nonlinear causation. It’s nonlinear because what happens isn’t a straight line of actions with equal and proportional response like dominos falling in a row, but instead even small causes like butterfly wings can have disproportionate power. Social disruptions are the perfect example of this, as simple events can set off a rapid and dramatic chain of events. For example, in 2011 when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunisia, set himself on fire, it contributed to subsequent protests in ways that went well beyond the act itself. The symbol of the vendor’s suffering, his suicide, mobilized other forces in a disproportionate way, spreading the fires of resistance well beyond the single act of defiance. In a system in which parts are systemically interrelated, causes don’t occur in isolation, but instead ricochet and amplify each other. This isn’t to say that the suicide caused the protests throughout Tunisia. Instead, its effect was disproportionate because of its occurrence within a complex system that overall produced an emergent event, the ruptures of 2011. The focus of media on the event itself in some ways shows how complex systems work since it is the salience of the act of protest that is so important to us and not the conditions that allowed the act to have whatever resonance it may have had.

Both feedback and nonlinear causation make single acts difficult to trace. In a hurricane it would be hard to tell what caused any individual object flying through the air to take flight. If I had not pushed the weight, would it have spontaneously taken to flight anyway? What interactions with other flying objects, currents, reflection of winds off buildings, and so on are relevant? This disconnect occurs between the different levels of organization. We can’t follow the chain from chemicals to motion, or from individuals to a riot. It requires a different level of explanation, which our minds at least cannot trace from lists of chemical facts. There is a shift from one level of explanation to the other that escapes our way of thinking. The complexity and interconnectedness of causes makes analyzing them difficult in such systems.

Levels and Properties

These systems then have forms of interconnectedness in which the pieces are mutually defined, produce effects in a broad system of interrelated causes, and do so in ways that make them challenging to parse for our minds. Within this complex web of relationships there are organized levels like we discussed. There are chemicals, cellular components, cells, organs, and bodies. Importantly, the levels don’t merely differ by scale. Cells don’t look like bodies and bodies don’t look like cells (except when you go back down to the level of cells). At different levels, new elements emerge. Emergence is made possible by the different levels of organization by complex systems. Take a very simple example, salt. When sodium and chlorine combine, they create a familiar compound: salt. Salt has properties that neither sodium nor chlorine has—the tastes of salt, its formation of crystals, and so on. Sodium is a silvery-white very reactive explosive metal. Chlorine is a pale yellow gas. Salt is a stable, innocuous compound unlike its dangerous parents, sodium and chloride.

The new properties of salt are caused by the atomic properties of its components (sodium and chlorine). Yet the properties of the new thing are not described by just putting them together. The effect, salt, is more than the sum of its parts. Whatever way we look at it, the metallic and gaseous properties of sodium and chlorine don’t add up to salty properties. However the combination occurs, it ends up producing something fundamentally different. Thus with emergence there are new things that emerge from lower levels, and the properties that emerge are more than simply the sum of the properties of their lower level components.[65]

Emergence, then, is a theory of organization and existence across time. Chemicals interacting over time create compounds. Cells replicating and dividing grow until a baby is created (with a lot of work along the way). Out of the chaos of heat and pressure over a time period, a highly ordered diamond forms from carbon. Living systems are merely a more particular case of these, as are social systems within living systems. Representative government evolves alongside emergent forces of wealth and power that interact to try and wrest more and more control over the forces of the State from other powers and the citizenry. In complex adaptive systems, there are ordered or organized interrelationships among components in the whole that act together to produce new events, structures, or properties.

Stability and Disruption

This world is not simply chaos, however. Systemic order also exists. New things do not emerge without organization. New things emerging and causing transformations in massively complex chains may seem mysterious. This is actually counterintuitive since it doesn’t feel that way. We walk on the ground and eat food regularly because of the stability of our world, not because of its chaos. We can rely upon the sun rising, rivers flowing to the seas, and people behaving largely in a regular fashion. Every day the efforts of billions of people deliver food, medicine, energy, and goods to people all over the world with remarkable regularity. The order itself is emergent, the product of countless interactions of pieces in a systemic whole.

Living systems in general (though not only living systems) are selforganizing. Self-organization means that they are able to respond as a system with ordered internal behavior. Consider body temperature in mammals. The environmental temperature fluctuates, but the self-organizing system of the mammalian body maintains a stable body temperature throughout. The body emergently produces consistency through the interaction of all the heat-bearing and heat-shedding activities of the cells, ingestion of compounds, sweating, cool/heat-seeking behavior, and so on. Living systems then can respond in an ordered fashion to neighboring causes (such as when our bodies respond to infections), and over time tend to evolve. On a short timescale, they adapt. As we reproduce, as all living systems do, the offspring respond to their environment and traits are promoted or inhibited in an ongoing cycle of reproduction over time. On a longer timescale, they evolve. Species develop abilities that allow them to thrive in their environment and pass on mutations to their offspring.

Within the organization of these systems, there are varying degrees of stability. Just as laws operate at different levels (like DNA behaving predictably), stability too emerges in systems. Ecosystems are a vivid example of this. Out of the chaos of the innumerable parts of the forest, a relatively stable order emerges in which all the creatures and plants are connected and evolve alongside one another. A forest often can be a forest for thousands of years without gross disruptions, absorbing damage from even landslides, volcanoes, or hurricanes.

