Phil Hearse 

For the last 20 years the related insights called ‘chaos theory’ have been rippling through different scientific disciplines. Now, in the form of so-called ‘emergence’, they are impacting on radical political theory as well. 

Briefly summed up, ‘emergence’ – popularised in Steven Johnson’s book of the same name (1) – is about how complex systems organise themselves, without any apparent direction or overall plan. Individual units of systems ‘do their own thing’ without knowledge of any overarching aim or scheme, but out of this ‘chaos’, order, pattern and system emerge. In Johnson’s book, classic emergent systems are ant colonies, cities and self-learning software, such as that which, it is promised, will bring self-organised order to the chaotic Internet in the not too distant future. 

What has all this got to do with politics? Observant readers with their fingers on the pulse of contemporary global justice movements will have spotted it in one. Social systems (and political movements), according to some theorists, don’t need any overall plan, but can be self-organised from below. A co-operative non-capitalist social order would need only the local ‘cells’ of its economy to relate co-operatively with those adjacent to them, and an overall pattern will ‘emerge’. Similarly, political movements, like the global justice movement, will ‘emerge’ in a similar fashion. (Hence the telling slogan: think local, act local [!]). 

Here we might note that ‘emergence’ is not just the property of radical theorists, but is also a coming fashion among management business schools. When you think about it for a moment, in the idea of an ‘emergent’ economy without control from ‘above’, you just have to delete the word ‘co-operative’ and replace it with ‘competitive’ and you get a dead ringer for anarcho-capitalist ideas of privatising everything and dispensing with the state altogether.  

Despite this, there is no doubt that the tension between self-organisation and top-down decisions, between national goals and local action (or between the state and civil society) has been a central problem in socialist ideas about post-capitalist society and political organisation in general. Maybe this discussion about self-organised systems can help us out. 

In their  New Internationalist article ‘The Web of Democracy’ (2), Roy Madron and John Jopling of the Worldwide Democracy Network insist on the distinction between self-organised systems and ‘engineered’ systems. Because I am going to challenge some aspects of this distinction, I will quote them at length:

“All members of [a democratic self-organised] system are interconnected in a vast and intricate network of relationships. They derive their essential properties and, in fact, their very existence from their relationships. The success of the whole community depends on the success of its individual members, while the success of each member depends on the success of the community as a whole.

“In contrast, engineered systems have predictable outcomes, because all their components can be precisely designed and controlled. Most of our political, administrative, business and NGO leaders assume that purposeful human systems should be as predictable as engineered systems. But it is only as they become both increasingly complex and increasingly self-organizing that purposeful human systems and their component parts also achieve an ordered state, which arises as an emergent property of the system as a whole. As Margaret Wheatley, the American leadership and systems thinker, says: ‘You can’t look at something like self-organization or complex adaptive systems in science, no matter what unit you’re looking [at] – plants, molecules, chemicals – without realizing that this is a kind of democratic process. Everybody is involved locally and out of that comes a more global system.’

"Thus, if we can think of ‘democracy’ as meaning a system through which members of communities organize themselves, rather than a system for controlling them, our democratic systems would be getting closer to being complex, adaptive and self-organizing.

"For as societies become ever more complex, their leaders have less and less control over the internal and external complexities they face. There is simply too much information for a small group of decision-makers, with limited skills, knowledge and time, to process in order to make confident decisions – no matter how powerful their computers or how vast their resources. Thus information processing and decision-making power should be devolved as widely as possible. The leaders and the subsystems can then take actions, which aid the viability of the system as a whole.

"Take a soccer game, for example. Suppose there are 11 equally talented players on each side but the players in one team can only do exactly what the captain tells them to do. Obviously, their opponents would run rings round them because, within certain fairly loose rules and shared understandings, they would play as a ‘complex, adaptive, self-organizing system’. By being ‘self-organizing’, the winning team would be able to generate more variety than the team that could only do what their captain told them.” (Ibid)

A lot of this is true, and there certainly have been examples of political regimes, which imagined everything could be controlled from the top. In reality, even the Nazi party, despite the Fuhrer principle, was a ‘chaotic self-adaptive system’. But what is wrong in the transference of the insights of ‘emergence’ to political democracy and economic systems is the its false analogy between physical systems, ant colonies, plants and even football teams on the one hand, and political and social organisation on the other. To see this, we need to look a bit more at classic emergence topics.

Steven Johnson starts his book with ‘The Myth of the Ant Queen’ – the myth that the ‘Queen’ tells the ants what to do (she’s just a breeding machine). He relates how he was shown an ant colony in a laboratory, and how it ‘spontaneously’ organised itself. The main colony area was flanked, at equal distances, by a rubbish dump where the remains of food were put, and a cemetery where dead ants were dumped. Both were at the maximum possible distance from the main colony.

Nobody knows exactly how ants organise themselves, but we do know that each individual ant can’t possibly have any knowledge of the overall system. In fact, ants pick up signals from chemicals called ‘pheromones’ which they all secrete. Scientists have shown that if two ants go foraging for food, the ant, which finds food closer, will return quicker, and thus deposit more pheromones than the other ant. This trail will then be followed by others, and an efficient pattern of food foraging established.

