Alternative organization without vertical hierarchies of spatial scale?

Abstract

Vertical hierarchies of spatial scale—where society in general, and organizations in particular, are differentiated into levels of spatial size—have often been criticized by those encouraging alternatives to capitalist organizing. These vertical scalings are said to promote authoritarianism, a monolithic capitalist economic system, uneven concentrations of social and organizational power and wealth, and ecologically destructive organizational growth. Consequently, so the argument goes, alternative organizing must scale horizontally whereby smaller organizations autonomously associate together into loose networks or federations. The aim of this contribution is to problematize such critiques of vertical hierarchies of scaling for alternative organization. To do so, I combine Management and Organization Studies (MOS) scholarship on scaling alternative organization with two theorizations of the politics of scale in human geography—namely those derived from Neo-Marxist Political Economy and Actor-Network Theories. My argument is that all those looking to understand and encourage the scaling of alternatives to capitalist organizing should engage with and not simply reject vertical scalar hierarchies.

Introduction

Capitalist organizing has often been defined as much by its hierarchies of spatial scale as its attachment to for-profit investment, private property, the appropriation of surplus labor, or market competition (Bakunin, 1873; Kropotkin, 1910; Monticelli, 2018; Parker et al., 2014a). Hierarchical spatial scale reverberates across organizational life. It is evident whenever organograms, corporate speeches, digital systems, or management theories, mobilize hierarchies of spatial size to locate individual employees inside workgroups, departments, firms, national industries, and a global economy. Critics of capitalism have long argued how these hierarchical scalings have negative effects. These become evident whenever managers in multi-national corporations draw upon mysterious global “economic forces” to explain away job losses (Marston et al., 2005) or marginalize indigenous populations (Banerjee, 2011). All of this presents a problem for those concerned with conceiving a world beyond capitalism as they are faced not just with challenging sites enacting voracious market competition, hypermobile capital, or alienated labor, but also a dizzying scaffold of vertical hierarchical scale that obscures “those sites of ordering practices, as well as the possibilities for undoing them” (Marston et al., 2005: 427). The difficulty is that hierarchical scalings position “the local (and thus all of us) in a place of subordination, as ‘the other within’ of the global [capitalist] order. At worst, it makes victims of localities and robs them of economic agency and self-determination” (Gibson-Graham, 2003: 50).

Such critiques are hardly new. Over a century ago anarchists also anchored their federalist vision of decentralized autonomous organizing in criticisms of scalar hierarchies (Bakunin, 1873; Kropotkin, 1910; Proudhorn, 1863). Contemporary MOS scholars of alternative organization (e.g. Colombo et al., 2024; Frenzel, 2020; Monticelli, 2018; Parker et al., 2014b) have similarly associated vertical scalar hierarchies with authoritarian tendencies in capitalist corporate and governmental organizations and organizing.

My aim in this paper is to problematize these notions that vertical hierarchical scalings cannot aid those concerned with scaling non-capitalist alternative organization. I do not want to contest concerns that hierarchical concentrations of power and wealth are integral to the sorts of appropriations of surplus labor that define capitalist organization, and for the health of this planet and its varied inhabitants such hierarchies need to be undone (Gibson-Graham, 2006a, 2006b; Parker et al., 2014b; Schiller-Merkens, 2024). But there is an important difference between rejecting hierarchies of power and wealth and rejecting all hierarchies, including those of spatial scale. Although the latter may sometimes be connected to the former this is not necessarily so.

My argument is capitalist hierarchies of power and wealth can sometimes be challenged by engaging with, and even generating new, hierarchies of spatial scale. Some MOS scholars of alternative organization have already recognized the possibility of engaging productively with existing vertical scale hierarchies, particularly multiple scalar levels of government (e.g. Adler, 2019; De Coster and Zanoni, 2023; Monticelli, 2021; Schiller-Merkens, 2020, 2024). However, there remains a lack of discussion about how to reconcile these ideas with important critiques that vertical hierarchical scalings are wedded to capitalist organization (Bakunin, 1873; Colombo et al., 2024; Gibson-Graham, 2003, 2006a; Marston et al., 2005). Moreover, the relationship between politics and spatial scale remains largely implicitly theorized in MOS scholarship on scaling alternative organization. One important issue here is that with the notable exception of engagement with Gibson-Graham’s (2003, 2006a, 2006b) post-capitalist geographies, MOS scholarship on alternative organization has tended to overlook analyses in human geography on the politics of scale, including those related to scaling non-capitalist organization (Gerhardt, 2020; Leitner and Miller, 2007; Marston et al., 2005; Springer, 2014). Thus, by bringing together MOS research on scaling alternative organization with human geographical theories on the politics of scale it becomes possible to better understand the role of vertical scalar hierarchies to scale worlds beyond capitalism.