Still, it would be a mistake to see equilibrium as timeless because our world is alive; equilibriums occur, grow, change, and also break down; mass extinctions occur; forests die; seas grow and retreat; asteroids destroy regions; new forms of life evolve that colonize novel areas. In society, regimes fall; empires last a thousand years before collapsing; slavery is destroyed and resurrected; revolutions lay waste to everything people thought about governments and economies. Living systems grow, stabilize, die, and give birth to new offspring, ecosystems, and orders.

A body when ill begins to lose its order. If bacteria can spread throughout the body, the body loses its ability to self-regulate, disease may set in, and the results are potentially fatal. Chemicals run wild opening veins, temperatures increase, organs become damaged through loss of blood, and toxins from bacteria corrode living tissue. These systems then have equilibrium, which can vary. When stability or equilibrium decreases, disorder increases and space emerges for new orders to reproduce and spread.

Social Emergence

The social world is a world of emergence. Two people exchanging crops from their back yards exhibit a social relationship of exchange. Similar exchanges on a global scale create emergent forces of markets whose effects are grossly distinct from simple one-to-one exchanges of surpluses among neighbors. Individuals owning property create forces within society of vested interests that create laws, attack other forces, anticipate challengers, and act nearly as organisms within a field of other emergent organisms. The interactions of individuals create such forces, but the forces themselves exhibit behavior distinct from individuals.

Emergence then is a potential tool for understanding how societies and social organizations develop, unfold, and change. In a cell, all the enzymes, DNA, RNA, organelles, and so on systematically interact to make things happen. You can’t understand anything that happens in a cell except in reference to the totality of causes, or at least a rather complicated chain of chemicals and structures. Society is the same. Let’s take a series of examples.

Earlier we discussed the path of people fleeing a fire. Traffic is a ready phenomenon that shows emergence in societies. From pedestrian traffic to the great flows of the world’s cities, the movement of people within complex adaptive transit systems exhibit the behavior of living systems. Traffic jams can be disproportionately caused by small actions by one or two individuals, such as in a crash. Slow traffic causes large shifts in the system, rerouting many people, changing the behavior of drivers, and unfurling countless events in the lives of those traveling and awaiting those traveling across cities.

Another obvious case is the growth and change of cities themselves. Far

from growing linearly bit-by-bit, cities evolve in an emergent fashion. Urban decay of neighborhoods or the boom of fashionable areas emerge out of innumerable changes happening in the homes, businesses, and streets of their areas. Those changes themselves are intimately connected to larger shifts in society, which are affected by the evolution of the neighborhoods and their residents. Neighborhoods can expand and decay explosively, though gradual change is more common.

People act and develop in ways that aren’t simply the sum of perspectives or actions of the individuals involved. A common example of this is mob mentality, when crowds behave differently from how people normally would on their own in some sense. When combined into social groups, individuals become generators of emergent powers and behaviors that do not directly reflect their routine mental states or even actions. A mob is simply a different kind of entity than the people who are swept up into it, though obviously the people create the mob. The law reflects these different perspectives as well. There are different crimes and sentences for rioting, the acts of property destruction or violence associated with it, and inciting to riot. This is part of an attempt to segregate components of the emergent force that comes into motion, its causes, and manners of participation.

All of human life in societies exhibit emergence. The most mundane facts and changes can be viewed in a new light once we grasp the influence of living systems and their emergence within our lives. Though this is clear with the mundane, it’s more profound when we look at the political world. Social organizations of power, and events contesting that power, also lie within the realm of emergence.

Though often people fixate on the power of the media, we see examples of emergent phenomena with governments, elections, and “popular support.” Consider the evolution of the victor in elections. The end results of votes can differ from opinion polling, visible activity in the streets, and even established methods of advertising, funding, and hype. This isn’t only because governments and capitalists attempt to socially engineer legitimacy and support, but also because of the ping-ponging of people’s views, actions, and social groups. Whether or not people think a candidate is winning or not influences their likelihood to show their support and mobilize. The sense of a candidate’s likely victory is complexly produced, not from a single organ like the media, but rather from a multiplicity of factors throughout society. This is infamously fickle, including factors such as weather on voting day, positioning within the ballot, physical appearances, and so on.

Popular opinion has an emergent character that can resist even massive attempts to socially engineer the public’s thinking. Politicians have repeatedly attacked social security and utilized corporate media to try to assault the vast popularity for the program. Despite such attempts, popular opinion continues to strongly support maintaining and even expanding social security, and that support alone is sufficient to stave off further attacks. This is true even without any major public force protecting or advocating for social security (perhaps until recently). Institutional liberal organizations in the past were content to accept market reforms alongside a trimmed-down social safety net, something that remains unpopular, leaving public opinion without an advocate.[66] It is the emergent force of popular will here that poses a threat to established power, and that will is created not only through the organs of ruling powers (media, schools, think-tanks, organizations, and so on), but also through the complex interaction of individuals throughout society. In this case, power was unable to impose its will on a system that continues to reproduce emergent counter-powers against austerity of that kind.

Today social scientists have begun exploring the impact of emergence in their fields.[67] Complex systems and emergence present narratives of social structure and behavior that link individual psychology and biology, while contributing explanations of how social structure functions in line with more basic natural phenomena. Viewing society and social structures through the prism of living systems and emergence also raises questions for those who seek social liberation. These concepts reflect the divisions in both our experience of the world (as thinking agents trying to respond from our own perspective to others and forces greater than ourselves) and the emergent orders that govern everything that are beyond any of us. If things like states, movements, institutions, rights, freedoms, work, and slavery are emergent, then what questions does it raise about how things came to be the way they are? What other ways of being are possible?

Most importantly, how could we change what shouldn’t be?

