Demand
Nina Power
To demand something from somebody (whether it be from an individual or a state) is often to accept, as many thinkers have pointed out, at least the broad outlines of the existing situation. To demand something—better working conditions, political representation, compensation—is at the same time often to recognize the framework and the institutions that could (but most often will not) acquiesce to that demand: employers, the government, the state. But does that mean that all demands are inherently reformist and therefore anti-revolutionary? It is clear that, as a political tactic, advancing demands has historically benefited workers and civil rights groups in many situations, especially when these demands have been backed up by strikes, mass protest, or other forms of collective action. The politics of demand need not always be realistic: sometimes demanding the impossible—as in the popular May ’68 slogan, “Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible!”—changes the way in which a particular political debate is framed and how people act within that framework. Nuanced takes on the idea of demand (e.g., “transitional demands,” “directional demands”) seek to fuse a desire for immediate change with a long-term desire for the abolition of the status quo. Only the most puritanical thinkers and actors would deny the necessity of improving things on the way to a revolutionary overhaul of the entire system.
“Demand” can be both a noun and a verb (“a demand”; “to demand something”) and stems from the Latin “demandare” (meaning “to entrust,” “commit to one’s charge,” or “to hand over”). So, while radicals are accustomed to thinking of “demand” simply as a request (or “mandate,” also from “mandare,” meaning “to order”) conveyed to someone else or to a larger institution, the word also etymologically implies trust. We might thus ask what it is that we trust about any person or institution we demand something from; what it is in their constitution that causes us to “commit” our demand to their charge? Moreover, if to demand is to place something in someone’s hand, it stands to reason that the hand must at some point be extended. This etymological relationship between demanding and being offered has important political implications. Even as we repeat abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ famous claim that “power concedes nothing without a demand” (1857), we must consider how the act of demand implies our trust in the very relations of power we seek to undermine.
“To ask for as a right”—the dominant contemporary conception of political demands—stems from early-fifteenth-century Anglo-French legal language. The noun form of “demand,” as in a request or claim, dates from the fourteenth century. Hovering in the background behind these usages is the economic sense of demand, as in the laws of “supply and demand” considered by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations from 1776. The legal and economic senses of the word remain present to some extent in contemporary activist and political uses, in which “demand” often stands in for (or is linked to) an insistence on the recognition of existing “rights” or appeals for new ones. “Demands” in this sense can be put forward by specific groups (trans rights, rights for indigenous peoples, and so on) or they can appeal to ostensible universalities, as was the case with the demands first advanced during the French revolution (e.g., the “rights of man”—now human rights—or “citizens’ rights,” including recent demands for a basic guaranteed minimum income). Specific demands need not be in tension with universal demands and may even complement them. The demand for fairer treatment by and for particular groups, for instance, will arguably benefit the majority insofar as a more equal society benefits everyone.
There have been several historical attempts to radicalize the concept of “demand.” In 1938, Trotsky marked the relationship between what he described as the minimum and the maximum program. These programs respectively correspond to reformist social democratic demands, on the one hand, and the replacement of capitalism by socialism on the other. Due to the “contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard,” Trotsky in his “Transitional Programme” (1938) proposed a series of “transitional demands” that would ultimately lead to the “conquest of power by the proletariat.” He argued that transitional demands, demands made from the “revolutionary perspective,” should replace the reformist minimum program. This sense presents “demand” in a processual rather than static light, as an ongoing series of mobilizations designed to undermine the basis for bourgeois and capitalist rule. Through this process, Trotsky envisioned that the proletariat would start to see itself as part of a growing revolutionary movement committed to the overthrow of capitalism. In this way, he aimed to overturn the formal distinction between revolutionary and reformist demands while ensuring that demands made to the bourgeoisie would no longer need to be articulated in piecemeal fashion.
Although many radicals choose to distance themselves from the legacies of Trotsky and Trotskyism, a great deal of the contemporary discussion concerning the nature of “demands” similarly views them less as fixed ends in themselves than as part of an ongoing process. The historical opposition between reformism and revolution is perhaps less rigid than it used to be. Today one can operate on multiple political fronts at once using a variety of different tactics. To see the demand for reductions in work hours as being in opposition to the abolition of the wage-labor system, for example, is to set up a false sense of scarcity (“if this change is made, this larger change can’t happen”). Many activists and theorists do not view demands made to states or employers as being in opposition to the greater desire to create a situation in which the original lesser demand would become redundant. In The Problem with Work (2011), Kathi Weeks advances a similarly important distinction between “utopian” and “nonutopian” demands. A utopian demand, she writes, “should point toward the possibility of a break, however partial, with the present.” In contrast, a non-utopian demand fails to “animate the possibility of living differently.” In her discussion of the Wages for Housework campaign, where feminists demanded that unpaid reproductive labor (e.g., childcare and cleaning) be economically remunerated, Weeks acknowledged, “None of its supporters presumed that wages for housework would signal the end of either capitalism or patriarchy. But they did hope the reform would bring about a gendered system characterized by a substantially different division of labor and economy of power, one that might give women further resources for their struggles, make possible a different range of choices, and provide discursive tools for new ways of thinking and imagining” (220).
