Contemporary Left-Wing Activism Vol 2: Democracy, Participation and Dissent in a Global Context [1 ed.] 0815363974, 9780815363972

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CONTEMPORARY LEFT-WING ACTIVISM VOL 2

Within many societies across the world, new social and political movements have sprung up that either challenge formal parliamentary structures of democracy and participation, or work within them and, in the process, fundamentally alter the ideological content of democratic potentials. At the same time, some parliamentary political parties have attracted a new type of ‘populist’ political rhetoric and support base. This collection, along with its accompanying Volume 1, examines the emergence of, and the connections between, these new types of left-wing democracy and participation. Through an array of examples from different countries, it explains why left-wing activism arises in new and innovative spaces in society, and how this joins up with conventional left-wing politics, including parliamentary politics. It demonstrates how these new forms of politics can resonate with the real-life experiences of ordinary people and thereby win support for left-wing agendas. Joseph Ibrahim, is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, School of Social Sciences, Leeds Beckett University, UK. John Michael Roberts is a Reader in Sociology and Communications, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University, UK.

Routledge Studies in Radical History and Politics Series editors: Thomas Linehan, Brunel University, and John Michael Roberts, Brunel University

The series Routledge Studies in Radical History and Politics has two areas of interest. First, this series aims to publish books that focus on the history of movements of the radical Left. ‘Movement of the radical Left’ is here interpreted in its broadest sense as encompassing those past movements for radical change that operated in the mainstream political arena, as with political parties, and past movements for change that operated more outside the mainstream as with millenarian movements, anarchist groups, utopian socialist communities, and trade unions. Second, this series aims to publish books that focus on more contemporary expressions of radical left-wing politics. Recent years have been witness to the emergence of a multitude of new radical movements adept at getting their voices heard in the public sphere. From those participating in the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, community unionism, social media forums, independent media outlets, local voluntary organizations campaigning for progressive change, and so on, it seems to be the case that innovative networks of radicalism are being constructed in civil society that operate in different public forms. The series very much welcomes titles with a British focus, but is not limited to any particular national context or region. The series will encourage scholars who contribute to this series to draw on perspectives and insights from other disciplines. Titles include: The Far Left in Australia since 1945 Jon Piccini, Evan Smith and Matthew Worley (eds.) Hybrid media activism ecologies, imaginaries, algorithms Emiliano Treré Contemporary Left-Wing Activism Vol 1 Democracy, Participation and Dissent in a Global Context Edited by John Michael Roberts and Joseph Ibrahim Contemporary Left-Wing Activism Vol 2 Democracy, Participation and Dissent in a Global Context Edited by Joseph Ibrahim and John Michael Roberts For more about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studiesin-Radical-History-and-Politics/book-series/RSRHP.

CONTEMPORARY LEFTWING ACTIVISM VOL 2 Democracy, Participation and Dissent in a Global Context

Edited by Joseph Ibrahim and John Michael Roberts

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Joseph Ibrahim and John Michael Roberts; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Joseph Ibrahim and John Michael Roberts to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-815-36397-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-815-36396-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-04740-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Swales & Willis Ltd

CONTENTS

List of tables Contributors Acknowledgements 1 Global dissent and left-wing activism today Joseph Ibrahim

vii viii xii 1

PART I

Communities of resistance 2 The making and framing of solidarity campaigning on asylum rights: a radical left social movement in Sheffield John Grayson

7

9

3 Community organising and Citizens UK: can tangible social change be achieved through institution-based apolitical politics? Louise Folkes

28

4 What has the internet done to leftist organisations? The impact of using digital media on Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists Noha Atef

47

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Contents

PART II

Political spaces of the left

63

5 Historicizing the Gezi Rebellion in Turkey: tracing revolutionary ideas in action Bora Erdağı

65

6 Urban activism and touristification in Southern Europe: Barcelona, Madrid and Lisbon Jorge Sequera and Jordi Nofre

88

7 Changes and continuity in the left in Chile (1990–2017): between the streets and institutions César Guzmán-Concha and Carlos Durán Migliardi

106

PART III

Hegemony, the state and extra-parliamentary politics 8 Instituting momentum Maia Kirby 9 The Workers’ Party in Brazil: the achievements, challenges and tragedies of a left-wing party in the global South Rogério G. Giugliano and Jacques de Novion

125 127

144

10 Science, hegemony and action: on the elements of governmentality Werner Bonefeld

174

Index

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TABLE

9.1 Evolution of Brazilian Exports with the global South between the years 2002–2014

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CONTRIBUTORS

Noha Atef is an early-career media researcher. She started as a journalist in Egypt

and in a number of regional media outlets, she got a Master’s degree in Social Media (2012) and a PhD on the interaction between the citizen media and the mainstream media in post-revolutionary Egypt (2017). She used to work as a Research Assistant at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Studies in Birmingham City University, and now teaches in a number of Egyptian universities. Werner Bonefeld is Professor in Politics at the University of York, UK. Recent

book publications have included Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy (Bloomsbury, 2014/2016), Notes from Tomorrow (Aakar Books, 2015), The Strong State and the Free Economy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and, as co-editor with Beverley Best and Chris O’Kane, The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, three volumes (Sage, 2018). With Chris O’Kane he is the co-editor of the book series Critical Theory and the Critique of Society (Bloomsbury, 2018–). His work contributed to the development of the Open Marxism school. Carlos Durán Migliardi is Doctor in Social Sciences (FLACSO Mexico), Master

in Social Sciences, sociologist and historian. His research interests include Latin American political processes and political theory. More recently, he has focussed on political discourses in Chilean contemporary politics. He is currently affiliated at the Center of Regional Development Studies (CEDER), Universidad de Los Lagos (Santiago), Chile. Bora Erdağı is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy at Kocaeli University, Turkey. His research interests are in political philosophy, critical theory, alternative movements, contemporary philosophy and especially Karl Marx and

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Walter Benjamin. Erdağı’s writings have appeared in journals such as felsefelogos, Sophia Philosophical Review, kampfplatz, Alternate Routes, and in book chapters. Louise Folkes is currently a PhD student at Cardiff University’s School of Social

Sciences. Her thesis is exploring social (im)mobility narratives in a workingclass community in south Wales, with an interest in the intersection of placebased, classed and gendered identities. Louise’s research interests include: social mobility, social class inequalities and community organising, with a methodological focus on ethnographic methods and creative research approaches. Rogério G. Giugliano is a professor of Sociology at the Brazilian Federal

University for Latin American Integration (UNILA). He has a Master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Brasília (UnB/2001) and a PHD from the split-site doctoral programme between the University of Brasília (UnB) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi (2015). He was a visiting researcher at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 2012 while developing an investigation about cash transfers in India. He currently researches the sociology of development with a focus on poverty reduction and a particular interest in the diffusion of public policies throughout the Global South. He coordinates the research group Critical Cartographies of Developments, which maps cash transfers in Latin America, the diffusion of this model throughout the Global South, South–South dialogue, global hegemonic flows and counter-hegemonic resistance. He is a member of the Mexico, Caribbean, Central America and Brazil Research Group (MeCACB). He also develops conceptual research on the epistemology of social sciences with a focus on the challenges for the construction of global sociology, coloniality of knowledge, decolonisation and spatialisation as epistemological subversions. He has worked as a consultant for UNDP and UNICEF on researches with Brazilian youth and monitoring/evaluation of public policies. John Grayson studied history at Cambridge University, worked for the Workers’ Educational Association, and taught social history at the Northern College and Sheffield Hallam University. He has published in the fields of social history, housing and adult education. He is an activist researcher with SYMAAG (South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group) and writes on asylum rights and anti-racism for www.opendemocracy.net and the Institute for Race Relations news service www.irr.org.uk. César Guzmán-Concha, PhD in Sociology (The University of Barcelona), is an

independent researcher and consultant. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Center of Social Movement Studies (COSMOS), Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy. His research covers issues of comparative social movements, civil society and political participation, with a focus on the effects of activism in the policymaking process in sectors such as higher education, social assistance and unemployment benefits.

x

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Joseph Ibrahim is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Leeds Beckett University,

UK. His research interests are social movements, political protests and social and political theory. He has recently completed projects on the application of social theory for understanding social movement dynamics, the politics of the alternative globalization movement, student politics and protests, and social movement emergence after the global financial crash. He is author of Bourdieu and Social Movements: Ideological Struggles in the British Anti-capitalist Movement (Palgrave, 2015). Maia Kirby is a historian of revolution and radical political organisation, from the French Revolution to contemporary political movements. She studied at the University of Sussex and Queen Mary University of London and is an active member of the UK Labour Party. Jordi Nofre holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Barcelona

and is Senior Researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences at the New University of Lisbon. His research topics include nightlife and urban change in south European cities, and social geographies of youth in Euro-Mediterranean countries. At the time of this publication, Nofre has published 50 works and is coeditor of Exploring Nightlife: Space, Society and Governance. Jacques de Novion is a Bachelor in History (UnB/1999), has a PhD in Latin

American Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM/2011) and a Master’s in History from the University of Brasília (UnB/ 2005). He is Specialist in Bioethics at the Center for Studies and Research in Bioethics (NEPeB/UnB/2002), Professor and Researcher of the Department of Latin American Studies (ELA/UnB), accredited in the Postgraduate Program in Comparative Studies on the Americas (PPGECsA) and a former researcher at the Postgraduate Center of the Americas (CEPPAC/UnB). He co-coordinates the Mexico, Caribbean, Central America and Brazil Research Group (MeCACB/ UnB) and the Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Studies on Access to Justice and Rights in the Americas (LEIJUS). He is also a member of the CLACSO Work Group – Anti-imperialism, Democracy, Modernization. He develops research from the framework of Latin American Studies, about hegemony in the Americas and Latin American and Amazonian geopolitics, and on the binomial of integration and security in Latin America with a specific focus on drug trafficking, environment and terrorism agendas. He is also dedicated to the history of Latin American thought and theory and the institutionalisation of Latin American Studies. John Michael Roberts is currently a Reader in Sociology and Communications

at Brunel University. He has researched and published on free speech and the public sphere, digital culture, work and globalisation, voluntary activity, and political activism in public spaces. His publications include The Aesthetics of

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Free Speech (2003), The Competent Public Sphere (2009), New Media and Public Activism (2014), and Digital Publics (2015). He is currently completing a book on digital work. Jorge Sequera holds a PhD in Sociology obtained from Complutense University

of Madrid. He is currently Postdoctoral Researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences of the New University of Lisbon. Jorge Sequera’s research focusses on key phenomena of urban transformation, such as lifestyles, social class, residential segregation, social exclusion, control society and biopolitics, gentrification, urban social movements and social protest.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Craig Fowlie, Rebecca McPhee and Thomas Linehan for their encouragement, help and guidance. We would also like to thank the anonymous referees. Joseph Ibrahim would like to thank The Leeds School of Social Sciences and the Global Inequalities Research Programme, Centre for Applied Social Research, Leeds Beckett University, for their generous financial support that enabled him to carry out the work for this edited collection.

1 GLOBAL DISSENT AND LEFT-WING ACTIVISM TODAY Joseph Ibrahim1

This volume considers a range of international protests and cycles of contention that emerged after the financial crash of 2007/2008. Indeed, 2011 is often cited as a key year when cycles of resistance and the formation of social movements became visible. That said, this volume also considers some less visible episodes that have been challenging neoliberal and authoritarian agendas imposed by various state and market actors. In fact, some of the actors could be classified as invisible at times. This is why the second volume is structured around three interrelated themes, the first of which is ‘Communities of resistance’. John Grayson starts this Part (Chapter 2) by discussing his research as an activist campaigning for asylum seekers and refugees in Sheffield and other parts of South Yorkshire. This chapter suggests that current left social movements in areas of past social democratic and trade union struggles can be positively framed both by history and geography. The development of the political asylum rights organisation SYMAAG (South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group), with which Grayson is involved, has drawn on reservoirs of activism developed in a ‘society of purpose’ (Smith 2010) that survived from the ‘proletarian cultures’ of steel and mining areas, and from the local political traditions of South Yorkshire. Drawing on such community activist resources, this chapter focusses on one major campaign by SYMAAG from 2012 – solidarity campaigning alongside asylum tenants in contracted asylum housing across Yorkshire. The campaign has had impacts on local authority policies towards such contracts and it has produced written evidence and oral testimony to certain Home Affairs Committee inquiries. Grayson is critical of what could be termed ‘asylum markets’ developed by for-profit companies across Europe (Grayson 2016). In this respect, Grayson demonstrates how working-class communities are still mobilising and resisting the effects of neoliberalism through new causes.

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Chapter 3 by Louise Folkes considers the way in which citizens have become active through key campaigns following the financial crash in 2007/2008. This chapter focusses on a relatively new method of engaging people in their local communities and in civil society through ‘Citizens UK’, a registered charity that utilises an American broad-based community organising model, with the aim of organising communities for power, social justice and the common good. The core goal of Citizens UK is to strengthen civil society, in order to make both the market and the state more accountable. Two central tenets of this way of organising are that 1) it remains apolitical and 2) its membership is built of established institutions only. The organisation has seen large success in its national Living Wage Campaign, which has its origins in East London and that has now spread with the creation of the Living Wage Foundation, a sister charitable organisation. Alongside larger national campaigns, the organisation has local alliances, or chapters, that work on smaller, locally orientated neighbourhood concerns. The chapter discusses both the opportunities and limitations of this style of organising for social change. In particular, the notion of neutrality and being ‘apolitical’ is explored, and how this is negotiated and managed by members of the organisation, who largely associate themselves with the political left. A further area that is explored is that of the institutional membership model of Citizens UK and the author asks if this is still relevant and suitable in a climate of reduced institutional membership in, for example, churches, trade unions and neighbourhood groups. The fourth and last chapter of this Part by Noha Atef focusses on the impact of digital media on the left-wing movement RevSoc in Egypt. Here Atef asks some key questions about when, in 2011, the RevSoc project was launched and a bundle of online social media accounts – video, photos and hyperlinks sharing platforms – were all put together in a website. Here, questions about the usefulness of such media come to the fore; whether it has led to a rise in membership, attracted more supporters who did not join it, or did it only stimulate debates about the left as an ideology? The research presented is drawn from in-depth interviews with activists and comparative analysis of new media and other ‘older’ forms of media. In terms of the latter, Atef asks questions about the editorial and stylistic differences, and what influences they have had over both the short and long term. The second Part is focussed on ‘Political spaces of the left’. That is, particular sites of resistance where leftist protests and movements have used key sites for their actions that have political and symbolic significance. Chapter 5, by Bora Erdaği, is on the famous Gezi Park rebellion in 2013, located next to Taksim Square, Istanbul, Turkey. The chapter focusses on the starting points and the progress of the Gezi Rebellion while comparing it with similar historical processes. The aim of the chapter is to take a standpoint that reveals and situates the Gezi Rebellion as an event/process in its originality. Therefore, the chapter moves on to argue that each historical event/process is distinct and

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authentic; that they always resist interventions; they represent the concreteness of the life world since they emanate from material social relations; and, finally, that they are always temporal and spatial. Chapter 6, by Jorge Sequera and Jordi Nofre, focusses on urban activism and its relationship with the touristification in European cities. The authors argue that urban tourism has gained a central role in the struggles and discourses of housing activism and anti-gentrification movements. In various European cities, the original euphoria associated with tourism has now given way to antagonism, protest and social conflict. These protests are relating housing issues with the rapid expansion of touristification in these cities, which has implicitly favoured the emergence of new conflicts in urban coexistence and community liveability that need to be urgently tackled and addressed towards a more inclusive, liveable ‘Tourist City’. By adopting a cross-national, cross-disciplinary and cross-methodological approach, this chapter analyses how the recent expansion, commodification and standardisation of tourism has reshaped the multifaceted set of strategies, interests, alliances and conflicts of housing struggles and the grassroots mobilisations of local communities in central areas of three European cities (Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon). Chapter 7 by César Guzmán-Concha and Carlos Durán Migliardi discusses the evolution, situation and prospects of left-wing parties and groups in Chile, with a special focus from the student protests of 2011 up to the present time. The chapter situates the Chilean case as an outlier in the context of the Latin American left turn that started with the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999 in Venezuela and includes other countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador. The authors describe how a number of domestic and international factors explain the decline and weakness of the radical left since the restoration of democracy in Chile in 1989. Contradicting previous analyses, their research argues that the massive student protests of 2011 made evident a crack in the political consensus that had emerged with the socio-economic model and the political institutions after two decades of stability and apparent social acquiescence. Interestingly, and unlike similar episodes that occurred around this year in other countries, this outbreak took place in a context of economic growth and expansion. The authors go on to argue that the exhaustion of the post-transitional consensus has allowed the emergence of various protest movements and left-wing groups that challenge the parties of the institutional left, which have prevailed over much of the last century. They describe the ideology and characteristics of the most prevalent groups that have emerged, showing that they are not completely new but have deep roots with previous experiences, and they identify the opportunities, challenges and risks they face in the current period. The authors conclude that, despite its various weaknesses, a new radical left might have opportunities to grow in this country, provided certain internal and environmental conditions. The next two chapters by Maia Kirby (Chapter 8) and Rogério Giugliano and Jacques de Novion (Chapter 9) discuss what might be termed ‘Movement Parties’

