Perspective Chapter: Options to Violence in Mass Movements – A Prospectus for Mobilization

Abstract

Mass movements in the early twenty-first century have taken on a remarkable significance not only in influencing governments and bringing down authoritarian regimes but in demonstrating what more fulsome forms of democratic association could look like. This essay seeks to identify parallel trajectories of contemporary mass movements in terms of common purposes of autonomous participation of people in the decisions that frame their lives, and in the specific modes of organization that have been shared between movements. Between these overlapping ends and means, public spaces for collective deliberation are opened up where the security state and capitalist accumulation have otherwise come to dominate.

1. Introduction

They must be convinced that an invincible force lives in the people which nothing and no one can withstand; and that if this force has not yet emancipated the people it is because it is powerful only when it is unified and acting everywhere at the same time, in concert, with one aim, and until now it has not been unified.

Michael Bakunin, “Statism and Anarchy” [1]

The mobilization of masses has taken on global significance, with worldwide gatherings of people demonstrating toward, among other things, more democratic, egalitarian, and sustainable forms of social and economic organization, often in the face of the increasingly crisis-prone character of capitalism and the security state.

This chapter will survey some of the mass protests that have spread globally through the early twenty-first century, with the aim of seeking to understand how the reliance on peaceful agitation has been a hallmark of success for some of these mobilizations, in terms of destabilizing authoritarian governments and agitating for greater social and economic equality and justice. Contrariwise, mass movements that have been marked by riots and armed revolution have tended to be more impotent, exposing the state as a monopoly on the use of violence within a territory, [2] while calling into question not only the legitimacy of authoritarian states but also their own legitimacy as peoples’ movements.

While there are robust literatures on the crises of capitalism and its associated imperial politics, from Marx to Lenin, to Kautsky to Hobson,¹ and on the limits of violence, for example in Arendt² and Agamben,³ as well as on the ecological catastrophes borne out of humanity’s intra-species domination, thinking here of Žižek⁴and Kovel, [9] with versions of the critique linking the domination of nature to the domination of our fellow human beings now becoming commonplace in the popular conscience, precisely how those crises function as the occasion for global demonstrations needs to be better understood.

For although they are borne out of a global capitalist system stretched to its limits of integration, these mobilizations are much more than reactions against that system and its conduits: being political acts and laying claim to new publics the movements have shown themselves capable of growth over time, with modes of organization developed in one locale adopted and adapted to new niches for demonstration, with a kind of learning of what it means for a community to be democratic, equal, and sustainable unfolding from out of these global experiments. What will be the consequences of these crises is as undecidable as any political act, it is being impossible to determine just what will happen when a group of people get together and together decide to do something (doing nothing and the absence of action are more predictable in this sense), let alone when masses of people make these kinds of decisions to act the world over. These are movements of multitudes that will determine their purposes, whether realizing them or not, under very fragile and contingent circumstances; considering that realm of ends, therefore, the capacities of theory shade into prayer. What can be discretely understood though are the lessons learned from mobilizations thus far, with certain patterns of growth evident from within these—considering what demonstrations worked, what these demonstrated—quite literally—and what kinds of reactionary patterns of violence these global gatherings of the masses provoked. And though the state-sanctioned violence has been predictably exceptional, exposing the obscene foundations of the security state, the patterns of growth within various movements have been more genuinely surprising, with for example the Arab world teaching the West lessons learned in the specific desire for democracy that is borne out of direct experience with brutal authoritarian states, and in the continuing value of labor unions worldwide in effectively exerting coordinated mass power.⁵ These developments within peoples’ movements have at times been able to at least intimate how to shift toward more substantial forms of democracy, predicated on economic equality and direct participation in decision-making processes, with those new modes of participatory organization introduced in the Arab Spring revolutions essentially ratified into the constitutions of other occupations worldwide.

