DILIP PARAMESHWAR GAONKAR
Charles Taylor has identified three vulnerabilities “internal” to the democratic project that, under certain sociohistorical conditions, can trigger a series of degenerative ideas and ideologies, dispositions and behaviors, mobilizations and movements detrimental to liberal and cosmopolitan values and constitutional norms.1 These vulnerabilities are rooted in what is constitutive of, and hence unavoidable in, modern democratic politics: the contentious relationship between elites and nonelites; the exclusionary temptation and rhetoric built into the very idea of “We, the people”; and the dangers of “winner-take-all” majoritarian rule facilitated by an electoral system based on universal adult suffrage. Along with its legitimacy, dynamism, and appeal, democracy, imagined and conceived by the Athenians as a form of “popular” self-rule of the people—and enshrined for modern times in Lincoln’s succinct formulation “government of the people, by the people, for the people”—is recurrently susceptible to degenerations. According to Taylor, these three vulnerabilities are converging today into a perfect storm and jeopardizing democracies across the world.
Craig Calhoun complements Taylor’s thesis by showing how democracy is a societally embedded historical project: democracy does not control its destiny. Calhoun provides us with a short but compelling historical account of how the fate of democracy, time and again, turns on the shifting social formations within which it is embedded. To put it differently, Calhoun’s account alerts us to Machiavelli’s profound insight that politics, especially republican politics, is eternally held hostage by the passage of time.2 For democracy, there are good times and bad times; there are hospitable social formations that allow it to flourish and inhospitable ones that destabilize and endanger it. Democratic societies cannot always anticipate these shifts. Forced to contend with the consequences of expanding capitalism over the last two hundred years, democracy has struggled to adapt. Every core social formation and institution—from family, neighborhood, and school to work, leisure, and religion—critical to the cultivation of democratic norms and civic virtues has been subjected to accelerating, often disfiguring, transformations wrought by capitalism and its market logic. This is amply illustrated in Calhoun’s account of Karl Polanyi’s two movements, the first marking the great societal transformation triggered by industrial capitalism and the second marking the delayed political response to the derangements and negative externalities of the first. Calhoun masterfully describes how the long hiatus between the two movements—“Engels’s pause”—challenged, strained, and diminished the very ideas of a common good and a shared future, both essential to democracy’s flourishing (see Chapter 2). Given the dynamism of capitalism today, “Engels’s pause” keeps recurring, and democracy is placed under duress, time and again.
In the first part of this chapter, I try to decipher and specify the underlying structure of the three degenerative vulnerabilities intrinsic to the democratic project and explain why they can, at best, be managed, but not eliminated. In the second part, I make a case as to why “direct action” mobilization is and should be a necessary element to reanimating the democratic project now in disrepair.
Taylor’s first degeneration is triggered by a generalized feeling of diminished political efficacy and agency among the vast majority of citizens, especially the nonelites. While Taylor identifies multiple causes that have contributed to the loss of citizen efficacy in mature Western democracies in recent years, he singles out what he calls the breakdown of “tamed class struggle.” This is an interesting formulation. This means that the health and stability of democracy is predicated on keeping class struggle under check, taming it ideologically and institutionally to ensure that it does not spin out of control. Here, Taylor is not using the phrase “class struggle” in any Marxist sense. Instead, he is referring to a proposition with a long and complex lineage—namely, that all known settled (non-nomadic) communities are marked by and contend with an enduring conflict between an elite (a small numerical minority) and a nonelite. While the intensity of conflict varies according to time and place, it is always present and ineliminable. This conflict turns chiefly on the asymmetrical and inequitable distribution of wealth, status, and resources within a given community.
The idea that socioeconomic inequality is constitutive of any and every political community, both ancient and modern, whether governed democratically or otherwise, is commonly accepted by thinkers of every persuasion—liberal, radical, conservative, and even reactionary.3 There are many explanations of how social inequalities arise (anthropological, structural, and causal) and justifications (economic, normative, and theological) of why they are unavoidable, and even necessary. Much of this is beyond the purview of this chapter. However, the historical experience of socioeconomic inequality accompanies and haunts the democratic project like a spectral shadow, and poses a question: What is to be done about it? Responses to this question (which has exercised the minds of many great thinkers from Plato and Rousseau to Marx and John Rawls) range widely, from how to organize and manage social inequality, both normatively and practically, to how to eliminate it altogether, as in a utopia. In all these speculations and analyses, there is one constant consensus: whatever its causes, explanations, and justifications, social inequality becomes dysfunctional, dangerous, and destructive once it crosses a certain point. Where that threshold lies is not easy to specify. Culturally and historically, it is elastic and variable, but within the social imaginary of any given people, it becomes legible, palpable, and obdurate. When Taylor says that “tamed class struggle” has broken down, he is suggesting that the degree of social inequality in today’s “Western democracies” has crossed the threshold and become dangerous. For Calhoun, the roots of the threshold breach are historical and reside in the steady dismantling of democracy’s social foundations since the 1970s (in short, the welfare state and its network of social provisions), under the so-called neoliberal dispensation.
Both Taylor and Calhoun regard the postwar trente glorieuses as an admirable period of “tamed class struggle,” a period of civil harmony across the various tiers of social stratification in Western democracies. Calhoun is relatively unambiguous about how one might address the current crisis. We need to rebuild social foundations to soften the impact of growing economic inequality and stem the corresponding tide of public anger and distress swelling among the nonelite. The statistical data on income and wealth disparity among the different quintiles of the US population are simply horrendous.4 The statistical data also alert one to the fact that categories of elite and nonelite are not homogeneous. There is a great deal of internal variation and differentiation in each category, not only in terms of economic resources, but in terms of social status, cultural values, religious beliefs, and ideological leanings. Modern Western societies are highly complex and stratified. Nevertheless, the distinction between the elite and the nonelite resonates loudly across all these layers of stratified differences and in the realms of political perception, public discourse, and folk understanding.5
Calhoun is also clear that “rebuilding” the social foundations of democracy is not a simple matter of reinstating dismantled welfare state provisions and returning to the good old days of les trente glorieuses. We are now in a different sociohistorical conjuncture, but one that is once again propelled by the ever-expanding and changing modes of capitalist production and reproduction that shape our lives. We are faced with new modes of production and distribution, new modes of communication and circulation, new modes of wealth creation, new labor regimes (what some call the “international division of labor”), and new modes of precarity.6 These formations directly affect and shape the vexed relations between the elite and the nonelites. They call for different and novel strategies for “taming class struggle,” new visions of the common good and a shared future, and new ways of building and strengthening bands of solidarity.
