Centrifugal & Centripetal Forces
A framework for understanding political action amidst the general crisis of coordination
Last month, I published an essay on how the Twelve-Day War represented continued US and Israeli efforts to lock-in the de-development of Iran and the eventual demise of an Iranian state. The reactions and criticisms have been thoughtful and engaging. Much of the ensuing discussion has focused on the validity of the de-development thesis versus the traditional narrative that the US and Israel seek classical regime change in Iran.
While these essays are generally focused on Iran (and the region more broadly), keen readers will notice that the commentary on Iran is an application of theoretical concepts that are being developed in the text. This previous piece was an opportunity to introduce and apply ideas like the state-in-waiting, stateforge, and centripetal-centralizing versus centrifugal-diffusing forces.1
Of these ideas, the latter (centripetal vs. centrifugal) has received the least attention, despite probably being the most important concept. This essay expands on the idea.
I. Forces
Broadly, the centripetal-centrifugal framework is about scale. Much in our lives cannot be determined by us as individuals — we inadvertently must coordinate with others (or otherwise participate in coordination as consumers, followers, etc).2 Generally, such coordination is often done through recursive hierarchies.3 I refer to forces that increase the size of this coordinating body as centripetal, in that they are pushing for a centralization of coordination through a single larger hierarchy. An alternative terminology could refer to a ‘scaling up’ of coordination.
On the other hand, there are forces running counter to this — which render it more difficult to coordinate at large scales.4 These forces are centrifugal, as they disperse coordination (and therefore power) away from the center on to new smaller hierarchies on the periphery, or even on to individuals. These forces reduce the scale of coordination.
An important claim in the previous essay (and foundational to the rest of the argument) is that the balance between centrifugal and centripetal forces has tipped strongly towards the former. I didn’t expand on this greatly, but this is referring to several trends. The first pertain to local factors, such as the internal pathologies of the Islamic Republic’s ruling clique and the external war being waged against it by foreign powers. But more importantly, it is referring to the general crisis in coordination throughout the world.
This is a somewhat slippery issue to define, but in broad strokes it is the decline in the ability of those without power to coordinate in order to advance their collective interests. While economic inequality has deepened in the last few decades, those on the lower levels of the economic and power hierarchy have become less able to impose their collective will.5
Climate change is probably the easiest prism for understanding this issue. On one side, a growing proportion of humanity has an immediate short-term interest in reducing carbon emissions, while everyone has a long-term interest in doing so. On the other side, a proportion of the capitalist class (already a minority) has a short-term interest in maintaining business-as-usual, or at least not being a first-mover in reducing their own emissions. This is actually a staggeringly uneven balance of forces. Nonetheless, the short-term fossil-capitalist interests, a minority within a minority, are able to absolutely dominate.
The Israeli extermination campaign in Gaza is another example.6 Even in the United States, a mostly pro-Israel country, public opinion is turning against Israel. Nevertheless, this turn in public opinion is fairly inconsequential, as the pro-Israel elite is able to easily dominate over the increasingly Israel-critical majority.7
One (flawed) way to phrase this coordination problem is simply as the ‘decline of the left,’ as the socialist bloc, communist parties, social-democratic parties, economic nationalists in the global south, unions, etc. all represented organized efforts by those on the bottom rungs of social hierarchies to coordinate and advance their collective interests.8 The fact that a large, dispersed, and individually-weak majority will often lose to a well-organized and individually-strong minority is a longstanding observation by social theorists — but it has been a long time since the problem has generally been this bad.
But to expand the idea further, the crisis described above is also part and parcel to a wider fragmentation of society and isolation of individuals. As the masses have become collectively weaker, they have also grown increasingly distant from each other.
An older literature, represented by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, has long documented this decline in sociality. Individuals participate less in unions, religious institutions, and other civic associations. Individuals are less likely to know their neighbors, they have less friends, work in smaller workplaces, marry less (or later), and have less children. Whether declining sociality is a cause or consequence of declining capacity for collective action — it has made it even harder for regular individuals to coordinate to advance their interests.
II. Iranian Centrifuges and Centrifugals
To zoom out, this is the background basis for the claim that centrifugal forces are outweighing centripetal forces in Iran. It is the local pathologies (the internal and international political context) and the general global breakdown in the ability of individuals to achieve collective action.9 With such a drastic change in the background conditions, a previously ‘normal’ occurrence like the collapse of the Iranian state (which has occurred many times, including at least twice in the 20th century), can lead to a different outcome than in the past.
Individuals cooperate to coordinate via larger groups like unions, neighborhood councils, NGOs, political parties, secret societies, and so on. The state is the scaling up of this to its highest degree, to endow a particular entity with sovereign power in order to resolve the coordination problem between these larger groups. If individuals are no longer capable of creating and maintaining these intermediating groups (like mass parties), it is unclear how individuals could construct a new state in a vacuum.
The state becomes something like a leftover vestigial technology from an ancient advanced alien civilization. A technology that we can still keep running, but that no one alive remembers how to build again from scratch.