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(Della Porta et al. 2017) in the UK and Brazil respectively. These chapters appear in Part III of this volume: ‘Hegemony, the state and extra-parliamentary politics’. Movement Parties can be considered to be those organisations that have on the one hand close connections to institutionalised politics but, on the other, are part of the social movement milieu. Kirby’s case study is of Momentum, which was established in October 2015 in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the UK Labour Party. Momentum was formed from the thousands of volunteers who worked on his election campaign. Over the past twelve months it has begun to establish itself as an organisation, with paid members of staff, structures and procedures. It has, through this process, replicated many of the forms of traditional political institutions. However, it has also adopted a position that is in many ways historically unique. It is both inside and outside mainstream politics, establishing new spaces of political interaction as well as following old forms of local activism. However, the relationship between party and movement is not always a smooth one and Kirby asks whether there is a tension between the two elements of this dual function and identity. What dynamics are at work between local and national structures, older and younger members and those within and outside of the Labour Party? Using interviews with Momentum officials and members, the chapter outlines the process of instituting Momentum. With a great deal of regional diversity in the operations of the organisation in its infancy, it is a study of a process. Therefore, further questions arise such as, for example, does the establishment of organisational structures inhibit the energy and propulsion implicit in the name ‘Momentum’, or indeed is it one of the first examples of a ‘new politics’ able to transcend the decelerating effects of institutionalisation? Ultimately, what does the process of instituting Momentum tell us about where the left is today? In Chapter 9, Rogério Giugliano and Jacques de Novion present a historical overview of the trajectory of the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil, beginning with the context of its foundation in the 1980s as a reaction to the military dictatorship (that was in power since the middle of the 1960s) and also to the traditional left, especially the communist party and labour organisations that, before the military coup, were the most significant left-wing forces in the country. The chapter shows the party’s path to winning the national elections in 2010 at the head of a diverse coalition of political forces that took Mr Lula da Silva to the presidential office. It then moves to discuss the PT experience in the coalition government and the challenges of conducting a development project through political conciliation in a country of the global south still marked by its colonial and subaltern past. In addition, the chapter provides a sociological analytic perspective on some of the main issues that arise from this historiographical narrative. The first analytic focus is on the different social forces that composed the party and the concessions made towards a less radical left-wing political perspective. The second connects these political rearrangements to the ideological–theoretical shift from socialism to what became called in Brazil neo-developmentism. As final point, Giugliano and Novion offer some perspectives on the connections of this path with the larger South American political context.

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The final chapter by Werner Bonefeld concludes Part III and the two volumes. This chapter provides a critical analysis of left-wing hegemony theory and its practical usefulness for understanding left-wing politics generally. The critical standpoint employed to undertake this analysis is a particular variant of the Marxist critique of political economy. This is important because, in contemporary analysis, the traditional certainty about unfolding processes of socialist transformation has given way to arguments about capitalism as manifesting either a capitalist hegemony, which is referred to as neoliberal capitalism, or a working-class hegemony, which is referred to as either planned economy, welfare capitalism, or simply anti-austerity. This argument suggests that the interests served by capitalist society are determined by the balance of social forces that are governed through the state. In contrast to the Marxist critique of political economy, which argues that capitalism establishes a definite mode of social labour and that the ‘abolition of hunger’ requires therefore a ‘change in the relations of production’ (Adorno et al. 1976: 62), the contemporary critical approach argues for counter-hegemonic struggles to secure the interests of workers in capitalist development. Bonefeld’s chapter demonstrates flaws in this particular school of thought around hegemony and argues that left-wing movements need to bring Marx’s critique of political economy back into their practical analysis of contemporary capitalism.

Note 1 Joseph Ibrahim is grateful to Palgrave MacMillan for permission to reproduce some material in Chapter 8 from Joseph Ibrahim (2015) Bourdieu and Social Movements: Ideological Struggles in the British Anti-Capitalist Movement, London: Palgrave.

References Adorno, T.W., Albert, H., Daherndorf, R., Habermas, J., Pilot, H. and Popper, K.R. (1976) ‘Introduction’, in Adorno, T.W. et al. (authors) The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, 1–67, London: Heinemann. Della Porta, D., Fernandez, J., Kouki, H. and Mosca, L. (2017) Movement Parties Against Austerity, Oxford: Wiley. Grayson, J. (2016) ‘Red doors for asylum seekers: MPs grill one of Britain’s richest landlords’, Open Democracy, 1 February, at: www.opendemocracy.net/uk/shinealight/ john-grayson/red-doors-for-asylum-seekers-mps-grill-one-of-britain-s-richest-landlord. Smith, D. (2010) In the Frame: Memory in Society 1910 to 2010, Cardigan: Parthian.

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PART I

Communities of resistance

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2 THE MAKING AND FRAMING OF SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGNING ON ASYLUM RIGHTS A radical left social movement in Sheffield John Grayson

Introduction Sheffield and its wider region of South Yorkshire was dominated by the steel and coal industries through to the 1980s. The region, its trades unions and politicians contested the industrial and social policies of the Thatcher governments and became known as the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire. In 1980 a national steel strike was launched from the region. In 1984 a year-long Miners’ Strike began at Cottonwood colliery in the Dearne Valley in South Yorkshire. These traditions of political contestation and militancy have produced in South Yorkshire what Dai Smith has called “Societies of purpose [where] it is then not nostalgic or historical wish fulfilment to work . . . to retrieve and take forward the values, of what was worthwhile in past lives that particularly speak to us, connect with us” (Smith 2010: xx). This chapter, based on my activist research embedded in an asylum rights organisation, SYMAAG (South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Rights Action Group), suggests continuities in the region’s political and activist culture that have been important in the emergence of radical asylum rights and refugee movements.

The survival and relevance of a proletarian culture Avner Offer has recently argued that British working-class communities of manual workers like those of South Yorkshire experienced a distinctive “proletarian” culture from the 1890s through to the 1950s: Manual workers made up a group with its own distinctive lifestyle and culture [and] . . . formed a majority in their towns, but these communities

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lived apart from the main currents of national culture, politics, and middleclass society, marginalized, unknown, misunderstood, despised by outsiders and elites . . . . Working-class society contained the full range of ability, and a pool of able men (mostly men) provided capable leadership for their own class, in trade unions, local politics, and all the way up to Parliament and government. (Offer 2008: 2) It was this local proletarian culture that acted as the context and lifeblood for independent working-class trade union and social movement initiatives. It is arguable that the influence of this proletarian culture structured workers’ histories and their social movements in areas like South Yorkshire through to the 1970s and beyond. Offer’s proletarian culture produced not only political leaders but also, in the immediate post-war period with the election of a Labour government, a more confident “working-class counter culture” and specifically a labour movement culture. South Yorkshire became “solid labour” (Grayson 1996). Barnsley has had a Labour Council since 1947, parliamentary constituencies in the Dearne Valley mining area have returned Labour MPs continuously from the 1920s. Local government reorganisation in 1973 created a South Yorkshire County Council – which became jokingly known as the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire.

South Yorkshire was changing . . . Social movements campaigning for migrant and asylum rights and against racism that emerged in South Yorkshire drew on these political cultures, and also had an embedded popular adult education agenda. By the 1990s there was a changing political economy in South Yorkshire, and in Yorkshire as a whole, with coal, steel and textiles employment gone and replaced by low-wage service industry and public-sector jobs. It was “rust belt” areas like Sheffield where “hard to let” council estates and “market failure” private rented housing was seen as available by Labour governments for the dispersal of asylum seekers. In December 2004, the Yorkshire and the Humber region had the largest number of dispersed asylum seekers (9,350) in the UK. In June 2005 there were 1,320 asylum seekers from 56 different countries of origin receiving National Asylum Support Service (NASS) support in Sheffield. There were also around 1,500 Slovak and Czech Roma in Rotherham and Sheffield who had arrived with the extension of the EU borders in 2004. In 2007 30 per cent of births in the city were from migrant families. Census data suggests that Sheffield’s minority ethnic population increased by a figure of 80 per cent from 1991 to 2001, to around 45,000 people. By 2011 it doubled again to 19.2 per cent of the population – around 106,000 people. The 2011 census also suggests that there were around 51,000 foreign-born residents from outside the EU and around 14,000 from other EU countries. (For detailed references see Grayson 2011.)

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As Paul Mason has observed: A culture that took 200 years to build was torn apart in twenty. Today in place of a static local workforce working in the factories and drinking in the pubs their grandfathers worked and drank in, a truly global working class is being created. (Mason 2007: xi) Rust belt and dispersal areas are, of course, also the areas where in the very recent past the far-right British National Party (BNP) (Trilling 2013) achieved some of its electoral successes. Rotherham elected two BNP councillors in 2008, and in Barnsley BNP candidates stood in most or all the 21 wards over a four-year period from 2007 to 2011. In 2009, Yorkshire and the Humber elected a BNP MEP in the European elections.

Asylum rights campaigning and migrant organisations before SYMAAG Asylum rights social movements first developed around anti-deportation campaigns and date from the late 1990s. There was campaigning in the 1980s but, by 2002, “it would be hard to claim that a mass social movement was still in operation” (Farrar 2004: 238–9). A national coordinating organisation, the National Coalition of Anti Deportation Campaigns (NCADC) emerged in 1995, the Committee to Defend Asylum Seekers (CDAS) a little later, and there were sporadic campaigns around individuals threatened with deportation. The CDAS established a group in Sheffield in 2000. A flood of immigration and asylum laws in the UK were created from the late 1990s to resist the increase in asylum seekers, resulting from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and from ongoing conflicts across Africa. One of the early measures of Tony Blair’s first government was the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, which created the dispersal asylum system that still operates in the UK. The destructive political discourses and media “common-sense racism” of the time was summed up by Sivanandan as “a politics of prejudice and fear to create a culture of xeno-racism and Islamaphobia; the asylum seeker at the gate and the shadowy Muslim within” (Sivanandan 2005: 2). In Sheffield, the development of a significant asylum rights social movement was a response to the social and political effects of this legislation, in particular the punitive and at times brutal operation of the legislation, creating in Cohen’s memorable phrase, “the Orwellian world of immigration controls” (Cohen 2006).

Mobilising outrage – the early activists in SYMAAG Sheffield’s distinctive left-wing collectivist political and social movement history was reflected in research interviews carried out by Stuart Crosthwaite and

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myself between 2008 and 2011 (in part reported in Crosthwaite & Grayson 2010) with activists in SYMAAG and other asylum rights organisations. People we interviewed identified this history as a major factor in developing and sustaining the anti-deportation movement. One interviewee suggested that many individuals who had a Labour Party and/or trade union background had joined anti-deportation campaigning in the tradition of “championing the underdog”, disillusioned with what little remained of the “labour movement” and local politics. Interviewees represented a generation of working-class activists, who had become educated, taken white-collar jobs in the public sector – and joined the Labour Party (Seyd & Whiteley 1992). Leadership in the asylum rights organisations came from people in their 50s and 60s, veterans of earlier radical periods in Sheffield or elsewhere. One interviewee, who had worked to establish the Northern Refugee centre to welcome Vietnamese “boat people”, said that when it became clear in 2003 that the Labour government was determined to treat asylum seekers very badly and deport many of them, he and other Labour party supporters were “outraged” and were determined “to do something about it”. Many of the activists had a Christian church background. Sheffield has a reputation as a centre for radical religious movements, again born out of its history of “mixing Methodism with Socialism”. Anti-deportation campaigning sucked in a range of radical and political clergy, ministers and congregations going beyond the established philanthropic or charity approaches. This was not surprising because many of the asylum seekers fighting deportation were themselves active members of Christian churches. A Catholic church rented a house in Barnsley for use by a “failed” asylum seeker family forced to go underground to avoid deportation. The congregation debated whether this was “illegal” but, as one of the interviewees put it, “I told them it was God’s law we were obeying, not the government”. Interviewees also saw their personal trade union networks as potentially important in contributing to asylum rights and anti-deportation campaigns. The 2009 TUC “Let Them Work” campaign for asylum seekers was seen by one interviewee as very important in giving real public legitimacy to the campaigns. Links did indeed develop. In 2007/2008 the union UNITE helped develop a Migrant Workers Support Network with SYMAAG that monitored raids on unionised factories for “illegals”, in one case Iraqi Kurdish asylum seekers. The UNITE union also supported a joint steward/campaigner workshop with the Northern Refugee Centre. In 2010, striking bus drivers’ pickets in Sheffield signed a petition en masse to stop the deportation of a Nigerian asylum seeker who had been persecuted for his union activities as a bus worker. Even members of the Public and Commercial Services union working at the Sheffield UK Borders Agency headquarters offered support through a campaign called “Not A Number”, emphasising that asylum seekers were real people. The SYMAAG built strong links with Unite Against Fascism (UAF), which in

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South Yorkshire was largely financed by the unions and jointly organised with Trades Councils. In Barnsley in 2008 the Trades Council with teachers unions and the miners sponsored a SYMAAG “Solidarity with Asylum Seekers” conference on May Day in the Miners Hall.

A left movement for asylum rights going beyond a “politics of compassion” The South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Rights Action Group sits within a network of asylum support and asylum rights organisations in South Yorkshire and, over time, has become the “political wing” and political voice of the network. Many of the organisations are charities responding to the needs of destitute asylum seekers, women survivors of trafficking, and others (City of Sanctuary, ASSIST, British Red Cross, Asiana, City Hearts, Snowdrop Project), and therefore are restricted in their scope for political actions. Jonathan Darling, in research in Sheffield in 2010, suggested that the “nonpolitical” response of charities in the city was a “politics of compassion” that, in practice, resulted in the “partial denial of agency for those presented ‘in need’ of care, compassion and generosity”. Reproducing an image of the asylum seeker as the “victim” of the “asylum system”, a bureaucratic machine through which decisions were made and lives decided upon with little capacity for contestation . . . a particular image of the asylum seeker – that of the vulnerable, dependent and rightless victim of the state. (Darling 2011: 414) Tom Vickers, in his critical research on refugee support organisations in the northeast of England, identified the development of a “refugee relations industry” (Vickers 2013: 24) with the wholesale co-option of voluntary organisations into funding “partnerships” with the state and the Home Office in managing asylum and the dispersal into asylum housing. Vickers quotes research by Linda Briskman and Sarah Cemlyn in 2005 that concluded: There is a mixed picture among those (NGOs in Britain) with government funding between maintaining independence and advocacy on behalf of asylum seekers’ rights and becoming enmeshed in managing an unsatisfactory situation. (Quoted in Vickers 2013: 20) Vickers also points out that, between 2005 and 2008, “refugees across Britain began to mobilise in a new wave of collective opposition to deportations, often around a shared country of origin”. In Newcastle, there were “significant

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mobilisations” by groups of refugees from the DRC, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Iran, Turkey and Iraq (Vickers 2013: 21). At the same time as the Darling and Vickers research, our activist research in SYMAAG in Sheffield was detecting the parallel revival of Anti deportation campaigning . . . an example of a significant contentious social movement being built . . . on the politics of outrage and an active network . . . based on solidarity with individuals deciding to campaign, and crucially collective political lobbying . . . Around three hundred activists are mobilised in Sheffield all of whom see anti-deportation campaigns on the basis of the cases initiated by asylum seekers themselves as something to support. (Crosthwaite & Grayson 2010) The SYMAAG interviews detected what Colin Barker has called “collective effervescence: the phenomenon of ‘people changing’. . .. A sense of self empowerment, the de-legitimation of existing authority, and the creation of new informal and formal institutions and networks” (Barker 1999: 11). The Sheffield social movement, of which SYMAAG was a part, seemed to represent, at that time (2009 to 2012), a break with other organisations seeing asylum seekers as powerless victims needing to be “integrated” into existing communities. Rather, SYMAAG was in tune with Vicki Squire’s notion of “mobile solidarities”: Characterized by the formation of mobile relations of solidarity in which distinctions between citizens/non-citizens, between different national or cultural groups, and between different migrant categories begin to unravel. (Squire 2009: 3)

SYMAAG and public pedagogy in Sheffield The SYMAAG, from its earliest days, had developed a form and content that reflected a history embedded in South Yorkshire radical cultures. The activities and challenges the organisation posed in campaigning with asylum seekers, refugees and migrant workers, and in having them as active members shaping the organisation, could be described as reflecting traditions of collective pedagogical struggle. Within SYMAAG a common feature of members, particularly asylum seeker and refugee members, is their commitment to self-education and seeking out educational pathways for themselves and their families. The tradition of autodidacts within social movements survives in SYMAAG. This is the same tradition that patterned what Rose described as the “Intellectual Origins of the British Working Class” (Rose 2001).