2. The miraculous value of peaceful mobilization

Perhaps the signal lesson to be learned from these manifestations of new publics is that the power of masses is enhanced by adherence to nonviolent means. Where we have recently seen amazing consequences of collective action have been in those domains where peaceful agitation has been the distinguishing feature of the assembled masses. Of course, masses qua masses need not be peaceful, though dissent and occupation can be. And where violence has been introduced (itself also being a kind of demonstration) the results have tended to be stalemate-prone, with retributive cycles of state and anti-state violence making the possibility of political miracles seem that much more distant. For example, to grasp by analogy, Libya and Syria represent two people’s revolutions born out of blood, and now seem entrenched in the logics of reciprocal violence, with the cycles of domination there being driven by that violence returned, seemingly with little room for de-escalation, disarmament, and peace for the people.

It is in those instances where people have gathered in peaceful ways that the consequences of their gathering have been that much more unexpected, that much more miraculous, seeming to move easily against the grain of the status quo. So, in the face of a joyous occupation, the police in the tyrant-Mubarak’s authoritarian state vanished as if it had gone out like the lights, and in that pregnant void where the state stood back the people stood in and did what was necessary to sustain their newly claimed public space, from garbage collection to community policing. They became their own self-government, both out of the perfect freedom of the situation and by necessity, coming into being as a community precisely in that self-absencing of authoritarian rule, occupying that absence of a commons within a regime otherwise grounded in domination, notwithstanding the failures of electoral politics that followed.

The unique power of these new forms of mass mobilization consists partly in their unexpectedness, arising out of the fact that, whatever the underlying causes of agitation and disenfranchisement may have been, and whatever expectations youth may have for their futures, the actions of people en masse are always, to the extent of circumstances, unpredictable.⁶

Consider the students of Québec, for example, going off in the surprising ways that they did in their Printemps Érable. They acted, and in so doing laid claim to public spaces—specifically the universities, and squares of cities—as domains suited by right and reason to the cultivation of free association, to public demonstration and individuals’ voicing of opinion.⁷ This new power of masses, developed out of a history of dissent and made possible by our new technological condition and the accelerated capacity for ideas to spread, in many ways reveals the essence of the political in the unconditioned, such that one can never be entirely certain what will occur when a mass of people gather, speak, and together act. This basic condition is also the condition of possibility for what might be called miracles in the political realm, that is free acts taken outside of deadlocked retributivism, the tragedies of revenge, or just simply the business-as-usual system-logic of orders given, received, and followed. A free act is in this sense unprecedented, and thus justifies the moniker of miracle, though as worldly and secular a miracle as nature and history would allow. Thus Arendt has it that:

… it is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of realism, to look for the unforeseen and unpredictable, to be prepared for and to expect “miracles” in the political realm. And the more heavily the scales are weighted in favour of disaster, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear; for it is disaster, not salvation, which always happens automatically and therefore must always appear to be irresistible [12].

Or as Žižek enthuses:

… the "Real as impossible" means here that THE IMPOSSIBLE DOES HAPPEN, that "miracles" like Love (or political revolution: "in some respects, a revolution is a miracle, " Lenin said in 1921) DO occur. From "impossible TO happen" we thus pass to "the impossible HAPPENS"- this, and not the structural obstacles forever deferring the final resolution, is the most difficult thing to accept [13, 14].

Manifestation is the French word to describe this kind of space, which beautifully captures the sense of these mobilizations as a coming to presence of a new public, one that includes particular struggles without obliterating their uniqueness, sublimating them into simple messages relating to the desire for autonomy, for direct participation in the terms of one’s life, for an education that does not automatically indenture a student into a life of indebtedness, for a truly fulsome democracy, and a more just economic system. The idea that something is being manifest through the public gathering is indeed a telling notion. So, what is it that is manifest as new publics come into being in what are effectively the ruins of an old order, i.e. in states without security, and under capitalism without real growth?

And from the other side of the barricades, how are the new publics being portioned off at the sub-constitutional level of intra-state violence, specifically when demonstrators are lined up against or penned in by truncheon-wielding officers of the supposed peace? No Heraclitean aphorism or grace of stupidity could wrap together those opposite terms of peace and violence,⁸ and whatever circuitous routes may connect those poles in the skein of world events, the basic principle of the inherent freedom and equality of individuals cannot hold in the face of this kind of treatment of persons en masse, with patterns of organization based in domination being ultimately incommensurable with any egalitarian form of democracy.

