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@BueRubner raised some interesting questions on our use of Asef Bayat’s term non-movement. For us, the concept of the non-movement expresses the confusion, frustration but also hope that we have witnessed the last twelve years or so after taking part in revolts and uprisings in
several parts of the world. We remember how a high-school student mobilized tens of thousands in a demo in Santiago, Chile a decade ago through a call on Facebook that the university organizations reluctantly followed. One of us talked with a hacker that decided to camp at Puerta
del Sol in Madrid in 2011 and laughed when the Spanish indignado answered to what extent the autonomous and radical left was involved: “Autonomous movement? I have never heard about the autonomous movement. There is no autonomous movement here.” And we understood how confused our
times were when a soldier told us in Paris at one of Gilets Jaunes’ demonstrations: “We love the black block. They think we are fascists. But we love them.” Obviously in all of these events organizations, parties and unions (movements) were involved, but the uprisings themselves
mobilized thousands of people who had never been formally organized but were close to what Bayat calls non-movements. But what is a non-movement? For Bayat, “Non-movements represent the collective action of noncollective actors, who are oriented more toward action than by being
ideologically driven”. They “are the shared contentious practices of a large number of fragmented people whose similar but disconnected claims produce important social change in their own lives and society at large”. Bayat argues that it is primarily the third world neoliberal
city that is the site of these non-movements and he has underlined how they made the arab spring possible. Yet, like many others he explicitly relates Occupy and similar revolts to the logic of the non-movement. Bayat does obviously not deny that organizations such as the Muslim
Brotherhood had a crucial role in shaping the Arab spring, just like different organizations and movements – think of Syriza in Greece or the student’s organizations in Chile for instance – have shaped many of the uprisings and protests that we have seen the last 12 years. But
Bayat comes close to argue that the uprisings themselves can be seen as non-movements, namely, collective actions that move beyond the logic of the classical social movement. For instance, formally unorganized actors can post a call to action on Facebook, set up a tent at a
square, or put on a yellow west and thereby mobilize thousands and thousands of "noncollective actors" and even force organizations to follow rather than lead. In "Onward Barbarians" we discuss how the uprisings we have seen the last ten years both interact with classical social
movements, such as parties and unions, and have led to the creation of new ones. But it is a fact that the uprisings have a logic and life of their own that can be expressed by the term non-movement. What is important is that Bayat sees the non-movements as ways to organize for
a fragmented and unorganized proletariat. He relates the emergence of the non-movements to a “postsocialist . . . and neoliberal climate where the ideas of revolution, distributive justice, social rights, and class politics had been dispelled in favor of the pervasive idioms of
civil society, NGOs, individual rights, democracy, and identity politics.“ In other words, the non-movements are a product of the world of stagnation that we have discussed in several texts, and reflect the demise of the workers’ movement that we have chronicled in, for instance
, “A History of Separation” ( https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4/en/endnotes-preface). What is even more telling is that Bayat argues that, “Non-movements usually work under the state forms that cannot, do not, or are perceived not to meet the social and material needs of the disenfranchised, who are then
compelled to resort to direct action.” We think that this is an apt description of a more general situation and this is why we use the term non-movement as an expression of the spontaneous uprisings that we have seen unfolding and even escalating the last years. Thus, for us, the
third world neoliberal city points to a global trajectory: the stagnation of capitalism that we think conditions the uprisings that we have seen taking place the last decade. This does not mean that everything began in 2008, note that we explicitly relate our use of the term
non-movement to the 1970’s, but we think that the crisis in 2008 radicalized tendencies that have been unfolding for decades. Some sociologists have rightly insisted that the Chilean uprising is an uprising of a neoliberal subject: disorganized, fragmented, hypermobile, a meme
more than an organization. This implies, as we insist in the text, that the logic of the non-movement reshapes the movements that are involved. For the growth of non-movements expresses not only the decline of the classical movement but reveals that the framework of politics
today is determined by capitalist stagnation. In other words, we use the concept of the non-movement to address the potentials and limits of contemporary mass movements in a world of stagnation. Bayat’s theory of non-movements points also to a daily politics, a reshaping of
people's lives that precedes and makes uprisings possible and that often survive the revolts themselves. This is the anthropological dimension of the non-movements that we point to when we argue that the George Floyd uprising represents a shift in the view on race among young
white Americans. The uprisings can thereby amplify wider anthropological changes that precede and survive revolts. This is also why we relate the non-movements to Bordiga's triad formism-reformism-antiformism and defend a symptomatic interpretation of the uprisings as signs of a
general change of the reproduction of class and even more the legitimacy of capitalism. In the end, the term designates a way to discuss proletarian autonomy in a postsocialist and neoliberal word. The non-movement can be described as something like Luxemburg's mass strike. It
is a concept that we can use to discuss similarities between different struggles today, not in order to deny important differences, but to insist on commonalities between the uprisings that we have seen unfolding since, around, 2008. We think that the class struggle is reshaped
along the lines of what Bayat calls the non-movement. We have seen how youth protesting a hike in transport costs overhauled the constitution in Chile, we have seen how the US has been shaken by a vast rebellion against police murder, and how a virus almost brought the economy to
a halt. We don't need to be optimistic to accept that we are in period that should radicalize rather than stiffen our imagination. We can see a global accumulation of "revolutionaries without revolution" and this is in itself a sign that our order is tottering.