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Alongside SYMAAG, émigré political organisations in Sheffield went beyond self-education into “public pedagogy” (Giroux 2011), with activists from the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) setting up a political education organisation “Africa Now” in 2009, with public meetings, films and education programmes on the “Great Africa War”, “AIDS and Africa” and “The death of Lumumba and Imperialism”. Refugees and asylum seekers from Zimbabwe continued émigré activity within the opposition MDC party, with large regional gatherings with visiting politicians from their home country. A refugee politician from Uganda became active in SYMAAG and arranged for visiting Ugandan opposition politicians to speak on the situation in Uganda in SYMAAG meetings. The SYMAAG meetings featured an early discussion on Syria (led by a Syrian refugee), China (led by a Chinese Muslim refugee), and Sri Lanka (led by a Sri Lankan volunteer refugee worker). A regular item appeared on SYMAAG meeting agendas – “Country Reports” – with regular updates from SYMAAG members regarding current events in the countries they had left. Many of the public meetings of SYMAAG have been organised with Sheffield University. In 2011, a Libyan professor at the university spoke about refugees in the “new” Libya and then returned to Libya as a minister in the provisional government. Other examples in more recent years featured BBC World Service journalists – one speaking about interviews with Kurdish fighters in Turkey and Iraq, another about his work on Eritrea. Both were organised in conjunction with the substantial Kurdish and Eritrean refugee community in Sheffield. The SYMAAG’s political lobbying role has been fairly easy in Sheffield and South Yorkshire with David Blunkett, former Labour Home Secretary, an MP in Sheffield until 2015. Nick Clegg, the Coalition Deputy Prime Minister 2010 to 2015, was a Sheffield MP, and Ed Miliband, Leader of the Labour Party from 2010, is a Doncaster MP. The SYMAAG organised public “hustings” before the 2010 and 2015 elections asking for election pledges on asylum and immigration from candidates. This “public pedagogy” through information and awareness raising, meetings and demonstrations, has been a hallmark of SYMAAG. The organisation was first established in 2007 after a three-day march from the Sheffield Home Office headquarters to the then Lindholme immigration detention centre near Doncaster, 35 miles away, to demand “Dignity Not Detention”. The march involved 200 people from 16 countries and laid the basis of the group’s future campaigning. The march was routed deliberately through the council estates and the devastated former steel and mining towns and villages of South Yorkshire, and established a campaign coalition of apparently disparate social, community and political groups. Crucially, the march established the self-confidence of asylum seekers to publicly challenge the asylum regime they had found themselves in. As one Sudanese marcher explained, “Now I can look people in the eye” (Crosthwaite & Grayson 2010).

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Ten years on, the SYMAAG banner, emphasising “Dignity not Detention” for refugees that was carried on the march to Lindholme, is carried regularly to demonstrations at the Yarl’s Wood women’s detention centre near Bedford, and in March 2017 at the first major national demonstration at Morton Hall IRC (Immigration Removal Centre) near Lincoln organised by SYMAAG. (Grayson 2017). Public pedagogy has been deliberately aimed at mobilising key groups of workers and students on asylum rights – a large gathering of health workers and students in April 2008 at the Showroom cinema launched a student “MedAct” group at Sheffield University and a campaign to stop restrictions on asylum seekers’ access to the NHS. A SYMAAG meeting of law students, retired solicitors and local legal workers in 2010 launched South Yorkshire Refugee Law and Justice, an attempt to replace vanishing legal aid and legal advice for asylum seekers. In March 2015, with students from Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam Universities, SYMAAG organised a march and rally demanding “Don’t let them drown”, protesting the Coalition government’s support for the EU decision to withdraw rescue vessels from the Mediterranean. A policy that meant that 5,000 refugees and migrants were to die in the Aegean and Mediterranean in 2016 alone. A policy that was designed as a public “deterrence” policy to stop asylum seekers coming to Europe and the UK.

Activists’ wisdom and activist research Both “activist wisdom” (see Maddison & Scalmer 2006) and activist research can also be mobilised for public pedagogy, knowledge production and the generation of theory useful to a movement (Bevington & Dixon 2005). Dempsey and Rowe emphasise the crucial importance of activist research as a resource for effective campaigns and argue that the Characteristics of activist knowledge are its very current, mobile, contingent and creative qualities. In order for activist campaigns to be successful [it] requires that activists have access to up to date research [and] require a complex mapping of the political terrain they face. (Dempsey & Rowe 2004: 34) I have been involved in this process of “activist research” within SYMAAG since 2009. My research data and evidence are made available to SYMAAG members and networks as part of a project of “activist research” (Choudry 2012), and also appear as investigative web journalism in articles for www. opendemocracy.net and the news service at the Institute for Race Relations www.irr.org.uk. The research project has involved structured and unstructured interviews with a large and varied assortment of migrants (asylum seekers, asylum tenants, refugees, undocumented and documented migrants from a wide variety of countries). Conventional research data from secondary sources have

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an important place in the methodology, but are matched by my primary sources – formal interviews, research conversations and active involvement in meetings, actions and debates. It seems to me important that research that underpins public pedagogy and campaigns needs to be also a project of critical analysis. As Phil Scraton has argued: Critical analysis foregrounds power, its relations to authority and its processes of legitimacy. . . . It turns individual cases and personal troubles into public issues . . .. It is more than this. It is about bearing witness, gathering testimonies, sharing experiences, garnering the view from below and exposing the politics and discourses of authoritarianism. It moves beyond the resources of theory into praxis, recognising the self-as-academic as the self-as-participant. (Scraton 2005: 22) In refugee and migrant social movements the activist research process can itself become an integral part of a popular adult educational and learning process, rooted in community research, creating and mobilising “really useful knowledge” for action (Johnson 1979). This process mirrors Freirian ideas on critical consciousness reflecting the possibilities of the dynamic of interaction with “researched” people and groups. Activist research methods are ideally suited to capture the processes of critical learning, organising and changing the world – knowledge production, against the grain, challenging “common sense” and capturing and building on “activist wisdom” (Maddison & Scalmer 2006; Newman 2006). It is perhaps instructive that, in the UK, as government policies on asylum have become overtly xenophobic, activist academic researchers have emerged to challenge political discourses. In 2017, a group of researchers, funded by an ESRC grant, produced a critical analysis of the Coalition government’s “Go Home” campaign in the summer of 2013 (Jones, Gunaratnam, et al. 2017), unfortunately some four years after the events.

Exposing “atrocious” G4S asylum housing and a deterrent asylum regime The campaigning priorities of SYMAAG, as an independent political asylum rights organisation made up entirely of volunteers with minimalist funding from churches, chapels and trades unions, have always focused on the UK asylum system or, as Steve Cohen described it, The mad world in which those caught up in immigration controls find themselves. It is a crazy world, that drive its inhabitants crazy, and often

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does to the point of suicide. It is a weird world where the real meets the surreal. It is a world with no apparent answers, only questions. (Cohen 2006: 12) This “crazy world” of immigration controls in the UK had, by 2012, been fuelled by both the Labour and Coalition governments’ creation of an overtly deterrent asylum system and reception policies designed to prevent asylum seekers “choosing” to come to the UK. As Squire put it, Rather than providing a support service for asylum seekers in the UK the analysis shows how dispersal entails a rendering of asylum support as a technology of punishment. Part of a wider rationality of deterrence that selectively moves through processes of criminalisation and securitisation towards abjectification. (Squire 2009; see also Tyler 2013) The deterrence and hostile environment came together in 2012. In May 2012, Theresa May told the Telegraph newspaper: The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration . . . Work is under way to deny illegal immigrants access to work, housing and services, even bank accounts. What we don’t want is a situation where people think that they can come here and overstay because they’re able to access everything they need. (Kirkup & Winnett 2012) The “Go Home” vans (Jones, Gunaratnam, et al. 2017) and the Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016 were to follow. In June 2012 the Home Office launched a £1.7bn asylum housing contract to be delivered by the largest private security company in the world, G4S (Group 4 Security), by Serco, another major international security contractor, and by the smaller Reliance security company. In April 2014, I wrote a piece for Open Democracy called “How to use housing to hurt people: Britain’s hostile environment for asylum seekers” (Grayson 2014). It had become clear that the UK government’s deterrent reception policies had become even more extreme, and horrific conditions in detention centres and squalid asylum housing conditions were linked to them. Deterrence policies were extended at Calais and most tragically in the Mediterranean. As Frances Webber said, The images conjured up when we think of migration to Europe are of boats – drifting, leaky and overcrowded; bodies – drowned, washed up on beaches and caught in fishermen’s nets; fences topped with razor wire; camps – squalid places of misery and desperation. They are images of exclusion and death. (Webber 2014)

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SYMAAG and the COMPASS contract campaigns When G4S was given the contract in Sheffield to house asylum seekers waiting for decisions on asylum, SYMAAG and a group of Sheffield asylum rights organisations organised a campaign to oppose the outsourcing of what was then council-provided asylum housing. In Sheffield there was little awareness of G4S, apart from the fact that their staff emptied cash machines in the city centre and read fuel meters in people’s homes. Research for the campaign, and the everyday experience of asylum seekers and refugees who had experienced G4S, started to build a very different picture and image of G4S as the largest security company in the world and the largest employer on the London Stock Exchange with security personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Asylum seeker tenants in Sheffield were certainly aware of G4S and its record. At a protest meeting in January 2012 when it was announced that G4S was the “preferred bidder” for asylum housing contracts across Yorkshire, one asylum tenant from Zimbabwe stood up and said “I do not want a prison guard as my landlord”. He had actually been in a G4S-run prison in South Africa. His statement became a watchword for the rest of the campaign. Sheffield homes, in which asylum seekers were living, were directly threatened by a company that had a brutal record of managing UK immigration detention centres. It was G4S staff who had restrained an Angolan man, Jimmy Mubenga, who died whilst being deported in 2010. The G4S Managing Director for their Care and Justice company, Stephen Small, who appeared in Sheffield in February as manager of the new asylum housing contracts, was the very same G4S manager who had appeared in London before a Parliamentary committee to defend the restraint techniques used in the death of Jimmy Mubenga – more than confirming the fears of Sheffield and Yorkshire asylum seekers. The campaign was designed around a “Notog4sYorkshire” research and monitoring group that included academics and researchers from Leeds, Sheffield, Huddersfield and York universities, asylum rights campaigners and asylum seekers and refugees. The campaign decided to concentrate solely on Yorkshire although G4S had asylum housing contracts in other areas. This meant that background research was feasible and, crucially, activists and asylum seekers could use their local and regional knowledge of asylum housing, council and private landlords and, of course, the asylum system. Two local Notog4s groups were established, the first one in Sheffield by SYMAAG, with support from other asylum rights organisations there. The other was in Huddersfield, where there were activists who had been involved in the main regional dispersal centre for new asylum seekers under the previous council-run contracts for asylum housing. The early campaign was a major exercise in knowledge production. Regular meetings researched local housing companies contracted by G4S and received reports on the dozens of cases where slum housing was allocated by G4S

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landlords. Activists in the Yorkshire groups worked in solidarity with asylum seeker tenants from Zimbabwe, Iran, Kenya, Ethiopia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Uganda, DRC, Pakistan and Sri Lanka; fighting cases and learning about the UK asylum “support” systems. Campaign leaflets were produced, demonstrations and actions organised, and dozens of articles were written as a result of briefing journalists or through a dedicated G4S portal at www.opendemocracy.net and on the IRR news service, www.irr.org.uk. In 2012, a SYMAAG website was set up by a young Zimbabwean activist who was involved with his own campaign to prevent his deportation. In 2015, an asylum seeker from Tibet took on the development of SYMAAG on Facebook. There has also been a great deal of formal knowledge production in the G4S asylum housing campaign. Written evidence has been submitted to the Westminster parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee inquiries into asylum housing in 2013 and 2017 (HMSO 2013b, 2017a), and to the Children’s Society parliamentary panel inquiry on children in the asylum system in 2013 (HMSO 2013a). Also, detailed evidence on the landlord contractors used by G4S was submitted to the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee’s 2014 report on asylum housing (HMSO 2014). Local “hearings” were organised by SYMAAG in Sheffield and Barnsley to submit evidence to parliamentary inquiries – giving a direct voice to asylum seekers, many of them SYMAAG members. In 2015 a hearing brought together people who had been detained in IRCs (Immigration Removal Centres) to give evidence for the APPG on Migration Report on the UK immigration detention system (HMSO 2015). One of the SYMAAG officers who gave evidence had himself been detained for two years in various detention centres. In 2016 hearings were held in Barnsley and Sheffield on G4S housing conditions and management with asylum tenants. Their evidence was recorded and submitted to the Home Affairs Committee’s inquiry that reported in January 2017 (HMSO 2017a). Many of these same G4S tenants, and former tenants, SYMAAG members amongst them, collaborated in producing a documentary film, The Asylum Market, with Brass Moustache films (The Asylum Market 2017), to be released at the same time as the 2017 Inquiry Report. Clips from the film had been agreed for screening by the BBC but were then withdrawn because (according to senior producers at the BBC) of pressure by G4S. Much of the “really useful knowledge” production and activist research in the G4S campaign has been built on the notion that interviews and group discussions with, and alongside, refugees and migrants can not only be transformed into leaflets, posters for demonstrations, and newsletters and websites in practical workshops, but also can change the world and “get us out of our present troubles” (Johnson 1979: 81). Thus, the G4S asylum housing campaign statements from asylum housing tenants in interviews and meetings, when recorded and reproduced, became totemic and actually generated action. We used the following statements.

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• • • •

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From a Zimbabwean asylum housing tenant in January 2012 at the beginning of the campaign in a meeting: “I do not want a prison guard as my landlord”, which immediately focussed on the human rights record of G4S in detention centres and prisons worldwide (he had encountered the company in prisons in Africa as well as detention centres in the UK). From a mother of a toddler in a squalid asylum hostel: “They simply want to make profits out of us, they show us no respect”, which focussed on the privatisation of public housing for asylum seekers. From another African mother, with a baby trapped in a house with cockroaches: “They give us no respect we have a right to a good house like anybody else”. From a mother of a four-year-old daughter living in asylum housing with rats and a jungle of a garden for six months, after the garden had been tidied: “At least the neighbours might not mind now, living next door to an asylum seeker”. From a young man: “I do not know why they want to humiliate us – we are simply trying to get a place of safety”. In an asylum reception centre in the grounds of a high-security prison, with the camera on his phone, he had created a “food diary” with shots of his appalling main meals each day; he had also photographed the dirty showers and the grubby dining hall. All for his personal record but he immediately made the evidence available for public consumption, albeit anonymously.

The returning themes of respect, humiliation, rights and demands for treatment “like anybody else” shine through the data. The whole point about really useful knowledge production of this kind in a campaign is that it is designed around statements that are known to be “going public”. The aim is to re-map (see Tyler 2013) the position and status of refugees to influence wider “common sense knowledge” and to change public perceptions. This knowledge is produced to be used collectively. We want to get us out of here!

Exposing asylum markets When Stephen Small, then head of the G4S Compass contract, came to Sheffield in 2012 to meet the academics who had launched the campaign against his company, he surprised everyone when he stated that G4S saw the asylum housing contract as a further step in developing the corporation’s “asylum markets” – a term then unfamiliar to researchers, but described in the US by Donna Red Wing as “every prisoner a profit centre, every immigrant a business opportunity” (Red Wing 2010). Chris Grayling, Conservative Work and Pensions Minister in the Coalition government, candidly described the attitude of the government to outsourcing government functions to private companies and corporations in June 2011: “What we have tried to do is to create a situation where our interests and the

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interests of providers are really aligned. They can make shedloads of money by doing the things we would absolutely love them to do” (Winter 2011). These new “markets”, not surprisingly, were very attractive to investors. In 2012, G4S’s major investors included pension and insurance companies Prudential, Legal & General and Black Rock Inc., the world’s biggest investment fund, which owned over 5 per cent of G4S shares. The process of outsourcing continues. In the first three months of 2016 new public-sector contracts worth £1.35 billion were announced in the UK – 65 per cent of all outsourced contracts (Arvato Bertelsman 2016). In June 2015, Rupert Soames, grandson of Winston Churchill and CEO of Serco, one of the other corporations profiting in UK detention and asylum housing markets, told BBC Radio 4’s business programme The Bottom Line that the new outsourcing market: “makes Britain now to public service provision what Silicon Valley is to IT” (BBC Radio 4). Activist research and activist solidarity campaigning has systematically shone a light on the connections between G4S asylum housing in South Yorkshire and companies in global and European asylum markets. The UK model of outsourcing pioneered by G4S has, over the last few years, been followed by international companies in Europe (Menz 2013; Grayson 2016b), in what Daniel Trilling has recently called “Europe’s migration industrial complex” (Trilling 2015) and the Wall Street Journal called “Refugee Inc” (Clark, Mesco & Troianovski 2015). One of the academics and activist researchers who joined the original campaign and the monitoring of G4S, Dexter Whitfield, had led the way in research on global secondary markets for the sale of public contracts (Whitfield 2010). In 2015, as refugees entered Europe, private companies were making profits by providing asylum accommodation (Grayson 2016b). It emerged that one major company, ORS Service based in Switzerland, owned contracts for reception centres, camps and military bunkers in Switzerland, Austria and Germany. The company, and its contracts, had repeatedly been sold in the developing global secondary asylum markets. The company has been sold three times since 2005 to private equity companies. London-based private equity firm Equistone Partners Europe Ltd bought the business for an undisclosed sum in 2013. The Equistone annual report in 2013 touted the acquisition as a new opportunity with “promising organic and acquisitive growth potential” (quoted in Clark, Mesco & Troianovski 2015). Equistone controls two buyout funds worth close to $4 billion. The private equity firm was part of Barclays Bank until 2011. Thus, the London capital markets are involved in buying and selling the management of underground bunkers for asylum seekers in Switzerland and overcrowded and unsanitary refugee camps in Austria.

