(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
After more than a decade with riots, uprisings and revolts, it is possible to make certain preliminary observations that anchor the new protest cycle in a longer historical process. There is something else going on in the last 10–15 years of mass protests. They take place in the dissolution of an earlier vocabulary of societal transformation. The 19th and 20th centuries were characterized by a notion of revolution, or different notions of a revolutionary process. From the French Revolution onwards, an idea of social progress was the starting point for the political struggles over the organization of society. Conservative and liberal forces fought against or tried to organize the development so that it did not change decisively the political and economic power, while socialists and communists wanted to accelerate it with a view to a completely different distribution of society's goods and values.
This notion of social progress was also paradigmatically beyond a Eurocentric framework, as is evident from the modernization discourse of decolonization. As the Jamaican anthropologist David Scott puts it, we are now in a situation where the triumphant narratives of national liberation, anti-imperialism and socialism have become exhausted, if not dead. The notion of progress seems to have lost its hegemonic status.
Revolution today has primarily a melancholic function and has more to do with breakdown and collapse than progress.
As Enzo Traverso writes in Revolution: An Intellectual History (2021), revolution today has primarily a melancholic function and has more to do with collapse and collapse than progress. But perhaps this development is not only a disadvantage for those who continue to walk the streets. When even decolonization was caught up in the revolution's immanent idea of progress, the breakdown is perhaps less of an end and more of a possibility.
An uprising without a subject
Without quite putting it that way, it is interesting that the Argentinian activist collective Colectivo Situaciones in the book 19 & 20 : notes for a new social protagonism (2002/2011) describe how the uprising in Buenos Aires on 19 and 20 December 2001, which occurred after the IMF withheld a loan advance that worsened the country's already miserable economy, was an uprising without a subject.
Thousands of people were on the streets protesting against the current government, but also against the opposition. They did not demonstrate in favor of other politicians, they rejected the political system as a whole. No desire was expressed for a replacement, a new government. It was not a democratic process where a new political subject arose, where the people deposed the ruling party and took power themselves. The link between insurgency and institutionalization was broken. It was not about reforming the state or establishing a new state formation. As Colectivo Situationes writes, there was no new subject. The mass protests were a destitutive act and no attempt was made to rally the protests or give them a direction. The absence of a program and a centralized form should have been a weakness, as Colectivo Situaciones writes, but it was what gave the protests their power. As the militant Argentine researcher writes: «Words had no meaning, but they resonated.»
From May 68 and after the labor movement
If May 68 was a partial rediscovery of the proletarian revolutionary offensive of 1917–1921, then the new protest cycle that began in earnest in 2011 is, for better or for worse, a completely new start. The mass protests that have taken place in a disparate pattern in virtually every part of the world for the past 10–12 years are no longer taking place with reference to the labor movement's models of social transformation, whether social democratic, Leninist or Eurocommunist. The big-city Indians in 1977 still made fun of Marxism and the revolutionary tradition: "After Marx, April" and "After Mao, June". Nobody does that anymore. The new protests are taking place in a vacuum. This is why they are characterized by being both strangely noisy and loud, but also mute. It is as if the protestors hit their mouths when they take to the streets and demand one or the other reform rolled back or demand one or the other politician away, out of the presidential palace or parliament. Or it is as if nothing comes out when the many millions open their mouths. There is no language for the resistance. Behind the specific demands that naturally emerge in the specific struggles, there is nothing hidden, no coherent program that brings the demonstrators together or that connects them to already existing trade union political organizations or political parties. Neither local nor global. Where strikes and demonstrations previously took place with reference to an idea of socialism, workers' welfare or "communist Sundays", there is nothing that unites the new mass protests.
From the Arab revolts in 2011 to the southern European occupation movements to the Maidan in Ukraine, the Taksim protests in Istanbul, Nuit debout and The Yellow Vests in France, Ferguson and the George Floyd revolt in the United States, constitutional protests in Chile, 'democracy' protests in Hong King, mass protests in Sudan and in Algeria in 2019, a feminist uprising in Iran, everywhere people are taking to the streets, building barricades, occupying spaces and fighting with the police. And rejects.