Looking forward, Taylor and Calhoun also insist that expanding existing social provisions will not be sufficient to resuscitate citizen efficacy. Citizen efficacy, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the nineteenth century, runs on dual tracks.7 Obviously, democracy won’t work for you if you feel that your voice is ignored, your welfare neglected, and your interests systemically disregarded. The functional complexity and technical opacity of modern societies might also deeply undermine and erode one’s sense of civic and political efficacy. However, the modern citizen, reconciled to living under a representative system, is not primarily concerned with the exercise of something equivalent to the ancient right and practice of isegoria (the equal right of every citizen to speak freely). In fact, the most generalized sense of loss of citizen efficacy occurs elsewhere, well before it surfaces in the political sphere. First and foremost, citizen efficacy is rooted in a person’s ability to provide for themselves and their dependents. For a vast majority of people in our time, that means having a steady, decently paying job. In this regard, state-sponsored social provisions such as health care, public schools, old-age pensions, and job training programs serve as infrastructural support and furnish necessary aid, allowing citizens to take care of themselves and their dependents. Second, there are other forms of incapacitating inequalities and discriminations based on race, gender, sexual preference, religion, and ethnicity that also contribute to and compound this generalized sense of loss of citizen efficacy. There are multiple ways in which one is made to feel marginalized and abandoned. Hence, restoring a semblance of citizen efficacy and agency requires more than simply reinstating the recently diminished or dismantled social provisions of a welfare state. It calls for renewing the demos and charting a course toward becoming a more egalitarian and culturally inclusive society.
Calhoun’s historical account of how democracy copes with the relatively regular disruptions wrought by capitalist acceleration provides a structural insight about the conflict and tension between the elites and the nonelites. If the struggle for reducing or stabilizing social inequality is directly related to “taming class struggle” and augmenting citizen efficacy, and if every attempt to reduce and stabilize social inequality gets disrupted by the technoeconomic logic of capitalism, then class conflict in a generalized sense cannot be eliminated. The struggle to reduce or stabilize social inequality discloses a palpable structure, one of oscillation. It is not directional. The intensity and magnitude of social inequality fluctuate over time but class conflict does not get progressively better or worse.
This structural insight yields two additional claims regarding how social transformations destabilize the already contentious relationship between the elites and nonelites. First, the negative externalities of periodic sociohistorical transformations affect the lives of elites and nonelites in different ways. As a rule, the disruptions and instabilities that accompany these transformations pose significantly greater economic risk for nonelites than they do for elites, as evident from the differential impact of the financial crisis of 2008 on these two groups.
Second, when a government does respond to the deepening crisis and institutes social programs and provisions to remedy the situation, its impact is compromised by what Calhoun calls the “Bourdieu catch.” That is, instead of providing relief for those left behind by the unfolding social transformations, the benefits of new social programs and provisions are captured largely by the more highly educated and better positioned social strata. All of this is intuitively grasped by the nonelites as they begin to notice how utterly the “system” is rigged against them.
Unlike struggles for civil and political liberties, the struggle against socioeconomic inequality is neither directional nor progressive. It does not have a clear telos, a set of final “ends.” There are no grand emancipatory narratives in which it takes center stage. Except for those who had once succumbed to the utopian lures of a classless society, those engaged in this struggle rarely entertain the prospect of radically leveling income and wealth. This is a highly variable and contextual struggle, shaped by the history and culture of a given people. It is imagined and fought within the frame of the possible, the feasible, and the negotiable. It involves back and forth movement within a horizontal spread. What is gained can be lost or diminished. To be sure, some gains, such as that of the eight-hour movement, have been permanent and irreversible, but even these provide little solace when job security, health care, pension benefits, and much else are in constant flux. The resultant volatility of socioeconomic inequality makes the conflict between the elites and the nonelites impossible to eradicate and limits the degree to which class struggle might be tamed. This does not mean that in the long history of democracy, the intensity of class conflict and its propensity to produce political discord has remained the same. Les trente glorieuses alludes to a time when class conflict was less intense, but never absent. Perhaps, it was already smoldering beneath the surface, not visible to untrained eyes.
The idea of conceiving democracy as a telic project, as Taylor does, requires one to think of the project as unfolding on dual tracks: first, democracy unfolds normatively, motivated by different, often conflicting, visions and versions of human flourishing; second, it unfolds narratively, as a sociohistorical account of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going—a self-hermeneutics of an unfixable “We, the people.” One can find such powerful and imaginative narratives, often tinged with myth, in texts as diverse as Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871) and Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India (1946).8 It is more productive to historicize democracy’s checkered career than to posit a refined or perfectible normative model. Such historicization calls forth competing narratives of “We, the people,” from which ethnocultural identity (however fictitious) and its disturbing claims to priority can never be fully expunged. Thus, the contested play between the normative and the narrative manifests itself in the guise of a crisis, both structural and historical.
What does it mean to say, as Taylor does, that there are degenerative tendencies intrinsic to the very idea of “We, the people”? Since democracy is an ongoing telic project and struggle, as we have claimed, its agential substance—“We, the people”—can never be permanently ascertained, fixed, or certified. This does not mean that the idea of “the people” has no referent. It is not only an empty signifier, as political theorists Claude Lafort and Ernesto Laclau claim, nor is it a necessary fiction of statecraft, as historian Edmund Morgan insists.9 On the contrary, it is a sociohistorically sedimented and essentially contested concept whose referent is both elusive and evolving. Hence, there is always a rhetorical and ideological struggle over the meaning of the phrase “We, the people.”
This raises the question: What is the underlying structure of the struggle over the meaning of “the people”? In my opinion, there is a similar structured movement to the one we detected in the case of the struggle against socioeconomic inequality. The phrase “We, the people,” oscillates between two poles: the “primordial” and the “constitutional” without ever settling at one end of the spectrum. The primordial pole stresses ethnonational and monocultural roots, real or imagined, of a given people. It often invokes an autochthony of the “first people,” of the “people of the soil,” and of the “heartlanders.”10 It calls for solidarity based on shared language, history, and religion and it looks backward to a golden age of imagined pristine unity unsullied by the differences and divisions afflicting the present. It fears that unity and solidarity are being contaminated by differences from within (minorities) and threatened by differences from without (immigrants). By contrast, the constitutional pole stresses the conscious political will of a self-made people and endorses multicultural difference as well as the myriad world-making lifestyles of their constituents (be they individuals or groups). It celebrates multiplicity, mingling, and hybridity. It proposes to enrich and strengthen unity in and through difference and to cultivate “constitutional patriotism.”11 Each pole has its characteristic bias or belief. The proponents of the primordial pole insist that the core meaning of “We, the people,” has a legitimate, verifiable historical basis. Although rhetorically potent, this kind of claim is always of dubious empirical validity. The error haunting the constitutional pole is not an obsession with fixing the meaning of the people, but of ascertaining its directionality. Its proponents claim that “We, the people,” is not a static given, but the dynamic “self-making” project of a collective agent capable of progressively undermining claims of ethnonational primordiality and priority. Those taking this position hope and believe that the trajectory of history would favor their side, as in the case of historian David Hollinger’s call for a “postethnic America.”12
It is not easy, however, to dispel, let alone eliminate, ethnonational claims or to annul the popular appeals and resonances they elicit. Both Calhoun and Taylor note that democracy requires strong solidarities to bridge cultural differences as well as socioeconomic divisions and intergenerational discord. Since the great revolutions of the eighteenth century, the democratic project has been closely aligned with the nation-state, its viability and durability dependent on the solidarities the latter facilitates. In modern times, nationalism has been and continues to be the most potent solidarity-building engine.13 But just as readily as nationalism unifies people, it can also divide and fracture them. Being so closely aligned with the nation-state, democracy can easily become embroiled in exclusionary politics. Democratic institutions, forms, and practices associated with elections and party systems are especially prone to polarization. During the heat of electoral campaigns, ethnonational majorities have a tendency to target minorities with exclusionary rhetoric and read them out of the body politic.