The message: real people profit from asylum seekers and their homes The SYMAAG campaign, because it was based around the G4S element of the contract, could focus attention on the people behind the asylum housing contracts

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and those who profited from them. My own research on Jomast Developments, the G4S sole contractor in the North East (Grayson 2016a), and with Andrew Norfolk of The Times for his “red doors” article of 20 January 2016 (Norfolk 2016), exposed the personal business face of the company and Jomast owner, Stuart Monk. Monk was personally worth £175m in 2016 and his family company managed to produce profit figures close to the company’s turnover figure without paying tax at all in 2013 and 2014 (Norfolk 2016). He described his much criticised asylum housing as “a product suitable for an asylum seeker” (Grayson 2016a). When Monk was summoned to the Home Affairs Select Committee on 26 January 2016, Chuka Umunna, MP for Streatham, said that the G4S/Jomast business model was pretty clear – “buying cheap property in the most deprived part of communities, making a profit from deprivation and people’s need for refuge”. Umunna called it “an unseemly and unsavoury” business (Grayson 2016a).

Corporate welfare state and a shadow state Business corporations like G4S benefit from what Whitfield calls “the corporate/ welfare complex” (Whitfield 2001: xviii) and what other commentators have called “Britain’s Corporate Welfare State”. Alan Law has suggested recently that G4S and business corporations like it are in fact a “Shadow State” (Law 2016), one of the “secret companies that run the British state”. They operate as what Stephen Wilks has called “political actors”. “Not only are large corporations political actors, their political power is exerted on an everyday basis as part of our political systems” (Wilks 2013: 41). Wilks argues that the “huge attraction of government contracting for corporations is that it provides a secure, reliable and low-risk return on investment”, and that their “extension of markets is in fact a code for transfer of influence to large corporations and transfer of policy initiative from government to negotiated governance involving cooperation with corporations” (Wilks 2013: 141). This transfer of influence has also meant corporations taking advantage of the revolving doors at Westminster and at public sector organisations where politicians, civil servants and public figures are recruited as board members or consultants. In the case of G4S, Lord (John) Reid, a former Labour Government Home and Defence Secretary, was a consultant and then on its board, along with the former London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Condon. In January 2012 G4S bought the services of the retiring British ambassador to Libya who was in office throughout the Arab Spring to develop the new Libya security “market”. Adam Crozier, head of ITV, was on the main board until April 2016. Current chairman John Connolly, once Britain’s highest-paid accountant at Deloitte, also chairs the board at the Great Ormond Street Hospital charity and was an advisor to Mayor of London Boris Johnson.

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SYMAAG and solidarities As the G4S campaign has developed these connections and political processes have been exposed and publicised. Beyond the asylum housing campaign SYMAAG has developed “solidarities” (Featherstone 2012) in the national StopG4S campaign alongside the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), the BDS (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement) and War on Want, united in exposing G4S’s role in providing security services for prisons where Palestinian child prisoners are held. The campaign had succeeded by 2016 when G4S apparently sold these interests to Israeli companies. Stop G4S researchers linked with the research staff at Unite the Union, Britain’s largest union, and produced a comprehensive briefing on G4S (Unite the Union 2014). StopG4S campaigns and researchers are extensively quoted in civil rights organisation Liberty’s G4S dossier published in November 2016 (Liberty 2016). The SYMAAG asylum housing campaign supported the development of CARAG (Coventry Asylum and Refugee Action Group) in 2014 and, most recently, held workshops with G4S asylum housing campaigns in Nottingham and on Tyneside. Local solidarities in Sheffield developed beyond the network of asylum rights organisations with joint actions with the South Yorkshire Community branch of Unite to protest benefit sanctions, with anti-racist campaigns in South Yorkshire and support for actions against far-right demonstrations. David Featherstone has argued for the importance of solidarity campaigning in social movements. Significantly, he cites the case of the movement Women Against Pit Closures that started in Barnsley in the Miners’ Strike of 1984/85 (Featherstone 2012: 31). The development of SYMAAG’s solidarity campaigning followed in the same society of purpose 20 years later.

Conclusions Many years of sustained campaigning by British asylum rights groups and social movements, including SYMAAG, has, on the surface, had little impact on the asylum regime in the UK. A securitised reception policy based on deterrence, begun in 2003 with a Labour government, has succeeded in dramatically reducing the numbers of people claiming their right to asylum. In 2003, there were around 82,000 asylum seekers in asylum housing, in 2016 around 40,000. When Germany was admitting over a million refugees in 2015 the UK granted asylum to 15,808 refugees. In 2016, this fell to 13,482 refugees (HMSO 2017b: 10). In 2012, I wrote a piece for the IRR news service entitled “First they came for the asylum seeker” (Grayson 2012). It was already obvious over the previous ten years that punitive social policies – cuts in benefits, vouchers or credit cards instead of cash payments, clothing handouts and food banks – had created for asylum seekers what Frances Webber called a “monstrous system” of poor law policy (Webber 2012: 92), and privatised

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asylum housing was reinforcing this treatment. Asylum seekers had been abjected from society (Tyler 2013), had been “othered” and demonised in political discourse. The poor and benefit claimants in the UK were to follow. But SYMAAG, in its solidarity campaigning and collective pedagogical struggles as a social movement, has succeeded in one important regard – it has mobilised large numbers of new people and has created wide-ranging solidarities. It has laid down a sediment of struggle for future campaigners. As Cox and Nilson point out, in social movement action “We make our own history: and movements from below have helped to create much of what makes our everyday lives worth living” (Cox & Nilson 2014: 209).

References Arvato Bertelsman (2016) UK outsourcing index Q1 2016, at: www.arvato.com/content/dam/ arvato/documents/reports/studies/arvato_UK_outsourcing_index_Q1_2016_main_info graphic.pdf. The Asylum Market (2017) Directed by Mark Donne, Video, Sheffield: Brass Moustache, at: https://player.vimeo.com/video/201062637. Barker, C. (1999) Empowerment and resistance: ‘collective effervescence’ and other accounts. In Bagguley, P. and Hearn, J. (eds) Transforming politics: power and resistance, London: Macmillan, 11–31. Bevington, D. and Dixon, C. (2005) Movement-relevant theory: rethinking social movement scholarship and activism. Social Movement Studies 4.3: 185–208. Choudry, A. (2012) Activist research: mapping power relations, informing struggles. In Choudry, A., Hanley, J. and Shragge, E. (eds) Organize! Building from the local for global justice, Oakland, CA: PM Press, 23–35. Clark, S., Mesco, M. and Troianovski, A. (2015) The growth of refugee Inc. Wall Street Journal, 14 September, at: http://s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/wpmedia.outlandish. com/irr/2017/04/26154904/The-Growth-of-Refugee-Inc.pdf. Cohen, S. (2006) Deportation is freedom: the Orwellian world of immigration controls, London: Jessica Kinsley. Cox, L. and Nilson, A. (2014) We make our own history: Marxism and social movements in the twilight of neo-liberalism, London: Pluto. Crosthwaite, S. and Grayson, J. (2010) Politics of anti-deportation campaigning, paper given at ‘Deportation and Development of Citizenship’ conference, 11/12 December Refugee Studies Centre and COMPAS, University of Oxford, at: www.adedknowledge. org (accessed 10 April 2017). Darling, J. (2011) Giving space: care, generosity and belonging in a U.K. asylum drop-in centre, Geoforum 42: 408–417. Dempsey, J. and Rowe, J. (2004) Why poststructuralism is a live wire for the Left. In Fuller, D. and Kitchen, R. (eds) Radical theory/critical praxis, Victoria BC: Praxis (e) Press. Farrar, M. (2004) Social movements and the struggle over race. In Todd, M. and Tyler, G. (eds) Democracy and participation: popular protest and new social movements, London: Merlin Press, 218–247. Featherstone, D. (2012) Solidarity: hidden histories and geographies of internationalism, London: Zed Books.

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Giroux, H. (2011) On critical pedagogy, New York: Continuum. Grayson, J. (1996) Solid labour, Wakefield: Labour Party and Northern College. Grayson, J. (2011) Organising, educating and training: varieties of activist learning in left social movements in Sheffield (UK), Studies in the Education of Adults 43.2: 197–215. Grayson, J. (2012) First they came for the asylum seeker. Institute for Race Relations News Service, 8 March, at: www.irr.org.uk/news/first-they-came-for-the-asylumseeker. Grayson, J. (2014) How to use housing to hurt people: Britain’s hostile environment for asylum seekers. Open Democracy, 7 April, at: www.opendemocracy.net/shinealight/johngrayson/how-to-use-housing-to-hurt-people-britains-hostile-environment-for-asylum-s. Grayson, J. (2016a) Red doors for asylum seekers: MPs grill one of Britain’s richest landlords. Open Democracy, 1 February, at: www.opendemocracy.net/uk/shinealight/ john-grayson/red-doors-for-asylum-seekers-mps-grill-one-of-britain-s-richest-landlord. Grayson, J. (2016b) The corporate greed of strangers. Institute for Race Relations News Service, 25 February, at: www.irr.org.uk/news/the-corporate-greed-of-strangers. Grayson, J. (2017) ‘People come in here normal, but they get ill’. Protesting against deaths at a UK migrant jail. Open Democracy, 21 March, at: www.opendemocracy.net/uk/ shinealight/john-grayson/morton-hall-HMIP-immigration-detention. HMSO (2013a) Report of the parliamentary inquiry into asylum support for children and young people, London: The Stationery Office Limited, January. HMSO (2013b) House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. Asylum: Seventh report of session 2013–14, London: The Stationery Office Limited, 11 October. HMSO (2014) National Audit Office: COMPASS contracts for the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers. Home Office. Report by the comptroller and auditor general, London: The Stationery Office, 10 January. HMSO (2015) The report of the inquiry into the use of immigration detention in the United Kingdom: a joint inquiry by the all party parliamentary group on refugees and the all party parliamentary group on migration, London: The Stationery Office Limited. HMSO(2017a) Home Affairs Select Committee regarding the inquiry into asylum accommodation across the United Kingdom, London: The Stationery Office Limited, 31 January. HMSO (2017b) Refugees welcome? The experience of new refugees in the UK. A report by the all party parliamentary group on refugees, London: The Stationery Office Limited, 24 April. Johnson, R. (1979) Really useful knowledge: radical education and working class culture, 1790–1848. In Clarke, J., Critcher, C. and Johnson, R. (eds) Working class culture: studies in history and theory, London: Hutchinson, 75–102. Jones, H., Gunaratnam, Y., et al. (2017) Go home? The politics of immigration controversies, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kirkup, J. and Winnett, R. (2012) Theresa May interview: ‘We’re going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception’. The Telegraph, 25 May. Law, A. (2016) Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain, London: Oneworld Publications. Liberty (2016) G4S: a history of discrimination, human rights violations, malpractice and mismanagement in the UK, London: Liberty. Maddison, S. and Scalmer, S. (2006) Activist wisdom: practical knowledge and creative tension in social movements, Sydney: UNSW Press.

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Mason, P. (2007) Live working or die fighting: how the working class went global, London: Harvill Secker. Menz, G. (2013) The neo-liberal state and the growth of the migration industry. In Gammeltoft-Hansen, T. and Nyberg Sørensen, N. (eds) The migration industry and the commercialization of international migration, London: Routledge, 108–127. Newman, M. (2006) Teaching defiance: stories and strategies for activist educators, a book written in wartime, San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Norfolk, A. (2016) Apartheid on the streets of Britain: red paint used to brand asylum seeker housing. The Times, 20 January. Offer, A. (2008) British manual workers: from producers to consumers, c. 1950–2000, Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History, No. 74, December, Oxford: University of Oxford. Red Wing, D. (2010) Every prisoner a profit centre: every immigrant a business opportunity. Open Democracy, 29 September, at: www.opendemocracy.net/donna-red-wing/everyprisoner-profit-centre-every-immigrant-business-opportunity-1 (accessed 26 April 2017). Rose, J. (2001) The intellectual origins of the British working classes, New Haven: Yale University Press. Scraton, P. (2005) The authoritarian within: reflections on power, knowledge, and resistance. Inaugural professorial lecture, Belfast: Queens University, 9 June, at: www.statewatch. org/news/2005/nov/phil-scraton-inaugural-lecture.pdf (accessed 23 April 2017). Seyd, P. and Whiteley, P. (1992) Labour’s grassroots: the politics of party membership, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sivanandan, A. (2005) Race, terror and civil society. Race and Class, January–March, 47.3: 1–8. Smith, D. (2010) In the frame: memory in society 1910 to 2010, Cardigan: Parthian. Squire, V. (2009) The exclusionary politics of asylum, Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. Trilling, D. (2013) Bloody nasty people: the rise of Britain’s far right, London: Verso. Trilling, D. (2015) Europe’s migration industrial complex. Foreign Policy, 18 June, at: http:// foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/18/immigration-privatization-britain-italy-syria (accessed 30 April 2017). Tyler, I. (2013) Revolting subjects: social abjection and resistance in neoliberal Britain, London: Zed Books. Unite the Union (2014) G4S: Serial human rights abuser: a briefing for trade unionists, at: www.labournet.net/other/1403/G4Slong.pdf (accessed 30 April 2017). Vickers, T. (2013) Refugees, capitalism and the British state: the roots of refugees’ oppression and implications for action, Newcastle: Northumbria University. Webber, F. (2012) Borderline justice: the fight for refugee and migrant rights, London: Pluto Press. Webber, F. (2014) The cradle or the grave? EU migration policy and human rights, Statewatch Journal 23.3/4 February: 3–7. Whitfield, D. (2001) Public services or corporate welfare: rethinking the nation state in the global economy, London: Pluto Press. Whitfield, D. (2010) Global auction of public assets: public sector alternatives to the infrastructure market & public private partnerships, Nottingham: Spokesman Books. Wilks, S. (2013) The political power of the business corporation, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Winter, P. (2011) Payment by results scheme to help long term unemployed launched. The Guardian, 9 June, at: www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jun/09/payment-results-long term-unemployed.

3 COMMUNITY ORGANISING AND CITIZENS UK Can tangible social change be achieved through institution-based apolitical politics? Louise Folkes

Introduction Political and economic changes, in both the UK and USA, have engendered a rising interest in broad-based community organising – a method used by local people to achieve social change (Bunyan 2010; Tapia 2013; Christens & Speer 2015; Holgate 2015). Broad-based community organising aims to build longlasting relationships between local people from a variety of differing backgrounds and institutions so that they can work together on common issues that are affecting their everyday lives (Voss & Williams 2009; Bunyan 2010). The goal is to re-engage people in their communities, enabling them to take responsibility for issues that are affecting them and ultimately to achieve social change and social justice (Tapia 2013; Christens & Speer 2015). Consequently, broad-based community organising has become a site of sociological interest. This chapter draws from a research project that explored the broad-based community organising group Citizens UK. It documents the history of Citizens UK before focussing on a particular local Citizens UK alliance. The chapter examines members of Citizens UK’s experiences of being a part of the organisation and their appraisals of the model of organising. It also draws upon my reflexive account of being a member of Citizens UK and attending various meetings, actions, and training events. The key areas that will be explored to understand whether this form of organising can achieve tangible social change are engagement and membership; and ideology, politics, and adaptability.

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Citizens UK’s background Organising the Alinsky way After successfully organising the ‘Back of the Yards’ neighbourhood in Chicago, an area that was severely hit by The Great Depression in the 1930s, Saul Alinsky became one of the fore-founders for what became known as ‘broad-based community organising’ (Bunyan 2010; Wills 2012; Beck & Purcell 2013; Tapia 2013). Using an alliance built up of trade unions and the Catholic Church, Alinsky formed the Back of the Yards Neighbourhood Council at the end of the 1930s to provide welfare services to community members and to promote union membership. Following the success in Chicago, Alinsky formed a national community organising network – the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) – in 1940, to achieve social change in local communities (Alinksy 1969, 1971; Beck & Purcell 2013; Tapia 2013). The IAF is now the largest community organising network with affiliates in many cities across the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and the UK (Beck & Purcell 2013; Tapia 2013). Alinksy (1971) maintained that there is potential to achieve change within the democratic system through the active participation of people. For Alinsky, it is necessary for community organisations to work with power holders in an effective manner, rather than working against them, as other organisations have attempted (see Hickel 2012; Pickerill & Krinsky 2012; Uitermark & Nicholls 2012; Kreiss & Tufekci 2013). Working with power holders in this way has been described as pragmatic and creative (Beck & Purcell 2013). It is important to note that Alinsky’s first work was written in the USA in the 1940s in the post-depression and post-war era; a very different landscape to the social, political, and cultural context of contemporary Britain. The UK has experienced 40 years of neoliberal policy, alongside the failure of community development policy to truly empower communities and the continual decline of traditional civic institutions (Bunyan 2010; Wills 2012; Tapia 2013). Therefore, it is important to consider the extent to which an Alinsky-style of community organising can translate into the UK context and achieve social change through the organisation Citizens UK.