Consider, for example the legal and street-level violence deployed contra the student and anti-capitalist street protestors in Québec, who themselves came together in a properly carnivalesque way, acting out as a reverse-engineered spectacle to reflect on that other, everyday spectacle, thus to be revolutionized—inspired by critical righteousness, sustained by strikes by those with nothing to strike with, save the mere presence of their bodies (and their kitchen pots and pans). Against this regular massing of many thousands in the streets and other public places centered in the large cities of Québec, and consisting of a range of people—from the committed student and cause activists, to school peers, to engaged bystanders, or even those simply occupying the same space—was manifest the sovereignty of the state against its people, banning spontaneous gatherings of more than 50 and armed with weapons designed to be used, thus demonstrating itself specifically as a so-called security institution in its displays of violent capacities. In the case of the Québec student protests against tuition hikes, these included the use of rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, flash-bang grenades, shields, and truncheons against people otherwise peacefully gathered in the streets and public squares. What is remarkable is how this militarization of crowd control has become a new normal and a default response for states whenever a mass of people gather together for the purposes of demonstration.

That very capacity to gather autonomously in the absence of modes of domination—that is peaceful, free association properly so called—is precisely what is so elusive and so threatening to modern-state formations, which take their basis rather differently from their sovereign authorization to the use of force. What we are witnessing in this impasse of two distinct ordering principles, the one essentially democratic the other inherently hierarchical,⁹ is an incommensurability in principle translated into an antipathy of means. So, from the divide between free association and corporate/military hierarchies arises a corresponding political division, as where a gathering of individuals actively expressing solidarity is penned in or “kettled” by a militarized phalanx of riot police, Cyclops masks of human beings with whom, at that precise moment of preventative mass detention, there is no talking. That is the limited power of the state remaining under these circumstances—the power not to respond, whatever crises of legitimation this may engender.

Or as Giorgio Agamben frames the concept, drawing rather notoriously on the political theory of Carl Schmitt, the sovereignty of the state is set apart by its singular difference: “the sovereign is truly the one to whom the juridical order grants its power of proclaiming a state of exception.” The violence coming from states in response to the global surge in popular protests is in this sense exceptional; for however predictable the episodic, mass resistances of erstwhile invisible populations may have been in hindsight, this kind of intra-state violence must have an astounding quality to it, considering how it acts out beyond any social trust one may have in either peace or civility, being beyond legitimation and manifestly contra to the freedom of groups and individuals.

3. Thinking beyond the Arab Spring and occupy

For neither the communitarian discourses of individual versus communal rights nor the classical liberal conception of overlapped and hence contested rights claims can account for this conflict between states and the citizens who protest against them. There is in this new instance an ontological separation of state and subject, with the two now drawing on essentially different powers. It is no longer realistic to suppose that the sovereignty of the state is drawn directly from the amalgamated powers of individual bodies, as in the modes and orders of lo stato that Machiavelli first heralds as the modern state, consisting at that time of the strength of a citizen-standing army]. Rather, in a contemporary state-as-machine for the production of social order, bodies are not seen as the collective source of power, rather they are the subjects of sovereign power. This is the dissonant pattern then witnessed, whereby states use violence (both visceral and economic) to manage the movements of bodies, while those bodies cry out in a political language alien to the technocrats and riot police both, making claims to a justice that transcends efficiency, speaking out toward miracles in an otherwise lock-step world.

This is part of the reason why the actual presence of bodies gathered is essential to these movements, which, at a meta-level and enveloping causes as diverse as accessible education, social and economic equality, anti-capitalism, anti-authoritarianism, Indigenous rights, etc., draws its power from all that remains of a people and a res-publica, that is the very fact of their being in public. The more fragile and exposed those public bodies are, as in for example the nude marches deployed against armored riot police in the Québec student protests, the more impotent the physical violence of the state is made out to be. Referring to the pointless failure of the 2005 Paris riots (to which one could add the similarly pointless 2011 riots in the UK, or likewise the “freedom convoys” and occupations in 2022) Žižek observes that, in the case of both the rioters and the riot police “we are dealing with blind passages a l’acte, where violence is an implicit admission of impotence.”¹⁰ So, youth riot because of their own sense of invisibility and powerlessness, while masked police react violently against violence engendered by their very presence, with each claiming the justification of the other’s existence. This kind of anticipatory and self-fulfilling violence shows itself to be a more brutally efficient form of robotic politics than preventative mass detention even, where the end of crowd control is to protect the crowd from itself by detaining it en masse, precisely before any harm occurs. Notwithstanding the obvious point that the mass detention itself could be taken as a harm, the action takes its self-legitimation from the fact that because of this violent act of corralling a group of innocent people, nothing happened.

