The crisis of 2008 was an event of a certain kind. We might call it a passive event because it appeared as something that happened to us. It feels like it’s been caused by forces beyond our control, akin to an act of nature. Events such as this tend to produce the feeling that possibility is closing down. The sense of possibility attached to one social form goes into crisis but new possibilities have yet to cohere. Events of a certain magnitude, even if they are passively received, can produce the divergence of experiences from which generational differences emerge. They create, we could say, the raw material for generational emergence, but they don’t automatically create a coherent generational outlook. The event of 2008 produced the potential for a large but politically ambiguous generation. Mannheim would call the common experience of this group a shared ‘generational location’, but that is not the same as a coherent political generation, which requires ‘similarly “located” contemporaries [to] participate in a common destiny and in the ideas and concepts which are in some way bound up with its unfolding’.1 Those initiating that process form ‘generational units’ among those who share ‘a certain affinity in the way in which all move with and are formed by their common experiences’.2
Mannheim is clear that generations can overlap with conservative, liberal or socialist movements, but I would supplement his theory by distinguishing between political generations of the Right and the Left. It is difficult for Left generational units to form around passive events because they need possibility to open up so new groups can participate in self-rule. By contrast, Corey Robin defines conservatism as ‘a meditation on – and theoretical rendition of – the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back’.3 The closing down of existing possibility associated with passive events can produce this kind of feeling and allow right-wing narratives to take hold. Left generational units are better suited to what we might call ‘active’ events. These are events which their participants experience as something that they have actively constructed with others. This tends to cause an expansion of social and political possibility. It is worth thinking a little more about that experience in order to see the influence it has on emerging Left generations.
Aristide Zolberg provides a useful sketch of such events in his seminal article ‘Moments of Madness’. In the introductory passage he outlines the challenge they pose to political thinking:
If politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ what are we to make of moments when human beings living in modern societies believe that ‘all is possible’? We know with assurance that such moments occur, if only because those who experience them are acutely conscious of their unusual state. Speaking with tongues, they urgently record their most intimate feelings. Furthermore, they are often aware of affinities across time and space with others in similar circumstances.4
Zolberg draws on this urgent record and compares testimony from six Parisian events, beginning with the revolt of 1848. The article, written in 1972, is undoubtedly a response to the Paris événements of 1968, and taking his cue from the awareness he found there ‘of affinities across time and space with others in similar circumstances’, he seeks out what is common in the experience of these moments. In 1968 there were living links to the 1936 wave of factory occupations that accompanied the Popular Front government, as well as to the contagious enthusiasm that followed the 1944 Liberation of Paris. Contemporary commentators on May ’68 also raised the antecedents of the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Zolberg treats the commonality of experience he finds in these Parisian events as an example of a wider phenomenon, and indeed testimony from them is quite consistent.
The recurrence of these moments over one hundred and twenty years, recognizably the same in spite of variations, gives the phenomenon a persuasive concreteness each event may not possess individually… . Whatever the attitudes of the writers at the time of writing, they record intense moments of festive joy… . Minds and bodies are liberated; human beings feel that they are in direct touch with one another as well as with their inner selves… . Simultaneously, there is a disposition to encounter the déjà vu; through the medium of collective memories recorded in sophisticated or demotic culture, in historical works or in folklore, human beings connect the moment with others. Liberated from the constraints of time and place, and circumstances, from history, men choose their parts from the available repertory or forge new ones in an act of creation. Dreams become possibilities.5
There is a tendency within political science and theory either to dismiss such moments as epiphenomenal, or, in the case of the French and American Revolutions, to treat them as foundational but exceptional. As Zolberg says: ‘Since we cannot ignore them, we segregate them from our main concern, the universe of normal political events.’6 The opposing, though related, tendency is to treat the experiences found in such events as in some ways ‘more real’ than those of ‘ordinary life’ and to treat the political forms through which that experience is expressed as the model for a universal politics to be applied in any situation. Instead I want to focus on how such moments are conditioned by the contexts from which they emerge even though they exceed them. Doing so will allow us to use these moments to better understand the political possibilities and limitations of the present. From this we can gain a clearer sense of how such moments can fit into ongoing projects of political change.