My argument runs across three sections. First, I explain and problematize counter-capitalist arguments against vertical scalar hierarchies. Second, I propose two theoretical approaches for scholars of alternative organization to engage productively with vertical scalar hierarchies: Neo-Marxism Political Economy and Actor-Network Theories. I conclude by discussing how we might reconcile these rehabilitated notions of vertical scaling for alternative organization with longstanding critiques.

Arguments against vertical hierarchical scaling and alternative organization

Counter-capitalist critiques of vertical scalar hierarchies developed in late 19th century anarchist thought. The underlying criticism of anarchists was that when the interests of individuals and localities are amalgamated as they are “scaled up” across ever larger spatial sizes, whether across the nested scalar tiers of democratic government, trade unions, or capitalist corporations, individual interests are diluted to the point of meaninglessness—facilitating the conditions for authoritarianism and exploitation (Bakunin, 1873; Kropotkin, 1910; Proudhorn, 1863). Although this criticism still inflects contemporary anarchist thinking inside and outside MOS (e.g. Maekelbergh, 2014; Springer, 2014), criticisms of vertical scalings have subsequently broadened and deepened.

One particularly influential line of critique stems from Gibson-Graham’s post-capitalist geographies, particularly their action research studies conducted in the Latrobe Valley, Australia in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Gibson-Graham, 2003, 2006a). The purpose of their studies was to explore and promote alternatives in the “openings and fissures” of capitalist organization (Gibson-Graham, 2006a: 135). Their definition of capitalism, which is also the one I adopt throughout this paper, is purposely minimal, corresponding to any “social relation, or class process, in which nonproducers appropriate surplus labor in value from free wage laborers [for] a variety of social destinations” (Gibson-Graham, 2006a: xxiv). Defining capitalism in this way is intended to invite a very broad consideration of non-capitalist organizing within capitalist economies.

As their project proceeded, Gibson-Graham’s research participants were invited to discuss how economic development affected their communities. The participants retold homogeneous and negative stories regarding the impact of privatization, rationalization, and downsizing on local coal mines and power stations. Conversely, when their participants were asked to discuss the strength of their localities, out with such changes, they were energized, generous and creative in discussing and planning non-capitalist gift economies such as literacy classes, basketball sessions, and household repairs (see Gibson-Graham, 2006a: 148). In other words, extending the sentiments of classical anarchists, when communities are located within enveloping larger-scale changes in a wider (capitalist) economy they are rendered passive victims, lacking diversity in thought and action. But if a smaller-scale local economy is the starting point for discussion it leads to a productive consideration of alternatives.

Reflecting on their experiences, Gibson-Graham (2003, 2006a, 2006b) conclude vertical hierarchical scalings present two problems for scaling alternative organization. First, they legitimize hierarchical relations of power, rendering individuals and communities’ powerless victims of mysterious distant forces that they can scarcely understand let alone change. Second, they homogenize thought, talk, and action, such that the particularity and alternative potential of the locality disappears from view and is replaced with generic stories of how communities can best win inward state and corporate investment through subsidies and other inducements (Gibson-Graham, 2006a). Such “capitalocentrism” makes it appear “capitalism has no outside” (Gibson-Graham, 2006b), “delimit[ing] entry points into politics – and the openness of the political – by pre-assigning to it a cordoned register for resistance” (Marston et al., 2005: 427). Consequently, building upon anarchist criticisms regarding authoritarianism and exploitation, hierarchical scalings are now said to inculcate dependency and homogeneity. Both of these forces curtail the egalitarian, creative, and diverse ethos essential to non-capitalist organization (Gibson-Graham, 2006a, 2006b).

