A decade ago, we found
ourselves in observance of a genuinely new global phenomenon – the global spread
of horizontalist networked protest movements. From the democratic vibrato of “الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام” [Ash-shaʻb yurīd
isqāṭ an-niẓām][1]
that resonated across the Arab World, to the Zuccottian cries of “We are the
99%” emanating from occupation after occupation, the early 2010s, or ‘teens’ as
they have come to be known, saw illustration after illustration of networked
protest spill over onto the global arena; where certain normative values overcame
arbitrary territorial frontiers and united peoples inter-nationally. Or, however,
at least it could have of appeared as such.
Following a reading of The
End of The End of History: Politics in The Twenty-First Century by the members
of the Aufhebunga Bunga podcast[2], I found myself reading Democracy
Disrupted by Ivan Krastev, the function of which is to evaluate exactly
such a sceptical claim – i.e., whether or not this series of globally networked
protests held revolutionary substance or were substantially a phenomenon of
appearance alone.[3]
Krastev’s short 2014 work examines the very character of these protests, not
only by looking at a handful of cases, but by examining the strictly ‘anti-political’
or ‘anti-representational’ quality that unified them.
Although I found this
work timely, for 2014 at very least, I would say that it was not without its
problems. The very fact that neither the global character of the Arab Spring
nor the Occupy Movement were addressed at any length somehow does take-away
from the work. These were two instances of genuinely global movements that
transcended borders with their logic; logics which could not be caged to a
single domain, and as such, contributed in their own way to the general
discourse of what it means to be a political citizen in the twenty-first
century, as a citizen-come-cosmopolitan human in a thoroughly global world. The
cases that Krastev discusses - Ukraine, Russia, Thailand and Turkey - are
geared more towards dispelling Francis Fukuyama’s claim that these protests
were simply similar middle-class eruptions, and thus were unitary and singular
cases to be compared, as opposed to the genuinely global.[4] Indeed, to summarise my only
point of critique if I were forced to find one, it seems that the ‘politics of
global protest’ that Krastev centred his reflections around is less that of
global revolutionism, of coordinated global ends and means, and more a certain character
of protest that reproduced itself within different localities in a single
period - and the two are distinct, albeit interconnected.
Returning to the
content of Krastev’s work, it would be a disservice to such a great conversationally
academic piece to summarise the work in but a handful of quotes. Nonetheless, if
I were to abridge Krastev’s argument in his own words, I would pick the five
following passages:
1 - “Today’s mass
protests, in many respects, are acts in search of a concept; they are praxis,
if you will, without theory”.
2 - “The protests are a rejection of a politics
without possibility, but they are also a form of acceptance of this new
reality. None of the protest movements emerged with a platform for changing the
world, or even the economy.”
3 - “Unlike elections,
which focus only on direct, formal centres of power, protests promise to
destroy the real centres of power – which are far more dispersed throughout the
society, culture and economy.”
4 - “The protests have
not marked the return of revolution. Like elections, they actually serve to
forestall revolution by keeping its promise of a radically different future at
an unbridgeable distance.”
5 - “‘The graduate
looking for work’ is not the new proletarian. Revolutions need ideology as
oxygen and fuel, and the protestors have no ideology or alternative vision of
the future to speak of.”
Each one of these speaks
directly to one of the qualities that Krastev identifies as colouring the
contemporary nature of such global networked protests. Let’s go through each.
