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A great exchange, this one. Since @BueRubner mentioned my work, here are some thoughts:
My impression is that the problem Bue points out lies not in the use @endnotesjournal make of the concept of "non-movements" as such, but in the grammar this concept supposes and reinforces. https://twitter.com/BueRubner/status/1338835790143565829
My impression is that the problem Bue points out lies not in the use @endnotesjournal make of the concept of "non-movements" as such, but in the grammar this concept supposes and reinforces. https://twitter.com/BueRubner/status/1338835790143565829
This is a grammar in which something is either a movement or not a movement because (this ultimately being the relevant feature) it is either organised or not organised. The question is then, what must we suppose in order to think that? I’d say at least two things:
1) That organisation is either/or: there is a definite threshold separating the non-organised from the organised. In the grammar of concepts like “non-movement”, it’s clear what the threshold is supposed to be: a certain type of “traditional” organisation that came to structure
collective action in the 19th century but has since become obsolete.
Now, we can say about this opposition between movement/non-movement, organised/not-organised the same thing that Pierre Clastres said about calling indigenous collectivities “societies without history/state”:
Now, we can say about this opposition between movement/non-movement, organised/not-organised the same thing that Pierre Clastres said about calling indigenous collectivities “societies without history/state”:
If you define a reality only negatively, by what it lacks, you’re not only failing to describe it positively by what it is or does have, you’re also reinforcing the idea that what it is defined against is the norm or the natural path of development. Note for example that
one of the weird consequences of taking this grammar to its logical conclusions is that “organisation” would be something that came to exist historically in the 19th century. Political organisation thus supposedly existed only for a brief moment in human history.
This grammar is very widespread. A point I make in my forthcoming book is that “horizontalists” and “verticalists” often implicitly agree that “organisation” and “party” are synonymous; where they differ is whether one should embrace or reject what follows from that.
The distinction that Bayat is highlighting, and that @endnotesjournal wishes to hold on to, is of course both valid and analytically/politically useful: there are important differences in the way mass movements organise now. What I believe @BueRubner is pointing out, however,
is that phrasing it in such terms ultimately deprives us of the capacity to do something we need to do (deepen our understanding of how these experiences are organised) because from the outset it denies them precisely the quality we’d like to investigate (organisation).
This renders the specific modes of organisation that already exist inivisible. Thus, previously unaffiliated people coming together around a call on social media or a tent in a square becomes not an account of how they became organised, but evidence of their “unorganisation”.
This is why I think this grammar should be abandoned altogether. Instead, we should suppose that everything is organised in its own way. What people see as a border separating organisation from non-organisation is rather the threshold between informal and formal organisation.
Collective action is not collective action only if it corresponds to a certain model of how collective action was organised that was prevalent between the 19th and 20th centuries. And neither were things in this period ever as monolithic as they’re retrospectively made out to be.
2) The other assumption implicit in this grammar is precisely that, if “movement” is synonymous with a certain historical form, and the latter appears from our perspective as solid, “organised”, monolithic, then this must be intrinsic to the definition of what “movement” is.
It then follows that what we have today cannot be “movements”.
Again, the grammar the concept supposes reinforces what it wishes to criticise, turning a form it deems obsolete into the gold standard in comparison to which what exists now can only appear as a negative image.
Again, the grammar the concept supposes reinforces what it wishes to criticise, turning a form it deems obsolete into the gold standard in comparison to which what exists now can only appear as a negative image.
It also implicitly subscribes to the fantasies of those who believe we could just go back to older forms: “back then there was always unity, clarity of purpose, everyone knew who was a member, how decisions were made, what the strategy/programme was, who the leaders were..."
What happens if we start instead from the assumption that everything is already organised in some way? Organisation is said not of this or that form of practice, but always of an ecology of different forms/practices that coexist and interact (knowingly and unknowingly) in time.
This is true both of what we have now and what existed in the past. Take a stereotypical “traditional” example like a miner’s strike: there’s the union structure, but there’s also the informal networks of women, an ad hoc group of parents at the local school, outside supporters…
Various centers and layers of organisation operating at different scales, like today. Every movement is in that sense always non-totalisable or (which is to say the same) totalisable only by metonymy, by making one part stand for the whole. "Distributed", in network terms.
What is the difference, then? The degree to which that distribution tends towards the centralised (as in the old workers’ movement) or the decentralised (as today). It’s the greater decentralisation (smaller organising cores working at smaller scales etc.) that makes
the way today’s movements organise harder to identify: it’s less visible because much smaller –– which is very different from saying there is no organisation there. This is a function of the historical decline of big rank and file orgs, new technological affordances etc.
Switching from an either/or to a difference in degree allows us both to avoid sweeping epochal generalisation (there once was only x, now there's only y) and to take a less descriptive stance in the face of these changes: instead of merely registering a historical shift,
we can implicate ourselves in the problem and ask: how could these ecologies be transformed, their balance between centralisation and decentralisation recalibrated? What interventions can take the form they have and give it a different shape, and what would doing so involve?
Ok, this was way more than 10p, so to wrap it up.
I too believe the problem @endnotesjournal highlights is the correct one (the specific form that revolts take to them), and agree that relating this to capitalist stagnation is a useful insight (though by no means a catch-all
I too believe the problem @endnotesjournal highlights is the correct one (the specific form that revolts take to them), and agree that relating this to capitalist stagnation is a useful insight (though by no means a catch-all
causal explanation); the question is whether the means we use to pose this problem don't risk undermining the goal of sharpening our capacity to intervene in it.