This struggle between the two poles is not an abstract one. It unfolds differently in different national and cultural contexts and has a history that shapes its scope and intensity. It would be inaccurate to pretend that the ethnonational’s pull and the constitutional’s push are of a uniform force across, say, the United States, Iran, and India. History, culture, and often religion can play crucial roles in mediating the tension between the two poles. To presume that the pull of the ethnonational has been attenuated and quelled in the mature and affluent Western democracies is no less an error than to forsake the constitutional struggle to protect and promote pluralism under the theocratically contained Iranian democracy. India today represents an excellent example of an ongoing struggle in which the two poles are more evenly matched. To be sure, under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and its avowed Hindu nationalist majoritarian agenda, the constitutional pole is very much under duress. It is, however, by no means or measure lost or abandoned. The struggle over the meaning of “We, the people,” in India, amid all of the country’s ethnic, religious, linguistic, and geographic diversity, is fully engaged, as it should be. Democracy is not a guarantee, but a promise of solidarity that “We, the people,” must fight to keep amid all our differences. While the fate and the trajectory of a given democracy are not foretold, there are intimations of the things to come, of the challenges to be met so that the struggle may continue.
In short, the ethnonational strand, with all its rhetorical appeal and potency, cannot be abolished. It may go dormant, but only for a time, awaiting the conditions that inevitably invite its resurgence. This does not mean that the primordial pole’s claims to validity and priority are legitimate. Instead of hoping that ethnonationalism will run its course and vanish, one should pose a series of constructive questions: Why does the specter of ethnonationalism continue to haunt the democratic project? Under what conditions does this specter erupt, suddenly dominating the political horizon? Why is this eruption named “populism,” time and again? Since what stirs and galvanizes ethnonationalism is rooted in nationalism itself, are there strategies for controlling its consequences—perhaps strategies analogous to James Madison’s institutional designs to curb and deflect the dangers of unencumbered factionalism?14 Distinguishing between “good nationalism” and “bad nationalism” is no longer productive, if it ever was. Nationalism is what it is. Evaluating nationalism from a cosmopolitan perspective ignores too much.
Taylor’s third democratic degeneration pertains to the dangers of unchecked “winner-take-all majoritarianism” facilitated by an electoral system based on universal adult suffrage. It is not easy for us to detach the democratic project from a representative form of government based on the principle of majority rule. Today, elections, universal adult suffrage, and majority rule are the basic mechanics of representative democracy. In the liberal imaginary, these basic mechanisms are embedded in, aligned with, and buttressed by a wide range of cultural forms, constitutional norms, and institutional practices, chief among them being the rule of law (especially an independent judiciary), free media, and a well-functioning party system. In the populist imaginary, by contrast, elections, universal adult suffrage, and majority rule stand in for and embody the doctrine of popular sovereignty in action. Elections are when the sleeping sovereigns—the people—awaken to attest to, if nothing else, their sheer existence.15 Whereas elections are a source of anxiety for liberals because they risk mobilizing the collective agency of the people and activating their unruly collective capacities, for the populist, election time is the time of the sovereign, as evident in the electoral rhetoric of populist leaders such as Narendra Modi in India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.16
As indicated in Chapter 3, the liberal anxiety about elections and universal adult suffrage has persisted since the time of the French Revolution when a revolutionary avant garde used the name of an incarnated people to justify a reign of “virtuous terror” and purify the body politic. After the French Revolution, restricting and delaying franchise came to be seen as necessary means for deterring future aberrations of political holism.17 Nonetheless, universal adult suffrage was on its way. The more effective alternative strategy was to devise a “liberal package” of constitutional and institutional mechanisms that promised to curb the concentration of powers in the hands of the government, especially the executive. The same package was also designed to hamper, if not nullify, the collective agency of the people.18 The “liberal package,” having evolved steadily over a long period of time, has become deeply entrenched in the daily workings of modern Western democracies. It is the default mode of our times. Not only does it steer the polity; it also sustains civil society, underwrites the market economy, and colonizes everyday life. Nevertheless, populist sentiments are never fully expunged from the liberal hegemony. Though marginalized and suppressed, the longing for “the people in their collective capacity” lingers submerged beneath the political unconscious, erupting periodically, especially around elections. It is precisely because they are ignored and dismissed as inconsequential that populist sentiments surface as fractures, marring democracy’s face.
Democracy, thus deformed, gives rise to majoritarianism, a degenerate form of majority rule. Majoritarianism, like the principle of majority rule, draws its legitimacy from its claim to being a practical expression of popular sovereignty. But unlike majority rule, majoritarianism is unconstrained by liberal constitutional and institutional guardrails. It refuses the label of “deviation.” Instead, such majoritarianism unabashedly embraces and endorses “illiberal democracy” for the sake of building a unified national community, as proclaimed by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.19 The difference is structural. Political majorities, especially those assembled by political parties, are usually coalitions, even when they are led by a dominant ethnic group. Since few, if any, modern societies are homogeneous in every relevant register—class, race, ethnicity, religion, language—a political majority must be continually forged. Hence, the relationship between a majority coalition and its constituents has a dynamic metonymic (parts / whole) structure. Majoritarianism, by contrast, is performative. It springs from the perennial temptation to do away with the laborious negotiation between parts and whole characteristic of coalition building. It proclaims the metaphoric unity of a given people based on an ethnocultural identity, real or imagined.