Revolutionaries and Emergence: Prelude to a Politics

Emergence is not only a tool of knowledge, but also one of action. The specific properties of living systems have implications suggestive of directions for struggle and show the limits of others. An understanding of social systems and emergence can unify seemingly disparate social categories. It gives us a foundation for critical thought and practice when applied to the social world.

Yet despite years of work by scientists and philosophers, the application of this work to a critical politics is rare. Bringing an emergence perspective to social struggles is work that must be carried out in the coming years. The connection of large-scale political questions like the nature of the State, capitalism, and hierarchical oppression are clear examples of places where emergence can inform our understanding and potentially transform our practices. What is the essence of the State? How does it reproduce itself? How can the State be overcome?

We have a general framework for understanding emergence and a direction to approaching social problems. The task of working through the specific problems is up to those of us active in taking up emergence. Addressing things like the State, capitalism, patriarchy, and so on is beyond the scope of this text and in some ways would distract from laying out emergence as a means to take a variety of positions on those issues—emergence as a metapolitical tool.

Interestingly, anarchist thought had from its outset deep emergentist currents within. This isn’t to say that other theories were not present; some adopted dialectical or other alternatives of their day, but anarchism was unique among modern social movements for developing independent ideas about emergence in an environment in which such ideas were both uncommon and largely unexplored. Explicit discussion of emergence in the anarchist literature is uncommon, but the general approach is clear enough if you look throughout the tradition—something that should be celebrated and highlighted.

Two of the heavyweights of libertarian thought came to anarchism in part due to their scientific research. Peter Kropotkin became an anarchist partly due to his work as an evolutionary biologist. He is widely recognized for his foundational work on the role of cooperation and mutual aid in evolution.[68] Kropotkin’s ideas about emergence are clearest in his biological writings and within his political work in which he speaks of nature and evolution. There is a clear connection between those ideas and his political proposals, but it is one that has not been made explicit frequently. Graham Purchase did so and demonstrates Kropotkin’s anticipation of emergence and complexity theory in his PhD thesis about Kropotkin’s thought.[69]

Elisée Reclus, a contemporary of Kropotkin, veteran of the Paris Commune, and militant anarchist, is famed as one of the founders of modern geography. Reclus describes in his writings on the natural world how order emerges from complex interaction between innumerable elements, and ties this to how order can emerge from the base up in anarchist society and the struggle against the State and capitalism. In his chapter, “The Distribution of Human Population,” from Man and the Earth, he presents a view of human societies as coevolving with their environment and producing emergent organisms out of their activity and adaptation. His concept of geography, surely one of the earliest such approaches in modern European traditions, is on display when he argues that “(e)very new city immediately constitutes, by its configuration of dwellings, a collective organism. Each cell seeks to develop in perfect health, as is necessary for the health of the whole. History demonstrates that sickness is no respecter of persons; the palace is in danger when the plague rages through the slums.”’[70] His geography is embedded with a picture of human (and ecological) life viewed through the prism of living systems (microcosms) that interact to form emergent structures with their own separate properties.

The earliest groupings are microcosmic, and then they become more and more extended and complex over time, to the degree that an ideal arises and becomes more difficult to achieve. Each of these small societies constitutes by nature an independent and self-sufficient organism. However, none of them are completely closed, except for those that are isolated on islands, peninsulas, or in mountain cirques whose access has been cut off. As groups of men encounter one and another, direct and indirect relations arise. In this way, following internal changes and external events, each swarm ends its particular, individual evolution and joins willingly or forcibly with another body politic so that both are integrated into a superior organization with a new course of life and of progress before it.[71]

It was not only the scientists among the anarchists who came to emergence. Pierre Proudhon, the French socialist and member of the First International Workingmen’s Association, was an important early thinker of the anarchist movement. He influenced key figures, such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Reclus, though he held important differences with the collectivist and communist forms of anarchism that developed thereafter by preferring cooperatives and a people’s bank in what he called mutualism. Laying out his theory of power, Proudhon argued that there are specifically collective forms of power that are not reducible to individuals who constitute them.

It is not only individuals that are endowed with force; collectivities also have theirs. To speak here only of human collectivities, let us suppose that the individuals, in such numbers as one might wish, in whatever manner and to whatever end, group their forces: the resultant of these agglomerated forces, which must not be confused with their sum, constitutes the force or power of the group… Collective force being a fact as positive as individual force, the first perfectly distinct from the second, collective beings are as much realities as individual ones.[72]

This argument may seem out of place or extraneous except that Proudhon then immediately uses the concept of emergent powers to construct his critique of the State, a topic we will return to. Likewise, he understood that the issue of our knowledge of emergence was a key factor in disguising the functioning of social systems. “Social power, inaccessible to the senses in spite of its reality, seemed to the first men an emanation of the divine Being, for this reason the worthy object of their religion… Even today, the economists have barely identified the collective force.”[73] Nor did he believe that emergence was produced in a unidirectional manner of individuals creating higher-level organization, as can be seen when he argued that “(t)hrough the grouping of individual forces, and through the relation of the groups, the whole nation forms one body: it is a real being, of a higher order, whose movement implicates the existence and fortune of everyone. The individual is immersed in society; he emerges from this great power, from which he would separate only to fall into nothingness.”[74] Here the individual is seen both as a product of society and an element producing the society shaping her at the same time. Proudhon clearly elaborates the novel aspects of emergent social forms, and connects them to the individual with all the political implications of the view at the center of his thinking around the State and even his economic ideas. It’s safe to say that this aspect of his contribution is not well recognized, and though his ideas on emergence are not fully developed, he is one of the few thinkers both to utilize that framework and to connect it to his critique of capitalism and the potential of liberatory society.