Who are Citizens UK? Citizens UK is a community organising charity with local alliances across the UK whose aim is to create a power alliance built up of civic society institutions that is strong enough to fight for social justice and change in local communities (Bunyan 2010; Wills 2012; Beck & Purcell 2013; Citizens UK 2015d, 2015e). Describing themselves as the ‘home of community organising in the UK’ (Citizens UK 2014b, p. 10), Citizens UK is the largest community organising network in the UK and is an affiliate of Alinsky’s international community organising network, the IAF (Citizens UK 2014b, 2015b). The organisation

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came to London in the late 1990s following the former executive director Neil Jameson’s experience of community organising training in the USA (Citizens UK 2013c, 2014b). Citizens UK describe themselves as a leadership development organisation, and not a campaigning group, which is important to consider when assessing how this model works and what kinds of social change can be enabled. A major achievement for Citizens UK was its 2001 work on the Living Wage, which originated in the East London alliance of the organisation, The East London Citizens Organisation, more commonly known as TELCO (Wills et al. 2009; Citizens UK 2013c, 2015a, 2015b). Many large organisations have become accredited Living Wage employers, raising the wages of thousands of employees. This led to the creation of a sister charitable organisation, The Living Wage Foundation. As well as its large national campaigns, Citizens UK also focusses on smaller-scale community-based issues through its local alliances across the UK, which will be explored this chapter.

Research methodology Working with a local alliance of Citizens UK, this research adopted a qualitative interpretivist design based on qualitative interviewing (Kvale 1996; Mason 2002; Marshall & Rossman 2006; Rubin & Rubin 2012). This approach was adopted to understand members’ experiences of working to Citizens UK’s model of community organising. The research was concerned with assessing whether Citizens UK’s model can successfully manage issues of membership and ideology to achieve tangible and sustainable social change and social justice.

‘Insider’ research and reflexivity It is important for researchers to be honest and reflexive about their role in the research process (Burman 1997; Mason 2002; Burr 2003; Marshall & Rossman 2006). Within qualitative research, the researcher, participants, and context are all inevitably intertwined in the construction of the data that is generated (Mason 2002; Nightingale & Cromby 2002; Burr 2003; Wills 2012; Holgate 2015); and my own involvement with a local Citizens UK alliance should be considered. I have been sporadically involved with Citizens UK for around three years and have attended local planning meetings and actions. I also completed the intensive six-day leadership training, as well as attending nationwide strategic meetings. I have seen from the inside how the organisation works in a multitude of settings and how this careful ‘front stage’ management is negotiated to achieve social change (Goffman 1959). Consequently, I drew on these knowledges both as a member and as a critical researcher. In my interviews with participants, we connected over shared experiences and produced co-constructed accounts. This

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allowed for open and frank discussions without fear of judgement, as all participants were happy to contribute to research that could help to improve the organisation. It is important, however, to recognise that being an ‘insider’ also has its disadvantages, such as assumed shared meanings and experiences, which need to be questioned reflexively. Mannay (2010) argues that we need to find a way to ‘make the familiar strange’ in this situation, and to be mindful and critical of the insider/outsider dichotomy.

Sample, access, and participants As a member of Citizens UK, access to participants was easily negotiated by working with the local alliance’s lead organiser as my main gatekeeper. Eight members took part in the research and all participants were white and educated to degree level;1 participants with religious affiliation were overrepresented;2 and the age range was 18–65. Such a small sample can in no way be representative of the views of all members of Citizens UK, however there were consistent themes that came up across interviews and through my own personal reflections. Overall, the participants were highly supportive of Citizens UK as an organisation. Participants spoke about the successes of the national campaigns such as living wage achievements, refugee resettlement, and the ending of child detention for those seeking asylum. There was also an appreciation of the smaller, more local successes. Nonetheless, issues were raised that participants felt need to be addressed to ensure the organisation’s future and place in an increasingly uncertain world, which will be the focus of the following sections.

Engagement and membership This section explores the membership model of Citizens UK, and the levels of engagement with the organisation in relation to its aim of achieving tangible social change.

The institutional membership model One of the key features of Citizens UK is that members are civil society institutions, not individuals (Bunyan 2010; Wills 2012; Beck & Purcell 2013; Tapia 2013). Civil society institutions involved in Citizens UK include faith groups, trade unions, schools, universities and other community groups, with over 300 institutions in membership across all alliances (Citizens UK 2014a, 2015e). Institutions provide large groups of people, the ‘people power’, adding to the power of the organisation. It is vital that the membership of Citizens UK is as diverse as possible in order to be representative of the local community (Citizens UK 2013a, 2013b). This aligns with Alinksy’s (1969) model of the ‘People’s Organization’. The institutions own Citizens UK as they pay

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membership dues,3 which helps the organisation to remain independent from state funding and centralises power with its members. Dues are the organisation’s main source of economic capital (Jamoul & Wills 2008; Citizens UK 2013c, 2014a, 2015g).

Strengths of the institutional membership model Bringing together groups who would not otherwise interact with each other in public life to work on common issues is considered highly powerful (Putnam 2000; Wills 2009; Citizens UK 2013c), and participants praised Citizens UK’s ability to bring together a range of people from a variety of backgrounds. For Diane, the Reverend of an Anglican Church, this enabled her to work alongside other parishes and people from other faiths. Similarly, Stephen, a community worker in a disadvantaged community, discussed how Citizens UK manages to bring different people together to realise their common concerns and to form a common purpose. Arguably, this enables people to look beyond their differences and no longer see different groups as ‘other’ to them (Baskerville & Stears 2010; Bunyan 2010; Wills 2012; Beck & Purcell 2013); increasing the community’s social capital, encouraging stronger bridging social capital across diverse groups, and building relationships between different institutional members (Putnam 2000; Beck & Purcell 2013; Citizens UK 2013c; Tapia 2013). These relationships are essential for building an alliance that is committed to working together for social change (Tapia 2013; Wills 2016); with sociality being key to understanding and working with communities (Studdert 2016; Wills 2016). Participants also understood the importance of having an institution-based membership model. Dawn, a student from a local sixth form college, mentioned how powerful it feels to have the people-power of yours and others’ institutions behind you. Both Dawn and Jamie (a new part-time community organiser) understood that power in numbers is important when working to achieve social change, which is why Citizens UK as an organisation focusses specifically on institutional membership. There are, however, weaknesses to this approach, which will be explored next.

Weaknesses of the institutional membership model Despite the strengths of having diversity and people-power, several weaknesses were noted that were common across participants’ accounts. Participants contended that having an institutional approach to membership can be quite difficult and old-fashioned, as membership of traditional civil society institutions has declined in recent times (Putnam 2000; Wills 2012; Tapia 2013). Some participants were concerned about what this would mean for the future of the organisation, in terms of both its membership numbers and its funding. Citizens UK aims to strengthen institutions and civil society (Citizens UK 2010, 2015d),

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however, this may be difficult to achieve if people are unlikely to commit or to belong to an institution. As Dawn (sixth form student) commented: It’s got a real force behind it and it’s clearly working because it’s still growing and . . . I just think they’re possibly missing out on a few people who could really help because they’re not part of some other group. One of the biggest concerns for participants was that the people who would benefit the most from the actions the organisation runs are the people who are likely to be excluded from becoming a member due to their lack of institutional ties. This exclusivity was highlighted by both Wills (2012) and Cox (2016) as a potential weakness of this style of organising. Arguably, those without institutional ties are in the most need of organisation, civic engagement, and representation, particularly those in marginalised communities. This correlates with recent work around re-imagining community, in which both Studdert (2016) and Wills (2016) argue that community should not only be thought of as these traditional formats that are seen as ‘lost’ or ‘lacking’; it is important to look more broadly and tap into sociality that occurs on a day-to-day basis to engage communities in more novel ways. Building on the concerns about the exclusivity of the institutional membership approach, Stephen (community worker) was concerned that Citizens UK is missing representatives from key working-class communities. This is a problem for the organisation as its charitable objective is to return politics to the everyday person and to help them participate in public life, especially those from typically disadvantaged communities (Citizens UK 2010, 2015d). Participants were conscious of the importance of those who have experienced social injustice being the forerunners in the actions. Alexander (part-time community organiser), commented on this issue: My strong belief is that we should be helping some of the people who feel least involved in public life in the UK, some of the poorest and most marginalised people and it’s for them, it shouldn’t be on their behalf, it should be with them and by them to bring about the change, and that’s why finding ways for them to engage is really important so that their involvement is not that they bring a really powerful testimony in a public assembly but that they are also part of institutions and part of all the discussions around change on the issue Being a member could provide the opportunity for these communities to become powerful in an alliance, and to make changes to their locality and their everyday lives. Yet it seems that this model for achieving social change is only an option for those already partially organised and engaged with an institution. Either there must be a way to engage a wider range of people with

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local institutions, or Citizens UK may have to consider alternative membership models to produce meaningful long-lasting social change.

Over-representation of faith-based groups It is widely recognised that Citizens UK alliances draw most of their membership from faith-based groups; Alexander (part-time community organiser) commented that ‘faith groups are some of the strongest and most vibrant institutions that we have’. Arguably, this is an artefact of the US origins of this model being focussed on faith-based institutions, and also the convergence of Citizens UK’s and faith groups’ core aims (Alinksy 1969; Jamoul & Wills 2008; Squire 2009). Citizens UK prides itself on its promotion of successful interfaith and interchurch work, allowing groups to work together who may not have done so before; 52% of its institutions are faith-based (Citizens UK 2013c). Warren (2009) and Wills et al. (2009) propose that this prevalence is because of the large faith-based social and political capital resources there are in the UK. Holding similar fundamental values as Citizens UK, faith-based groups can utilise their ‘people power’ to help reach the organisation’s aims and achieve social change (Jamoul & Wills 2008). Despite the importance of faith-based institutions in terms of the capital they bring to Citizens UK, it is important to consider the impact that such an over-representation has on the organisation and its aims of achieving social change.

Religious ‘ethos’ of Citizens UK Although the majority of participants identified as Christian, there was a particularly important issue raised about the religious ‘image’ and ‘ethos’ limiting membership diversity. The concern was that, unless the organisation broadens its appeal, it will deter people who are not religiously affiliated from getting involved; appearing exclusive despite the inclusive nature of the organisation. Many participants noted that there needs to be a way to involve other communities, organisations, and groups so that Citizens UK can be representative of society as is claimed in its literature (Citizens UK 2013a, 2015e). An example that came up in both the interviews and the literature was the impact of the religious ‘ethos’ on the involvement of trade unions with Citizens UK. The large faith-based involvement has made it difficult for some trade unions to engage with the organisation (Wills et al. 2009; Holgate 2015). Seen as largely secular organisations, trade unions have been cautious to affiliate themselves with Citizens UK as it can be seen as a highly religiously motivated organisation with different goals and ways of working that may be incompatible with union procedure (Wills et al. 2009; Holgate 2015). This may become problematic when working on employment-focussed issues, such as the living wage and employment rights, limiting the potential of the organisation.

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Location and content of events A further issue that arose was concerning the use of religious buildings and religious groups for events. Some participants pointed out how many of the events that Citizens UK have hosted have taken place in religious buildings alongside a number of religious performances. Although it was recognised that this may be purely for logistical reasons, as churches and other religious buildings offer the space needed and are unlikely to charge for the use of the building, participants were concerned about how the location may put off potential members from attending. For example, Adam (third sector actionresearcher) spoke about why he wanted an upcoming event to take place on neutral ground: For the pre-launch assembly in December I’ve been saying . . . that it needs to be more secular and we’re looking at a secular place . . . and I think that’s really important that that takes away some of that ‘oh it’s in a church again’. I know it’s not organised as a church event and it’s not sold as that, but as soon as you go into that territory a lot then it’s easy for people to think this is really another churchy thing. Similarly, Dawn (sixth-form student) recalled her struggle to get people to come along to a pre-election event as her friends considered Citizens UK as having a religious ‘ethos’ based on the event’s schedule. There was recognition across the participants that for Citizens UK to be able to reach out and broaden its membership beyond faith groups, events may need to take place in more neutral locations. These findings suggest some tension and contradiction in terms of the diversity of Citizens UK’s membership; arguably the social capital of the organisation needs to expand so that it is representative of the communities it is working with to achieve broad-reaching social change (Bourdieu 1984; Putnam 2000).

Difficulties engaging with the model Power and habitus positioning Citizens UK work with politicians, businesses, and other influential stakeholders in society. As negotiating and working with these groups is not a natural occurrence for many members, it is often encouraged that local leaders of institutions attend the Citizens UK six-day training course (Citizens UK 2013a, 2015f). It is important that people learn how ‘to do’ politics, and for Citizens UK this means learning the art of public action, public assemblies, and how to negotiate with people in power (Citizens UK 2013a, 2013b, 2014b). The training, from my personal reflections, has a very corporate feel, with lead organisers from around the country attending and running the course, all of

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whom are in smart attire. In fact, it is rare to see any lead organisers not wearing smart clothes at any Citizens UK event. Although it is easy to see why this presentation of self may be required when working with key powerholders in society, at training and informal events it can appear off-putting as it engenders a sense of formality and power (Goffman 1959). This is further exacerbated by the high education level and social class of most organisers. Similarly, some people, particularly those from disadvantaged communities, may not feel comfortable speaking or negotiating in meeting situations, which is an issue both Stephen and Adam highlighted. This could work to limit the organisation’s aim of getting those from traditionally more disadvantaged communities engaged in public life and leading campaigns if people lack the confidence to speak in actions. To use Bourdieusian terms, when your habitus is in disconnect with the social field you find yourself in, it can be difficult to negotiate the situation and feel as though you belong (Bourdieu 1984). This may lead people away from engaging with this model of organising for social change if they feel as though it is something ‘not for them’.

Accessibility of the six-day training A further apprehension amongst participants was the availability of the six-day training course to members. Besides the practical logistics of not being able to attend a six-day residential training course (although it has recently been introduced on a modular basis), the biggest worry for Stephen (a community worker) was that the theory behind this style of organising is not necessarily simple to grasp. The political theories about power and the Alinsky approach to organising may prove difficult concepts and ideologies to grapple with (Alinksy 1969, 1971; Citizens UK 2013c, 2014b). The feedback I gained from attending the training was that it can be difficult to access for people who struggle to engage with text and/or academic environments. This may mean that not everybody will be able to gain an understanding of the way in which the organisation works. It was suggested that perhaps Citizens UK needs a new approach to explain the philosophy behind how the organisation works on a more informal and basic level so that it does not alienate potential or current members. If it is difficult for people to understand the model of community organising being used, it undermines the principle of getting politics back to the people in order for it to be authentic.

Concluding comments on engagement and membership This section has highlighted several areas of concern around Citizens UK’s membership model. The model of membership may need to be adapted as we continue through an ever-changing political landscape, and novel ways of engagement may need to be introduced to combat weak institutional presence in communities. Citizens UK also needs to be actively reflexive of its high faith-

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based membership, and manage its appeal to broader audiences of people who may not be aligned to a faith group. There is also a large social class element that needs to be considered: if members are made to feel uncomfortable when working to this model of organising, or if people are excluded from this model of organising altogether because of their lack of institutional ties, this is a serious outreach problem for Citizens UK. For the organisation to be more inclusive and broad in its membership, as is claimed in their literature, these issues need to be addressed to achieve the social change that will improve the lives of those who are most marginalised.

Ideology, politics, and adaptability This section will explore the challenges of two core ideological themes: remaining apolitical and image management of Citizens UK. These issues are core to the organisation and need to be managed carefully when working for social change as they can affect the scope of the change Citizens UK seeks to achieve.

Importance of remaining politically independent At the ‘ideological’ heart of Citizens UK it is recognised that, to be able to negotiate and work with a vast array of power holders from various political positions, Citizens UK must remain independently funded and non-party political (Warren 2009; Baskerville & Stears 2010; Bunyan 2010; Wills 2012; Beck & Purcell 2013). What Citizens UK aims to do is to look beyond political affiliation and go back to the basics: what is it that is affecting your life and how can we realistically do something about it? (Citizens UK 2013b). Diversity is central to Citizens UK and they claim to be made up of members from a variety of political backgrounds, and to campaign on issues from both right- and left-wing perspectives (Citizens UK 2013b). Across participants there was recognition that it is important for Citizens UK to remain independent and non-party-political in their work in order to be able to work with a range of power holders with different values and beliefs. Several participants also discussed how this was the strength of the model of organising that Citizens UK work with, as it manages to bring together people with different views to work on issues that affect the local community, thus strengthening bridging social capital (Putnam 2000). This has allowed the organisation to see many local successes by working with a range of different power holders, although this has not been without difficulties. It appears, however, that Citizens UK is a great compromise for those members from both the left and the right politically as it allows them to work for gradual social change in a controlled manner. Participants were appreciative of how Citizens UK allows them to engage in social change via clearly

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identifiable campaigns with broad support. Even though participants from all political viewpoints identified a struggle with keeping their political opinions separate from the work they do with Citizens UK, the overall feeling was that it was worth attempting to keep these views separate in order to see the end result.