The evils of majoritarianism—diminishing minority rights and protections, gutting the opposition, and silencing public criticism—are partly built into the very logic of majority rule, but they are also exacerbated by the exclusionary temptations and rhetorics of electoral politics. The majoritarian quest for permanently neutralizing, if not annihilating, the opposition and trying to secure an irreversible electoral majority cannot possibly succeed in the long run. Given the societal complexity and diversity of a modern democracy, one can only govern by building majority coalitions that endure for varying amounts of time, never permanently. The majoritarian temptation in electoral politics is palpable and ever present. There is a constant oscillation between the coalition politics of majority rule and the identity politics of majoritarianism, making it difficult to draw a hard and fast line between the two. Traditional political parties committed to coalition politics sometimes succumb to majoritarian lures. Similarly, majoritarian movements and parties are often forced to enter into coalitions and alliances out of necessity. Majoritarian rhetoric, often harsh, divisive, and exclusionary, might be accompanied by more conciliatory politics.
Take the case of how India’s electoral politics have evolved since 1952, the year of the first national elections after independence. In the afterglow of independence, the dominant ruling Congress Party, ideologically secular and social democratic, fielded candidates without paying much attention to the caste demographics of electoral districts. In 1967, a mere fifteen years later, in the wake of the fourth elections in the lower house of Parliament, having lost its allure as the vanguard of the Indian independence movement, the Congress Party dramatically changed its electoral strategy. For the Congress Party, as well as for virtually every other party, caste demographics became the single most important criterion in selecting competitive candidates at every level of government—federal, state, and local. This shift was justified as a purely pragmatic decision rather than as a sign of ideological backsliding. Since then, the ideological basis of caste-based electoral strategies has grown stronger, and the logistics that provide its infrastructure more sophisticated (aided by big data analytics). It is customary (and to a large measure accurate) to characterize the BJP as a Hindu majoritarian party and the Congress Party as an inclusionary secular party. While their ideological positions diverge, on key “minority” issues—especially those pertaining to religion and the caste system—their electoral strategies substantially converge. The ideology, rhetoric, and logistics of the BJP are better aligned than those of the Congress Party, which appears to give the BJP an advantage. It might be an error, however, to assume that the pragmatics of misalignment are always and necessarily a disadvantage. The BJP often fields a Muslim candidate in a Muslim-majority electoral district.20
What does this tell us? The ethnocultural demographic unconscious, suppressed in the civil tongue of ideological discourses, continuously manifests itself in strategic thinking and data analysis. The point here is not to deconstruct the surface discourse of ideologies, be they liberal or conservative or even reactionary, to reveal that they are all complicit in yielding to ethnocultural calculations in their electoral strategies. On the contrary, the point is to recognize and acknowledge that ethnocultural demographic calculations are built into the coalition politics of majority rule itself. The historical promise that shifting and negotiable interests would replace enduring and nonnegotiable identities under the regime of capitalist modernity has not fully materialized.21 Hence, the coalition politics of majority rule, especially in mass societies where numbers matter, is always in danger of being drawn into the politics of identities and succumbing to majoritarian temptations.22
Today, the BJP in India is being painted as a paradigm case of majoritarian politics. At one level, this characterization works. The BJP’s ideology, rhetoric, and logistics confirm it, especially in the last two decades as the BJP has emerged as an increasingly viable national party and alternative to the Congress Party. Since its ascension to power in 2014 and its resounding victory in 2019, the BJP has pursued an audacious Hindu majoritarian agenda, marching not only through the streets but through the institutions. Yet, they don’t command the majority. While India is 80 percent Hindu, the BJP has never won more than 40 percent of all eligible voters. (The same is true of Donald Trump’s election.) This should not be a source of comfort to anyone who is dismayed by the BJP’s political agenda. The basic political fact of representative democratic politics is that majoritarianism does not require the support of or ratification by a majority of eligible voters.
The American founding fathers promoted and endorsed a representative form of government not simply as a necessity in a large country, but as a desirable institutional formation to curb popular passions and deter the formation of tyrannous majorities. Today, the exact opposite is occurring as the electoral calculus of the representative system can easily generate majoritarian tyranny in the absence of an actual majority. In multiparty elections, a ruling party facing a fragmented opposition can win a commanding majority in the parliament without necessarily securing the majority of votes cast. This is not an uncommon phenomenon among existing democracies across the globe. This is why the fate of modern democracy cannot be tied exclusively to the representative form of government and its procedural twin, elections. Neither is capable of mastering and steering what is unleashed by the doctrine of popular sovereignty as embodied in universal adult suffrage. The liberal strategy of simultaneously invoking popular sovereignty and bridling it with constitutional norms and institutional constraints is looking exhausted and may be at its limit. One needs other means to resist and combat those majoritarian politics not grounded in actual majorities.
Each one of the three degenerations identified by Taylor has an oscillatory structure. They are not directional. They are rooted in the very structure of democracy and its representative form. They are ineliminable. Class conflicts and tensions are not going to disappear. The same is true of the politics and rhetoric of ethnonationalism and its exclusionary tendencies and temptations. “Winner-take-all” majoritarianism is imminent to the representative form of government, universal adult suffrage, and the principle of majority rule. Democracy cannot be saved simply by renovating the representative system, refining checks and balances, and cultivating liberal norms. These strategies are all necessary but not enough. The oscillatory structure demands extra-institutional pressures rooted in the demos itself. It calls for a politics of the demos, a politics of periodic direct action by the people. Democracy is a permanent struggle of the people and by the people for fairness, equity, and recognition for the people.
As indicated earlier, and given the dynamism of capitalism today, “Engels’s pause,” the hiatus between Karl Polanyi’s two movements—the great societal transformation triggered by industrial capitalism and the delayed political response to its derangements and negative externalities—keeps recurring at shorter intervals than when Polanyi recounted them in his 1944 work on The Great Transformation. These pauses strain democracy and call forth a distinctive mode of political response from the nonelites, the governed. That mode of politics may be broadly characterized as “direct action.”
The expression “direct action” was frequently deployed by Martin Luther King Jr. during the US civil rights movement in the 1960s. In King’s political imagination (which owes much to Gandhi), “direct action” implies a particular way of staging “the people” and refers to a mode of movement-based mobilization that functions as an alternative to exercising political power through elections or through parliament. “Direct action” is also regarded as an alternative to the legal route for redressing grievances when the court delays and denies social justice. For King, as well as for Gandhi, “direct action” suggests nonviolence. I will try to offer a different (not necessarily violent) genealogy of “direct action.” This other genealogy takes the same agents as King and Gandhi—crowds, riots, and uprisings—but looks to the molecular rather than the molar and the local rather than the national to explore direct action’s scopes, temporalities, and addressees. More than anything else, I want to invite you to rethink “direct action” (in all its ubiquity) in an age of globe-spanning rapid growth, selective abundance, asymmetrical affluence, and deepening inequality.