Anarchist thinking around emergence was not limited to describing nature, but rather it was also integral to an understanding of power and the capacity of groups for their own liberation. Rudolph Rocker, the German union organizer and theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, elaborates an emergence approach to how radicals attempt to sort out history and courses of action. Criticizing the Marxian view of history as determined purely by economic forces, he wrote:

There is scarcely an historical event to whose shaping economic causes have not contributed, but economic forces are not the only motive powers which have set everything else in motion. All social phenomena are the result of a series of various causes, in most cases so inwardly related that it is quite impossible clearly to separate one from the other. We are always dealing with the interplay of various causes which, as a rule, can be clearly recognized but cannot be calculated according to scientific methods.[75]

More recently, Graham Purchase developed a unique ecological critique based on complexity and chaos theory. He posits a natural order that is stifled when the emergent order of society is constrained through centralized of dominating minorities. Starting in the 1980s, he connected the potential for climate crisis to capitalism and the State via emergent disequilibriums that might problematize human societies.[76] One could object to the narrative of naturalness as being arbitrarily defined. Where would the line be drawn exactly in terms of nature on different forms of social organization? Still, exchanging naturalness for values is an obvious way to see the utility of Purchase’s writings. There are better and worse ways to organize societies based on the goals the author argues for, such as ecological health, solidarity, and human flourishing; and those can be connected to an understanding of the natural phenomena of emergence that could either encourage or inhibit achieving those goals.

Though it would be a longer argument this is at least part of what is going on with Murray Bookchin’s social ecology.[77] Part of the break from Marxism by Bookchin was a shift towards the more methodologically open process Rocker speaks of and coming to view struggles and the new society in terms of emergent relationships between people and their environment. Like Purchase, Bookchin uses ideas about living systems and complexity in both his critiques and proposals, without necessarily elaborating a theory of emergence.

There are three aspects to the role of (perhaps proto-) emergence theories within anarchism: an understanding of the natural world as exhibiting emergence out of complex systems, using that functioning to demonstrate weaknesses in the dominant power system, and proposals for social change and future society drawn from emergence. In Reclus and Kropotkin, these are implicit threads that run throughout their thought. Proudhon directly addresses the phenomenon and uses it to critique the State and capitalism. Purchase raises the potentials of emergence for anarchist thought, including ecology and our relationship with the natural world, though without elaborating a theory of emergence or agency. These developments are particularly remarkable given that the general thrust of European thinking from the 1600s until the present can be classified essentially as reductionism.[78] Such science was reductive in so far as scientists and thinkers broke up their subjects of study into analyzable parts and sought to reconstruct them piece by piece. This method led to the emergence of science as we know it, and only hundreds of years later did the limitations of such approaches become clear.

More recently some radical thinkers have taken up emergence directly and drawn out lessons. Immanuel Wallerstein, Dante Arrighi, and other World Systems theorists should be mentioned. Wallerstein in particular was influenced by complexity theory and his analysis of capitalism and predictions for how the system evolves clearly use his interpretation of that framework in a way that is productive and is useful for revolutionaries.[79] While critical of liberal reform and the social democratic tradition Wallerstein has been often agnostic on other possibilities or at times bordering on similar positions he critiques. His positive proposals then have limited applicability for those who seek a different route to a society beyond the State and capital. Still, for such theorists it is clear that they’ve moved beyond the methods, vocabulary, and theories of the left they grew out of and are producing interesting novel analyzes that are relevant and challenging.

A few scattered articles have explored more overtly revolutionary implications of emergence and complexity in preliminary ways. Nicole Pepperell’s dissertation attempts to cash out a Marxist approach to capitalism via emergence. Pepperell seeks to make dialectics compatible with emergence, and to recast concepts of Marxist political economy into the language of emergence. If we set aside whether polar dialectics are compatible with the multidimensional world of emergence, we will see that this is an important attempt to wrestle with our changed understanding and struggles with large scale forces like capitalism from a critical perspective.[80] Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins explore emergence in depth as biologists. However, their aim is not to elaborate a framework from an emergence perspective, but rather to explore biology through the lens of Marxian dialectics.[81] They do however draw interesting conclusions for social change out of these issues.

Interest, unfortunately, in emergence has been largely academic, and it’s found much more popularity as a tool for metaphors about existing theories than in something worth taking seriously on its own. Specifically, there has been a failure to thoroughly consider the implications for practice of viewing social struggle and societies via emergence. Previously I’ve tried to introduce emergence in the course of analyzes of post-capitalist economics, workplace organizing, and political organization within history.[82] Beyond limited attempts like these, the field remains wide open.

Emergent Potentials and Limits: Applied Knowledge and Nature

Emergence and living systems teach us two kinds of lessons that help us struggle: lessons about what we know and how we know it, and lessons about the nature and qualities of the social world. The most intuitive and obvious outcome of these ideas are as limits of what we can know, understand, and do. As aweinspiring as emergence is, it makes clear the limits of our minds and capacities. Our abilities to predict, control, and interpret living systems are limited by both our own capacity to follow them and by the sheer force of dominant powers within. On the streets of New York City, the patterns and undulations of the crowd are impossible to see. We only get a sense of it in glimpses. From the trees, the shape and evolution of the forest is obscured. Or take the example of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose suicide served as inspiration for many in 2011. As individuals, our ability to register events like this and make predictions is quite limited. Other such suicides have occurred throughout history without the same effect. Similar causes, based on their context, have dissimilar results. From the level of agents where we stand, we are unable to pull ourselves out of our own situation to the higher-level of organization, society, and track the events of our lives towards larger emergent ones. This is a hard limit based on the structure of society and the limitations of our minds.

