Read on Twitter
I always enjoy reading Endnotes, and I've learnt much from it, but it's also often a baffling experience. > https://endnotes.org.uk/other_texts/en/endnotes-onward-barbarians
How can they describe are all/most contemporary movements as non-movements? Organized components are important to very many of them, and often take on leading or cordinating roles.
For Bayat, non-movements are strictly unorganized. An example is slumdwellers hacking into electricity networks on an individualized basis, but coming together to defend their gains when the state/electricity companies try to stop the practice.
That clearly doesn't fit with most of the movements cited by Endnotes, many of whom have a large presense of actual, often big organisations, and in most of which pre-existing political networks and connections play important roles.
The Yellow Vests sure, but Chile with its established student movement, or Ecuador with the strong organized indigeneous participation, not so much...
Much more baffling, however, is the conflation of non-movements with identity politics. Sure there are overlaps, but is Hong Kong identity politics? Struggles against cuts to fuel subsidies or hikes to metro fares?
"In contrast, the non-movements express the antagonistic dimension of identity politics in the sense that they cannot constitute a people, and seldom even articulate clear political or positive demands." I'm not really sure what this means, nor what it refers to
"it is by no means clear that we are witnessing a “counter-revolution”, for the Trumps of this world can only escalate conflicts and deepen schisms, to the point that the party of order reveals itself to be the party of anarchy." This is extremely well put, and continues:
"These neo-populists cannot produce any real hegemony, but only split populations."
yup. Very succint way to state the difference from classical fascism which united already split populations by means of violence.
yup. Very succint way to state the difference from classical fascism which united already split populations by means of violence.
Perhaps the best way to make sense of Endnotes' talk about non-movements isn't Bayat's definition which doesn't fit, but Carl Schmitt's definition of social movements as "the mediation between the unorganised people and the state". But why accept that?
Yes, the mobilizations, protests and riots mentioned by EN are non-movements if we take mov't to mean "the mediation between the unorganized people and the state", but that's a definition that captures fascist mov'ts well, while definitionally excluding "the real movement that.."
One of the most generative aspects of Endnotes' approach is their attention to the political implications of declining growth rates: "state politics has been reduced to fighting over the distribution of a fixed or shrinking pie"
The most productive way to read this isn't as a linear causal factor where economics determine politics, but rather as a problematising factor which is generative of very different responses
That's not overdetermination, where as a single situation being determined by multiple causes, but the oposite, in which a single cause determines multiple situations.
However, this would suggest the need to analyse the specificity of different situations, which Endnotes doesn't do. Instead they try to unify all situations under a global description, but this description is as weak as the unity of the global situation it tries to name...
Describing the global situation in purely negative terms of confusion and ungovernability provides us with a negative unity whose positive counterpart isn't the analyses of specific situations, but some preceding state of imagined or real clarity and governability
Which means the analyses guides us from and towards the past - once again, it seems, the past of the workers' movement and social democracy - even if only to negate it.
But there is another clarity than the one that's been negated by the present - the clarity of the analysts themselves, elevated above the confusions
The collective once again, hesitantly, poses the question of what needs to be done (cf. the composition problem), but since the question isn't isn't situated in the specificity of situations, but on a global level defined negatively, we get abstract answers to abstract problems
In short, the question of "what needs to be done" drifts towards "what would need to happen" - for revolution and given the negative global analysis. Rather than studying the possibilities of the conditions, the focus is on the conditions of possibility.
years ago, after Endnotes 2, I wrote this critique and it's an interesting (at least for me) yardstick for Endnotes development. I'm off to bed now, but maybe tomorrow I'll reflect on how they've moved since then https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/surplus-population-social-reproduction-and-the-problem-of-class-formation/
I think Endnotes did overcome some of the limitations I pointed out in my critique - especially by taking up questions of composition and motivations, while maintaining their core perspective:
Keeping an eye on the conditions of possibility of (global) revolution today. While communization is receding from view, there's still this search for communist hope in the global situation... The problem is, however, that..
There's a deep tension between strategic compositional thought and this global horizon. Time and again, the latter still takes precedence over the former:
especially, as argued above, when the the negative definition of the global situation isn't followed up with a study of the generative implications of this negativity in the specificity of situations.
This desire to keep open the global horizon of revolution is, I think, a sign of the weakness of communist practice today. If communist horizons were kept open accross the world from specific situations, there'd be little need for an abstract, detached analysis to do that
I'm all for keeping the horizon open, but from this abstract and elevated perspective - which is anchored as "anthropological" and a "science of the species" (Bordiga) - all sinners are the same and mankind becomes God. Here's how:
All sinners become the same: "we see little by way of longing to return to the horrible worlds of social democracy and fascism."
Mankind becomes God: In the whole text, there is no mention of climate change and ecological destruction. And there's no mention of covid-19 as an ecological crisis.
Studying the present trajectory of globalized, ecocidal capitalism without (critiques of) political ecology and political epidemiology is like studying the workers' movement and capital without (the critique of) political economy.
Of course Endnotes know the differences between fascism and social democracy, and that we're in a deep emergency of climate and ecology.
It's just that in the perspective they write from, these recede from view, despite being key determinants of struggle & politics in the present
It's just that in the perspective they write from, these recede from view, despite being key determinants of struggle & politics in the present