In the first case, the
great reversal can be seen at play. Whereas in ages past the question asked was
‘what is the praxis that is an extension to the theory?’, answered chiefly in
the praxis-oriented nature of the Leninist query ‘What is to be done?’, Krastev
highlights that today it appears that such global protest operates on the site
of its inversion – it is instead asked ‘what is the framework that is an
extension to our praxis?’ or ‘What is to be theorised?’. Primarily, if praxis
is not directed to a given ends – i.e., the enforcement of particular legislation
or the seizure of the state apparatus, for instance –praxis alone without
direction can quickly become potential to all possibility, not only the
affirmative, but the regressive and conflictual also. The events that unfolded
in Libya may demonstrate this most profoundly. This centricity upon praxis,
with its lack of direction, if successful in rupturing the political trajectory
of the state, or in disrupting its functioning deeply enough, can turn to
colour a vacuous state of disorder, out of which the potential to possibility becomes
the character of one’s nightmares as equally as one’s dreams. Perhaps, equally, this is what Theda Skocpol cites as demonstrating those civic movements that are between "heads without bodies" and "bodies without heads".[a]
This character is compounded
in the second and third quotes above. These protests rejected the lack of
possibility the status-quo entailed, but were equally resigned to it. Discourse
centred around ousting a particular regime or dislocating the centres of power
that limited the citizenry to some ends. Nonetheless, without theoretical
framework, without ends, without alternative, there emerged not even the
semblance of change nor the whisper of overturning the order of the day,
nationally of course – tangible global change did not even seem worth the time
to contemplate, despite the globally networked nature of such movements.
These features come to
a head in the fourth and fifth points I have selected to highlight. Such a character
of protest serves only to forestall an authentically global revolutionism. At
every turn, such movements provide a crushing dose of ‘reality’, reconstituting
the very neoliberal principle that some of these protest rally against, i.e.,
that ‘there is no alternative’. In fact, by constructing the headless-chicken-like
praxis in the manner they do, such global protests serve to reinforce the
Capitalist Realism described by the late Mark Fisher[5]. Simply put, by presenting
the illusion of their genuine alterneity, the supposed reality that there is no
alternative to neoliberalism becomes itself reconstituted with every failure,
and these protests, by virtue of being ends-less, being alternative-less,
without telos, can only fail. Thus, a future of radical difference
is kept perennially at an arm’s length away and so an alternative future
remains foreclosed to us.
In these regards,
Krastev’s work is as critical as it is descriptive or analytical of the
character of the then primary wave of globalised networked protests. Therefore,
Krastev’s reflections may be short, but they provide guidelines for how to
think about global protest, be that from the perspective of the theorist or
practitioner, and their evidenced potential to cause change in the world itself,
be that on a national or global scale.
____________________________
The rest of this piece contains those
quotations and notes I wished to record of Krastev’s work, for future use.
____________________________
Page 10:
“The demonstrations were different, but the slogans
of the protestors were strikingly similar.”
Page 11:
“While the slogans of the protestors were similar,
the demands varied.”
“The spread of the protests resembled a flu
epidemic. The revolutionary virus of Tunisia was easily caught in Madrid. The
white piano that became a symbol of the protests in Istanbul got reproduced in
Sofia.”
“The global spread of the protests was assisted by
the visual dimension of politics, since images are more universal and
contagious than words.”
“Ultimately, several protests managed to overthrow
governments or blocking certain policies. Others were defeated or ran out of
steam. It is instructive that with the passage of time it is increasingly
difficult to decide which protests succeeded.”
Page 12:
“The new social movements conceptualized themselves
as networks and became convinced that networks can trump hierarchy. The
all-powerful network is their organizational weapon of choice in the same way
that the small but disciplined revolutionary party was once the organizational
weapon of choice for communists.”
Page 13:
“Today’s revolutions are not inspired by theories;
they have acquired company names. Pundits speak of ‘Facebook revolutions’,
‘Twitter insurrections’, and ‘Blackberry Riots’. Spanish Sociologist Manuel
Castells called the nameless new protest movements ‘networks of outrage and hope’[6]”.
Page 19:
“Today, hardly anybody is interested in the system.
The current revolution is not revolution of readers start radical students
today are only preoccupied with have experience the system-not by what kind of
system it is. Barely thinking in terms of social groups, they have a shared
experience but no collective identity.”
Page 20:
“In most of the protests, citizens on the street
treat politics not as a set of issues but as a kind of performance art.”
“It was more of a radical consumers protest than a
protest of radical utopians.”
Page 21:
“We are living through the world’s first
libertarian revolution.”
“The success of the revolution lies in the people’s
readiness to return to the square at any time needed by any means necessary.” –
[Reference to Hirschman[7]:
leaving, fighting, and accepting.]