While it may seem intuitive, in fact it goes against a large portion of liberatory thinking and tradition. Adoption of different approaches as political agents will not elevate us above the system we reside in nor the emergent forces that are beyond our immediate control. Had we been participants in the crowd in Tunisia, we would have had no way of knowing that such an event would have the effect it did. Neither could we anticipate the effect of the struggles that occurred surrounding Bouazizi’s suicide. Our position within the tumult of actions places us in a poor vantage point to the stage upon which social forces act out in history. We do gain insight about emergent events, but only when we switch frames to that higher-level of analysis, and neither translate directly into each other. Each level has its own domain, logic, practice, and analysis.

Likewise, within levels, complexity exceeds our capacity to follow the movement of social forces. It is logical that we would be unable, say, to trace the actions and causality of each person in a crowd that comes to take part in a riot.

The riot is made up of all the myriad thoughts, beliefs, desires, physicality between individuals, motions, and experiences of all the participants. Each motion, action, and response in combination yields uncountable interactions each defining each other in a dizzying array of reactions. Though it’s readily understandable why it’s difficult to think that way, we regularly attempt to do this anyway. Much of political thinking is directed towards applying the logic of individuals to these group situations, something emergence should make us suspicious of.

During the Arab Spring many activists and some in the media sought to attribute the protests to the role of social media. In Tunisia the suicide of Bouazizi was cited as the cause of the disruptions. Obama’s messages of hope and change in 2008 are argued to have caused youth, blacks, and Latinos to vote in record numbers. Surely all these things played roles in the events analyzed. Likely these analyzes seek to capture what is different about these situations from others when similar events did not take place. Yet they share an attempt to isolate the interaction of individuals with their respective factors (actions of Bouazizi, content of Obama’s message, social media in the Arab Spring) with the overall event.

In fact, the causality is much more complex than that. Similar to explaining a riot, what makes people vote is complicated. It may be useful to isolate single elements to look at them, but that’s not how those decisions are made. Even when we’re not in physical proximity to each other, such as in riots, crowds, traffic, and so on, our political decisions are made through constant dialogue among ourselves on a worldwide scale (though obviously how worldwide and to what extent depends on the individual event, too). The decision to escalate protests, enter into the electoral world, or modify my relationship to those movements comes not in isolation, but instead within a total framework of the world political environment, the forces around me, and the decisions of people I know, my own history, etc.

Both levels of organization and complexity can thus change the way we look at political events, but emergence itself also makes its own contribution. Consider the newness of emergence. With emergence, things that are not contained (however we understand this) in their parts come into existence. Neither study of its parts nor the thing itself will tell us the complete story of the emergent thing. As we said before, no list of chemical reactions could tell us about the life of a cell. Likewise, with political entities we are similarly limited. Take the State. If we look at the institutions, personalities, and functions of the State in society, we will fail to understand the way in which the State is created through the relationships of individuals throughout society. Yet looking only at those interactions will not make visible to us the overarching force of the State in society. The State is more than the sum of the interactions of individuals that create its reality. It is an emergent force beyond the level of individuals, though constituted by them. The State has properties that the individuals do not, even though the individuals create it. This isn’t to say analysis is impossible or unimportant; quite the opposite is true. As political agents, the complexity of living systems limits our predictive and anticipatory power. Yet there are other tools available that let us address complexity, levels, and emergence.

Today’s complexity science in practice bears this out. Unbound by prior radical thinkers’ methodologies, today’s scientists use artificial modeling of complex systems to make projections. Researchers of the dominant ruling forces (economists, political scientists, sociologists, biologists, military planners, law enforcement, and so on) look to large-scale modeling to help guide their attempts to drive society. In 2013 complexity researchers used emergence theory to predict worldwide disruptions surrounding food, which made international news and exposed a wider trend of military and government researchers attempting to outpace explosive protest movements and maintain social control.[83] The prevalence of such models is becoming deeper, touching everything from election campaigning, the National Weather Service, military models of artificial life in warfare, and law enforcement’s attempts to use passive technology to track potential radicals.

This is the burgeoning field of artificial life, or more mundanely simply modeling. Models exist, but as of yet they are very broad. Still, reflect on the fact that it is through modeling the system as a whole that the path of hurricanes and famines, spread of disease, and so on may be tracked rather than just contemplated by thinkers creating lists of historical events and trends. Likewise, this departs from the traditional sociology of individual researchers trying to pinpoint trends using their reflection in combination with citing studies, and extrapolating an order in a linear manner. Artificial life and modeling integrates the lessons of emergence through its centering on levels and the special behavior of living systems.

This isn’t to say that individual analyzes of sociologists, philosophers, or political thinkers are irrelevant. Rather it’s to delineate how different types of analyzes put us into different relations with different points of the system. Models abstract features to make them manageable. They represent reality so we can play with it and get results that approximate reality, more or less. They reflect reality then, but they are not reality. Likewise, the role of the political thinker isolates other features of society, crafting a narrative and arguing for threads. Both reflect reality and have their own role. Looking at the difference between those two modes of analysis illuminates emergence. The multiplicity of perspectives characteristic of emergence produces those different paths to discovery. Living systems create different channels we can explore, and each channel contains truths and projects singular to its own domain. Emergence shows us the limitations of the nature of our inquiries at least in attempting to grasp all social phenomena from the comforts of the armchairs of political strategists. Modeling can show us the emergent behavior of different elements of systems at certain levels, but it is limited by its variables, perception, and level of analysis. The same is true with individual analyzes, statistical regressions, or experiments in action.