These early critiques of vertical hierarchical scalings have significantly influenced contemporary scholarship on alterative organization in both human geography and MOS. Within human geography, Marston et al. (2005) even went as far as to propose removing all vertical scalar hierarchies from the discipline. Citing Gibson-Graham, they lament how hierarchical scalings promote a “global talk” that removes “agency at one end of the hierarchy in favor of such terms as ‘global capitalism’ thus concealing from view that ‘even the most privileged social actors are no less situated [and thus open to transformation] than the workers they seek to command’”(Marston et al., 2005: 421). Springer’s (2014) anarchist call for a “a human geography without hierarchy” proceeds similarly by criticizing hierarchical scalar imaginaries for aiding authoritarian social organizing, whether capitalist corporations or Marxist revolutionary states: “Its vertical ontology attempts transcendence” (p.404) . . . “drawing away from the grounded particularities of the everyday” (p. 408) which are the basis for radical resistance, democracy, and collective action.

MOS scholars have gone further by empirically elaborating the largely theoretical claims developed in classical anarchism and human geography. So far this has resulted in three strands of critique.

The first resonates with early anarchist critiques by focussing on how counter-capitalist principles are eroded when alternative organizations themselves are “scaled up.” For example, worker cooperatives, like the Mondragon Corporation, that have vertically scaled up their businesses to compete with the economies of scale of capitalist transnational corporations have been criticized for diluting their cooperative principles by acquiring international capitalist companies and marginalizing local communities and workers (Cheney et al., 2014; Flecha and Ngai, 2014; Peredo and McLean, 2020; Schiller-Merkens, 2024). Similarly, Frenzel (2020) cautions how large, vertically scaled, organizing in early protest camps led to the degradation of direct democracy and autonomy among their diverse constituent groups.

The second strand concerns how alternative organizations become degraded when they engage with other vertically scaled organizations. Discussing one intentional community, Monticelli (2018) cautions how engagement with vertically scaled government bodies led to tensions within the community between those who “want to maintain autonomy and prevent co-optation and those who see an opportunity to scale-up and disseminate initiatives and practices” (p.512). Responding to such tensions, Kokkinidis (2015) applauds how Syn Allois—a Greek alternative food trade cooperative—rejected working with larger, vertically scaled, supermarkets that might threaten principles of autonomy, egalitarianism and direct democracy among local farmers, suppliers, and retailers (see also Daskalaki and Kokkinidis, 2017).

A third strand concerns how notions of vertically “scaling up” promote the idea that the scaling of any organizational idea or practice equates to profitable capitalist organizational growth—contributing to the irresponsible normalization of exponential economic growth on a planet with finite resources (Colombo et al., 2024; Pansera and Fressoli, 2021). The corollary of these three criticisms is that almost no distinction becomes possible between vertical hierarchies of scale and those of power and wealth (Frenzel, 2020; Kokkinidis, 2015; Maekelbergh, 2014).

Taken together, these critiques problematize the transcendentalism of vertical scalings for promoting organizational forms defined by their authoritarianism, homogeneity, dependency, irresponsibility, and ultimately socio-ecological destructiveness. Although scholars sometimes acknowledge hierarchical scalings are not reducible to corporate capitalist organization—and might also equally serve an oppressive proletarian dictatorship or fascist state capitalism (e.g. Springer, 2014)—they appear utterly antithetical to think or realize progressive alternatives to capitalism.

Responding to these criticisms, scaling the spatial reach of alternative organizations is instead to be organized within networks of smaller, autonomous, organizational forms where ideas and practices can be easily adapted to the needs and capacities of diverse socio-ecological communities (Banerjee, 2011; Colombo et al., 2024; Daskalaki and Kokkinidis, 2017; Frenzel, 2020; Gibson-Graham, 2003, 2006a; Kokkinidis, 2015; Marston et al., 2005; Springer, 2014; Vieta and Heras, 2022). This networked scaling of alternative organization has been variously described as “translocal” (Banerjee, 2011; Daskalaki and Kokkinidis, 2017), “flat” (Gibson-Graham, 2006a; Marston et al., 2005; Springer, 2014), “horizontal” (Frenzel, 2020; Kokkinidis, 2015; Vieta and Heras, 2022), “prefigurative” (Schiller-Merkens, 2024), or simply “scaling with” (Colombo et al., 2024). Researchers of alternative organization are also encouraged to reject grand theorizing, and attendant hierarchical scalar imaginaries, and instead work analytically with a flat ontology of social sites (Marston et al., 2005) that explains processes of organization (including capitalist) with a “weak theory [that] requires acting as a beginner, refusing to know too much, allowing success to inspire and failure to educate, refusing to extend diagnoses too widely or deeply” (Gibson-Graham, 2006a: 8; see also Schiller-Merkens, 2024: 14).