Page 23:
“In this sense, voice is never synonymous with
simply opposing power; it assumes the responsibility to be the
power.“
Page 32:
“What seems clear are a series of aporias. The
protesting citizen wants change, but he rejects any form of political
representation. He longs for political community, but he refuses to be led by others.
He’s ready to take the risk of being beaten or even killed by the police, but
he is afraid to take the risk of trusting any party or politician. He is
dreaming of democracy, but he has lost faith in elections.”
Page 35:
“The result is that voting has a dual
character – it allows us to replace those in power, thus protecting us from
the excessively repressive state, but it also takes no measure of
popular passions, thereby defending us from the excessively expressive
citizen. Democracy allows mad people to vote and It could even elect them
(though it surely would not tolerate them for long), but it also disarms their
madness.”
“Democracy at once restrains the
intensity of political actors while overdramatizing the stakes of the political
game. It tries to inspire the apathetic to interest in public life while
simultaneously cooling down the passions of the zealot. Mobilizing the passive
and pacifying the outraged – these are two of the primary functions of
democratic elections. But elections also have a transcendental character. They
ask us to judge politicians not simply on what they have done but on what they
promise to do. In this sense, elections are a machine for the production of
collective dreams. Ban elections and you consent to live in a present without a
future – or you subscribe to a future decreed by the state. Elections give us a
hand in constructing the future. They bring change; they do not foreclose.”
Page: 37:
“In the days of the Cold War,
citizens would go to the ballot box with the expectation that their vote would
decide their country’s fate: whether it would remain part of the West or join
the East, whether industry should be nationalized, and so on. Large, imposing
questions were the order of the day. Today, the differences between left and
right have essentially vanished and voting have become more a matter of taste
than of ideological conviction.”
Page 39:
“The paradoxical effect of the loss
of drama in elections is their mutation into a ritual of humiliation to the
party in power rather than a vote of confidence in the opposition.”
“Voters simply do not see their
ballot as a long-term contract with the party they have chosen. No longer
predicated on one’s future expectations, voting is now purely a judgement on
past performance”.
“ ‘No one is truly elected
anymore’, Pierre Rosanvallon has argued. ‘Those in power no longer enjoy the
confidence of the voters; they merely reap the benefits of distrust of their
opponents and predecessors’[8]. In several of the new
democracies in Europe, it is easier to ‘resurrect’ than to re-elect.”
Page 59:
“In this, a world defined by
mistrust, popular sovereignty will assert itself as the power to refuse. Do not
expect politicians with long-range visions or political movements to inspire
collective projects. Do not expect political parties to capture the imagination
of the citizens and command the loyalty of their followers. The democracy of
the future will look very different. People will step into the civic limelight
only to refuse certain policies or debunk particular politicians.”
“The core social conflicts that
will structure political space will be between the people and the elite, not
between left and right. The democracy of tomorrow – being born on the streets
of the world’s great cities – will be a democracy of rejection.”
“The protestors on the streets of
Moscow, Sofia, Istanbul, and Sao Paulo are the new face of democratic politics.
But please do not ask them what they want. What they know is only what they do
not want. Their rejectionist ethic may be as radical and total as dismissing
world capitalism (see Occupy Wall Street) or as local and modest as a protest
against a new railway station in Stuttgart.”
Page 59-60:
“We do not make positive choices
anymore; we are active in politics by our readiness to reject.”
Page 60:
“We are heading to a new democratic
age in which politicians will not have our trust and citizens will be
preoccupied with controlling their representatives. Political representation
does not work in an era inhabited by people with multiple identities…Nothing
should constrain or challenge the freedom of her individual choices.”
“ ‘Why should it be more important
for me that I am a German than that I am a cyclist’, a young member of the
European Parliament from the Greens told me. She refused to think in terms of
social or ethnic groups and she refused to take history into account. Nothing
should constrain or challenge the freedom of her individual choices.” [Fisher +
individualism – Vampires Castle?]
“In the new democratic age,
electoral politics will no longer take pride of place. Elections have lost
their connection to the future.”