Since all historically known societies are marked by the unequal distribution of income and wealth—of rank and status as well as of access to resources and opportunities—there is always palpable social conflict and tension between the two broadly constituted but internally heterogeneous groups, the elites and the nonelites. It is also the case that while the nonelites are numerically vastly greater than the elites, the latter invariably control, manage, and steer the polity, economy, and culture. As David Hume perceptively observed in the mid-eighteenth century, such is the case not just under autocracies, but also under popular modes of governance:
Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular.23
While rightly claiming that the few invariably govern the many, Hume appears to have overestimated “the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.” There is a constant tension as the few seek to uphold the status quo and maintain their hegemonic control over the polity by continuously defending and justifying highly stratified group formations and unequal allocations of resources and opportunities. Hume also overstates the power of opinion.
This ongoing struggle between the few and the many is not confined to the ideological or discursive planes but is constantly shifting and emerges on the extra-discursive and bodily planes of direct action. While this shift to the extra-discursive and bodily planes may occasionally be eruptive and violent, these are certainly not constitutive features. There is a tendency, especially among liberal and deliberative democrats, to view direct action as a prelude to, if not the equivalent of, violence. As poignantly and eloquently stated by King in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” this characterization is unwarranted. In a section famously known as “Why We Cannot Wait,” King explains to his “liberal” friends and supporters why he must resort to direct action (and disobedience) by marching in the streets and why he cannot, as they urge him, stick exclusively to legislative and judicial routes to seek redress and pursue racial justice.24
The social conflict that structures the relationship between the elites and the nonelites is also intensified and destabilized by social change. Often propelled by technoeconomic innovations and organizational changes promoted by the elites in the name of progress and prosperity, modes of social reproduction are continuously transforming. This sort of transformation, of varying intensity and scope, has been underway intermittently since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The ensuing changes, especially when they are dramatic, can alter and destabilize existing social arrangements, straining the already unequal relation between the elites and the nonelites. Even when these changes might actually augment the wealth of a given political community, they risk accentuating the inequality between the elites and the nonelites. It might very well be the case that in the long run some of these changes—scientific and technological as well as socioeconomic—benefit the nonelites. There is hardly any question that the life expectancy of the nonelites, along with that of the elites, has steadily increased over at least the last three hundred years. The same can be said of literacy. Such an enlarged temporal horizon has little resonance, however, for those caught in Engels’s pause. Dramatic changes in the modes of social reproduction hit the nonelites harder than the elites. Given their limited resources, the nonelites cannot wait indefinitely for the initiation of Polanyi’s second movement—the delayed political response (or the corrective state action) to mitigate the negative externalities of opaque and distant structural changes. They must act and they do, with or without a clear agenda or a full understanding of what is to be done. They must pressure the powers that be to initiate the second movement and they do. Direct action is the objective corelative of a temporally constituted political subjectivity heralding “why we cannot wait.”
Within the liberal and deliberative democratic imaginary, “direct action” is seen as an unstable and potentially dangerous “third” option available to those wishing to protest and publicize their grievances against an existing order. Further, it is assumed that in advanced Western democracies—given their mature liberal package of formal rights and rule of law, built on an inclusionary history and character and bolstered by a robust public sphere—there would be decreasing need for any aggrieved group, socioeconomically or ethnoculturally marked, to exercise this “third option.” Without endorsing their tactics, liberal and deliberative democrats might understand why an aggrieved group might resort to direct action in a fledgling or corrupt democracy or in a democracy that has turned “ugly.” But, in a mature and well-functioning democracy where the two legitimate and reliable options for redress—legislative and judicial—are fully available, liberal and deliberative democrats struggle to decipher the rationale behind direct action’s recurrence. There is a deep historical amnesia involved in this way of thinking. What is forgotten here is the story of how each of the defining features of mature democracies, including the coveted liberal package, were fought for and secured through some type of direct action. There is a venerable tradition of reverting to direct action, time and again, both to enhance democracy and to arrest its degeneration. That tradition is alive and resurgent today. In fact, when democracy is conceived as a telic project, direct action cannot but be a constitutive feature.
While there is a deep and abiding anxiety about direct action among liberal and deliberative democrats, even they don’t summarily reject and dismiss every type. They recognize that the politics of protest are an integral part of democratic tradition and struggle. Still, they retain cautious reservations. “Direct action” is a rich and heterogeneous category made up of a broad repertoire of forms, genres, rituals and practices. Some species of it are deemed more legitimate and acceptable than others. The acceptable ones, such as petitioning, peaceful marches, and candle-light vigils, are often referred to as “civil” or “public” actions. By contrast, “sit-ins,” “die-ins,” “taking the knee,” burning effigies, and human blockades are deemed “uncivil,” disrespectful, and coercive. It is worth noting that these allegedly “uncivil” actions are by no means spontaneous. Burning an effigy is not the same as burning a public transportation bus. One must make an effigy, which takes time, talent, and planning before committing it to flame in public.
The distinction between the acceptable and unacceptable usually turns on two criteria. Any direct action associated with organized social movements with a palpable agenda and an accountable leadership is deemed acceptable and sometimes even recognized as unavoidable. The scholarly literature on social movements is extensive. It covers a wide range of historical and contemporary social movements and includes a dizzying number of causes and issues, unfolding within and across myriad national and cultural spheres. This literature shows that social movements are not reduceable to direct action; the latter is only one feature among many. Social movements often promote their agendas by legislative and judicial routes. They solicit publicity through the institutions of the public sphere; they enlist material and ideological support from civil society’s figures and forces; and they align themselves with political parties, electorally as well as legislatively. Direct action is more dominant and critical in some social movements than in others, but it is never obligatory. What makes social movements credible, legitimate, and acceptable is precisely their flexible multipronged strategy for civic action.
By contrast, what is generally seen as unacceptable and undesirable is direct action associated with disorganized, leaderless, and relatively unplanned (if not wholly spontaneous) eruptions of discontent. Such eruptions are viewed as undesirable and unacceptable because they allegedly devolve into riots. There is a wide spectrum of direct actions that stretches from well-organized social movements at one end to eruptive riots at the other. Within the liberal and deliberative democratic imaginary, riots have no redeeming social value. They are seen as futile and counterproductive. Riots harm the cause that is being espoused, provided a cause is even legible amidst the mayhem; they disfigure the grievance that is being articulated. More than anything else, what fatally discredits riots is that they are destructive and violent. Here we come upon the second criterion for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable modes of direct action: the possibility of collective violence.