We saw in the previous chapter how the logic of the institutions we interact with can create a constrained sense of social and political possibility. It’s a contraction of horizons that’s reinforced by the technical and media environments within which we live our habitual lives. As Maurizio Lazzarato puts it, ‘Those who govern have the power to define problems and formulate questions (which they term “the possibilities”) and establish in this way what is noteworthy, important, relevant, feasible, worth acting on and speaking about.’7 The type of event with which we’re concerned may produce the sensation that ‘all is possible’, but possibility is constrained in different ways in different historical and social contexts. What is being witnessed is the opening up of possibility, or more specifically the exceeding of a particular constriction of possibility. It’s for this reason that I want to call these events ‘moments of excess’.8 Each individual event of this kind contains its own moment of excess: the point at which what was previously tolerated suddenly becomes intolerable. Sometimes it’s an individual action that produces this moment: the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, for example, which sparked the Tunisian revolution in December 2010. Sometimes it’s a collective action, such as an unexpectedly large or militant demonstration. The storming and occupation of 30 Millbank, the Conservative Party offices in London, in November 2010 is an example of this. It sparked two months of student protests and university occupations. Either way, the moments of excess do not emerge from nowhere. They are rather crystallizations of longer-term trends and changes in class composition, which put pre-existing subjectivities under pressure. The explosion of possibility experienced in a moment of excess exceeds the subjectivities with which we have lived our everyday lives. But there is no such thing as a completely fresh contact with a moment of excess. The narratives through which we make sense of the world leave a trace in the moments in which we exceed them.
Recognizing this allows us to incorporate such moments into a class composition analysis. As we saw with our discussion of the Piazza Statuto revolt, moments of excess have been key indicators of a changing class composition. To be more specific, by crystallizing the emergence of new attitudes and new political problems, these events play a key role in the emergence and recognition of new political compositions. They involve, as Zolberg points out, ‘a sort of intensive learning experience whereby new ideas, formulated initially in coteries, sects, etc., emerge as widely held beliefs among much larger publics’.9 By crystallizing and framing a problem, they force observers to make a decision on whether to align themselves with the old or the new space of possibility. It’s this process that produces what autonomists call the circulation of struggles, in which similar organizational forms and repertoires of action emerge simultaneously across many different contexts and where people recognize themselves in the actions of others. As the Italian writing collective Wu Ming put it when discussing a wave of mutinies by Italian soldiers on hearing about the Russian Revolution, ‘[T]hose proletarians asked themselves: “What does this remote event look like? What does it feel like?” And they answered: “It feels like what I’d like to do myself!”’10 As events in individual cities or countries spread in a wave-like fashion, they enter into a relationship of mutual amplification, producing a moment of excess on an international scale. It is these moments that can prove to be generational.
In times such as ours in which the technical composition of society is so complex and variegated, the common shape of events emerging in a wave across many different countries can provide strong clues as to what is common across these apparently different contexts. The shape taken by a moment of excess, the problems it forms around, the organizational and action repertoires that it produces, all indicate the politically salient elements of a changing composition. They show the direction the new generation of politics is moving in. But it would be a mistake to accept these moments on their own terms. The resonances between them come from a certain similarity, or compatibility, in technical compositions. And as such they will bear the scars of the pre-existing experiences and subjectivities of their participants.11 We can think of moments of excess as the first draft of a potential new politics, but political composition is also a political project in which militants, or a generational unit, can attempt to innovate new forms of organization and modes of struggle in order to overcome the limits, blockages and moments of non-communication inherited from the underlying technical composition. Although it appears that these moments all produce similar affects, the forms through which those affects are expressed and received reflect the conjuncture from which they originate. By tracing these forms, and the functions they fulfil, back to the technical composition from which they emerge, we can better understand how the same style of politics may take new forms in the future. However, the scars of existing society are not the only inheritances we have to think through. Any new generation of politics also has to position itself among, and interact with, the ideas and practices of already existing, and past, Left generations. There are generational dynamics to how that plays out.
