**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.

**Keywords:** protest, mass movements, state violence, peace studies, political theory

### **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 Arendt<sup>2</sup> and Agamben,3 as well as on the ecological catastrophes borne out of humanity's intra-species domination, thinking here of Žižek4

<sup>1</sup> The ultra-imperialist thesis that would be subject to Lenin's critical ire now seems like a rather cogent take on the consolidation of capitalism. Kautsky projects towards an "ultraimperialist," then future historical phase, characterized by the union of separate national empires, largely pacified in inter-state dealings by their agreement not to fight amongst themselves but rather to consolidate and integrate their imperial mechanisms of extraction, transportation, manufacture, and most importantly, re-investment, i.e. the "joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital" ["Ultra-Imperialism" 1914]. This seems very much like the present conditions of globalization, with imperialism turned inwards to systemic, intra-state forms of violence associated with the management of things human and nonhuman, ruled over by an ideological pact to ensure free market penetration for corporations and security for states *vis a vis* one another.

In response to this version of capitalism closing out the historical register, effectively ending any further progressive histories through the pacifying mechanisms of a capitalist imperium, Lenin instead regards Kautsky's thesis as an abstraction from the wars that are the necessary drivers of historical capitalism. He claims that war between capitalist empires is a systemic function of an economy predicated on production for profits, which he sees then driving towards crises borne out in inter-state conflicts [3].

This question of what to do with our social surpluses is crucial for confronting a political economy where patterns of reinvestment are treated as automatic decisions—closed circuits driven by positive feedback responses—wherein excess attracts excess, rather than having surpluses flow, as they should, towards the economic base of the system, that is the people *en masse*.

Here Hobson's speculations on the range of fiscal policy choices available to states seeking to make their foreign policies peaceful and sustainable—as in the redistribution of incomes, differential tax rates, and socially useful spending by states—may be relevant, to the extent that determining fiscal policy remains within the purview of states. Whatever the emergent mechanisms of economic integration, if we judge simply based on historical consequences, we can at least find some evident truth in the observation that the annexation of developing countries incapable of their own self-defence against first-world empires purchases "poor and precarious markets" at great expense, and in the end benefits neither the empire nor the colonized [4].

<sup>2</sup> So Arendt has it, contra Clausewitz and in many ways inverting Agamben's claim of the sovereignty of violence over the political, that "Where violence rules absolutely, as for instance in the concentration camps of totalitarian regimes, not only the laws—*les lois se taisant*, as the French Revolution phrased it—but everything and everybody must fall silent. It is because of this silence that violence is a marginal phenomenon in the political realm; for man, to the extent that he is a political being, is endowed with the power of speech" [5].

<sup>3</sup> Giorgio Agamben [6]. For Agamben, behind the forms of violence that back the law and those that stand outside of it as its sovereign source is another kind: a historical violence that is capable of creating something new, or violence as a transition threshold, as in the Heraclitean aphorism, "All birth is brutal"; or in Nietzsche's critical history as a hammer; or Benjamin's *Angelus Novus*, a wide-eyed angel of the new shoved backwards by a history of destructive leveling passed off as progress [7].

<sup>4</sup> Behind the intellectual bravado and spastic tangents into mass culture, at his clearest Žižek's basic premise for engagement seems to be that: "the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its 'four riders of the apocalypse' are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions" [8].

*Perspective Chapter: Options to Violence in Mass Movements – A Prospectus for Mobilization DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106381*

and 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

<sup>5</sup> While the perfect stage of Tahrir Square drew saturated media coverage, the strikes by workers at the port city of Alexandria drew much less attention in Western mass media, though arguably they did more to bring the regime to an end by cutting off its trade. The labour strikes did make clear though that the revolutionary motives of social and economic equality are correlates to the political freedom otherwise denied by dictatorial governance.

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* 

<sup>6</sup> On what young people might expect, consider for example the imposition of economic austerity measures onto the masses, while a corporate elite arranges for society at large to invest in and insure collectively accrued risks. What results, symbolism-wise, is a gesture of nonconfidence by which the helmsmen of a civilization effectively bet on their own failure.

<sup>7</sup> The pulsed series of strikes in Québec was distinctive in its sustained, coherent episodes of direct action, united by the goal of a universally accessible education as social and economic right, and by resistance to a system that indentures students to lifetime debt and corporate suzerainty. Its unity as a movement is also what makes it so singularly heterogeneous in relation to the capitalist ethos on campus, in the sense that

<sup>&</sup>quot;…at the heart of the uprising is a subjectivity in revolt against the idea that the paradigm for everything is business." ([10], in [11]).