In both cases, the violent act demonstrates its own cause and effect, and in this sense represents a kind of politics beyond legitimation. Rather, the free act and peaceful gesture (as in the iconic images of peace signs flashed at riot police, or flowers placed in rifle barrels during anti-war protests) have their basis of possibility in the dangerous situation of those protesting bodies, in which that specific danger is projected as a demonstration of the precariousness of the body politic as a whole at that particular moment of crisis.

This is action well beyond old anarchist tactics of shaming the state into showing itself for what it is through provocation, exposing it as a monopoly on the use of organized violence. This fact is now plainly acknowledged; much as the imperial realities of neoliberal foreign policies are enthusiastically endorsed by ideologues as instrumental to a new world order, it seems that, within the new normal, there should be little surprising about state formations stripped down to their rudimentary, and often rude security functions, as if that were the sin qua non of the new social contract. Rather, here disobedience against civil government takes on its symbolic function in making a spectacle of the precarious exposure of those who are the objects of policy and policing, those two being a pair of perversions of the Greek root polis, corrupted from public forum into domain for the management of things human and nonhuman.

Beyond breaking through this kind of Hegelian “bad infinity” where the rationalization of society into an efficiency-driven machine gives rise to its own unintended consequences, which in turn occasion greater rationalization, and so on, the retrieval of the sentiment of solidarity in the crowd offers a place from which to reflect on otherwise seemingly inexorable logics of domination. For the mere peaceful, physical presence of others offers a powerful rejoinder to the mandate of the security state and the politics of fear that sustains it. Here the protest chant <Who are you protecting?> rings true both as commentary, while demonstrating, again quite literally, that the peaceful organization of masses of people can be achieved in the absence of coercion. Contrariwise, physical domination is shown to be more tuned to the breaking up of gatherings, though even there with limited successes.

For what more visceral form of solidarity is there than the ancient pathos of sympathy, of a shared plight? To share in the suffering of others is a basic form of union. In this sense, for example the 2001 Québec City demonstrations at the Summit of the Americas brought back less in the way of policy options, beyond the inherently right-minded principles that autonomy is important, that preserving labor rights and environmental protections constitute the ennobling claims of peoples to their work and their lands. What did emerge as novel and shocking from out of that summit were the lasting wounds on Canadian civil society, as evidenced in the scars and bruises borne by the protestors’ bodies. These would become spurs for further community involvement and physical proof that if the state was not necessarily there to protect them, functioning as some kind of abstract, neutral third-party mediator of differences, then all that they could truly believe in were the people linked together by their shared presence. Beyond regulated behaviors, what could be trusted was that simple presence of others, demonstrated through the linking of arms, the treatment of the wounded, or the push of the crowd marching together.

What is interesting, as we progress beyond episodic assemblies paired up to coincide with state-sanctioned summits, is how articulate these manifestations of solidarity can become, as if developing out of a Rousseauian amour de soi that sees the world undivided as an extension of self, to one that can at once register the existence of difference, and hence act politically, and at the same time self-divide so as to portion out the respective dimensions of trust, sustaining all those day-to-day, street-level assumptions that we make about our social environment and collective responsibilities. So, we would trust that the commons will be unpolluted, that food and water will be available, along with a place to sleep; and beyond those basics we would trust that there will be something interesting to see and to listen to out in the streets. And as these communities of dissent grow, they demonstrate how these trusts could be secured through other means, on the basis of free association, with volunteer sanitation crews keeping the public parks fit to occupy, food distributed by on-site kitchens, lending libraries housing books (perhaps the most beautiful excess of the Occupy movement has been the “people’s library” phenomenon), [17] and General Assemblies of the whole punctuating days of simply being there together, along with the constitutive chance to say what is really worth doing in the company of others.