Regardless, riots are ubiquitous. People riot all the time—not every day but with alarming frequency, both in the past and in the present. People riot everywhere—across every national and cultural space, in poor countries and in rich countries alike and under authoritarian as well as democratic regimes. People riot over all sorts of things: the price of bread, oil, and onions, the publication of a book, the screening of a film, the drawing of a cartoon; they riot on account of police brutality, political corruption, and desecration of the holy places; they riot when subjected to ethnic or racial slurs (real or imagined) and when continuously deprived of basic necessities such as water, electricity, and sanitation; they riot when justice is denied and petitions are ignored; they riot after soccer games, cricket games, music concerts, and also before, during, and after elections; the list of occasions and grievances that can precipitate riots can be extended indefinitely.25 Instead of declining and disappearing, riots appear to be multiplying, not only in the global South but also in the global North. Wikipedia lists twenty-four well-documented riot or riot-like incidents in 2019 alone, of which ten occurred in Euro-America.26 They are an unavoidable feature of the contemporary ecology of protest. What are we to make of this?
Here again, one has to distinguish between instances of protest and riots. They are not reducible to each other. Protests come in various forms. As indicated above, direct action or protests staged by organized social movements are different from relatively spontaneous eruptions of discontent. However, a steady accumulation of eruptive moments in response to a palpable pattern of repeated injuries can coalesce and initiate a powerful social movement, as in the case of #Blacklivematter in 2013 and the subsequent founding of the Movement for Black Lives coalition in 2015. But in themselves, spontaneous eruptions might be theorized as contingent “moments,” which are very different from planned protest events associated with social movements. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which keeps count of such eruptive protest incidents in mainland China, euphemistically refers to them as “mass group incidents.”27 While any protest / demonstration can result in a riot, eruptive protests are seen as particularly prone to devolve into riots. This is not actually true. There are many eruptive protests all over the globe today, even in the authoritarian and highly securitized China, and most of them do not become riots leading to the destruction of public facilities and the looting of private property. There is, however, a long-standing tendency to equate them. This tendency is rooted in the fear of crowds, especially political crowds, assembled to express their grievances or to rally for a cause or a candidate/leader.
Starting with Plato’s image of the demos as “a great beast,” there is a persistent anti-crowd sentiment running through Western political thought. With rare exceptions, such as Machiavelli and Spinoza, there is hardly a political thinker who does not consider the bridling of the multitude an essential task for constitution-making or the art of governing.28 In the aftermath of the French Revolution, this fear of crowds, mobs, and mass gatherings intensified—as is evident from Hippolyte Taine’s hyperbolic, but highly popular, account of the French revolutionary crowds. Writing in the wake of the wreckage wrought by the Paris Commune (1871), Taine traces the susceptibility of revolutionary crowds to engage in acts of wanton destruction and bloodthirsty carnage back to their inaugural moment in the great revolution itself. According to Taine, driven by visions of emancipation and equality, ordinary French people who were once sensible and sober became unhinged and reverted to the savage ways of a “state of nature.” They turned their back on the tradition that regulates desire, belief, and conduct in accordance with one’s station within a stable hierarchical order. Thus, individual autonomy and social responsibility were both set aside as hordes of people looted and pillaged. Basic instincts were let loose as licentiousness, alcoholism, and gratuitous violence prevailed. Such is the orgiastic and contagious nature of crowd behavior. Hence, in Taine’s account, nothing threatens civilization more than a crowd, with its egalitarian ethos and leveling impulse. The hollow republican promise of equality culminates in “spontaneous anarchy,” followed by mob rule.29
Buttressed by the unavoidability of crowds in modern life under the sway of industrialization and urbanization, this anxiety begins to acquire a psychosocial dimension in the writings of Scipio Sighele, Gabriel Tarde, and Gustave Le Bon in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, following the tumultuous days of the Paris Commune. In their theorizations of crowds and crowd behavior, each of these three thinkers was decisively influenced by Hippolyte Taine’s revisionary historical interpretation of the revolutionary crowds and mobs of the French Revolution.30 With the coming of mass society, this tradition is further thematized and bolstered in the writings of Sigmund Freud, Ortega y Gasset, and many others, culminating in Elias Canetti’s monumental Crowds and Power (1960).31 Most of this literature (with the rare exception of Canetti’s book) is suspicious of and hostile to crowds, comparing collective action in crowd formations to the behavior of the “drunk,” the “irrational woman,” and the “mentally deranged.”32
While this is not a place to summarize the complex genealogy of the anti-crowd thesis in Western psychosocial and political thought, it should suffice to note that the proponents of liberal-deliberative democracy remain deeply fearful of crowds and mass gatherings. From that perspective, there is something intrinsically “illiberal” about the crowd to the extent it leads to the dissolution of the “individual.” Within the liberal imaginary, the individual is the bedrock of social ontology, moral responsibility, and economic calculation, and the crowd jeopardizes all those invaluable assets. Every crowd is a potential mob and susceptible to rioting.33 This way of thinking is not conducive to critically exploring one of the most striking political phenomena of our time, the return of crowds to public space. The specter that haunts Western-style liberal democracy today is no longer guerillas in the hills or generals with armored tanks, but justifiably frustrated and angry people marching in the streets and assembling in the squares. This phenomenon is often mischaracterized as the populist upsurge and gets equated with the huge political rallies of Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and other authoritarian political figures, whose divisive and ethnonationalist rhetoric is distinctly “illiberal,” even though it is staged on a democratic platform. But this phenomenon of the coming of the people, their embodied appearance in concrete multiplicity, in public spaces across the world, is much wider, deeper, and more consequential. This is not the first coming of the people, nor will it be the last because they have always been there, but invisible and inaudible. People becoming visible and audible, from time to time, in their collective capacity as a crowd or as an assembly, is not an orderly or a sequential process. One does not stand in a line to become visible and audible and to be hailed as a collective political subject. It happens suddenly as an event, and it is often misrecognized and dismissed by the ruling elites. This is not helpful because when people rise periodically in times of crisis, they do so to correct and renew democracy, not to disfigure and undermine it.
When nonelites feel a sense of discontent, when they are aggrieved, when they are marginalized and ignored, how do they react? They may patiently endure a desperate situation for a while, but without other means of recourse, they will eventually begin to protest. To be sure, shaped by precipitating issues as well as national and cultural contexts, the scales and expressions of discontent vary. A putative phenomenology of political discontent—that is, how an aggrieved group of nonelites experiences, understands, and expresses its condition—is a temporally structured interpretive enterprise. It is imperative to recognize that the temporal horizons of elites and nonelites diverge radically; they experience the flow of time and its contingencies and urgencies differently. To dismiss the mounting number of riot-like incidents as the irrational eruptive flailing of malcontents does not advance our understanding of why, today, we are facing a veritable global protest tsunami.
