Non-Movements
= "we have in fact witnessed since 2008 is a continuous increase of what the Iranian-American sociologist Asef Bayat has described as “non-movements”, namely, “the collective action of dispersed and unorganized actors”". [1]
Contextual Quote
1.
"On the one hand we have argued, against Bayat, that we are witnessing the production of revolutionaries without revolution, as millions descend onto the streets and are transformed by their collective outpouring of rage and disgust, but without (yet) any coherent notion of transcending capitalism. On the other hand, against Lind, we insist that the non-movements point to the disruptive kernel of our era, the fact that capitalist stagnation implies a crisis for political representation as such, and thus the end of political movements in the classical sense."
- Endnotes [2]
2.
<The non-movements are, as we have been insisting, the subjective expression of a more general disorder that has its roots in capitalist stagnation. It is the sheer quantity of protests and riots — their increasing normality — that distinguishes our era from, for instance, the anti-globalization years. This is why we say that our era is marked by the production of revolutionaries on a global scale. Men and women from across the spectrum of political ideology and identitarian stratification are confronting the reigning order with their disgust, fear, and anger, and increasingly defend their right to “evade” the unbearable costs of capitalist life. They are revolutionaries without a revolution, but in their confrontation with capitalist reproduction, as well as in their hunger for community, the non-movements express a potential conflict with the logic of capital as such.>
Discussion
Endnotes:
"This does not imply that we are steadily moving towards an omega point where revolution becomes inevitable. These movements may simply indicate our entrance into an ungovernable world. But we can today repeat the words of Jacques Camatte from 1972 and insist that “[s]ince May, there has been the movement of the production of revolutionaries”. All over the world men and women are, if not abandoning the world of capital, at least expressing real dissent with the status quo. Implied in the accumulation of protests since 2008 is a growth in the number of people with experiences of mass mobilization and practical dissent who can potentially begin “to understand the existing needs for revolution”.14 Thus, even if our period is not revolutionary in the short term, it is fundamentally disruptive and produces the potential for a break with the capitalist mode of production. The accumulation of struggles, and thus of men and women who have experienced for themselves the need for revolt and perhaps revolution, is a prerequisite for any serious discussion of overcoming capitalism.
It is true that revolution is not a school, and we cannot trust collective memory any more than our individual (mis-)rememberings. But the accumulation of social dissent over the past decade seems likely to continue and, increasingly, to shape the terrain over which the struggles are fought. This is not merely because anti-governmental struggles have already restructured the political landscape, as in the cases of parties such as the Five Star Moment in Italy or Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche, which organized assemblies and copied the 2011-rhetoric of being neither left nor right. Nor is it simply because square movements, youth riots, and similar struggles laid the basis for Syriza and Podemos and inflated the dreams of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders (paralleled by the growth of the nationalist right that seems to be the truth of the populist turn). No, we insist that the accumulation of social dissent since 2008 signals a continued intensification of class conflicts simply because the often brutal failures, or for that matter feeble victories, of the movements since 2011 have not exorcized the spectre of change.15
On the contrary, the anarchy of our period implies that enormous demonstrations, massive riots, and (we need to emphasise) waves of strikes,16 have become the new normal. In Chile one can, for instance, identify a red thread going from la revolución pingüina in 2006, when hundreds of thousands of high school kids brought the school system to a halt, demanding free travel passes and education reform, to the more violent and general uprisings around 2011. And then again, with even more intensity, we saw a new leap in 2019 when masses poured into the streets, outraged by president Sebastián Piñera’s declaration of war on the population, which led to overhaul of the constitution.17 Similar trajectories can be identified in many countries, such as in the United States, where Occupy Wall Street was followed by Black Lives Matter, which in turn paved the way, this year, for the largest social movement in that country’s history.18 Enormous uprisings and intense social conflicts are becoming such a normal facet of our period that even the radical left dismisses them as failing to meet their high standards: they are too liberal, too violent, too passive, too informal, too nationalist, too much part of the status quo, or too invested in identity politics.