Page 62:
“In our new democratic world,
loyalty has evaporated. Politics has been replaced by collective consumerism in
which citizens regularly appeared poised to bolt for the door.” [‘Bolt for the
door’ = Hirschman’s ‘exit’].
Page 64-65:
“The citizen who decides to leave
the country hardly has reform in mind. He is interested in changing his lot in
life, not lives of others. But the use of exit by governments as a way to
reduce the pressure for change can be an impetus for bringing protestors to the
streets.”
Page 65:
“The impact of the global financial
crisis on the growth of protest politics was most strongly felt not through the
rise in unemployment and economic hardship, but through the evaporation of
emigration as an option to deal with social and economic pressures. The crisis
was global. There was nowhere people could go to escape.”
“Middle-class individuals have been
empowered by the freedom to leave. The financial crisis reversed this
perspective, however, and exit began to be perceived as a sign of
disempowerment. In order to understand the logic of the current protest wave in
the world, particularly in Europe, we need to grasp this redefinition of voice
and exit.”
“In their organizational logic, the
protests can in fact be interpreted as a collective act of exit; the protestors
reject representation and the possibility of negotiation and even agreement on
a common platform or list of demands. But by denying the state of normal
politics organized around conflicts between organized social groups, the
protesters have been forced to oscillate between the individual and symbolic
level of politics.”
Page 66:
“The demand can be grandiose and
symbolic, as in ending capitalism, and then the meaning becomes the demand
itself. In order to protest to be successful, it should be either concrete or
symbolic. The middle level – messy space of actual politics that cannot be
addressed by crowds huddled in public squares – has disappeared.”
Page 67:
“The secessions did not hope to
bring change; they demanded the restoration of cosmic order.”
“Today’s mass protests, in many respects, are acts in
search of a concept; they are praxis, if you will, without theory”
“They [mass-protests] are the most
dramatic expression of the conviction that the elites do not govern in the
interest of the people and that the electorate has lost control over the
elected. They stand for insurrection against the institutions of representative
democracy but without offering any alternatives (or even an openness to endorse
non democratic replacements).” – Lacan and the Parle. During a lecture at the
Catholic University of Louvain in 1972, a young man interrupts Lacan by pouring
flour and water over the desk Lacan was lecturing from.[9] In this, the young man is
asked what his desire politically entails and responds with something akin to
‘I want revolution’, demonstrating themselves as perhaps a ‘rebel with
cause but without solution’. Is this the same here? Was the young man in
the Lacanian Parle exhibiting the nascent character of global networked protest
today? Perhaps.
Page 67-68:
“This new wave of protests is
leaderless not because social media made leaderless revolution possible…but
because the ambition to challenge all forms of political representation has
made political leaders unwelcome.”
Page 68:
“Globalisation liberated the elites
from their dependence on citizens. When drones and professional armies replace
the citizen-soldier, elites lose interests in the views of citizen-soldiers.
The flooding on the labour market by low-cost
immigrants or outsourced production reduces the elites’ willingness to
cooperate. As a result, the citizen-worker gets detached from the
citizen-voter.”[10]
“Elections fail to evince either
the drama or the capacity to solve social problems that they once did, while
rebellion from below has become unconvincing. Capturing the government is simply
no longer a guarantee that things will change.”
Page 69:
“We live in a society of ‘innocent
criminals’, where governments prefer to claim impotence rather than power.”
“The futile attempts of several
leftist governments to increase taxes on the superrich are the most powerful
demonstration of the constraints that governments face in an era of global
markets and international capital flow. It is unclear if it would make more
sense to topple the government or pity it.”
“Voters feel helpless today because
the politicians they choose are candid about their lack of power. It is up to
citizens to decide whether to trust that the politicians do in fact have their
hands tied or to treat the cries of powerlessness as the ultimate power grab.”
Page 70:
“Democracy is nurtured by promises
because politicians who fail to fulfil them can be held accountable. When there
are no promises, there is no civic responsibility.”
“The protests are a rejection of a
politics without possibility, but they are also a form of acceptance of this
new reality. None of the protest movements emerged with a platform for changing
the world, or even the economy.”