Left-leaning inclinations Despite acknowledging how important it is for Citizens UK to remain independent, participants highlighted a contradiction at the heart of this model. They recognised that this style of working for social change will always appeal to a certain type of person, typically those with left-wing political inclinations. Participants positioned Citizens UK as being ‘soft left’, ‘centre left’, and a ‘left-wing organisation’, which is in direct conflict with the philosophy of conservatism. The large majority of participants identified as having left-wing political views, which contradicts Citizens UK’s claim that their members are from a variety of political backgrounds (Citizens UK 2013b). Similarly, participants noted that most of Citizens UK’s campaigns fall on the political left, which questions Citizens UK’s statement that they work on issues from both the right and the left of the political spectrum (Citizens UK 2013b). Not all participants agreed with labelling Citizens UK as left wing, however. For example, Dawn (sixth-form student) commented: I know Citizens has been accused of being particularly left wing because they speak about the common good and getting normal people to do these things but really that’s not particularly left wing, well it shouldn’t be, that’s just politics. But the particularly right-wing people [power holders] were kind of brought round by the right-wing people within Citizens so I quite liked that. There seems to be some tensions highlighted by the participants here about whether the organisation comes from a certain ideological background, and how practically feasible it is for Citizens UK to remain non-partisan, particularly when there is not the broad range of political backgrounds represented as is claimed. These accounts also bring into question the organisation’s aims of looking beyond political affiliation to get back to basics and return politics back to the people in everyday forms (Citizens UK 2010, 2014b). Participants suggested that Citizens UK has not successfully managed to look beyond certain political affiliations or views in terms of their membership and aims, thus still leaving much of the engagement at the level of party politics rather than everyday concerns. This could work to alienate those who do not engage with politics and the political spectrum, limiting the membership and the scope for social change.

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Political imbalance pre-election in London 2015 The main event that stood out for participants where the organisation failed to remain apolitical was the accountability assembly held in London in 2015. Held three days before the general election, Citizens UK used this assembly as a fantastic opportunity to have all three main party leaders in a room of 3,000 members, to try to get them to commit to working with the organisation over the course of the next parliament (Citizens UK 2015b, 2015c). The main purpose of this was to build working relationships with the leaders of all the main political parties, hence proving the organisation’s willingness to work with various power holders from a range of political standpoints, or at least those most likely to come to power (Citizens UK 2015b, 2015c). Many participants I spoke with who attended the assembly could not help but point out how much better received by the audience Ed Miliband (then leader of the Labour Party) was than either Nick Clegg (then Liberal Democrat leader) or Sajid Javid (Conservative Party representative). It was even suggested that the reason for David Cameron’s last-minute absence from the assembly was simply because he knew that it was unlikely that he could persuade many of the people present to vote for the Conservative Party in the election. Participants were worried about whether the organisation’s reputation amongst politicians would be affected following the more obvious support for the Labour Party over the Conservative Party at the assembly in London. This is a difficult issue for the organisation to manage and something which will need to be explored in order for the organisation to be able to work with politicians from a variety of backgrounds on an equal footing, and for the organisation to be taken seriously as a power broker representing a diverse civil society (Citizens UK 2013b, 2015b, 2015c). Elizabeth (a member of the Catholic Church), who identified herself as ‘the acceptable right-wing element’ of her local Citizens alliance, was deeply concerned about the way the events in London unravelled. From her perspective, Citizens UK failed to come across as an apolitical organisation, which may affect how much of a successful working relationship they can now gain with the Conservative Party who are in government: at the end of the day the Conservatives won, and we didn’t do ourselves any favours by proving what they all suspect that we are just a left-wing pressure group. There seems to be a disconnect between what Citizens UK aims to be politically and what it achieves in practice, and this tension was noted by participants who had participated in the events in the lead up to the 2015 election. Participants’ accounts suggest that Citizens UK needs a better way to manage the organisation’s overall image, so that it appeals to a broader spectrum of political beliefs. This would help the organisation to keep its

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independent and apolitical stance. However, whether ideology or party politics can ever be separate from community organising is debatable, as illustrated by the participants’ concerns.

Image management, consistency, and adaptability An interesting facet to Citizens UK is its ‘front stage’ management (Goffman 1959). Many of their actions and campaigns are highly controlled, kept to time, and scripted. This provides a method for Citizens UK to carefully manage their image and work with an established format to ensure that they gain what they want from an interaction. This is akin to Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgy model, which suggests that the ‘front stage’ performance is how people (or, in this instance, an organisation) present themselves consistently and appropriately in the given context. Citizens UK describe actions as having a dramatic element, and the methods of achieving their aims as pragmatic (Citizens UK 2013b). This careful control and scripting is an important aspect of Citizens UK’s image management, and impacts upon the success of their campaigns and their ability to achieve tangible social change. It could be argued that the organisation’s adaptability and spontaneity is thwarted in order to work tightly to the Alinsky model of organising.

The language of organising To be able to negotiate and work with power holders, Citizens UK places significant importance on training its members in their Alinsky-inspired techniques (Alinksy 1969, 1971). This training has the purpose of getting members to explore the philosophy behind this style of organising, explaining how concepts such as power, self-interest, and conflict are used in very specific ways (Citizens UK 2013c). The purpose of this is to provide a common language for all leaders when building local alliances, and to ensure that the power is in the hands of the ordinary person when seeking to challenge power holders, although the accessibility of this training has been questioned in this chapter. Language use is of interest here as Citizens UK describe themselves as a leadership development organisation and not a campaigning organisation. Here the distinction is made between ‘campaigns’ and ‘actions’, as ‘actions’ are the heart of community organising and are needed continually to keep the organisation alive. ‘Campaigns’, however, are seen as one-off events that do not bring the potential for development of leaders and relationships, or for tangible social change. The key to the actions Citizens UK run is that they must be ‘winnable’. This brings up an array of questions concerning the scope of social change that this model of organising can achieve if it limits its actions to those that are ‘winnable’ in the current political climate.

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Inability to question the model Despite participants being complimentary about the ideology and methods that Citizens UK adhere to, participants discussed how formulaic and almost cultlike the organisation can be. It was understood that the methods used by Citizens UK in actions need to be controlled to maintain the image of the organisation, but there was a sense of frustration as this control limits members’ abilities to question the methods being used. Even when methods have been questioned before, participants told me how the organisation has been reluctant to take these suggestions on board, as Stephen recounted: but there is this feeling that there’s this whole package that you have to buy or you don’t buy and it’s like, and it’s almost like when you go on the six-day training they’re trying to sell it to you. And although they say they want an argument, if you start picking on it, saying actually no I don’t agree with that or I don’t like that aspect of it or, you feel like they see their job as persuading you and you have to buy the whole package, and I was never gunna do that, that’s just not me. Since speaking with Stephen for this research, I have myself attended the sixday training and heard similar accounts from other trainees. People commented on the limited scope for flexibility and adaptability. Although the training invites you to have an argument and discussion about the methods being taught, when disagreements arose there was a reluctance by Citizens UK staff to engage with them. This rigidity seems counter-productive, and could cause discontent amongst members who may feel as though their grievances, or ideas, are not being listened to by the organisation.

Keeping to script Scripting is used by Citizens UK to ensure events flow well and so that the organisation and its aims come across effectively (Citizens UK 2013b). Participants understood why scripting is used by the organisation and agreed that it is a method of carefully controlling events. However, many struggled with this method and wished there could be more spontaneity. As many Citizens UK events rely on powerful personal testimony to make the actions seem more real, many participants worried that the scripting element of events may make it seem less genuine and too staged. Diane, an Anglican Church leader, was cautious about the prescriptiveness of methods used by Citizens UK. Although she saw it as useful to have a guideline to work with, she argued that in practice this will not always work as tactics should be tailored to who you are working with and what you are trying to achieve. The adaptability of the model is limited, which works to carefully manage the ‘presentation of self’ of the organisation

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(Goffman 1959) at the cost of members’ frustrations. Whether Citizens UK will feel as though it can deviate from the standard template to let organic interactions occur is something that the organisation should consider in terms of going forward, to ensure that all members feel they can express themselves in actions, thus feeling more connected to the model and the social change it can achieve.

Concluding comments on ideology, politics, and adaptability This section has focussed on the challenges of two core ideological themes: remaining apolitical and image management of Citizens UK. It is important to note that, despite these difficulties raised by participants, there was high praise for the pragmatic relationship-seeking methods used by the organisation. The jovial nature of many actions was seen as an alternative and refreshing way of ‘doing’ politics, and ‘the best of what we have got’ to achieve tangible successes. However, with an emphasis placed on actions being ‘winnable’, Citizens UK limits the social change that it can achieve, as it works within the narrow parameters of what is acceptable in the current political regime and does not push or question these political and economic boundaries. Citizens UK accepts the current status quo that power lies with big business and Westminster, despite its rhetoric around building a strong civil society. To this end, Citizens UK struggle to question the large structural mechanisms that entrench and reproduce inequalities today. The scope of the social change Citizens UK can achieve is thus limited and bounded by its Alinksy-inspired belief (1971) that there is potential to achieve social change within the democratic system without questioning the mechanisms that produce injustices in the first place. The rigidity and prescriptive nature of the organisation also means that the methods used will not keep pace with and reflect an evolving political and technological landscape. Additionally, the interview data suggests that negotiating an independent political stance can be a struggle, especially when the individuals involved hold strong political views. Claiming to be apolitical yet only working with the three main political parties in the UK also means the organisation entrenches and only works within the small parameters of established party politics. Citizens UK’s defence would be that they are only working with those likely to come to power, but it seems that, by shutting down communication with other political parties and organisations, Citizens UK does have an ideological and political affiliation. It is limiting the organisation’s remit by not having a broader discussion about inequalities experienced today, although Citizens UK would argue that its actions need to be ‘winnable’ and therefore it cannot get caught up in such large-scale ideas. It is also important to remember that this involvement with political parties may alienate those who have little faith in the political system, and those who

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do not engage with it at all. Perhaps the organisation needs to look beyond the established modus operandi to be able to widen its scope and appeal.

Discussion and personal reflections This chapter has explored many issues that face Citizens UK and its future, including membership and engagement; and ideology, politics, and adaptability. This form of community organising has seen both national and local successes, and participants were dedicated to this model, positioning it as ‘the best of what we have got’. Arguably, Citizens UK offers an effective model of community organising for those who are already partially organised and engaged in an institution. However, its difficulties lie in how it reaches some of the most vulnerable people who fall outside of this remit. It is these people who should be both the actors and the beneficiaries of such an attempt to achieve longlasting social change and social justice. The idea that political ideology can be swept aside seems to be contradictory when some of the main power-holders Citizens UK works with are political party leaders and MPs. The organisation appears to engage considerably within the realms of party politics, which impacts upon the scope of the organisation’s membership and its achievements. This, alongside concerns about engagement, including institutional membership, the complex model, over-representation of faith-based groups, and methods used to negotiate with powerbrokers, remains problematic. The model can appear exclusive, and as something ‘not for the likes of me’ to many people. When attending actions and meetings, you cannot help but feel as though the room is filled with middle-class community members. From observations and from participants’ accounts it seems the breadth and diversity of the organisation’s membership and scope needs to be considerably extended to achieve meaningful social change. And, finally, this chapter raises one important question that has been bubbling under the surface throughout – what exactly do we mean by social change? This is difficult to answer and, as Citizens UK demonstrates, it is achievable on varying scales. As important as small-scale community successes are, it is important to have mechanisms in place to question and explore wider societal issues. The scope of change that Citizens UK can achieve is mirrored to them through the boundaries of the political system. Perhaps it is too utopian and idealistic to consider change beyond this, but some of the most ingrained social inequalities need to be tackled from the root cause and not just by alleviating some of the consequences (Adamson 2016). This chapter has demonstrated that any organisation or social movement that works for social change needs to carefully consider and balance the scope of its ideology and membership to be successful. The findings of this study suggest that, as yet, the scope of the ideology and membership of Citizens UK does not quite reach far enough.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr Dawn Mannay, Dr Eva Elliott and Christina Nascimento for their advice and revisions to drafts of this chapter.

Notes 1 With the exception of Dawn who was just about to start her degree at a highly prestigious university. 2 Five out of eight participants openly identified as Christian. 3 Membership dues are paid by institutions in order to become members of Citizens UK. The amount paid varies due to the size and financial capability of the institution.

References Adamson, D. (2016) Class, poverty and politics in devolved Wales. In: D. Mannay (ed.) Our changing land: revisiting gender, class and identity in contemporary Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 195–213. Alinksy, S.D. (1969) Reveille for radicals. New York: Vintage Books, Random House Inc. Alinksy, S.D. (1971) Rules for radicals. New York: Vintage Books, Random House Inc. Baskerville, S. and Stears, M. (2010) London citizens and the labour tradition, Renewal, 18 (3/4), pp. 65–70. Beck, D. and Purcell, R. (2013) International community organising: taking power, making change. Bristol: Policy Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. Translated from the French by R. Nice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (originally published in 1979). Bunyan, P. (2010) Broad-based organising in the UK: reasserting the centrality of political activity in community development, Community Development Journal, 45(1), pp. 111–127. Burman, E. (1997) Minding the gap: positivism, psychology and the politics of qualitative methods, Journal of Social Issues, 53(4), pp. 785–801. Burr, V. (2003) Social constructionism, 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Christens, B.D. and Speer, P.W. (2015) Community organizing: practice, research, and policy implications, Social Issues and Policy Review, 9(1), pp. 193–222. Citizens UK (2010) Citizens UK: unlocking the power of civil society. Available at: www. youtube.com/watch?v=c-ccuQRCZgI (accessed: 2 July 2015). Citizens UK (2013a) Citizens UK: what is community organising? Available at: www. youtube.com/watch?v=ddBjb-xRPOk (accessed: 2 July 2015). Citizens UK (2013b) The road to 2015. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch? v=qw8pOR9eb_Y (accessed: 2 July 2015). Citizens UK (2013c) Citizens UK impact report. Available at: www.citizensuk.org/citizen s_uk_impact_report (accessed: 2 July 2015). Citizens UK (2014a) Citizens UK, political campaigning without politicians. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkRsZXM8Lus (accessed: 2 July 2015). Citizens UK (2014b) Citizens UK newsletter issue 1: July 2014. Available at: www. citizensuk.org/national_news_issue_1 (accessed: 2 July 2015). Citizens UK (2015a) Citizens UK: 2 year build up to the citizens UK general election accountability assembly 2015. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUgYtpRHR1Y (accessed: 2 July 2015).

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Citizens UK (2015b) Citizens UK newsletter issue 3: Summer 2015. Available at: www. citizensuk.org/national_news_issue_3 (accessed: 2 July 2015). Citizens UK (2015c) Citizens UK manifesto 2015. Available at: www.citizensuk.org/ citizens_uk_manifesto_2015 (accessed: 2 July 2015). Citizens UK (2015d) About us. Available at: www.citizensuk.org/what_we_do (accessed: 2 July 2015). Citizens UK (2015e) Local chapters. Available at: www.citizensuk.org/local_chapters (accessed: 2 July 2015). Citizens UK (2015f) National six-day community organising training. Available at: www. citizensuk.org/six_day_training (accessed: 2 July 2015). Citizens UK (2015g) Donate. Available at: https://citizensnew-citizens.nationbuilder.com/ donate (accessed: 2 July 2015). Cox, J. (2016) The audacity of hopelessness. The Welsh Agenda 57, pp. 6–8. Goffman, E. (1959) The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor Books. Hickel, J. (2012) Liberalism and the politics of Occupy Wall Street. Anthropology of this Century 4. Available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/43389/1/Liberalism%20and%20the% 20politics%20of%20Occupy%20Wall%20Street%20%28LSERO%29.pdf (accessed: 5 June 2015). Holgate, J. (2015) Community organising in the UK: a ‘new’ approach for trade unions? Economic and Industrial Democracy, 36(3), pp. 431–455. Jamoul, L. and Wills, J. (2008) Faith in politics, Urban Studies, 45(10), pp. 2035–2056. Kreiss, D. and Tufekci, Z. (2013) Occupying the political: Occupy Wall Street, collective action, and the rediscovery of pragmatic politics, Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 13(3), pp. 163–167. Kvale, S. (1996) InterViews. London: Sage Publications. Mannay, D. (2010) Making the familiar strange: can visual research methods render the familiar setting more perceptible? Qualitative Research, 10(1), pp. 91–111. Marshall, C. and Rossman, G.B. (2006) Designing qualitative research, 4th ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Mason, J. (2002) Qualitative researching, 2nd ed. London: Sage Publications. Nightingale, D.J. and Cromby, J. (2002) Social constructionism as ontology: exposition and example, Theory & Psychology, 12(5), pp. 701–713. Pickerill, J. and Krinsky, J. (2012) Why does Occupy matter? Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 11(3–4), pp. 279–287. Putnam, R. (2000) Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Rubin, H.J. and Rubin, I.S. (2012) Qualitative interviewing: the art of hearing data, 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Squire, V. (2009) Mobile solidarities: the City of Sanctuary movement and the Strangers into Citizens campaign. Milton Keynes: Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG), The Open University. Studdert, D. (2016) Sociality and a proposed analytic for investigating communal beingness. The Sociological Review, Special Issue: Being in Community: Re-Visioning Sociology, 64(4), pp. 622–638. Tapia, M. (2013) Evaluating community organising: does the context matter? Evidence from the UK, Germany, and the UK. Unpublished paper, New York: Cornell University. Uitermark, J. and Nicholls, W. (2012) How local networks shape a global movement: comparing Occupy in Amsterdam and Los Angeles, Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 11(3–4), pp. 295–301.