Despite their influence, critiques of both practical and analytical vertical scalar hierarchies have not proceeded without countercriticism. Attempts to remove scale from human geography have, for instance, been challenged for preventing further critical scrutiny and deconstruction of such hierarchical scalings (Gerhardt, 2020; Leitner and Miller, 2007; for a rejoinder see Jones et al., 2007). What is more, human geographers have also argued critiques of vertical hierarchical scalings ignore work showing that their use does not necessarily imply “top-down” hierarchical power relations. For example, hierarchical scalings have also been analytically mobilized to explain how “bottom-up” local practices produce global capitalism (Leitner and Miller, 2007) and thus might be locally disrupted (Blakey, 2021).

For their part, some MOS scholars have also argued for engagement with vertical hierarchies, particularly those of government, to “scale up” alternative organization (e.g. Adler, 2019; De Coster and Zanoni, 2023; Monticelli, 2021; Schiller-Merkens, 2020, 2024). However, thus far, MOS researchers have not reconciled these ideas with longstanding critiques of such scalings, while conceptualizations of spatial scale, particularly the relationship between vertical and horizontal scalings, remain underdeveloped. For example, Schiller-Merkens (2020) proposes alternative organizations vertically “scale up to broader levels of society” through what resembles a horizontal scaling wherein “the nowadays dispersed and unconnected alternative organizing communities and organizations start joining forces” (p. 25). Given the lack of engagement with wider theories of the politics of scale, it is perhaps unsurprising some MOS studies on alternative organization (e.g. Colombo et al., 2024; Frenzel, 2020; Kokkinidis, 2015; Monticelli, 2018; Vieta and Heras, 2022) have turned back to deterministic notions from classical anarchism that vertical hierarchical scalings promote authoritarian forms of organizing. In the rest of this paper, I do not only challenge these critiques of vertical hierarchies but also elaborate how such scalings might be useful (or not) for alternative organization.

Arguments for vertical hierarchical scalings and alternative organization

To explore the role of vertical scalings for alternative organization I draw on two human approaches from human geography on the politics of scale inspired by Neo-Marxist Political Economy (NMPE) and Actor-Network Theories (ANT). Despite the longstanding influence of Marxist theories and ANT on MOS, the varied contributions of these theories for thinking scale have yet to inform MOS work on scaling alternative organization. In this section I explain how each approach helps us conceptualize scale and the scaling of capitalist and non-capitalist organization before elaborating arguments for vertical hierarchical scaling and alternative organization. To flesh out my argument, I draw on examples and studies of alternative organization from MOS.

Neo-Marxist political economy: Or what is being scaled up and why?

Over the last few decades or so human geographers have developed NMPE to explain how vertical hierarchies of scale are socially constructed epistemologies that actors mobilize to order and re-order the spatial reach of their own agency and/or those of others (Leitner and Miller, 2007). These processes of ordering are driven by contradictory forces and crises of capital accumulation. Harvey (2001) explains capitalism as a social formation organized around spatial “fixes” to accumulation crises, wherein capital is invested (or “fixed”) at a certain spatial scale that will eventually be destroyed as it generates a surplus in capital and/or labor that undermines further capital accumulation at that scale. Resolving such crises is said to involve developing another spatial fix for capital and labor at a higher rung on a hierarchy of spatial scales. For example, surpluses of capital and labor at the national level generate unsold commodities, idle factories and pressures to expand production globally (Harvey, 2001). Across these processes capital accumulation may jump scale from a lower to a higher level—for example, from a city to a nation-state or from the nation-state across the globe (Swyngedouw, 2004). Organizations can similarly jump scales to pursue capital accumulation (Spicer, 2006). Firms may, for instance, upscale their operations to a global level to benefit from economies of scale or counteract labor disputes (Taylor and Spicer, 2007). Equally, resistance groups, such as trade unions or activists, may upscale their activities to challenge capitalist classes (Spicer, 2006).