Johnson’s next example is the city, and interestingly he uses Engels’ observations of Manchester, the first truly industrial city anywhere, in the 1840s. Engels observed:

“The city is built in a peculiar manner, so that someone can live in it for years, and travel in and out of it daily, without ever coming into contact with working-class areas or even workers – so long as he confines himself to his business affairs or to strolling about for pleasure…”  

Steve Marcus in his book on Engels and Manchester (3) argues that the cordon sanitaire which ‘emerged’ around the working class areas was too complex a system to have been planned and thought up in advance. It was the sum of tens of thousands of individual decisions, out of which a system emerged of hiding the working class from sight.

Now this is far removed from the example of the ants. The ghettoisation of the working class may not have been planned in advance, but it was certainly the outcome of conscious decisions, ie decisions of middle and upper class people to live as far away from the workers as possible, and to similarly site their businesses – and of the economic compulsion which excluded poor workers from buying houses in middle class areas. This may not have been a planned decision, but it was conscious.

This takes Johnson on to a more general consideration of cities, as classic examples of ‘organised complexity’, or rather ‘self-organised complexity’. It is in this example that the whole analogy with the natural world breaks down. Cities are in fact – like all human society – a dynamic interaction of planning and spontaneity. To make the city work, it takes millions of individual decisions every day. No one plans in advance the complex dance whereby hundreds of people get off a train at a Metro station, and hundreds more get on it – all within a minute. But that this dance takes place at all is a function (usually) of the chronic underfunding of public transport, and (not least) the decision to build the Metro in the first place. Decisions of this kind may not have been simultaneous and may have aggregated over time, but they did not just ‘emerge’ out of thousands of local, individual decisions. Self-organised complexity interacts with very organised complexity.

Johnson has a good point against this view, when he shows that through the generations cities replicate their basic structure, even if all the individuals (obviously) and businesses change; they are ‘patterns in time’. Nevertheless, in principle at least those patterns can be radically interrupted through human action, either urban planning or catastrophes, natural and human-made.

Before we go on to discuss the interaction of the planned with the spontaneous in post-capitalist society, I can’t resist answering the football team analogy. Arsenal’s performance on the pitch may show self-organised complexity, but Arsene Wenger their manager would have a different take on it. Their orientation on the field is planned in advance; their routines are rehearsed and choreographed down to the smallest detail. And the game itself is rule-governed in the extreme. None of that works of course without the self-organisation of the players, and no one can plan a Thierry Henry and his spontaneous brilliance. Their performance is an interaction of overall planning and ‘spontaneous’ self-organisation.

On August 9 2003 the Zapatista movement in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas presented at a ceremony in Oventic their newly created Zapatista municipal authorities. Here we have an example of self-organisation, indeed from the bottom up and without reference to, indeed against, state authority. This formidable achievement has taken 10 years of work in difficult circumstances. But the limitations of what can be achieved are evident. When, in the year 2000, 500 Zapatista civilians from the base communities arrived in Mexico City as part of their national ‘consulta’ campaign, those welcoming them were alarmed that at least half of them were ill – and rapidly mobilised progressive health workers to aid them. They were suffering from chest infections, toothache, thrush, skin infections of all kinds and dozens of other conditions. What made them ill? Poverty. And a lack of basic medicines like antibiotics, which would immediately cure most of them. Self-organisation depends on its overall conditions, and there are resource limits at any local level – let alone Chiapas. That’s why ‘think local, act local’ is a dead end in creating a democratic and sustainable non-capitalist society, or indeed a democratic and effective movement for overthrowing it.

When you delve deeper into emergence theory, you discover – Steven Johnson argues this forcibly – that emergent systems are rule-governed. In natural systems the rules are established independently of the units, whether birds in a swarm or grains of sand. In human societies the ‘rules’, the norms of behaviour and activity, have to be established consciously. Human societies are indeed too complex for any authority – national or local – to organise everything. Why would anyone want to? But national and international collectives (of citizens) have to establish democratically the overall rules for the functioning of society. Will there be private firms? What proportion of the national product will be allocated to the health service? How much should people be paid? What holidays should people have? ‘Think local, act local’ can’t solve any of these problems. In any post-capitalist society the citizens must have institutions and procedures for national and international self-government, as well as local self-organisation and initiative in solving problems and doing all the work needed to reproduce society.

The theorists of societal emergence have one more objection to socialist self-organisation and democratic planning – so-called ‘wicked’ problems. These are problems where there can, by definition, be no objective statement of what the problem is, and thus no ‘objective’ solution, no right answer. Problems solving therefore has to proceed experimentally over time; and those concerned (‘stakeholders’) have to work out and accept the solutions which look most promising at any particular time. Madron and Jopling give the examples of homelessness, drug dealing, racism, overfishing and global warming as ‘wicked’ problems.

Here most socialists (most I know anyway) are going to part company with emergence radicals almost totally. There are knowable (and known) reasons for these phenomena, and they have everything to do with the existence of capitalism (and imperialism). There are also knowable solutions, which can substantially address these problems in a non-capitalist society. The fact that Madron and Jopling don’t see this is perhaps related to the fact that the word ‘capitalism’ does not appear in their article, nor is there much evidence that their emergent democracy is seen as a radical break from it. This is alarming, and perhaps a salutary warning to those who too glibly christen the movement against neoliberal globalisation as being uniformly ‘anti-capitalist’.

End Notes

1) Emergence, Steven Johnson, Penguin Books, 2001

2) The Web of Democracy, Roy Madron and John Joppling, New Internationalist 360, September 2003. To see their article in full click HERE

3) Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class, WW Norton 1974.