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4 WHAT HAS THE INTERNET DONE TO LEFTIST ORGANISATIONS? The impact of using digital media on Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists Noha Atef

Introduction The internet has become a host to almost every political group in the world. The allure of user-friendly, quick and cheap digital communication – alongside a huge online media audience – has encouraged many people to use the platform. Amidst all of this, one question comes to the fore: should leftist movements ‘go digital’ or not? A pragmatic response to such a question lies in what can be achieved by using the internet. In this chapter I answer the following question: how has digital media use by the Revolutionary Socialists group in Egypt influenced the movement? The Revolutionary Socialists is a leftist group that was formed in 1995, inspired by the socialist ideologies of Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin. The rationale behind selecting this group is its achievement in using digital media for communication with the public as well as internally. Moreover, and to a good extent, the Revolutionary Socialists have managed to bridge the digital gap and allow members from different age groups to use social media. To understand how digital media affects the Revolutionary Socialists as a leftist group, I first explain the motivations behind going digital and the process of digitalisation by focussing on its influencing factors. Next, I illustrate the impact of digital media on the group from intellectual and organisational standpoints. Digitalisation in the context of this chapter is the process of using online media, digital devices and mobile applications for internal communication (between members) or for publicity. RevSoc denotes a collection of accounts belonging to the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists movement on different networking sites, including the website RevSoc.me, three Twitter accounts (@Egycapitalism, @Egystrikes and @RevSoc), a YouTube channel (Socialist Television), a Facebook page (The Revolutionary Socialists Movement) and an account on SoundCloud (Socialist

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Radio). The influences of digitalisation on the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists can be identified in three areas: publicity, organisational structure and members’ visions to the revolutionary media. In terms of data collection, I conducted several in-depth interviews with digitalisation leaders in late 2016 and in 2017. Basically, I chose those who could provide insightful answers to questions such as why digitalisation was or was not needed, how it happened and to what it has led. My participants were Hossam ElHamalwy, a famous journalist and blogger who initiated the push toward digital media, and Karim Ali (pseudonym), head of the Publicity Committee, the media arm of the Revolutionary Socialists. Ali preferred anonymity, so I have deliberately concealed any information that might lead to identification. This research was conducted between December 2016 and April 2017 amidst a state of political inactivity in the political arena. A notable decline in street actions started by the end of 2013 when, on 24 November 2013, the former president signed a protest law (Act 107, year 2013) granting the Ministry of the Interior the right to utilise violence to disperse gradually protests in breach of the law (Chapter 2, Article 12), or what Amnesty International described as ‘a serious setback that poses a grave threat to freedom of assembly and gives security forces a free rein to use excessive force’ (Amnesty International 2013). Three years later, in November 2016, the Egyptian parliament adopted a law on civic associations that eliminated civil society by allowing an entity formed by the president to determine all matters related to NGOs in the country, including financial matters. The two laws implicitly criminalised forms of political mobilisation. Furthermore, 2016 witnessed numerous development and rights organisation closures, asset freezing and criminal charges against their members, noting that the establishment of the Egyptian human rights movement in the 1980s and 1990s was largely attributed to the leftists of the 1970s (Shehata 2010). I start this chapter on the impact of the internet on the organisation of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists first by explaining how this leftist movement was digitalised, then I clarify the functions of the internet within the movement and, subsequently, I move on to the discussion of the influence of RevSoc, the digital media package, on the organisation of the Revolutionary Socialists, focussing on the structure, publicity and the understanding of their members of the ‘Revolutionary Newspaper’ notion proposed by Lenin. I conclude the chapter with an evaluation of the Revolutionary Socialists’ adoption of digital media and whether it harmed or benefitted their leftist organisation.

The journey of digitalising the movement Like many leftist movements around the world, Egyptian revolutionary socialist media started underground through a newspaper sold only to members. In the 1990s there were two socialist groups, namely the Revolutionary Socialism

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Group, with their newspaper The Socialist, and the Labour Liberation Group, a Trotskyist group that was founded in the early nineties by students and young leftists, whose newspaper was The Spark. Later on, these two groups united and published The Socialism Flag in 2011. The current The Socialist was not released before 2006, and it is the first publication of this movement to be sold to non-members. From the 1990s until the solidarity movements with Iraq in 2003, Yahoo groups were common discussion boards for political and social activists in the Arab region (Bishara 2012). The Revolutionary Socialists used these groups for theoretical discussions (interview with ElHamalawy 2017), but their revolutionary newspaper remained in print. Commonly, the objectives that motivate political parties to access the internet are mobilisation, fundraising and news agenda; however, these goals were absent in the case of the Revolutionary Socialists. There were, nevertheless, motivations for the Revolutionary Socialists to revise their media practice. The first was the emergence of protest and solidarity movements, which proved capable of mobilising people on the ground and evoked the left to reconsider the efficacy of its communication strategies by asking how a new movement could organise a protest involving thousands in the heart of Cairo while they could not do so. Subsequently, more grassroots organisations were established and their mobilisation had a digital dimension represented in blogs. At that time, a few members inside the movement, including participants in this research, started to push for using social and digital media to promote leftist ideology and actions, as well as to facilitate the Revolutionary Socialist organisation. In 2000, the Palestinian Intifada offered momentum for Egyptian socialists on seeing the huge street actions organised by student organisations; the socialists were totally isolated from these students (ElHamalawy 2013). In fact, the execution of these student protests continued to impress the organised left through their mobilisation on the ground. For instance, in 2003, students from the American University in Cairo demonstrated in Tahrir Square, at the very heart of the city, against the invasion of Iraq, what ElHamalawy (2013) described as ‘the biggest ambition’ of the left. This grassroots action galvanised after the foundation of Kefaya (Enough! – also known as The Egyptian Movement for Change) in late 2004, which was a coalition of leftists, Islamists and different opposition figures who wanted to protest against the Mubarak regime and denounce the potential inheritance of power by his son, Gamal. Kefaya succeeded in convening hundreds of protests nationwide, sometimes with the participation of hundreds and even thousands of people, one of which was in front of the Ministry of Interior premises protesting against torture and illtreatment, something that was ‘surrealistic’ for leftists (ElHamalawy 2013). Effectively, the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists dipping in to digital media was the foundation for a digitalisation process from 2008 onwards. Three distinct phases of digitalisation for the Revolutionary Socialists movement can

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be identified between 2009 and 2016; the first between 2009 and the stepping down of Mubarak in 2011. The first stage of digitalisation started with the launch of the e-socialists.net website on the first anniversary of the Mahalla Uprising, an event involving strike action by around 24,000 textile workers in objection to the corrupt CEO of the Mahalla textile mill. During this first stage, the movement’s website was updated irregularly and most of its content was taken from books, pamphlets and articles about the ideology of Marxism. It was more like an online archive for the literature of the left, rather than a publicity tool. In contrast, in the third phase (from 2012 onwards), news and statements dominated the content of the RevSoc.me website and all the RevSoc media, which was inevitable because of the surge in political activism and labour strikes; for instance, 500 strikes took place in 2011 alone, and almost 3,500 strikes were called in 2012 (Benin 2013). Coverage of such a high number of actions would require bigger publishing platforms than a simple newspaper. In parallel with the early digitalisation phase of the Revolutionary Socialists, a number of Marxist youths used blogs to articulate their ideas. Atef (2016) observes that: these bloggers were keen to highlight their identity, whether by including the name of the organisation in the title of the blog . . . such as ‘Small Socialist Dreams’, ‘Egyptian Left’ or to use images of leaders on the front of the blog, especially Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx. Also their headers usually included pro-leftist slogans, such as ‘I am defending the socialist revolution’. (Atef 2016: 72) Most of the socialist blogs that appeared in 2008 focussed on criticising state policies, exposing a number of cases of administrative corruption in factories, clarifying socialist concepts and covering protest activities carried out by Revolutionary Socialists. In fact, the organisation neither supported these blogs nor confronted them. On the other hand, the blogs rarely tackled the organisation of the left; it could be that these young bloggers were preoccupied with the rebellion against the political system rather than its rebellion against the organisation (Atef 2016). The Revolutionary Socialists started taking to social media in 2008, but they did not have a strong presence back then, mainly because of two reasons: the first was that the choice of channel was not appropriate for a political movement. For instance, on Facebook, the Center for Socialist Studies, the premises of the movement and the venue for its public events, had a personal account, and people were adding it as a ‘friend’ and interacting through comments and posts on the account’s wall. The second reason for the weak presence of the Revolutionary Socialists on social networking sites at the beginning of its

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digitalisation was the lack of originality, meaning that the content was not made especially for social media. For instance, in 2010, the Revolutionary Socialists Movement page was created and linked to the website of the movement in a way that allowed updates from the website to appear automatically on the page. However, in 2012, that all changed, and the personal account of the Center for Socialist Studies and the page of the Revolutionary Socialists were merged into one page, with some members assigned to update it on a regular basis (interview with ElHamalawy 2017). The second phase started with the stepping down of former president Hosni Mubarak in January 2011 and lasted until the end of 2013. In this period, digitalisation saw its quickest pace of advancement. Besides using Revsoc.me from August 2012 onwards, the Revolutionary Socialists also utilised several mobile applications for communication on the ground. In addition, there were further adoptions of digital communication. At the same time, there were no tangible differences between the presentation of content on the website and how it was printed in the newspaper; the names, titles and main body of text remained the same on both outlets. Looking at the timing of publishing, material on the website preceded or came after the publication of the newspaper, because ‘some members finish their contributions earlier than the print time, so they get published earlier than others who just finish on time’ (interview with Ali 2016). There are only marginal differences between the newspaper content and the online copy on RevSoc, so we can say that the content has been ‘adapted’ to digital media rather than ‘changed’. Regarding images on RevSoc, in most cases photos and illustrations that appear in The Socialist newspaper vary from the website. In addition, we find that website photos have captions, whilst in print they do not have such headings. In fact, the Revolutionary Socialists linked the intensity of using social media to the amount of users. Therefore, at the peak of political protest in 2011, 2012 and until late 2013, Facebook was the main channel for the Revolutionary Socialists to publish updates because it was the most popular social networking site globally and locally. In June 2012, the number of Facebook users in Egypt reached 16 million, which was a 41% increase compared with 2011. Clearly, with RevSoc, names given to the accounts of the movement on social media simulate mainstream media. For instance, the SoundCloud channel is called The Socialist Radio and the YouTube channel is The Socialist Television, which I first interpreted as a sign of the counter-discourse these channels would provide, or as being an alternative to the mainstream media. However, as Ali explained to me, these names were given ‘to make an impression of the regularity of content update, which was the case when these accounts were created in 2011’ (interview with Ali 2016). Regularity becomes important because, as Lenin contends in What is to be Done?, the organising newspaper must be published regularly.

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Lastly, the third phase starts from late 2013 onwards when digital media platforms became the common method used for internal communication between different committees and across the Egyptian republic, using mostly Gmail and Skype as they were both familiar and secure. The RevSoc website and social media were used for publishing statements, commentary and event analysis. In fact, since 2011, there had been a practical need to improve internal communication and to adopt fast and secure digital channels, because there were many events convened by the movement, many political incidents to comment on and a tangible increase in membership numbers. Ali affirms that if the Revolutionary Socialists had continued their struggle without revising their internal communication system, especially after 2011, they would have been in serious trouble. He told me: The most negative side of slow or weak internal communication between members of the Revolutionary Socialists [as in the classical face-to-face model] is making many of them unaware of the movement’s struggles, hardships and successes. More importantly, it might cause the movement to lose its coherence and be turned into distant circles of students, farmers, factory workers, etc. (Interview with Ali 2016) Todd Wolfson (2014) proposes the term ‘Cyber Left’ for how the internet is used to establish cross-national communication between leftists. He aligns this concept with the Zapatista movement in Mexico in the 1990s, as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation contacted activists in 1996 to create a network amongst all those involved in the struggle. Nevertheless, the fulfilment of this goal in the case of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists was challenged by a digital and economic gap between members, as buying smartphones or laptops was unaffordable for some of them, whilst others were completely illiterate in digital terms. To get over this issue, the movement encouraged members to purchase smartphones through instalments and stimulated peer learning in relation to mobile use. In fact, the Egyptian environment helped bridge the digital gap, because mobile phone use increased dramatically; for instance, between 2012 and 2013 users increased from 15% to 36% of the total population, and in 2013 active mobile data service users reached 80% (Ministry of Communications 2015). This means that each member should have had at least one family member who could help in learning about this digital technology.

What is digital media used for by the Revolutionary Socialists? Between 2009 and 2015 there were two main functions of the Revolutionary Socialists’ digital media. The first function was as a carrier of content for RevSoc. This was the visible part of the organisation. Using digital media as an

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online backup for publications was an easy job, just a republishing step. However, the production of original online content was difficult. This was either because members did not understand why they should care about digital media, which was the case especially at the start of digitalisation (interview with ElHamalawy 2017), or due to their lack of knowledge and expertise in reporting as, in many cases, members filed reports on events that lacked fundamental information. Therefore, the editorial board of RevSoc.me published a manual on the style of news reporting it expected,1 including corrections of common mistakes made by members. Thus, the Publicity Committee provided advice to members in this regard and held a few workshops to illustrate the essentials of reporting and photography, as Ali informed me. The movement would take any opportunity to enhance the reporting skills of not only its members, but also of supporters who may have wished to contribute. For instance, at an event entitled ‘How to Support the Labour Movement’, which was convened in the Center for Socialist Studies in 2013, ElHamalawy urged the audience not to wait for the mainstream media to cover it. Alternatively, he encouraged them to write about the protest events they attended and then email their reports to The Socialist newspaper, as well as to provide live updates on social media. ElHamalawy also outlined some basics to consider when writing a report or a short update, and provided a checklist of information that must be in any submitted content (The Socialist Television 2013). Overall, the Publicity Committee worked as a filter for reports sent in by members. Consequently, if a member wanted to share textual content with their comrades or with the public, they would just write it and send it to the leader of Publicity Committee, who would then ensure the clarity of the content and double check that it had the classic ‘Five Ws and H’ (which are the basic elements of news reporting: when the story happened, who are the actors in it, where were the incidents and why the story happened), before subsequently publishing it online and then in the movement’s print publication. However, multimedia production was overseen by the Publicity Committee. The second function of digital media for the Revolutionary Socialists movement was supporting internal communication. Here, digitalisation became the adoption of a variety of internet tools and mobile applications for the purposes of fast communication between members and widening their outreach to leadership. Nevertheless, why did the Revolutionary Socialists pay so much attention to the facilitation of internal communication? Hossam ElHamalawy (2013) answers this question in his article ‘ICT and The Revolutionary Organization in the 21st Century’. He likens the Marxist organisation to an army and emphasises the importance of its internal communication apparatus. He cites Sun Tzu’s Art of War to remind us that good generals are capable of communicating effectively with all their soldiers, at the same time, and ruining the communications of their enemies. The article stresses that the weakness of internal communication had turned the movement into a ‘virtual

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organisation’, which only existed in the minds of its leaders, because their visions remained in their heads if they were not shared at the right time with members.

The influence of digitalisation on the Revolutionary Socialists movement Over more than five years, the gradual utilisation of digital technologies had an impact on the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists’ organisation, representation and intellectual levels. Here I detail this under the categories of publicity, organizational structure and the members’ vision to the revolutionary media.