Neo-Marxist scale theorists envision capitalism as effectively hard wired by crises of accumulation to “scale up” by extending its reach across ever larger circuits of activity (Harvey, 2001; Swyngedouw, 2004). However, the salient point for my argument here is that “scaling up” capital flows often involves owners of capital working across multiple scalar levels (Spicer, 2006; Swyngedouw, 2004). Increasing capital accumulation might require a CEO to support a community plan to build a new road junction, lobby national governments to deregulate labor standards and shift capital around global markets. Consequently, counter-capitalist organizing must also operate across vertical hierarchies of scale that include levels that are transcendent and detached from the here and now (Gerhardt, 2020; Smith, 1992). Alternative organizing might simultaneously involve speaking to friends within our town to set up a childcare cooperative, signing a national petition to support the representation of indigenous peoples in national government and sharing ideas on anarchist organizing in a podcast with likeminded individuals across the world.

By drawing attention to the elasticity and plurality of vertical scalar hierarchies to serve multiple political purposes, NMPE firmly rejects deterministic ideas from classical anarchism that such vertical scalings breed authoritarian, homogeneous, dependent, and irresponsible capitalist organizations and organizing (as in Colombo et al., 2024; Frenzel, 2020; Gibson-Graham, 2006a, 2006b; Kokkinidis, 2015). NMPE thus echoes the calls of some MOS scholars that alternative organizations might engage with vertically scaled governmental organizations (De Coster and Zanoni, 2023; Monticelli, 2018, 2021; Schiller-Merkens, 2020, 2024). For example, associations of cooperatives might combine a smaller scale “prefigurative politics” experimenting with non-capitalist organizing in the here and now with a larger scale “contentious politics” that represents and advances the collective interests of non-capitalist organizations across supra-national government bodies and multi-national corporations (De Coster and Zanoni, 2023). However, NMPE goes further because it also encourages all proponents of alternative organization to recognize that resisting, refusing, and reworking, capitalism must take place in the processes through which the contradictions of capital are fixed through scale (Harvey, 2001; Swyngedouw, 2004). This means going beyond calls for alternative organizations to engage with pre-given, usually higher, scales to instead explore the processes and sites of struggle that can change “the importance and role of certain geographical scales, reassert the importance of others . . . [and] . . . sometimes create entirely new significant scales” (Swyngedouw, 2004: 34).

This process-based approach to scaling challenges ideas that hierarchies of scale function as a straightforward proxy for hierarchies of social and economic power (e.g. Marston et al., 2005; Springer, 2014). Instead, it suggests that although capital accumulation encourages particular hierarchies of scale, with transnational corporate and governmental centers seemingly placed at their apex (Smith, 1992), the relationship between power and scale is far from linear and is often reworked in complex struggles that affirm or contest the interests of capital owning elites (Harvey, 2001; Spicer, 2006). For example, Swyngedouw (2004) identifies how since the latter half of the 20th century national economies have glocalized such that “the spaces of the circulation of capital have been upscaled, while regulating the production/consumption nexus has been downscaled, shifting the balance of power in important polarizing or often plainly exclusive ways” (p. 42). Placing too much importance on occupying or engaging the highest level of any existing hierarchy of scale (whether governmental or corporate) to accrue power to scale any alternative organization thus runs the risk of simplifying the differentiated processes of scaling that socially distribute wealth and power. Instead, what is required in any non-capitalist approach to scaling is an exploration of ways of contesting and reworking the socio-economic processes of scaling wherein power is accrued. Imagine, for example, how the appropriation of value from surplus labor might be contested by downscaling capital flows to a city or community and by upscaling regulation over production and consumption to a global level. Put simply, NMPE draws attention to questions around what is being scaled up (or down) and why. However, the fairly broadbrush analytical lens of NMPE is less useful to explore the specific mechanisms of organizing that might facilitate this vertical scaling. These questions of “how” are important because if labor regulation or consumer protection is upscaled in a manner that denies local needs it might readily serve non-capitalist forms of authoritarianism (e.g. communist dictatorship). To explore these questions further, and how they can contribute to scaling alternative organization, I turn to ANT derived theories of scaling.