In terms of a reason why these occupations occur, and what holds them together, it is commonplace to understand them in relation to some term of opposition. So, the Tahrir Square occupation is counterposed to Mubarak’s authoritarianism; the Spanish Indignats’ acampada set in relief against austerity policies; “I Am 132” as against the corporate monopolization of national media; OWS against, as the acronym implies, Occupation Wall Street as a center of corporate capitalism, etc.. Interestingly, however, that last occupation took place not on Wall Street proper, but in a kind of liminal space between private and public, where concessions on the owner of the property to allow public access restricted the leeway given to the City authorities to clear Zuccotti Park. The point about zoning allowances is raised by Nichols Mirzoeff, whose observation points to interesting potentials for autonomous association, “in the variant space between the security-regulated public commons and the deregulated zones of the neo-liberal market” [18]. As in the #YoSoy132 or “I Am 132” movement in Mexico, the identity of the movement is wrapped up with something that is presently empty—the absence of an egalitarian public forum—that is to be filled in. Jane Jacobs’ practical concept of urban in-filling fits wonderfully here—as in Occupy from an urban planning perspective—where one first identifies an absence and then gathers with others to fill that void [19, 20].

This suggests a shift in the orientation of protests, no longer turned against something and thus reducible to that anti-cause, and giving rise to the familiar interrogation of <Well, what would you have us do instead?>, a trope invoked even among allies, as in Žižek’s injunction that “we will have to address the truly difficult questions- questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want.” [21]. Here instead we find demonstrations coming into being at a distance from the supposed origin or anti-cause of the movement. Another parallel example would be the protests against Bay Street and the center of corporate finance capitalism in Toronto, Canada, which after some debate, were set up at the more hospitable setting of St. James Park. The point is not simply one of amenable convenience, though the practicalities associated with an encampment (sleeping space, sanitation, livability, and view) certainly figure into the sustainability of a situation.

Rather, in these instances, we have demonstrations arising not precisely against but rather out of a certain set of circumstances, at a new merger of the private with the political. In this sense, the circumstances that are protested against are also what make the protest possible, not in the limited sense of liberal accommodation of otherwise flattened out differences, but as crises that contain their own causes of overcoming, here the demand for autonomous participation in setting the terms of one’s day-to-day existence. In this sense, what the post-political landscape of efficiency and profit-oriented policy options give rise to is a more fulsome appetite for the political properly so-called, with people desiring a direct say in the decisions that affect their lives, forming associations toward something that “is in the view of those involved, a good.”¹¹

4. The power of consent

If the distinguishing feature of these new social movements consists in their autonomous claims to free association, with their capacities for peaceful organization contingent on their being nonhierarchical, nonviolent, and democratic (bracketing the question of violence in its modalities, from violence as exception to the systemic violence that underwrites episodic outrages of ultra-violence),¹² then the deliberative formation of these common goods, and thus of communities, will have a constitutive role for each of these communities in their uniqueness, as well as for a global peace movement.¹³ This is one of most concrete senses in which the movement is in fact a whole, in that its deliberative mechanisms for speaking out of dissent and toward consensus have been shared and developed as they have spread from site to site, masses to masses: Tahrir Square to Pearl Roundabout, Indignats to Occupies worldwide, have all drawn on a still developing yet quite functional constitution, wherein a people is constituted by their terms of association, freely agreed upon by all members of the community, with the terms of their consent contingent upon their actual approval, each approving individually what is done on behalf of the whole. This living constitution, described in terms of a new way of doing politics—as in a new set of customs and modes of social organization— is essentially ratified for the purposes of any particular occupation within its General Assembly. At that level, the organization is distinguished by the physical presence of its constitutive members, in an embodiment of the political complimented by the virtual presence of worldwide witnesses along with other, similarly coded organizations—where the on-the-ground forum is spectrally linked to a network of other Occupations and actions. What makes these alike is that evolution of democracy encoded in the new terms of consent, thus:

We affirm that consent is not just the absence of a “no,” but the presence of a “yes.” [25]

The modes of direct democracy hinge upon the active expression of consent, embodied in the <yes> that each says to all. At the most visceral level, this is the amplification of one by all in the “human mic,” with the repetition of a speaker’s words, clause by careful clause, empowering the many to have their collective voice heard, while each individual is asked whether they would make those words their own.¹⁴ Thus, active consent is ascribed at every stage in the articulation of an action, with the power to block a proposal that may oppress or exclude retained by each individual member of the community. Clearly, this is a kind of arrangement that requires patience, and that would be sustained only by the common desire to organize with others.

Here then, at the level of the gathering of the whole, the deliberation toward working consensus has a constitutive function, with the people as such emerging in their distinctiveness from out of that dialog. As a matter of course then, and after the theoretical fashion of what has been called “the undecideable” (Mouffe) or “the danger” (Heidegger), the constitutive deliberation of a General Assembly has an open-ended quality to it: it is the kind of discourse that can never be settled, any more than a people’s identity can be resolved and rendered final, save in its dissolution.

If the principles and power in Occupy’s organizational structure reside within the mandate of the General Assemblies, then what may be called its executives, or the Spokes Councils, perform service functions to the assembly of the whole, making it possible and sustainable for the people to be there together. Much as in the democratic regimes that at times prevailed in ancient Athens, the executive is regularly cycled, with what might be called political offices, here literally a specific place within the group—sitting at the hub of the spokes—freely and regularly exchanged. Committee membership is open to all, and the power to decide is shared by all. While the nodal structure of the Councils, arranged as rotating spokes of a wheel, allows for reporting by offering an accountability mechanism to relate part to whole, the fealty to direct consensus even at that operational level means that it would be both impractical and unprincipled for the Council or for any other working group or caucus to claim rights to speak on behalf of the General Assembly without the whole being gathered and consent conferred. This is not to say that a committee could not be mandated by the General Assembly to serve the collective as its diplomatic corps, thus allowing action initiatives to spread meme-like through occupations. This would be one effect empowered by the new capacity to communicate worldwide, that is, coordinated global actions. That power to say <yes> to a proposal by voicing it for oneself or to block a proposal (as a contravention of the constitution of the whole) can only derive from the people present. That is to say, in these new modes and orders of organization, these new ways of interacting and new principles of association, there can be no legitimate claim to speak on the behalf of others.

This is the great strength of these movements and a source of their distinctive coherence, and also their most significant challenge at the system level, understood in terms of the coordination and amplification of actions from one Occupation to another. That is, as it is constituted executives do not possess the power of being somehow representative of their respective General Assemblies, in order to address other Councils or Assemblies. Those kinds of external communications could only originate out of the General Assemblies themselves, in a structure where the outside aspect of the group is in a sense internal to its constitution, arising from the inside out. Any attempt to represent here would dissolve into so many words, lacking the legitimating social substance of consensus. So then, how does a movement articulate itself as such? To the extent that the notion of the external is meaningful in a networked world, where delimitations of inside and outside are self-selected boundaries, contingent on the potential range of an action—always a provisional assumption—the pattern of the external relations between occupations worldwide is less one of speaking out to the world than it is of bringing the outside world into the community, ratifying and thus amplifying organizational modes (i.e. Community Agreements) and principles (i.e. Principles of Solidarity) within a particular situation. These codes for discourse shared in recombinant applications and developed in response to the necessities for coordinated global action gather together the ideas of others freely shared with what one would willingly say for oneself, thus effectively, in the end (this is the hope) doing unto others as they would have done unto themselves.¹⁵ Thus, what remains of executive function takes on its proper role in the service of others, with only those others then capable of speaking their interests and desires for themselves. All legitimate authority is mandated directly, with all of those mandates responsible to the assembly as a whole, that is the people.

This would be the political aim of the movement as a whole to realize that claim to direct autonomy. This would be claimed through direct participation in the terms of each person’s day-to-day life, with that autonomy of the person to be decided in the workplace as in the streets, through the demonstration of more democratic forms of social and economic organization.