In this article we argue that what we have in fact witnessed since 2008 is a continuous increase of what the Iranian-American sociologist Asef Bayat has described as “non-movements”, namely, “the collective action of dispersed and unorganized actors”. These non-movements are not in any sense revolutionary in themselves. They are closer to what Camatte has recently called “passive revolts”: subjective expressions of the objective disorder of our times.20 They reflect above all the growing delegitimization of politics in a context of ongoing stagnation and austerity. It is the combination of steadily rising non-movements involving unprecedented numbers of people, with a decline in democratic legitimacy, that allows us to describe the trend of our era as the production of revolutionaries without a revolution.
As examples of “non-movements” Bayat points to the struggles of the unorganised poor in Egypt; the fight of youth in Turkey to reclaim and realize their desired lifestyles; as well as womens’ struggle for gender equality both in the domestic and public spheres in Chile, India and the United States. In these struggles “claim-making practices” make themselves felt “through direct actions, rather than through exerting pressure on authorities to concede — something that the conventionally-organized social movements (like labour or environment movements) usually do.”21
Such practices often dress themselves in the garments of identity. Just as the workers movements belonged to an emergent capitalist world order organized by a polarization of the political field along class lines, so today class fragmentation has shaped the horizon of the non-movements. In an age of debt, where large parts of the population have no or even negative reserves, the decomposition of class undoes the basis not only for a workers’ movement, but for democratic representation itself. Thus today it is rational for proletarians, and increasingly also for members of the middle classes, to turn to other categories in order to define one’s place in a tottering world order. Class remains the primary source of our separations — old fashioned Marxist sociology is still in many ways valid — but class belonging is today calibrated by a multitude of variables such as age, gender, geography, race, or religion that act as channels, as well as real limits, for social struggles, and make identity politics a real expression of class struggle.22
As we make clear below, we do not wish to dismiss, denounce or, for that matter, exalt identity politics, nor to conflate it with liberalism or reformism.23 However, it must be recognized that there is something quite liberal about the non-movements, in that they are compelled to confront the illiberal tendencies of our era."
(https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/endnotes-onward-barbarians)
2.
"While traditional movements formed around relatively stable ideological structures and real communities, such as the union, the mass party, or the state socialist countries, those that have spread across the globe since 2008 express the collectivized desires of increasingly atomized populations. But while the end of the age of movements is in a sense the end of ideology, it is, as we have seen, not the end of identity. On the contrary, identities proliferate in an increasingly racketized and subculturalized economy where, as Tyler Cowen has argued, the average is over.40 There is no longer any stable centre, but rather a highly segmented class structure that reconfigures the ground of classical movements such as fascism and social democracy. If the centrist politics of Clinton and Blair during the 1990s, and the rise of identity politics since the 1970s, already signalled this change, the period since 2008 reveals instead an increasing confusion of identities.
The non-movements are, as we have been insisting, the subjective expression of a more general disorder that has its roots in capitalist stagnation. It is the sheer quantity of protests and riots — their increasing normality — that distinguishes our era from, for instance, the anti-globalization years. This is why we say that our era is marked by the production of revolutionaries on a global scale. Men and women from across the spectrum of political ideology and identitarian stratification are confronting the reigning order with their disgust, fear, and anger, and increasingly defend their right to “evade” the unbearable costs of capitalist life. They are revolutionaries without a revolution, but in their confrontation with capitalist reproduction, as well as in their hunger for community, the non-movements express a potential conflict with the logic of capital as such.
In such a context, politics — in the classical form of enmity and schism — comes back with a vengeance. Identity politics today announce a return of the political rather than the birth of a post-political era (as many left-wing critics of identity politics have argued). But politics can no longer produce any meaningful stability. It splits the population against itself and moves nations to, if not civil war, at least heightened conflicts and deeper schisms. Yet while the aporia of identity represents a loss of what we might call community, we see little by way of longing to return to the horrible worlds of social democracy and fascism. On the contrary, we tend to see a hunger for communal existence based on the liberal demands expressed in the non-movements. Liberalism and wokeness have, strange as it may seem, become disruptive forces at a time when broad sections of the left are becoming increasingly conservative, embracing the nationalist populism that fuels the right."