One of the resources we can draw on to conceptualize this problem is Marx’s great text on historical repetitions, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’:
Human beings make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brains of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in their time-honoured disguise and in this borrowed language.12
The starting point here is that we only rarely get the chance to become historical actors. We only rarely confront the possibility of collectively breaking with the historical conditioning that limits how our lives can be lived. During these moments of excess there’s an understandable tendency to draw on, and repeat, the traditions of past generations of struggle. During moments of excess people encounter experiences, problems and degrees of freedom that they’ve not faced previously. It makes sense in this situation for them to seek out antecedents to help orientate themselves. Failure to learn from the experience of those who have faced similar problems would leave us disorientated and unarmed in the face of historical conditioning, helpless to stop the old world reasserting itself.
There are, however, different modes in which this repetition can take place. In a famous line that precedes the passage above, Marx says, ‘All facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice … the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’.13 Reading this passage, Gilles Deleuze finds that
historical repetition is … a condition of historical action itself… . [H]istorical actors can create only on condition that they identify themselves with figures from the past… . [R]epetition is comic when it falls short – that is, when instead of leading to metamorphosis and the production of something new, it forms a kind of involution, the opposite of authentic creation.14
When the organizational models, forms of acting and interpretive grid of a previous Left generation are simply overlaid onto the new situation, the new movement folds in on itself, obscuring the potential to address the present. We are all too familiar with the farce of treating each new movement as a simple repetition of 1917, 1936 or 1968, failing to recognize that the forms being repeated emerged from a political composition that no longer exists. If contemporary Left generations are to prevent the inheritance of past generations from weighing ‘like a nightmare upon the brains of the living’, then they must not repeat those traditions uncritically. A non-comic repetition is one that allows the new to emerge by recognizing its connection to current circumstances. Authentic creation requires forms of repetition that ‘constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew’.15 Now that we have established this schema we can apply it to the events that sparked Generation Left.
If 2008 was the ‘passively received’ event that produced a generational location, then 2011 was the moment of excess that gave birth to an international Left generation. 2011 was a historic year of protest. Time magazine even gave its annual person of the year award to the generic category of ‘The Protestor’. Like most iconic years it started early and finished late. I would date the start of the wave of protests, revolutions and square occupations to late 2010 and the coincidence of the UK student movement and the beginning of the Tunisian revolution. The latter sparked the Arab Spring wave of revolutions and protests in early 2011, and as these revolutions played out, the action moved back to Europe, when on 15 May a huge demonstration in Madrid turned into an occupation of Puerta del Sol square. The massive movement of protests and square occupations that then blossomed across Spain became known as the 15M or ‘Indignados’. A similar movement of protest camps emerged in Greece a few weeks later before the international wave of Occupy camps was sparked in September by the establishment of the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park, New York.16
Each one of these events contained its own moment of excess in which what had previously seemed impossible suddenly burst into existence. Yet as the sequence of events unfolded and similar shapes emerged, the significance of each individual event increased. From the Arab Spring, through the Indignados, to the Occupy movement, the dominant organizational form of the 2011 protest wave was the general assembly. It gained this prominence because of its compatibility with the dominant protest repertoire, the protest camp. The camps of 2011 were semi-permanent occupations of prominent public space, often city squares. The camps facilitated other forms of protest and direct action, but it was the very fact of occupation, as a public display of dissatisfaction, which made the most impact. They acted as a pole of attraction through which the dissatisfied could congregate and find each other. Within this the general assemblies of the camps found themselves moving beyond an ancillary, supporting and merely organizational role to become central to the very purpose of the protest. The assemblies were the primary means through which people discovered and displayed their commonality. The protest camp at Tahrir Square in Cairo certainly held mass assemblies, but it was the 15M movement of the Indignados in Spain that began to introduce a particular form of consensus decision-making process. It was Occupy Wall Street, however, that did the most to spread this process and codify it as assembly practice.