The uptake of all this is not only limits, but also suggested directions for action. First, emergence allows us to understand specific failures and avoid them, showing more promising paths. For example, levels of organization and causality demonstrate why attempts to control individuals and society on a broad level fail. At work, micromanaging is a good example of how trying to impose upper-level plans directly on groups actually breaks down efficient production (except when the workers disregard managerial discipline). Bosses micromanaging disrupts the emergent workflow through their attempts to insert concerns from the managerial level directly on the plane of the employes carrying out the work.

A traditional method of striking called work-to-rule uses exactly this tension. Working-to-rule involves following all the formal rules and standards management creates, but which are essentially never followed precisely because to do so would be too inefficient. Before mail sorting and processing was mechanized, in theory workers were required to weigh all letters to ensure proper postage was paid. Workers in the Austrian postal service typically did not weigh letters that were clearly underweight, thereby obeying the rules in spirit but modifying them to ensure workflow. During conflict with management, they began weighing each piece of mail, which tied up deliveries significantly. Workers thereby effectively rebelled against management through strict obedience.[84] This manipulates management’s weakness in organizing the workplace from above.

It is successful because when workers actually follow all of management’s rules, work stops. This is due to the fact that the rules created by managerial hierarchies do not reflect the reality of daily work life. The bureaucracy of management is an emergent product of the company separate from the workforce. The rules they create are often contradictory, inefficient, and could not function if they were applied fully. Workers know this and selectively ignore them without ever spelling out in paper or deciding explicitly which rules they follow. Work-to-rule shatters this emergent order by implementing the artificial regime of management, grinding work to a halt by following the rules that cannot be applied at that level.

There is a subtle genius here. One on hand, it means that the rules and order of which management conceives aren’t really followed, or at least that workers selectively and intuitively follow rules in a way that allows work to continue. This is done intuitively— workers do not generally sit down together and decide which rules will be followed when. Workers instead produce the rules collectively through their interactions and follow some level of discipline. The example of work-to-rule strikes shows the ability of people to emergently create organization in the face of attempts to impose order constructed at a different level and points to their ability to destroy and replace it at will.

There are darker examples, such as the USSR’s attempts to build the Belomor canal. The canal was taken by the Soviet authorities as a triumph of central planning in the Soviet economy using gulag labor. The canal was conceived as part of building industrial infrastructure necessary for transforming the Soviet economy into a functioning industrial economy. The building of the canal cost countless lives and created massive suffering for the gulag laborers who built it.[85] Separated from the reality of construction on the ground, and insulated from the creativity and collective knowledge of the laborers forced to work under tight centralized discipline, the bureaucracies could not produce a well-functioning project. Though often ignored, the individual and collective creativity of workers serve a crucial role in making plans and engineering function properly in implementation. Workers solve problems with collective intelligence that could neither be planned for nor anticipated by bureaucracies. The massive financial and human costs, prison labor, and so on of the canal are severe enough to show the dangers of central planning. Yet even more ironic is that the canal itself ultimately served no function except to transport foreign dignitaries and party officials on tourist ferries as a propaganda effort. The canal was never made wide enough to transport the industrial vessels it was meant for, and thus both wasted humanity in its creation and made the effort in vain.[86]

The focus on central planning and party discipline of these governments explains their fascination with crowds. Mass games, large orchestrated exhibits of synchronized movements and images generally telling official party history, and military marching formations can be viewed through this light. It was a totalitarian fantasy to reduce the chaos of the crowd to the discipline and organization of the committee, politburo, and sect. People are transformed into colors, objects, and components moving much as a machine does, and without any relationship to their esthetic creation except their implementation of the planned spectacle. Mass games are a metaphor for the totalitarian imagination in which the party can drive all of society through central planning, and where society is mobilized into an amorphous mass unified around the thought of the planner.[87]

Both traditional micro-management and centralized planning of Marxist-Leninist governments (USSR, China, Cuba, and so on) were likewise bound to suffer systematic problems for similar reasons. Acting at a higher level of organization, such strategies attempt to directly cause activity in systems with different logic at lower levels, where simple causation is materially impossible in the way conceived. There simply is no way to force the complexity of workforces into the logic of individuals in a boardroom. Nothing gets done without the collective intelligence and emergence of order from workers interacting in an adaptive system. It is literally impossible to engineer liberated societies in the manner of social engineering and totalitarian thinking that emerged in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

The point is deeper than just a rejection of the worst forms of social engineering and the crassest management. When we look at the emergent world, we see that in fact other alternatives can be more fruitful. Interestingly, managers and industrial relations theorists have begun looking at emergence for management strategies through creating environments of autonomous workflow organization aimed at profit. In other words, they see that what functions the best is when organization arises organically out of social relationships of workers cooperating on the job. People are creative, and collaboratively they make work run better with minimal mediation by managerial structures. Workers can independently solve problems that hold back profit, but often are impeded by managerial bureaucracy from improving business. This is something that is evident to anyone who’s ever worked in a subservient position. Social order emerges from the complex interactions of individuals united in an effort through largely decentralized person-to-person networks.

