In the recent past it has been David Harvey as much as anyone who has advanced a position along the lines suggested by the title question here.
Rebel Cities is a long read but this excerpt from a shorter interview will do for conveying something of Harvey's thoughts on the matter:
Ed: I want to come back to what you touched upon about embracing a plurality of strategies, and linked to that you talk about the need for a variety of organisational forms. You’ve waded into an enduring and sometimes pretty hostile debate that’s been going on for a long time but which has been quite acute in the last few years, between ‘horizontalists’ and ‘centralists’ or ‘verticalists’. Can you expand on that, and how it relates to your analysis of capitalism and the city?
David: I think there is a great attachment right now to horizontality. I try to say to the students that I like to spend much of my life horizontal, but I also like to stand upright every now and again and walk around! Because I think this is not helpful. But again, I’m not against being as horizontal as you possibly can. There is what I call in the book a sort of fetishism of organisational form, and that was as bad in the democratic centralist forms of organisation, the Leninist parties and Communist parties.
I think again, the question for me is what kind of organisation is able to confront and address what kind of problem, at what scale? And I think that horizontality can work with certain problems at certain scales, but it soon runs out of possibilities. We live in a world where there are a lot of tightly coupled systems around, tightly coupled in such a way that you need command and control structures immediately to deal with them. For example, a nuclear power station is a tightly coupled system. When something goes wrong in it, you need to react immediately because otherwise it will go very fast through the whole thing and explode. The university is not a tightly coupled system. If something goes wrong in it, say somebody doesn’t turn up for a lecture, it doesn’t matter. The university survives perfectly well. But in tightly coupled systems you need very quick decision making.
So I say to all the people who are horizontalists, do you want to organise air traffic control on a horizontalist principle? Do you want to have assemblies all the time in the air traffic control tower? Would this work? How would you feel if you were half way across the Atlantic, and they suddenly said “well, actually the air traffic controllers have just gone into assembly mode, and they’ll let us know tomorrow what they’ll do”? There are many things like that that need a completely different sort of organisational form, and I think it’s good that people are talking about horizontality, but it’s bad that they kind of say it has to be horizontal or nothing.
Ed: It comes from at least a quasi-anarchism, and a deep suspicion of any form of authority. Are you saying that, basically, to be a radical, to be anti-capitalist, you still need to recognise that authority has its place at times?
David: Yes, of course. I think authority has its place. The problem that is posed by this, and it’s a very important one, is how do you hold authority accountable? What are the mechanisms of recall, and what are the mechanisms of control, because a hierarchical structure can indeed become top-down and authoritarian. But there’s a big difference between authoritarianism and authority. I think that at certain points you need somebody to have the authority.
The famous example that a lot of people quote would be the Zapatistas. But the Zapatistas, militarily, are not horizontal. The only reason they have survived is precisely because if you try to mess with them militarily, they have very good command and control structures in which they can actually resist. And if you don’t have that, you’re very vulnerable. One of the criticisms that was always made of the Paris Commune was that, because a large part of it was brought up in a sort of philosophical anarchism, there was no central authority to defend the whole city. People were defending their arrondissement, but not the whole city, so the forces of reaction could easily get through because there was no command and control structure to resist militarily the invasion that came.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... vey_part_2