Consensus decision-making has undergone continuous development within social movements for over 40 years, resulting in a highly structured process. The group Seeds for Change, who provide training in consensus decision-making, offer a useful definition: ‘Consensus is a decision-making process that works creatively to include all persons making the decision. Instead of simply voting for an item and having the majority of the group getting their way, the group is committed to finding solutions that everyone can live with.’17 The consensus process works best amongst fairly cohesive groups committed in advance to the same broad objective. The big stalling point with the consensus process is its unsuitability for making strategic decisions, that is, how to collectively generate objectives different from the ones the assembly was formed around.18 The pressure to come to a consensus provides a bias towards the status quo. It is harder to achieve near unanimity on a proposal to break with existing practice. Veterans of the alter-globalization movement of the early 2000s introduced this consensus process into the events of 2011. At first many thought that 2011 represented a continuation of that movement, but it soon became apparent that 2008 had changed the circumstances so much that the assemblies were being used in a very different way. The assemblies of 2011 were located in busy city centres, were open to all comers and attracted a huge range of people. The aims and politics of the camps had to be built rather than assumed. As a result, when we look beyond the rhetoric we can see that the 2011 assemblies were fulfilling quite different functions to those of the alter-globalization cycle.
In 2011 emphasis was put on allowing people to express themselves, at the expense of efficient decision-making. We might call this an emphasis on testimony, and it is a good indication of the role the assemblies were really fulfilling. As Paolo Gerbaudo reports from an assembly he witnessed during the early days of the Puerta del Sol occupation, people constantly used their two minutes at the microphone to talk about the problems they had been suffering in their lives, from unemployment to bankruptcy to inadequate childcare. Each ended their testimony with the phrase ‘“Yo tambien soy un(a) indignado/a”: “Me too – I am an indignant.”’19 In the US the same function was visible in the popular ‘We are the 99 percent’ website, which featured photographs of people holding pieces of cardboard upon which they’d written their stories of financial hardship.20 The sheer aggregation of these stories and the common themes within them not only produce a sense of commonality but also stimulate a shared understanding of the structural nature of the hardship. If so many suffer from the same problems, then those problems cannot, as we might previously have felt, be due to our individual failings.
We can see in this an almost therapeutic element to the assemblies. Testifying in public about your conditions helps overcome the shame and self-blame that the techniques of consciousness deflation have inculcated in us. Yet the collective nature of this testimony produces something different to the therapeutic narrative, which Jennifer Silva’s work shows is so central to how young working-class adults make sense of their lives.21 It seems likely that the assemblies proved so attractive, at least at first, because they allowed a form of participation that was familiar to those trained by neoliberal administration. As Lazzarato puts it, ‘In “individual monitoring” one is expected to come clean.’22 Recognizing this link doesn’t mean we should dismiss the assemblies as contaminated by neoliberalism. We should, rather, see it as a point of departure in our attempts to move beyond or exceed our pre-existing selves. The event of 2008 produced a crisis in the ‘entrepreneurial’ subjectivities so central to neoliberalism. It’s this that has opened the space for new collectivities to be built. Recognizing common problems is powerful, but tackling structural causes takes a different form of collectivity to mere aggregation. It requires collective analysis and action, and it involves us changing ourselves as we change society.
It’s here that we can see another function of the general assemblies. They acted as screens upon which people could recognize themselves as newly emerging political subjects. It was often what we might call the ‘affect of democracy’ within the assemblies that people found most appealing. Being listened to and taken seriously by others while taking collective control over an important political moment really can be life-changing. This radically participative element, along with taking collective action, did most to increase people’s collective capacities. It was this that produced such a strong identification with the process of the general assemblies, as Quinn Norton, a journalist who spent several months participating in the occupations across the US, makes clear.
The GA [general assembly] process also became part of everyday life: the queue, called ‘stack’; the people’s mic; consensus; arguments and counter arguments; points of information; blocking. Fights and logistical problems fell into little GAs, and the GA became a way of organizing thought. Hand gestures, called twinkles in New York, let groups express their feelings in silence. All of it migrated into the culture of camp life. After a while in the camps, you put your concerns ‘on stack’, and you twinkled people in conversation as a phatic. At first, like so many parts of Occupy, it was a wonder to see.23
The early exhilaration of participation in consensus-driven assemblies overlapped with an ideology of prefigurative proceduralism, also inherited from the alter-globalization movement, in which adherence to the correct organizational process could act as the point of unity and stand in for an assumed political commonality. This combination produced what I would call assemblyism, the idea that the general assembly is the direct and sufficient answer to the demand for ‘Real Democracy Now!’24 Just as some council communists in the twentieth century thought they had discovered in workers’ councils the organizational form of a future communist society, some in Occupy, and beyond, mistook consensus assemblies, which had emerged from quite specific circumstance and inheritances, for a new universal model of democracy, which at the very least prefigured the post-capitalist society to come.