“Neither are the protests examples
of Fukuyama’s revolution of the global middle class – at least not in the sense
of them being a demonstration of its empowerment.”
“But if the protests do not signal
a return of revolutionary politics, neither will they represent an effective
strategy of citizen empowerment in the age of globalisation.”
Page 71:
“The notion of control in protest
politics is instead focused on manipulating the elites to prevent them from
benefitting from their positions of power. It is the protests’ spontaneity that
makes it difficult for the elites to capture them.”
“The rise of protest politics is a
natural outcome of the oligarchic turn
in democratic politics.”
Page 72:
“Protests did not change what
governments were actually doing but rather how they soke about what they were
doing. We now see that democratic governments are able to exhaust protest
movements while nondemocratic governments (even when democratically elected)
try to crash them.”
Page 73:
“Because protesters are no longer
sure who governs, they end up attacking the whole system of governance. Was it
not symptomatic that protesters in the United States occupied Wall Street
rather than the White House?”
“Unlike elections, which focus only
on direct, formal centres of power, protests promise to destroy the real
centres of power – which are far more dispersed throughout the society, culture
and economy.”
Page 74:
“The power of protest is negative.
It injects insecurity into the elite, and it is the contagious nature of
protest that turns it into a global issue.”
“Mass protests immediately divide
the elite between those who want to engage and those who want to crush, between
those who want to dialogue with the protestors and those who would rather
arrest them.”
“Even when they are nor advocating
anything concrete, the protests assert the possibility of change and thus do
something that elections once did – keep the future open. People who occupy
public spaces get a sense of power that is absent in the electoral booth” – This
makes me think of Arendt, whereby Power, as acting in concert, sits in relation
to natality as always power potential.[11]
Page 75:
“Regardless of the myriad
demonstrations of civic courage and political idealism and the inspiring videos
and rich expressions of countercultural imagination, the protests are not the
solution to ‘there is no alternative’ politics. They are, however, powerful
manifestations of resistance to the subordination of politics to the market
(even when they are premarket). In the final account, the protests demonstrate
the resilience of the political but signal a decline of political reform. The
waning of the voice option is a side effect of this new generation of political
mobilisation. In political activism that is so individualistic and symbolic,
there is no place for Hirschman’s small-scale reformers. Contemporary protests
are therefore much more about exit than voice.”
“Indeed the anti-institutional message of the
protests drives the younger generation spontaneous, internet-centred activism
and discourages more formal organisational thinking.”
Page 76-77:
“’The graduate looking for work’ is
not the new proletarian. Revolutions need ideology as oxygen and fuel, and the
protestors have no ideology or alternative vision of the future to speak of.”
Page 77:
“The protestors disrupt democracy,
but then democracy returns, poised and primed for the next disruption. Which
will come. And then end. Just like the last time. Just like the next.”
[1] "The people want to bring down
the regime".
[2] Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and
Phillip Cunliffe (2021) The End of The End of History: Politics in The
Twenty-First Century. London: Zero Books.
[3] Ivan Krastev (2014) Democracy
Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest. Philadelphia: The University of
Pennsylvania Press.
[4] See, for instance: Francis
Fukuyama (2013, June 28.) ‘The Middle-Class Revolution’. wsj.com. Available
at: htt
ps://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323873904578571472700348086.
[a] Theda Skocpol (2013) Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. pp. 167, 180-223.
[5] Mark Fisher (2009) Capitalist
Realism: Is There No Alternative?. London: Zero Books.
[6] Manuel Castells (2012) Networks
of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
[7] Albert O. Hirschman (1970) Exit,
Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[8] Pierre Rosanvallon (2008) Counter
Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, p.176.
[9] One may find a video of this
extract of the Parle here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jeXs3ZqoLg.
[10] Ivan Krastev (2013) In Mistrust
We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders?. New York:
TED Conferences, p. 47.
[11] Hannah Arendt (1970) On
Violence. New York: Harvest Books, p. 44.; (1998) The Human Condition.
Second Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 200-203.