One might begin by making a distinction between the expression and manifestation of discontent, on the one hand, and the organization and mobilization of that discontent toward a project for change, on the other. The latter minimally requires a set of explicit demands and an addressee (often a national, provincial, or local state) and often calls forth additional actors from the folds of political society—sympathetic NGOs, interested political parties, concerned civil servants, and sometimes, even the police. How the expression and manifestation of discontent maps onto or transforms into an organized movement for change is a critical constitutive moment in the unfolding of direct action. Two things should be noted here. First, every incident of protest does not always get organized into a movement for change, but a series of such incidents does prepare the ground for initiating a movement for change. This is why, prompted by the expressive politics of an aggrieved people, direct action often springs from the ground up—from the streets and squares. Second, direct action does not always align with electoral politics, legislative priorities, and judicial proceedings. This is because direct action tends to pursue immediate relief ahead of enduring solutions. Here, once again, dismissing the former as a band-aid tactic misses the point. The temporalities governing the exigencies of direct action undertaken by nonelites radically diverge from the temporalities of institutional governance administered by the ruling elites.
Even before a horizon limited to immediate relief, the temporalities and tactics of direct action vary significantly from case to case. For instance, the immediate relief sought during an “onion riot” is different from the elongated duration of slum-dwellers, charged with squatting, resisting eviction. These two types of direct action occur often in India. In the former case, relief arrives swiftly as state officials scramble to reduce and stabilize the market price of onions, an indispensable ingredient in the rather austere diet of Indian subalterns. In the latter case, slum-dwellers resist eviction by creating local associations and movements and soliciting support from NGOs, political parties, and sympathetic civil servants. Incidents of direct action recur as onion prices continue to fluctuate and attempts to evict squatting slum-dwellers are repeated. While government bureaucrats appear to lack the foresight to stabilize the price of basic staples—such as onions—the elites of the ruling party lack the political will to evict the squatting slum-dwellers, often considered a powerful vote-bank. Hence, there is rarely an enduring solution to such problems. Instances of direct action of this sort are a common feature of the everyday life of the lower and more precarious segments of the nonelites in India and elsewhere in the global South. For the urban poor, direct action functions, to borrow James Scott’s phrase, as one of the reliable “weapons of the weak.”34 In the global North, the situation is more complicated. It is not primarily poverty and other forms of severe material duress, but powerlessness or the general lack of citizen efficacy in shaping legislative agendas and public policies that pushes people toward resorting to direct action politics. The appeal of direct action is particularly compelling when people are facing obdurate and persistent social problems such as ethnoracial discrimination, gun violence, police brutality, sexual harassment, environmental degradation, housing insecurity, job precarity, and growing social inequality and the governmental response is slow and feeble. This is evident from the direct action agenda, practices, and strategies adopted by contemporary social movements such as #BLM, #MeToo, Occupy Wall Street, March for Our Lives, and many others in the United States.
These multiple modes and variable temporalities of protest constitute a general ecology of direct action. Operating on multiple temporal layers, nonelites are remarkably resilient. As indicated before, while defending squatters’ rights, slum-dwellers don’t simply erupt into noisy agitation as they would in the event of an “onion riot.” Instead, they organize and petition to secure access to necessities, such as drinking water and electricity and basic health services such as vaccination. They also build alliances with sympathetic outsiders in civil society whose agendas and temporalities differ from their own.35 Sometimes, these divergent temporalities collide—for instance, when the squatters (or some other aggrieved group) shift to an agitational mode and elicit disapproval from their civil society partners. The incommensurability of temporalities evinced here is not any different than the one noted in the celebrated case of King explaining to his disapproving liberal friends that his people cannot wait any longer and must take to the streets now. It should be noted that the squatters switch to an eruptive mode of protest only when they are confronted with the threat of an imminent eviction or when (as is more often the case) access to basic necessities is deliberately disrupted by the authorities to harass, intimidate, or extort them. While forced to live in a state of permanent duress, the squatters and similarly disenfranchised do not live in a state of permanent rage, ready to erupt at the slightest provocation. Nor are they prisoners of time. They just happen to be more alert to its vicissitudes (than those who wear Apple Watches). Thus, to understand how expressions and manifestations of discontent evolve into organized movements for change, one has to pay close attention to the multiple temporalities motivating different groups and setting their agendas.
These temporalities, in turn, are shaped by the location and the addressee of direct action. To explicate the dynamics between location and addressee, one needs to distinguish, to borrow terminology from the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, between two types of direct action: molecular and molar.36 To be sure, the varied manifestations of both molar and molecular direct action share one common feature: they involve physical assembly of one sort or another.37 But we need to think of assembly not simply as it appears in the First Amendment, as an abstract “right of people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Instead, what’s required is a phenomenology of assembly capable of exploring the lived experience of people coming together, discovering hitherto unknown solidarities among strangers, and imagining common horizons. Charles Taylor believes that when they coalesce, such solidarity-inducing performative acts of mutual display occurring in distinct “topical common spaces,” give rise to the “metatopical” public sphere, and hence to a reflexive understanding of “We, the people,” as a collective agent.38
The eruptive onion riots as well as the relatively organized slum-dwellers’ agitations are essentially local and molecular. The latter, however, might have national implications. Though each slum community organizes itself at a local level and, when necessary, agitates in its own defense, individual slum communities may also become a part of citywide and nationwide (and sometimes even global) slum-dwellers’ organizations and movements. Despite these affiliations, slum protest and resistance remain predominantly molecular, arising most often out of local contingencies. A community of slum-dwellers might be drawn into wider spatial and longer temporal horizons when their partners in civil society and their (electorally motivated) political allies help steer their petitions and promote their causes through the legislature and the courts, but the gravitational center of their grievances is local, and the structure of their performative politics of discontent is molecular.
By contrast, even when triggered by a local case, India’s anti-rape protests are quickly assimilated into a national frame and narrative. While the specificity of the transgression remains highly salient to the aggrieved (the survivor, their family, and friends), the ensuing protest is read as attesting to and bolstering the broader ongoing legislative and judicial campaigns being waged across the whole society. The same can be said of anticorruption campaigns. The provocations are usually local, but the response is often national. While the state remains a primary addressee, these protests and campaigns are also aimed more generally, as they seek to transform widespread indifference and resignation by raising societal awareness and shifting public opinion. Here, the temporal horizons extend further into the future: navigating courts and legislatures at one level and transforming culture at another require different types of organization and take time. The structure of these movements is molar rather than molecular.