There was in this a failure to see how the needs of the conjuncture were forcing the general assemblies to adopt functions for which the consensus process wasn’t designed. It was this that eventually turned the assemblies into a farce. As with all ideal types, a disconnect from the historical conditions from which they emerged set the model up to fail. As the limits of usefulness were reached, complete rejection ensued. This dynamic is quite visible in Norton’s continuing testimony:
Because the GA had no way to reject force, over time it fell to force. Proposals won by intimidation; bullies carried the day. What began as a way to let people reform and remake themselves had no mechanism for dealing with them when they didn’t. It had no way to deal with parasites and predators. It became a diseased process, pushing out the weak and quiet it had meant to enfranchise until it finally collapsed when nothing was left but predators trying to rip out each other’s throats… .
The idea of the GA – its process, its form, inclusiveness – failed. It had all the best chances to evolve, imprinted on the consciousness of thousands of occupiers like a second language. No idea gets a better chance than that, and it still failed.25
Rather than seeing the general assemblies, and so the movements of 2011, as a failure because they reached their limits of scalability, we should see them as a necessary moment in the emergence of a new political generation. The assemblies inadvertently ended up fulfilling the consciousness-raising functions that were so prominent in the 1970s. This makes sense to me for two reasons. Firstly, it seems that consciousness raising is a vital opening moment in class formation in situations in which there’s no shared mass workplaces to fulfil the role of aggregation. The consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s feminist movement were used to compose ‘women as a class’ by overcoming the isolation of women, and the relegation of their problems into the private sphere. Secondly, we need to overcome neoliberalism’s techniques of consciousness deflation. The individualizing effects of neoliberal governance and debt mean that some form of consciousness raising is a crucial step. The assemblies were a necessary moment, but they weren’t sufficient. Many of the mechanisms of consciousness deflation built in the neoliberal era involved changing material conditions, which puts them out of reach of a mere ‘revolution in the head’. These also undermined the sustainability of the protest camps. The all-or-nothing intensity required for full participation in that model of protest rubs up against our lack of free time as our lives are filled up by demoralizing work and dissatisfying distraction. The general assemblies and protest camps might allow the recognition of commonality and begin the search for structural causes, but they can’t, on their own, overcome those structures.
Some of the most sophisticated campaigns to emerge from the 2011 wave retained the consciousness-raising functions of the assembly form as a first step in attacking mechanisms of control such as debt. The Strike Debt campaign targeting medical debt and student loans is one example that emerged from Occupy Wall Street.26 One of the key pieces of advice Strike Debt gives to those wanting to initiate an anti-debt campaign is to hold debt assemblies, at which people testify publicly about their indebtedness to recognize their commonality and overcome their guilt. The same is true of the immensely powerful Spanish group Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages), who use assemblies to ‘realize the collective dimension of the problem and that there are structural elements that have influenced our decisions’.27
Campaigns like this were attempts to move from the symbolic leverage of the protest camps to exercising material leverage directly upon the structures and mechanisms cramping people’s lives. Effective though these were, they increasingly encountered the problem of repression. Much of the Arab Spring fell victim to counter-revolution or civil war, while the Spanish government made much protest activity, and even the expression of dissent, illegal. The attempt to route around parliamentary democracy through the exercise of extra-parliamentary forms of power came up against the problem of the State’s ability to set the conditions within which political activity takes place. Generation Left was born within explosive extra-parliamentary movements, yet all around the world between 2014 and 2016 these movements turned towards electoral politics.
In some countries, such as Spain, the generation of 2011 was large enough to create a new political common sense vying for dominance in the sphere of formal politics. In the UK the long 2011, which ran from the 2010 student movement, through Occupy, to the August 2011 riots, formed a much smaller generation but one that stayed highly internally networked. Despite its relatively small size it was able to facilitate the take-over of the Labour Party by the Left because it could act in a more cohesive fashion than any other sector. This electoral turn doesn’t prove that 2011 failed. Quite the opposite: it proves it was successful. The unanimity with which the shift took place across many different countries in such a short period is the greatest proof that 2011 produced what Mannheim would call a Left generational unit on an international scale.