Actor-network theories: Or how to scale up?

A helpful starting point to elaborate how exponents of ANT theorize vertical scaling is Latour’s (2005: 173–190) conceptual distinction between oligopticons and panoramas. Oligopticons are sites where “sturdy but extremely narrow views of the (connected) whole are made possible – as long as connections hold” (Latour, 2005: 183). Oligopticons include any site with many strong, yet narrow, and spatially extensive connections to other sites. These super-connected sites might include a board meeting, politburo, or general assembly in a workers cooperative. Such sites are not only really “bigger, [but also] more powerful, overarching” (Latour, 2005: 178) than “smaller” less connected ones such as a bus stop or garden shed. The oligopticon concept draws attention to how vertical scalar hierarchies (of power and size) are constructed through mechanisms that distribute relative differences in the number and quality of connections between different sites. In contrast, panoramas are sites of illusion where the whole totality of the world is scaled into hierarchical levels without connections being formed with other actors (Latour, 2005: 183–90). These sites include films, political speeches, grand social theories or indeed ideas of a “shared communist horizon” (Zanoni, 2020: 11). By producing illusions of transcendent contexts (e.g. “global capitalism”) panoramas are politically consequential in generating collective identities and actions. These two types of sites do not only highlight the way the “global is situated, specific, and materially constructed” (Law, 2004: 24) but also ask us to consider “which versions of the global, are to be preferred, enacted, and transported?” (p. 25).

ANT encourages analyses exploring how vertical hierarchical scalings emerge relationally within flat ontologies (Legg, 2009; Sage et al., 2015). These approaches thus go some way to resolve the seemingly contradictory idea of some MOS theorists of alternative organizations wherein vertically “scal[ing] up to broader levels of society” can be accomplished by multiplying the strength of horizontal relations between “dispersed and unconnected alternative organizing communities and organizations” (Schiller-Merkens (2020: 25). To elaborate how vertical scalings are relationally constituted exponents of ANT borrow a concept from mathematics—topology—to explain how Euclidean (or topographical) space is twisted, stretched, and folded like a handkerchief or rubber sheet as distant sites ‘make their presence felt, more or less directly, by dissolving, not traversing the gap between “here and there” (Allen, 2011: 290). When the number and quality of connections between sites is held stable, topologies of power cohere to hierarchize space—effectively “scaling up” certain sites over others, such as a corporate boardroom or the World Social Forum (WSF), with increased capacities to see and influence sites elsewhere and pasts/futures elsewhen (Latour, 2005; Ratner, 2020).

What is critical for my argument for vertical scaling and alternative organization is that capitalist and non-capitalist sites usually do not stretch and fold space and act at a distance in the same way. To explain these differences, it is helpful to combine the analytical focus of NMPE with what is being scaled with ANT’s focus on how what is being scaled is scaled. Comparing the mechanisms that organize scaling in a boardroom and the WSF is particularly instructive here. Members on a corporate board employ specific mechanisms (e.g. majority voting, key performance indicators, management accounts) to monitor and control the circulation of financial and other resources across many distant sites to accumulate capital for shareholders. These mechanisms in turn enable directors to unilaterally change local sites (e.g. closing factories). By contrast, attendees at the WSF employ different mechanisms (e.g. Charter of Principles encouraging free debate and participation, workshops, indigenous artistic events) that influence the global flow of ideas, experiences, and information to guide and co-ordinate local sites, while flows of capital and other material resources remain localized (Banerjee, 2011). Both sites organize with vertical scalar hierarchies. However, while the boardroom also produces hierarchies of power and wealth, the WSF generates hierarchies of ideas.

ANT also suggests non-relations (e.g. censorship, filtering, obstructions) are just as important organizing mechanisms as relations (e.g. circulations, flows, accelerations) in the production of non-capitalist vertical scalar hierarchies (Legg, 2009; Sage et al., 2015). This is why in the pursuit of alternative forms of organizing indigenous activists blockade roads against land development, climate change protesters glue themselves to runways and attendees at the WSF discuss tactics to block certain global policies. When these infrastructural flows are obstructed, the material reach of governmental or corporate centers (oligopticons) is cut and these sites can instead be reworked into symbols of how to “scale up” an alternative world (panoramas).