Almost wherever you look in the world, in the last ten or twelve years we have seen demonstrations, riots and rise to an extent we have to go back to the mid-1960s to find in similar numbers. There have been so many uprisings since the financial crisis that none really count anymore. From the Arab revolts in 2011 to the southern European occupation movements to the Maidan in Ukraine, the Taksim protests in Istanbul, Nuit debout and The Yellow Vests in France, Ferguson and the George Floyd revolt in the United States, constitutional protests in Chile, 'democracy' protests in Hong King, mass protests in Sudan and in Algeria in 2019, a feminist uprising in Iran, everywhere people are taking to the streets, building barricades, occupying spaces and fighting with the police. And rejects. There is, of course, always a triggering 'local' factor, new taxes, police killing of a racialized subject or savings from already cut public services. But it is as if the specific reasons dissolve into a general and blanket rejection of the political system as such. People gather in the streets in anger and disgust and speak out.
It is a global phenomenon, as Donatella di Cesare writes The time of the revolt (2020). But the resistance does not coalesce into a recognizable and redeemable political demand, instead growing into a hatred of the entire political system, which, according to the protesters, sustains a world of both exploding inequality and generalized meaninglessness. No matter how big the resistance becomes, how massive it appears, it does not coalesce into a recognizable political position. There is thus a kind of absence in the midst of the mass protests. An absence of any notion of a solution or change to the situation that triggers the protests. In that way, there is something common in the protests, not a common agenda, and not a program at all, but a species Mood, that transcends the local problems. There is an air of depression about most of the protests. They refuse, but they don't suggest anything else. Nothing else is put in place of what is rejected. The protesters withdraw their support for the existing system. They come forward in protest, but they do not say anything that can be perceived as support for the existing order, regardless of what it can come up with to offer or promise to do.
Deposition
In continuation of The Invisible Committee and Giorgio Agamben, Marcello Tarì has described the many mass protests of the past decade as destitutive, because they will not only remove the representatives of power, but require the dismantling of the entire system of political representation that we have known for the last 200 years in the West. The protesters have had enough and want the rulers out. They have to go. But they must not be replaced by other politicians or leaders.
Marcello Tarì has described the many mass protests of the past decade as destitutive.
What is remarkable about the uprisings and protests that have taken place in the last 10–12 years is that they are not taking place with reference to a political opposition to take control of society and the economy. Traditional right-left divides are irrelevant, the demonstrations and uprisings reject as much the immanent opposition of the left, which long ago might have referred to a different idea of politics, but hasn't for decades. Government parties or opposition, the protests place themselves completely outside the already established political system and demand that politicians resign and the whole system is dismantled. In this way, it is a radical rejection where the very notion of political representation is challenged.
«No movements»
Sociologists and communist theory groups have described the protests as «non-movements» and «anti-movements». And it is true that there is no positive political horizon, and attempts to translate the protests into previously recognizable political positions have either quietly run into the sand or crashed into the realpolitik wall of the extreme center, as has happened with, for example, Syriza and Podemos, which tried to use massive popular dissatisfaction with austerity policies as a starting point for anti-political party formations, which quickly turned into more of the same. The convulsive attempts to balance between the implosion of the political on the street and participation in the national democratic spectacle will undoubtedly continue, even the radical actions of the George Floyd revolt were tried to be recorded – a police station on fire turned into photos of Democrats with Nancy Pelosi at the head, who kneel in Congress with Kente scarves – but the experiences of De gule veste seem to show that there may be a limit to what the system can absorb. When national symbols are vandalized, as the Arc de Triomphe was in December 2018, it is more difficult to affirm.
We may well call the mass protests "non-movements", as Endnotes does Onward Barbarians (2020), if by this we mean that they take place after the dialectic, after the death of the labor movement. The important thing will then just be to avoid that the reference takes on the character of a nostalgic critique of the new mass protests, where there is an absence and even a lack of a former working-class identity. The new protests are class politics beyond the reference to the working class. It opens for a return of the proletariat in an expanded form, where not only is the distinction between productive and reproductive labor dissolved, but the boundaries between human and more-than-human become porous.
Laurent Jeanpierre's «anti-movements» in his book on The Yellow Vests, In the round (2019), is probably better, as that designation indicates that the movements are not movements as the various parts of the labor movement were. These are exactly uprisings without subjects. It is a radicalization of the situationists dream of a revolt written by anonymous authors, no leaders, but also no idea of the essence of the proletariat. Therefore there is nothing to realize. These are mass protests without teleology, programless revolts, where there may be both a tactic in the struggle in the street against the police and state representatives, and a strategy to avoid representation, but where there is no plan to be followed in order to realize a program.