*Perspective Chapter: Options to Violence in Mass Movements – A Prospectus for Mobilization DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106381*

*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, flashbang grenades, shields, and truncheons against people otherwise peacefully gathered

<sup>8</sup> As in Heraclitus' claim that "War is the father of all things and king, it shows some as gods and some as humans, some it makes slaves and others freemen." (my translation) §44.

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,

<sup>9</sup> …as in a mode of neo-liberal suzerainty, where technocrats legitimize the function of wealth in terms of efficiency while oligarchs legitimize the calculations of the technocrats, simply by their being rich, in a regime that is its own *fait accompli*, a perfectly self-referential mode of kleptocracy coded to diminish autonomy via the regulation of the political process, with priority given to economic drivers and an efficient social order.

#### *Perspective Chapter: Options to Violence in Mass Movements – A Prospectus for Mobilization DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106381*

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

<sup>10</sup> Slavoj Žižek [15]. See also Jacques Ellul [16]. In consideration of the distinction between peaceful demonstrations and riots against the technological system, according to Ellul "Order receives our complete approval: even when we are hostile to the police, we are, by a strange contradiction, partisans of order".

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 dayto-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

*Perspective Chapter: Options to Violence in Mass Movements – A Prospectus for Mobilization DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106381*

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."<sup>11</sup>

#### **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

<sup>11</sup> Aristotle, *Politics*, (my translation) 1252a.

<sup>12</sup> Consider along these lines Žižek's distinction between "subjective," "symbolic," "systemic," and "divine violence" (the later category drawn from Walter Benjamin) in *Violence: Six Sideways Reflections*, New York: Picador; 2008.

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

<sup>13</sup> Here is where the provisos begin to be piled on, as commentators seek to trace out striations of affinity between demonstrations, suggestive lines of connection imprinted as if by some glacial movement onto the epoch, while at the same time emphasizing the uniqueness of each as embodied modes of resistance to capitalism. Thus, however situated each claim to a more just community is, the demonstration remains as systemic as its occasion. The qualifiers that register the movement as one consisting of multitudes, and thus as a whole dependent on the recognition of differences within, are crucial to the capacity of the movement to articulate itself over time, to democratically decide what it will become, to change and to grow. The theoretical effort, therefore, is not to "unify this collectivity under a substantial identity—race, ethnicity, religion, nationality. Rather it asserts it as the 'we' of a divided people," [22]. Similarly, in linking demonstrations from the Arab Spring, to the Spanish *acampadas*, to the Wisconsin statehouse protests, to the Israeli tent encampments, to Occupy, Hardt and Negri are careful to register that "The context of these various protests are very different, of course, and are not simply iterations of what happened elsewhere. Rather, each of these movements has managed to translate a few common elements into their own situation" [23]. This pattern of equivocation—<*it is one, but many*>—runs in parallel with the renewed discourse around empire that preceded it, wherein the definition of what empires have become took on all kinds of qualifiers (from "empire-lite," to "*hyperpuissance*," to "liberal empire"), suggesting that the systemic sense of a whole that our technological society induces is punctuated by and concentrated in nodes where power is actually applied. So, while contemporary forms of empire may be de-territorialized, or seemingly virtual, they most certainly do touch ground and occupy territory, linking the sites of power within a system of domination, here recovered as a system for resistance. On this theoretical shift in the meaning of empire [24].

#### *Perspective Chapter: Options to Violence in Mass Movements – A Prospectus for Mobilization DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106381*

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

<sup>14</sup> It is interesting to hear Žižek give his staccato speech to an open air, OWS forum in Zuccotti Park, especially when the speaker pulls out an old Marxist line, to the effect that the revolution is not an action, that they are not the real dreamers, that praxis is rather an energizing of an already existing crisis situation, that it is the system itself exploding, with the subject reduced to a kind of puppet of the historical moment, etc., and as if missing their cue to mirror a prestigious thinker, the human mic pauses. It was natural that the demonstrators did not jump to repeat those words, since they were most certainly committed to acting freely, whatever the context of the situation that made that action necessary. [Internet] http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=eu9BWlcRwPQ [Accessed: June 10, 2022).

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.