The potential of hierarchical scalings for alternative organization, and the practical value of ANT and NMPE theories of scaling, can be further illustrated with a fictional example. Imagine a workers cooperative set up by farmers to sell bread to independent restaurants and shops. This cooperative is committed to social solidarity and invests its profits in local projects relating to renewable energy, biodiversity and social justice. As the cooperative succeeds a vote is taken to decide whether to retain profits for a period of 5 years to invest in expanding production and social solidarity to a regional level. Most members reject the proposal on the basis that cooperatives can only make a difference to a community if they are fully immersed in that community and instead propose they allocate some of their profits to promoting and supporting cooperative ideas across the wider region. One member quotes Kropotkin (1910)—“True progress lies in the direction of decentralization!”

What would happen if the members instead turned to theories of scale from NMPE and ANT rather than anarchism? They would first need to ask what is being “scaled up, why and how?.” They then recognize that yes production is being scaled up but not to centralize wealth and power. Rather this scaling serves to provide stronger support for community projects elsewhere, allowing the spread of cooperative principles. Moreover, all of the mechanisms involved in allocating social investment could, in principle, be democratically controlled by people living in those communities by for instance creating a democratic regional-level social justice council that selects projects proposed by communities (cf. Adler, 2019).

Despite the radical potential of such vertical scalar hierarchies for alternative organization there is a need to balance optimism with caution. That is, although vertically scaled, highly centralized, organization might not be sufficient cause of irresponsible capitalism, it does seem a necessary one. By way of conclusion, I reflect on this crucial point and my concluding argument that if we are to rehabilitate vertical scalar hierarchies for alternative organization, as I think we should, this should only be a partial rehabilitation.

Concluding comments

It seems clear to me that the presence of vertical hierarchical scalings within and sometimes against alternative organization needs to be better acknowledged and empirically understood. MOS scholars are ideally placed for this effort. My contribution in this paper is to make a first step in arguing how these scalings already serve multiple political purposes. To this end I have introduced two approaches from human geography that help reveal the differentiated politics of vertical scalings as elaborated with some brief empirical examples and studies. Both approaches problematize how vertical scalar hierarchies have been criticized within scholarship on alternative organization, particularly due to the influence of classical anarchism (Bakunin, 1873; Kropotkin, 1910; Proudhorn, 1863). In doing so they draw attention to how the political effects of vertical scalings are better explored with two empirical questions: what is being scaled and why? (i.e. capital accumulation, labor regulation and consumer protection, scale jumping) and how is it being scaled? (i.e. oligopticons and panoramas, flows and obstructions). By exploring these empirical questions with these theories, it becomes possible to reconcile the growing recognition in studies of alternative organization that there exist no “inherently good or bad alternative organizing structures exist that help us form ultimate judgments” (Alakavuklar, 2023: 18) with the old anarchist point that vertical hierarchical scalings, like all practices of organizing, are also far from politically neutral.

My departing argument is that attending to these empirical questions helps us recognize that vertical hierarchical scalings are differentiated and multiple, replete with complex and uncertain political effects. Recognizing that vertical hierarchical scalings are multiple does not mean stripping them of their political effects but rather appreciating that these effects are agentially nuanced. Like all organizational practices their effects cannot be reduced to a binary between “full causality and sheer inexistence” rather they can “authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggests, influence, block, render possible, forbid” (Latour, 2005: 72). Vertically scaled oligopticons where capital flows can be controlled unilaterally, and labor regulation delegated to local sites, do not determine irresponsible capitalism as anarchists used to have it, but they can certainly suggest such a society. Equally, a vertically scaled panorama of non-capitalist organization, of the kind suggested in Adler’s (2019) vision of a democratic socialist world or Zanoni’s (2020) “shared communist horizon,” cannot determine a non-capitalist alternative society, but might certainly encourage one. Above all what is required is greater acknowledgment that vertical scaling is an organizational practice—and like any other it should be explored empirically not ideologically in terms of its differentiated forms, processes, and nuanced political effects—for or against alternative organization.