This framework has implications for how individuals should participate responsibility in political life. The background conditions are of massive centrifugal forces, like a gravitational well tearing societies apart into entropy. Meaningful political action (that is, serious attempts to collectively organize those without power), must push in the opposite direction. Such action must be centripetal, constructing centralizing structures that allow individuals to coordinate through democratic hierarchies.10
Although not framed under these terms, Vincent Bevins’s seminal book If We Burn is a decade-long catalogue of individuals undertaking centrifugal politics en masse, then becoming bewildered as everything they care about becomes worse as a result of their actions. The centerpiece of the book is the Brazilian movement for free public transit. In their attempts to tear down the (deeply imperfect) incumbent socio-political hierarchy built through the Workers’ Party, the anarchists and leftists comprising the movement watched in horror as their actions sparked the rise of Bolsonaro and the Brazilian far-right.
The book’s critical insight is that when existing hierarchies are torn apart, it is difficult to construct alternatives. This was always true, but now much more so because of the background decline in sociality and increased challenges to collective coordination.
As a baseline, the centrifugal forces of entropy dominate. While the lumbering masses try to organize; smaller hierarchies comprised of the incumbent rich and powerful can move quickly to establish their dominance and re-wire the political domain to their advantage, permanently. In a competition between individuals, those starting with the most resources will win. This is an obvious fact. In a one-on-one political fight, you will not defeat a billionaire — or even a multi-millionaire. If your movement simply seeks to smash an existing hierarchy into a thousand pieces, you are simply setting the stage for a fight between you and your friends against people much more powerful than you. The only path for collective action is through centripetal politics.
The paragraphs above connect to Iran because the overwhelming mode of political participation for Iranians is through centrifugal politics. This is especially true in the diaspora. While most diaspora activism is grifting and clout-chasing, its only tangible impact is to render the existing state more illegitimate.
Some practical tips from this essay: when you are at a protest or other political event — ask yourself if it is contributing to centrifugal or centripetal forces. Is there a defined organization you can join? Is it constitutive of a democratic hierarchy that allows you to be led and to lead others? Does it create opportunities for you to be trained? Is it a starting point for the creation of a new social milieu beyond the occasional event? Is it generating a coordination mechanism that allows you to solve collective action problems with those around you? To eventually govern? If not, your actions can functionally only generate more entropy. Despite your deepest wishes and desires, your actions will make things worse.
The thesis here is most definitely not that you must have constructive solutions in order to criticize. That is irrelevant. It is perfectly fine to be part of a force that only criticizes — as long as you are part of an organizational form with a democratic hierarchy that is expanding in scale.
We must always recall the fundamental problem with the existing Islamic Republic: that it is a vehicle for a minority (the Islamist elite and the wider Islamist social pillar) to monopolize power. A democratic and progressive replacement is a much larger political hierarchy that allows for the majority to participate in governing society. Simply destroying the existing state runs in the opposite direction, ensuring that even smaller hierarchies than the Islamic Republic can emerge to dominate Iran. Much like the Brazilians and Egyptians in If We Burn, Iranians may burn down the bad in order for worse to emerge. We may one day witness diaspora supporters of the Woman-Life-Freedom movement watch in horror as the Taliban rolls into Khorasan and the Iranian plateau enters its own terminal Warlord Era.
A centripetal force tends towards the center while a centrifugal force tends away from the center.
As an individual, I cannot determine what modes of transportation are available to me (ex. if my city has a subway system). But as an individual, I have greater agency in choosing a particular mode of transport.
This concept comes from private correspondence with Alireza G. Tafreshi and Frans de Waal.
These centrifugal forces could be negative, in that they neutralize centripetal dynamics (ex. sanctions weaken the center’s ability to generate economic growth, which weaken the center’s capacity to coordinate through distribution of its economic surplus). They can also be positive, in that they make centrifugal coordination more attractive (the promotion of new national identities in the Iranian periphery).
The direction of causation is unclear; if increasing economic inequality caused increased political inequality or vice versa. Probably, causation is bidirectional (it took a great deal of self-restraint to not use the word ‘dialectical.’) For more on this, a forthcoming paper by Tafreshi, Bach, and Akçay on how inequality blocks climate action will be illuminating.
Though obviously salient, this example is imperfect: there are many people with a rational long-term interest in expelling Palestinians from Gaza (unlike climate change, where no one has a long-term interest in maintaining or increasing total carbon emissions).
The public perception risk to Israel is that a young generation of US elites turn against it, not that regular Americans do.
This framework is flawed because it misses that non-leftist vehicles for collective action have also declined, like Christian Democratic parties, etc. Additionally, it shifts attention away from subterranean changes in society. A ‘decline of the left’ could simply be that social structures have stayed constant but that the aggregate of individual preferences has shifted. The problem today is more interesting, and more frightening: even if solid majorities are progressive, they have no mechanism by which to impose their collective will.
This general decline in sociality is in some ways less pronounced in parts of Iran, though in other ways Iranian society is in the vanguard (ex. social-media fueled isolation, declining birth rates). As the famous quote goes: the future is already here, just distributed unevenly.
It is increasingly rare to come across progressives who believe in ‘decentralization’ and other forms of lower-scale coordination, even in the Anglo world.