But there’s work and then there’s work. There is a complex interplay between emotional bonds, aspirations, incentives, and a system of control that maintains an individual’s participation in the workforce. Workers engage in work not because they are necessarily personally committed to their job, but also because of a compulsory system of discipline. We work because we need to pay the bills, and if we don’t work how they want us to, there’s an array of disciplinary measures in place to force us back into line and to work harder. On the one hand, you need the voluntary labor and initiative of individuals creating solutions to problems in an unmediated collective environment. On the other hand, you need to ensure that people work and do so for the profit of the company. That mediation creates inefficiency and antagonism.

The rub here though is that there’s an inherent tension in the attempt (selforganized capitalist workplaces) to empower workers to perfect their work because disciplinary infrastructure is always necessary. If there weren’t coercive and repressive means within the workplaces, people might otherwise organize it to their benefit (let alone avoid work all together), and management recognizes this problem. If workers were radically free, they might redirect their activity not towards profit of the owners, but rather toward their own collective benefit, toward the benefit of others, or toward some other aim. Just as the order they produce is emergent, people working together can create emergent forces towards their ends. This is something management exists to restrain, repress, and channel into the desires and whims of those who maintain wealth and power.

This example teaches us a number of things. Inherent in emergence is a critique of hierarchical power relations. In understanding how social organization is an emergent property of social relationships, and how centralized power is inherently flawed in attempting to bridge those gaps, we see also a critique of institutionalized hierarchies and a libertarian method for political work. Those hierarchies are a net drain on society and introduce a form of disease into how the social organism functions. Complex systems help us critique why centralized management of labor and society are regressive forces that parasitically feed off the emergent orders of human collective creations.

Likewise, the order that exists is already emergently produced by people adapting and responding to their circumstances. In our daily lives, we have the inherent ability to construct alternative orders, not as architects or planners, but rather through our interactions within the social ecology. While there are no guarantees about what kinds of organization can be produced, investigating emergence opens up possibilities. We see both inherent antagonism created by emergent parasitic classes and the possibilities of more libertarian orders without dystopian social engineering schemes. Emergence provides a framework to think through that project, leaving that plane open and arming us with both critique and examples for moving forward in a critical liberatory struggle.

Second, emergence allows us to understand and act upon the potential of political events. It presents an alternative means of understanding political events that moves away from mechanistic and determinist accounts. Emergence uses the multiplicity of levels within events and the complexity in how they unfolding over time. Doing so presents a number of available approaches to both creating and understanding action. For instance, ruptures are political events that roughly break from the dominant order of their time, often ushering in new eras. Though caused by the actions of individuals, events such as ruptures burst politics as usual to present new potentials as the equilibrium of dominant power is disrupted. These shifts are disorienting for political agents, because they are disproportionately caused by and occur with complexity that outpaces our capacity to understand them. We cause them, but they seem to us to come out of nowhere (until much later we are able to carry out a higher level of analysis). Ruptures are clear examples of nonlinear causation and emergence forces coming out of seemingly nowhere. Without understanding social emergence, the speed and depth of changes in such insurrectionary eras can seem mystical. Indeed, much political thinking is divided between belief in spontaneous rebellion and in only relying on the actions of small groups substituting themselves for larger bodies. Emergence gives us tools to see how ruptures are possible and how they come from real activity of groups and individuals before the rupture, as well as to situate them within the functioning and evolution of systems of power.

If this is right, it is evident how we can both help facilitate ruptures (though we will be unable to reliably predict them with any great accuracy) and deepen them. Ruptures are another way of saying a breakdown in the equilibrium of social forces and institutions. Think about a body struck with a horrible disease like cancer. Whole organ systems, hormonal triggers, blood vessels, and so on are hijacked by the cancer to sustain its own life against the body it emerged from (since cancer cells are your own cells mutated against you). The normal functioning of the body begins to change and rapid shifts in the rules of normal chemical reactions, body functions, and so on occur. In society likewise, when the forces of equilibrium are functioning well, some doors are realistically closed. Our ability to help produce emergent liberatory forces on any significant basis is improbable (though it’s hard to know this from where we stand at any given moment). While the system has a functioning cooling system and can absorb the heat we produce, it keeps moving. But sometimes systemic problems can break down those recuperative mechanisms and produce so much activity that the whole thing begins to deteriorate.

As that order breaks down, however, new possibilities for new emergences can rapidly explode as the previous system’s means of ensuring stability break down. Political events have systemic contexts. Ruptures are merely a name for particularly extreme version of events that are more routine. How causality unfolds depends on the broader stability and equilibrium of the system, the emergent forces within, and the composition of the higher-level emergent powers maintaining order. Emergence allows us to feel out where we stand in the changes of the system, where to intervene, and how to grow with the changing forces that social struggle creates. As a framework, it gives us the ability to propose specific answers to those questions, though not any particular proposal. This isn’t to say have faith in spontaneity, but rather it is the opposite; it gives us tools and an understanding of the historical reality of the dynamic between organized activity and the emergence of new protagonists in struggle. As we stand, agents trying to choose different courses of action, emergence brings to light how we are situated in a web of causes throughout society that can reverberate with other forces in society and either be absorbed, amplified, or transformed in the unfolding of political events.

Likewise, the activities of organized bodies, even quite small ones, can in the right context have disproportionate effects. We don’t need to look only at butterfly wings and tsunamis here. Anyone seriously involved in social struggle has tasted the dramatic shifts that can help when a small group in a certain moment takes action. This can be both positively when it moves a movement forward, such as in the Flint sit-down strike when the organizers made the decision to strike by occupying the factory and thereby started a revolution in workplace organizing, or negatively when small groups clumsily attack the police at the wrong moment and a protest collapses. Groups acting in a favorable context can have deep transformative consequences. In the right situation, organized revolutionaries can have a disproportionate effect either against popular power or with it. Lewontin and Levins propose a model of action based on these considerations.