5. Conclusion

That this potential arises out of an ominous situation—encompassing crises of humanity and of nature—is as manifest and clear as its consequences are dangerously uncertain. Massive social movements can of course go in several directions, and it is abundantly apparent that authoritarian, fascistic, racist, and other violent forms of mobilization and occupation inspired by fear and hatred are also possible responses to the freeing up of political subjectivity, now at once liberated and dominated by the technological transformation of our public places, both at the street level and virtually. Even more dire, perhaps, is the decline of the middle class and the radicalization of economic inequalities, with a reactionary oligarchic class desperately trying to cordon off its assets from the very public that has hitherto insured the risks of corporate capitalism via the states they legitimate. The apparent impasse between private profits for corporations and collectivized risks for the public exposes an unsustainable situation, with the prospectus for social change borne out of that specific division of interests, becoming clearer with each new crisis of corporate capitalism.

Now that there has been this wellspring of popular mobilization for a more democratic economic system and for direct participation in public life, what remains to be seen is how new modes of organization, so clearly needed in the absence of effective leadership from a corporate oligarchical class, can be applied to places of work and other instruments of the economy, as well as exert influence on civil society broadly construed. The Yo Soy 132 youth movement in Mexico gives a powerful suggestion of such potentials, specifically to democratize the political framework at a systemic level, including the structure of mass media, through mass actions capable of meme-like spread from one place and public to another. And beyond this, there is the question of how these various occupations of what are presently empty sites of power—abandoned factories and stores, foreclosed homes, and evacuated city streets—can be linked together in common struggle for the public good. For here, we reach a crucial point in the building of more just and democratic communities via the reclamation of public spaces, wherein the interests begin with justice here and now, and extend to the relations between these emergent power units. That is to say that something like properly democratic relations could be had between occupations worldwide, whereas true democracy seems to have proven impossible between states, being unequal as they are in their sovereignties, and apparently incapable of transcending those inherent differences. This task of transformation, therefore, now belongs within the purview of the people and bears out the shared responsibility of our time: to either watch the world perish while a few profit or to build a better, that is more democratic and sustainable system. Risks can only be engaged in common, with full and freely willing participation, when all have made their wagers freely. However uncertain the consequences of collective actions may be, this legitimizing claim to consensus may ground common trusts even as the world as we know it falls apart.

In her reflections on the global surge in students’ movements in the 1960s, Arendt insists upon the mere instrumentality of violence, as well as its increasingly apparent uselessness, when confronted by technological developments such as nuclear weapons and weapons of mass or indiscriminate destruction [27]. She makes a distinction that is perhaps even more apparent in the early twenty-first century between violence as a tool, necessary in strictly limited justifications of self-defense, and the power of mass movements. This power consists in the capacity for coordinated action on the basis of free association.

If violence and the responses to it are grindingly, tragically predictable, then the power to act in concert with others is uncertain both in its origins (i.e. apathy could set in and nothing could happen) and in its outcomes. While observing that the student movements she was witnessing then seemed to share in some common quality, and constituted a “global phenomenon,” she is quick to point out that the phenomenon as such was not bound together by a singular cause. For if it were, then this determination would essentially limit the movement, as if according to some overarching historical necessity. This would make it something other than political action as such, which must act out beyond such determinations if it is to draw on the power of the people:

A social common denominator of the movement seems out of the question, but it is true that psychologically this generation seems everywhere characterized by sheer courage, an astounding will to action, and by a no less astounding confidence in the possibility of change.¹⁶

Fear in the face of violence is predictable; courage is not. The power to act in this sense is by no means a given, however catastrophic that precariousness may turn out to be.

There is some real truth in the observation from the origins of Western political theory that democracy represents a way for the masses to protect themselves against the powerful few, that is contra those who claim the privilege of doing injustice, and who must, therefore, be forced to honor claims to equality.¹⁷ If social contracts hold in this sense it is because they are agreements autonomously chosen, and against those who claim the right to domination only the power of the people can succor them both justice and equality.

Conflict of interest

“The authors declare no conflict of interest.”