We might think of molar protests and movements as phenomena of the maidan (or the square). They are national in focus and orientation. While they are often orchestrated to occur simultaneously in many places, they are bound together by agenda and addressee. The national character is also highlighted by massive rallies and demonstrations in capital city squares or similarly marked places, such as the Lincoln Memorial (the March on Washington, Washington DC, 1963), Camp Crame (People Power Revolution, Quezon City, 1986), Tiananmen Square (Beijing, 1989), Azad Square (Tehran, 1979 and 2008), Tahrir Square (Cairo, 2011), Syntagma Square (Athens, 2011), Zuccotti Park (New York, 2011), Taksim Square (Istanbul, 2013) and Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Kiev, 2013). As people of diverse backgrounds and identities assemble, these protests enact a commonly held citizenship—one recent example being the protests surrounding India’s new citizenship law, which blatantly discriminates against Muslim immigrants.39 By bridging differences, however temporarily, the enactment incarnates the people, a feat that established authorities are unable to accomplish. Thus, by way of a synecdoche, a series of dispersed protesting assemblies centripetally linked to a highly publicized and massive capital rally, performs the sovereign unity of the people.
Almost without exception, these molar protests brandish their disciplined, organized, and nonviolent character. Occasionally, they might devolve into riots, but that is not the way they are conceived and staged by the people and parties involved. On the contrary, considerable energy is expended to showcase their law-abiding pacifism, casting the protest as an orderly expression of grievances and the assembly as sober claimants petitioning for redress. Along these lines, one of the most extraordinary narratives to come out of the two long weeks of protest in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring was of segments of the assembly cleaning up the refuse and debris left behind every evening.40 Lest they be mistaken for a mob, they made their message clear: the protesters were disciplined and civic-minded people.
As distinct from the maidan paradigm, the molecular mode of political protest—vastly more frequent and geographically diverse, at least in the global South—might be best characterized as a politics of the street. To be sure, the phrase the “politics of the street,” deployed here to contrast and distinguish it from the “politics of the maidan,” is not ideal. After all, the people who assemble to protest in a city square often march through adjoining streets to get there. (In fact, marching through the streets, to the square, is a routine occurrence in organized molar demonstrations.) One comes to a public square, however, to protest for a specific duration. One might end up occupying a public venue for an extended period of time—as in the cases of the Tahrir Square demonstrations and Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park—but sooner or later the protest ends and the square reverts to its civil status and function. The maidan is a place of coming and going.
By contrast, I use “street” to signal the most common and proximate “public space” where the people—especially the nonelites—live and work. Within the paradigm of the politics of the street, protest involves a wide range of agitational forms, including rioting, that disrupt the daily flow of everyday life. These protests are not conveniently scheduled for, say, Sunday afternoons. They erupt and disrupt unexpectedly, but often. They make no normative claims to incarnate the people as a whole. Instead, they actively pressure the government to remedy a variety of intolerable conditions, material deprivations, and collective indignities in specific contexts. Numerous race riots in in the United States, often triggered by excessive and fatal police violence directed at members of the Black minority community, fall into this molecular category. Similarly, those involved in periodic prison riots in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere in the Americas, excluded as they are from the public sphere altogether, make no claim to embody or speak for the people as a unified whole, a national body. These riots are strictly local contextually and temporally, even when they point to a larger problem and capture national attention. Eschewing transcendence, a politics of the street situates protest within multiple registers of everyday life, while remaining connected to larger geopolitical and institutional problematics. With a deep but confounding connection to everyday life, a politics of the street calls attention to an immediate dimension of the experiences of an aggrieved people, a far cry from the recurrent fictions of national unity and democratic equality.
The politics of the street does not merely refer to the fact that people pass through the street during a protest, which they certainly do, but to something more. Today, many people in the global South live either on the streets or in a nearby slum. Streets and slums are symbiotically related, with the latter proliferating at an astonishing speed. While more than two billion people live in slums or slum-like conditions today, the figure is expected to double by 2030. By then, we will certainly be living on what historian Mike Davis calls “The Planet of Slums.”41 The street and the slum have multiple functions: they serve as workshops for producing goods and services, as markets for exchanging, as theaters for self-fashioning, and, more than anything else, as schools for learning how to live under permanent duress. In the autobiographical writings of both the American Black Panthers and the Indian Dalit Panthers, the street and the slum (or ghetto) are often characterized as the primary sites of pedagogy for the oppressed. The street is where people mingle; where they size one another up; where mutual display occurs; where common horizons, however fleetingly, are established. According to Marx, only the industrial proletariat, not the scattered peasantry, is capable of collective revolutionary consciousness and action because they work and live together in a common space that discloses their mutual plight, their state of being exploited and oppressed by the bourgeois.42 Today, the street has replaced the factory, and something akin to a slum consciousness has replaced class consciousness.
An exploration of the phenomenology of political discontent, be it in the global South or in the global North, must begin where the people, the nonelites, live, congregate, and resist. While the general ecology of direct action is spatially and temporally diverse, the molecular politics of street protests are an indispensable and foundational constituent of democracy. To renew the battered demos today, to arrest and reverse the democratic degenerations discussed in this volume, we must first learn to read the expressions of political discontent germinating and circulating all around us. The world is as full of signs of discontent as it is brimming with restless collective energy, ready to be tapped for productive mobilizations. The democratically mature and economically affluent countries of the Western world are also witnessing molecular manifestations of discontent. More and more protests are flaring up over simple “wallet issues” such as rising fuel prices and subway fare hikes. Not long ago, riots over rising fuel prices were the domain of countries such as Nigeria, ironically a major exporter of oil. Then, in October 2018, they came to France rather dramatically with the mouvement des gilets jaunes. As they decry “Les élites parlent de fin du monde, quand nous, on parle de fin du mois” (the elites talk about the end of the world, while we talk about the end of the month), we need to ask whether the temporalities governing the actions of the gilets jaunes in France are materially different from the temporalities propelling onion rioters in India.43
The gilets jaunes are part of a larger phenomenon of eruptive direct action that has spread across a distressed if affluent Europe and includes the Indignados in Spain, the anti-austerity Direct Democracy Now activists in Greece, and many others. Aside from the “wallet issue,” nonelites all over the world share a simmering discontent over their sheer powerlessness—their voices unheard, their demands ignored, their actions scorned, and any vestige of citizen efficacy evaporated. This feeling of marginalization and abandonment might result in a withdrawal from democratic participation in any form, or it might succumb to the lures of a xenophobic exclusionary politics and the promise of an easy fix. The only way to fight these negative tendencies is to renew the demos. To do that requires embracing “direct action” and harnessing the many forms and genres of its resources and energies, rather than anxiously tolerating its fitfulness and struggling in vain to extinguish its eruptions. To secure progressive social change on both economic and cultural fronts, it is imperative for organized social movements, relevant civil society stakeholders, and electorally oriented political parties to engage with and draw on the enormous reservoir of emancipatory energy that “direct action” politics is capable of releasing and thus radically transforming the political imaginary, as in the case of the George Floyd protests in the United States recently.