Seemingly impossible or improbable demands can open up a significant political and conceptual space for thinking about the world differently. What would it mean, for example, to understand that “work” includes everything that keeps humanity going, is highly gendered, and is not merely restricted to wage labor? Even if there was no hope of achieving any form of economic recognition for housework, utopian demands of this kind force us to think differently.20 For example, what if—rather than profit—we took “care” to be the most fundamental value in society? What would it mean to adopt the standpoint of prison abolitionists who begin from a vision of the world in which incarceration didn’t exist at all and then work backward from there?
In a similarly “utopian” vein, philosopher Simon Critchley has written about the idea of the “infinite demand.” Following the work of Knud Ejler Løgstrup and Emmanuel Levinas, Critchley argues that ethical subjectivity is constituted through our commitment to the unfulfillable ethical demands that befall us upon recognizing the other. Arguing that we live in an age in which the proletariat is no longer the revolutionary subject, Critchley suggests that contemporary anarchism—as the “continual questioning from below of any attempt to impose order from above” (2007, 13)—is where hope for democracy lies. Here “demand” is understood as an ethical imperative “whose scope is universal and whose evidence is faced in a concrete situation” (132).
In recent years, activists have begun to strongly criticize the traditional logic of demand, particularly when it comes to strategy. In “Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupation,” a text about the New School occupation of December 2008 written by the Inoperative Committee, the authors attack what they describe as “radical liberals” who operate within the logic of “[n]ames, demands and identities.” Like Critchley, they oppose “infinite demands” (which are held to be “compelling, but ultimately an alibi for reform, a series of binding delays which blunts the force of any potential upheaval”) and advance the call to become “infinitely demanding.” With this reversal of the logic of “demand,” the authors make clear that it is no longer a question of asking someone in power for something. Instead, what is required is the recognition that something is ethically and politically demanded of them (or, indeed, us): “Those who occupy, strike, or sabotage are not the ones who infinitely demand, rather it is occupation, striking, and sabotage themselves which are infinitely demanding in their fulfillment. We do not demand something infinite by means of occupation; we are demanded by occupation to infinitely extend it. This is why there is no excuse for conceding in an occupation. Every demand is already a defeat, and the only genuine failure is one that occurs in the attempt to expand it” (Inoperative Committee 2001, 10).
But even as the Inoperative Committee engaged in their polemical reversal and overhaul of “demand,” other movement thinkers were in the process of salvaging the concept and giving nuance to its meaning. In the 2007 article “Walking in the Right Direction?” Ben Trott recounts discussions—in particular, those taking place in Germany—around the idea of “directional demands” (Richtungsforderungen). While Trott acknowledges that there is currently “no single unified position” determining what constitutes such a demand, he presents their deployment as an expression of “the desire to constitute a social actor, movement or counter-power capable of intervening in, and influencing, social and political developments” in the hope of bringing about a class recomposition capable of disrupting capitalism. In his account, Trott explicitly opposes such directional demands to Trotsky’s “transitional demands,” arguing that the latter might be “realisable in bourgeois society” while the former look for “a way out.” In this view, directional demands are global (i.e., not dependent on nationality or citizenship status recognition) and they don’t give primacy to the industrial proletariat as political vanguard. Instead, and in conjunction with the insights of post-Fordist thinkers like Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Paulo Virno, directional demands favor “the Multitude.” No single actor can claim a monopoly on the right to advance directional demands. Moreover, such demands cannot be said to have “necessary stages.” Like Weeks’ notion of utopian demands, directional demands in Trott’s account “open up the potential for possible future worlds.”
Historically, “demand” has shifted between reformist and revolutionary conceptions, as well as between utopian and non-utopian ones. Severed from an understanding of “demand” in a strictly legal rights–based sense, activists and theorists have sought to reformulate the concept to emphasize processual, infinite relations and an open-ended series of tactics. The old image of “demand” as asking for something concrete from someone in power within a particular national context has mutated into something much more global, infinite, and universal.
See also: Accountability; Conspiracy; Prefiguration; Revolution; Rights; Utopia; Vanguard
20. It should be noted that the Wages for Housework campaign has recently achieved some material gains: a 2013 Venezuelan law pays full-time mothers a wag e and a pension, recognizing their contribution to social reproduction and altering the traditional conception of work.