The anti-movements are not the absence of workers' insurrection, but a new type of insurrection after the dissolution of the workers' movement. It is no longer as workers, people take to the streets. Wage labor is no longer a point of resistance, and therefore the glass floor (between circulation and production) exists primarily in the minds of the Marxist theorists who keep ordering workers to cease work in those factories (where they no longer work). It is left-communist theorists who have spent decades criticizing the established reformist labor movement, but confronted with a new mass protest, they begin to dream back to the good old days of established class identities and demands for the socialization of production. In doing so, they paradoxically overlook the connection between the second labor movement and the new protests, where it is unpaid lives and subjects exposed to racial-colonial, patriarchal and anti-trans violence, and not wage workers, who take to the streets.
The Anthropological Revolution
It is an extension of the revolution which reaches so far that it is becoming something else. It is an anthropological and not a political revolution, in which Marx's distinction between political and social revolution dissolves in favor of a new antagonism beyond the coordinates laid out by the labor movement at the end of the 19th century and which was dominant throughout 20th century, right up to May 68, when the idea of another (state) power was still valid. It is no longer. This is what Tarì describes. The demonstrators and those who find themselves on the street in the many riots, is not out to take power. They have let go of the sovereigntist principle they reject without affirming an alternative within the system. This opens up another territory beyond the known paradigms of revolt and revolution. This is the perspective of the new protest cycle.
It is exceedingly complicated, as Endnotes points out in Onwards Barbarians, we have escaped the grip of the labor movement, but are finding it difficult to move forward. We are in a situation where successful uprisings produce only failed revolutions. Practically and theoretically, we are constantly banging our heads against a wall, many hold back, politically horror vacui, but there is not much to glean from the story. Least of all the labor movement and its notion of revolution. The important thing will be to develop the concrete communism that is present in the protests, where the rejection becomes an affirmation of another life beyond the state and money.
We live in an era of generalized fragmentation characterized by a dissolution of mass political subjects and the absence of both a reformist and a revolutionary imaginary world – the 'system' that Lyotard described reproduces itself with increasing difficulty. Disorientation is today's solution. Neither Blanqui's conspiracies, Lenin's and Trotsky's war communism, nor, for that matter, Baader-Meinhof's provocation aesthetic terror attacks exist anymore. And the democratization of the state by Togliatti and all the other Western European social democrats has also disappeared and is difficult to reactivate.
Nihilism lurks
The political has collapsed, and various nihilistic phenomena are dancing on its grave. The storm at Congress on 6.1. 2021 was an example of this. Today, even the fascists appear zombie-like. Phenomena such as Men in Black and Q-Anon show quite well how eroded the political has become. Today, everyone is aware that politics is a spectacle, that it makes no sense to say that the king has no clothes, that we are dealing with an empty backdrop.
Today, everyone is aware that politics is a spectacle, that it makes no sense to say that the king has no clothes, that we are dealing with an empty backdrop.
The Late Fascists is the farcical attempt to play the play one last time and pretend there is someone on stage, as if it exists. The fascists are desperately looking for one arks. When Bolsonaro supporters storm the Brazilian National Congress and Trump's Proud Boys occupy Congress, they recreate the image of national democracy as an existing space where the political takes place. Then the 'real' politicians can show up when the protesters have been led away or have had their selfies taken and gone home.
We no longer have any positive myths, even the fascists somewhere know it well, that's why they appear so kitsch. Across the board, the political is rejected, even when it is tried to be maintained. Desperation is evident, nihilism lurks, and martyrdom offers itself as a solution. Also in the destitutive protests. It is about avoiding being swallowed up in the relegating destruction, so that the destruction of the subject, which is intensified in the revolt, leaves a residue that can become a starting point for a transformed everyday life.
As Walter Benjamin wrote in the mid-1930s – when it became harder and harder to find his way because fascism mobilized the masses and let them express themselves in an exclusionary racist project, and Stalin was busy forcibly collectivizing and putting former comrades on display for counter-revolutionary activity. It is about organizing the pessimism and transforming the emptying of the political into a defense for all the many worlds that already exist, but which are constantly being neutralized by capital and the state.
Excerpt from the introduction to Kafka's Party, edited by Mikkel Bolt and Carsten Juhl (Antipyrine, 2024). The book contains texts by The Invisible Committee, Giorgio Agamben, Marcello Tarì, Serge Quadruppani, Carsten Juhl and Mikkel Bolt