In chaotic systems, anything cannot happen; only a range of alternatives within a set of constraints can happen. It would take more than the flap of a butterfly’s wing to induce monsoon rains in Finland or a drought in the Amazon or equal representation of women on the Harvard faculty. Great quantities of energy and matter are involved in particular configurations for the major events to occur. Only when a system is poised on the brink can a tiny event set it off. Therefore, the task of promoting change is one of promoting the conditions under which small, local events can precipitate the desired restructuring.[88]

Here the authors focus primarily on these kinds of ruptures and suggest focusing on facilitating them, but we could expand that view. From the perspective of human liberation, it may be superior to find ways to promote consistent counter-powers across a wide area that may not lead immediately to such ruptures, but may improve the lives of numbers of people, and encourage the shifts in conviction and thought that empower new revolutionaries and aid insurrectionary work in other contexts. These differences show the potential of the theory for cashing out strategic differences, rather than being limited only to a single frame.

This isn’t to overemphasize the actions of small groups, nor to say groupings should act in the name of movements, but rather to place revolutionaries within a non-privileged sphere of revolutionary action without the assumption of leadership that substitutes itself for the multitude. There are potentials and limitations to this kind of causation, and understanding the problems of groups attempting to act in the name of systems as a whole, emergence places the role of organized revolutionaries back within the movement, rather than as its executor. Ruptures are when these elements become most obvious and necessary.

Yet even within normal political activities where equilibrium is sustained, these tools can be applied to understand counter-systemic action by political agents in more localized forms and in strategic thinking. Brazil, for example, exploded in protest that nearly brought the government to its knees in 2013 over increases in the cost of transit with grievances over the existing services. The Movimento Passe Livre, or Free Fare Movement, arose some ten years earlier out of localized struggles in different cities where organizers were persistently agitating around transit issues with limited success until the fury of the population boiled over.[89] It is easy to forget that a vast sea of grievances that exists within society is typically brought to a more cohesive form by the investment and experience of committed militants who have the vision and practice to shift proposals into concrete actions.

Navigating the evolution of the system, its ability to reproduce, and the breakdown of its order is part of the tasks for forces organizing for liberation. Understanding our limitations, the tentativeness of our predictions, and the real potential (both for recuperation and for disproportionate influences) places both objective factors and group intervention at the core of action. This seems common sense, though for much of the history of political thinking there was an unbridgeable chasm between the individual and society created by ideology that failed to connect agency to society. Living systems demonstrate the balance and relation between different modes of social activity and struggle, not merging them simply by squishing them together, but rather giving each its place in a coherent whole reflecting the structure and adaptation of society itself.

Lastly, it’s worth stating that emergence is a materialist theory of the political world.[90] Materialism in its widest sense tries to explain reality through only appealing to matter. That is to say, there is no external realm of ideas or spirit outside the material world in which we live and breathe. It thus provides a potential method for showing how basic physical forces produce the whole universe, of which the psychological, social, and political spheres are only different presentations of that same basic underlying material reality. Having a direct connection to physical existence and science is a strength of these ideas, for the basic reason that it makes the political cohere to more basic forces in nature.

This isn’t to say that society doesn’t have its own specific content, but it makes it less magical and mysterious and brings it within the domain of potential actions. Indeed, it’s been the obscurity of society’s functioning that often has been used as a tool against people, a tool to reinforce dominant power through ritual, faith, and even obscurantist or technocratic science. Political leadership of the State, despite the rhetoric of participation and democracy, wraps itself in rituals of expertize and superhuman abilities to reinforce its exclusive claim to governing, when in reality it is the unconscious actions of millions that sustain the social order that the State struggles to maintain its influence over. The theater of power is filled with parliaments, architectural feats of awe, oval offices, pulpits, and presidential limousines and airplanes. These are not only the excesses of an insulated elite drunk on their own power, but also a conscious cultivation to hide the fact that their decisions can be forced and eroded not with expensive fountain pens, but with the calls and footsteps on the streets below their balconies.[91] The more we can grasp at this world and bring it within the reach of all, the more power we have to challenge the wrongs enforced on people every day.

Through the discussion of emergence, a view of political events has been elaborated that frames and centers the role of agents and provides a framework for the relationships between peoples’ actions and larger social forces. Likewise, this understanding contributes to unifying the living and physical world based on shared laws and matter by explaining why it is difficult for us to conceive of the transformation of the physical into the living and social. It does so arguing that different levels of organization produce different behaviors and properties. Inherent properties of living systems have political significance in demonstrating how order is emergently produced; institutionalized hierarchies introduce inherent problems into social systems and mark the potential for a liberatory selforganized social order.

The real work of this theory is yet to be done. Its implications for our understanding of capitalism, the State, and oppressions are in its infancy and will be the task of those of us working to develop this line of thought. Revolution, self-management, non-statist society, and organization are questions ripe for critical answers from an emergentist perspective. It is there in the large questions of liberatory politics that emergence shows its real use. The work of addressing all of them would require a text on its own. There are a few core concepts though that increase our ability to tackle these large questions, and which require their own sections of this book. Part of the appeal of this perspective is its ability to explain the functioning of power as an emergent force in society, and to situate political thinking and action in a radical light. In the next section, power will be explored.