Publicity RevSoc, as a collection of digital media platforms, has become a credible point of reference for the public when looking for information about the movement or its ideology. This is apparent from an increase in the numbers of visitors and followers when the Revolutionary Socialists are in the news. One such example comes from an incident that happened in September 2011, when state-run television broadcast a video on an event at the Center for Socialist Studies. In this video, the socialist leader, Sameh Naguib, spoke, in what appeared to be a seminar, about the need to demolish the old state that had existed before the 2011 revolution and to establish a new one. The same video was also covered on popular talk shows, which increased the number of ‘likes’ on the movement’s Facebook page hugely, from 3,000 to 30,000 users in only 48 hours (interview with Ali 2016). If this had happened before the movement had access to RevSoc, the public would still have been interested in knowing about it, but they probably would not have found credible sources, or they may have found a source but the movement would not have been aware of how many people it had reached. Moreover, online Revolutionary Socialist channels work as a stand from which to refute media smears against the group, such as, for example, through its website articles The Revolution Does Not Demolish. . . it Constructs (‫ﺍﻹﺷﺘﺮﺍﻛﻲ‬ 2011), In Solidarity with The Revolutionary Socialists: Down with the State and Viva our Revolution! (The Socialist Innovation Current 2011), The Revolutionary Socialists present their own Investigation Report (ElBasiouny 2012) and Why Do Revolutionary Socialists want to Demolish the State? (Yousri 2013). At all times, the Revolutionary Socialists regarded publicity as a political position rather than a professional one. Thus, the leaders in the Publicity Committee are sought because they have a very good understanding of the movement’s ideology instead of because they are a professional journalist or technology geek. Internet skills would be a secondary requirement as well as a good command of standard Arabic (Fus’ha).

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Besides helping the movement to widen its audience and to have faster communication with the prospective members, RevSoc enabled the Revolutionary Socialists to know what content people were reading, watching or listening to on their media, as well as knowing the core make up of their audience, in terms of geographical location, age range and gender (interview with Ali 2016). Moreover, digital media guided the Revolutionary Socialists to the times when people are searching for content, whilst readership statistics encouraged them to make and share content, and to act on audience feedback. In practice, using digital media for publicity did not make the Revolutionary Socialists very interactive with internet users or very responsive to them. Actually, the accounts of the movement on most social media platforms were for content broadcasting only. Even at the time of the highest level of political activism, social media platforms for the group were not interactive. Content was published and visitors were allowed to comment on and debate any issues, but moderators would only intervene to delete comments that included swearing or which were deemed as spam. ElHamalawy links the decrease in the sociality of RevSoc to political stagnation, as ‘The rhythm of events is very slow in comparison to three or four years ago. Hence, it is becoming a bit meaningless to ask a member to dedicate time and effort to updating or moderating our Facebook page’ (interview with ElHamalawy 2017). This low interactivity in relation to using social media is common across the world. Studies in Italy (Mascheroni & Mattoni 2013), Canada (Small 2008) and France (Vaccari 2007) show that political parties lack interactivity on social networking sites, what Klinger (2013) describes as a ‘challenge of having to adapt to the new logic of social media’ (p. 733). However, members of the Publicity Committee do look at content viewership analytics and the feedback they receive from social media users.

Organisational structure Digital media required the foundation of subordinate bodies inside the Revolutionary Socialists, whose mission was to run and coordinate the new channels of communication. For instance, the increase in the movement’s media outlets led the publicity committee to expand, to include working groups on world and regional news, features, running the RevSoc YouTube channel, updating the RevSoc account on SoundCloud and looking after the movement’s Facebook page. In addition, the use of digital media in publicising the Revolutionary Socialists has caused changes in the ways in which the movement corresponds with prospective members. Originally, fundamental aspects of member recruitment involved sharing readings with members-to-be and seeking their feedback. In the past, this could take months, especially if there was no movement branch in the applicant’s location. However, after digitalisation, members could comfortably use end-to-end encrypted emails for this step, in what was a time- and money-saving exercise (interview with Ali 2016). Nevertheless, following the launch of the Revolutionary Socialists’ current website, RevSoc.me, in 2012,

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people can now seek membership through an online form, on which they provide personal details, interests and preferences for the sub-committees they may wish to work on should their membership application be successful. On the same form, an email address is provided, just in case applicants experience delays in their membership requests. More importantly, going digital helped the Revolutionary Socialists to increase coherence and avoid potential fragmentation. Basically, the movement was receiving many membership requests during 2011 and 2012, and new members were adhering to different committees based on their geographical location and action groups. It was therefore very likely that they would not get to meet each other unless their paths crossed in one of the movement’s organisations (shared membership of a certain committee or work group) or actions (attending or convening an event together).

Members’ vision to the ‘Revolutionary Newspaper’ Classically, Vladimir Lenin’s The Urgent Tasks of Our Movements (1900), What is to be Done? (1901a) and Where to Begin? (1901b) were essential sources for the leftist’s vision of the media, including that of the Revolutionary Socialists, who believed that the revolutionary newspaper ‘is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer’ (1901). With the fast growth in the number of internet and mobile phone users in Egypt, there was an urge to hop on the train of digitalisation, but the main problem with this was the theoretical foundation of this step. At the early stage of digitalisation (2007 and 2008), Ali and ElHamalawy conducted numerous debates inside the movement to prove that digital media would empower the role of the revolutionary newspaper as the movement’s organiser: ‘In time, comrades were able to see how connecting with each other and to internet users would save time and generate new types of data that were very hard to get without digital media, such as readership statistics’ (interview with Ali 2016). Eventually, following the launch of RevSoc.me in late 2012, the movement released a statement that said: Today, if we consider the website as the organiser, it means that we must update this site minute by minute, and follow political events and activities that occur in Egypt before any traditional source of expertise. The arrival of reports and updates for the site around the clock translates organisationally into the presence of revolutionary correspondents on the ground, getting involved in events and then sending a report to the ‘centre’, which is the site’s editorial board, which imposes in turn a faster rhythm of organisational work. (The Revolutionary Socialists 2012) But, over time, the digitalisation process of the Revolutionary Socialists helped members develop their perceptions of Leninist literature through the revolutionary

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newspaper as well as to reconsider and reinterpret it in the age of the internet. ElHamalawy explains to me ‘We [himself and Ali] were not call for a new thing and claim it matches Leninism, but we urged the comrade to see how digitalisation is a way of achieving Leninism at the age we are living’ (interview with ElHamalawy 2017). The manifestos of the editorial board of Iskra, in 1899, stated that the roles of a leftist organisation’s newspaper should include connecting members, providing news from a socialist perspective and acting as a platform for discussions between members (Taha 1989). The Revolutionary Socialists were conscious of these notions when digitalising their media, and so RevSoc.me has certain sections that represent the movement publicly on the ground. Normally, for different protest events, the Revolutionary Socialists would have two tables set up – one for recent releases and publications, the other for translated books and leftist literature. The movement’s representative flag would be visible, and one of the two tables would be used as a meeting point for members, particularly those tasked with selling copies of The Socialist, the group’s newspaper. Around either of the two tables, the Revolutionary Socialists would hold one-to-one discussions with event participants, answer their questions about the Left and its ideology and explain the membership procedures for those who showed interest in joining. On RevSoc.me, the table for recent leftist publications is now represented by the Media section. Additionally, instead of handing out press releases, these are now available for download under the Press Releases section, and discussions about membership are channelled through email, simply by letting applicants fill in a form on the website. Moreover, debates about the movement’s actions or ideology, between members and the general public, are held online. The expansion of RevSoc and the leap to social media in 2008 have been particularly effective in supporting discussions between members and non-members. The evolution of the vision of the Revolutionary Socialists to digital media is reflected in changes between their old website, e-socialists.net, which was launched in 2009, and the new one, RevSoc.me, which went online in late 2012. The older website had a basic horizontal red banner on the top with one image, and on the home page recent content would be laid out, with a navigation bar in the top middle of the page. Hence, the outline of the old website gave prominence to the textual content. This traditional design reflected ‘a traditional political vision of the function of a website as an online copy of The Socialist newspaper, which the movement was releasing monthly at that time’ (The Revolutionary Socialists 2012). However, as a result of changes in what was expected of digital media’s role, the new website looked radically different, with various sections, videos on the main page and a social media sharing button placed in a prominent position. This gives significance to the choice of the extension ‘.me’ for ‘media’ in the new address of the website, instead of using ‘.net’. Therefore, having a web page on the internet is not merely a case of having an online presence.

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In fact, the newspaper of the workers’ action is becoming digital, seen particularly through Facebook pages that were created for the thousands of strikes that erupted in different sectors in 2011 and 2012 and that ‘served as platforms for the dissemination of content created by workers’ concerns’ (Alexander & Aouragh 2014: 901). This might have been influenced by a push by the Revolutionary Socialists’ activists to engage the strikers, or it could simply have been organic, as Facebook was becoming a handy tool for publicity. In both cases, the examples provided by Alexander & Aouragh (2014) support the fact that the revolutionary newspaper could be digitalised and work in favour of the leftist organisation.

Did digital media benefit or harm this leftist organisation? Digital tools helped the movement avoid possible inarticulateness after increasing its membership in 2011, as they worked to create a public sphere for meeting older members, especially those living in other provinces of Egypt or belonging to other sectors. Moreover, digitalisation quickened the pace of decision-making, since many members’ discussions were facilitated by end-toend emails, facilitated particularly by Gmail. Actually, modern-day leftist issues include internal fragmentation, as well as a lack of cohesive infrastructure and mobilisation (Shehata 2010). Shortcomings in the digitalisation of the Revolutionary Socialists are issues that any political movement may have to face when going digital. Basically, ElHamalawy identifies two main issues: First is that, on social media, anybody can present themselves as a Revolutionary Socialist, just by writing that on their profile or using the #revsoc hashtag. The problem with the person who claims to be leftist is that they can give their insights and present them as if they belong to Leninism. Often, people on social networking sites do think of these opinions are actual representations of the left. The second issue is the fact that the availability of digital content holds members back from reading leftist literature. If one has access to brief and concise reading, as we see with digital content, why would they go and read [lengthy] books? I call this an ‘issue’ because reading is essential for the preparation of a political cadre. (Interview with ElHamalawy 2017) ElHamalawy’s point regarding online content as more consumable intellectual content in comparison with primary sources of the leftist ideology brings to the fore the notion of ‘clicktivism’. Consequently, if members of leftist organisations read distilled online content as an alternative to the deep literature of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, will they, similarly, click hyperlinks on their computers instead of taking action on the town or city square?

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Usually, political movements cite clicktivism as their biggest fear when it comes to digital media, but, in practice, it is not necessarily caused by internet penetration in the organisation. In his article Clicktivism is Ruining Leftist Activism, Micah White (2010) introduced clicktivism as a consequence of the digitalisation of action. Micah, who was co-creator of Occupy Wall Street, gives many examples of online platforms that are used for protesting and describes the influence of their creation on the way leftist actions took place in the US up until 2010. He slammed the commodification of protests and political activism. In fact, White (2010) raised different concerns leftists may have in regard to digitalisation; nevertheless, looking at the many examples he provided, we find the problem of clicktivism arises when digital tools are used to invite the public to take action. Therefore, people who are external to political organisations are more likely to be drawn in to clicktivism, whilst ‘real’ activists will continue to work on the ground as well as online. The solid structure of the Revolutionary Socialists was a shield against clicktivism. ElHamalawy believes that ‘Clicktivism is an action taken in response to the question of “what should we do?” And in a strong organisation, the member is assigned roles and tasks, they get the answer to the “how” question’ (interview with ElHamalawy 2017). Ali agrees that digital media serves activism instead of replacing it, recalling how mobile applications for texts and voice calls worked effectively for members on the ground on occasions of massive action, such as during the numerous protests that took place in Egypt in 2011, 2012 and 2013. The Revolutionary Socialists did not think of digitalisation as a replacement or even an equivalent to activism on the ground – it only facilitates it in real time, for instance by making communication between members easier, faster and cheaper. Furthermore, digital media can help in following up on the results of the activism, for instance by publishing a flyer online and checking the number and demographics of views. Generalising the positive impact of digital media on other leftist organisations requires reflection on the variables that shaped the experience of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists. The digitalisation process employed by the Revolutionary Socialists had three variables. First was the level of political activism or stagnation. The political sphere affected the pace of digitalisation because, at a time of strong mobilisation, the movement was searching for more digital tools to use to publicise work on the ground, for mobilisation, for internal communications between members and for external interaction between the movement and its audience. However, in a time of limited political mobilisation, the Revolutionary Socialists barely explored new digital channels or media and used the online channels already open to them. Second, the match between socialism and using digital communication media influenced the process of digitalisation. As Ali told me, ‘at the start, there were many debates over the compatibility between the internet and the ideology of the left. I remember sharing many papers about whether digital media could

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serve the left – or not’ (interview with Ali 2016). The absence of a discussion about digital media in the classical Marxist literature continued to hinder RevSoc (at the beginning). Third, cultural and economic circumstances pushed the Revolutionary Socialists towards digitalisation, which started from 2008 onwards. Over time, political and social conditions varied several times, due to the frequent changes of regime from 2011 (the stepping down of Mubarak and the taking over of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, the election of President Mohamed Morsi in 2012, the coup d’état in July 2012 and handing the presidency over to President Aldy Mansour, and the election of Abdel Fattah ElSisi in 2013). Amidst this political instability information had to be circulated quickly inside the movement, something that could not have been achieved without using digital technologies, and digital media was a good alternative to most face-to-face meetings because securing digital messages becomes easier than securing personal communication. Furthermore, the 2011 uprising underscored digital activism, through using social media for political mobilisation and the organisation of protest events. There are numerous examples of Egyptian state officials attempting to catch up with the wave of technological advancement sweeping activist communities and portions of civil society in the country by having an online presence of their own. Hence, in 2011, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces started a Facebook page, following which all ministries and governmental bodies followed suit.

Conclusion Digital media could be employed successfully to serve a leftist organisation in both publicising and facilitating organisational work. In the case of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists, digital media platforms act as carriers of the content of their publications and allow members to connect instantly and cheaply. These sites and pages help particularly in reaching out to those who may be on the run or living abroad. In the assessment of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists, clicktivism is less likely to affect members of political groups, and so the solid organisation of a group will result in no members limiting their actions to the internet and becoming inactive on the ground. Effectively, digital media has served the Revolutionary Socialists in terms of becoming a trusted news hub and a point of reference for the public seeking information about the left. Besides, at the internal level, digital media supports the coherence of the movement through the creation of communication channels between members, especially after the 2011 uprising saw the number of members increase; a possible lack of contact between members would have led to internal fragmentation. Furthermore, the process of joining the movement became easier and faster with the facilitation of digital media, as internet services enabled members from outside the capital city of Cairo to apply remotely.

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Note 1 http://revsoc.me/messages/styleguide.

References Alexander, A. & Aouragh, M. (2014). Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution: The Role of the Media Revisited. International Journal of Communication, 8, 890–915. Amnesty International (2013). Egypt: New Protest Law Gives Security Forces Free Rein. Amnesty International Press Releases, at: www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2013/11/ egypt-new-protest-law-gives-security-forces-free-rein (accessed April 12, 2017). Atef, N. (2016). The Media of People: Between the Media of the State and Mediatization (1st ed.). Cairo: Al-Arabi Publishing House (‫)ﺩﺍﺭ ﺍﻟﻌﺮﺑﻲ ﻟﻠﻨﺸﺮ ﻭﺍﻟﺘﻮﺯﻳﻊ ﺩﺍﺭ‬. Benin, J. (2013). Workers, Trade Unions and Egypt’s Political Future. Middle East Research and Information Project, at: www.merip.org/mero/mero011813 (accessed April 12, 2017). Bishara, M. (2012). The Invisible Arab: The Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolutions (1st ed.). New York: Nation Books. ElBasiouny, M. (2012). ‘The Revolutionary Socialists Submit their Own Self-investigation Report’. The Revolutionary Socialists Movement, at: http://revsoc.me/politics/lshtrkywnlthwrywn-yqdmwn-mdhkr-thryt-n-nfshm (accessed April 12, 2017). ElHamalawy, H. (2013). ‘Information Technology and the Revolutionary Organisation in the 21st Century’. The Revolutionary Socialists, at: http://revsoc.me/-10787 (accessed April 12, 2017). Klinger, U. (2013). Mastering the Art of Social Media: Swiss Parties, the 2011 National Election and Digital Challenges. Information, Communication & Society, 16(5), 717–736. Lenin, V. (1900). The Urgent Tasks of Our Movements. Moscow: Iskra. Lenin, V. (1901a). What Is to be Done? Moscow: Iskra. Lenin, V. (1901b). Where to Begin? Moscow: Iskra, 13–24. Mascheroni, G. & Mattoni, A. (2013). Electoral Campaigning 2.0—The Case of Italian Regional Elections. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2(10), 223–240. Ministry of Communications (2015) Measuring the Digital Society in Egypt: Internet at a Glance, at: www.mcit.gov.eg/Upcont/Documents/Publications_1272015000_Measur ing_the_Digital_Society_in_Egypt_12_.pdf (accessed April 3, 2017). Shehata, D. (2010) Islamists and Secularists in Egypt: Opposition, Conflict & Cooperation. Abingdon: Routledge. Small, T. A. (2008). Equal Access, Unequal Success—Major and Minor Canadian Parties on the Net. Party Politics, 14(1), 51–70. The Revolutionary Socialists (2012). To Comrades: A Political Paper about the Revolutionary Socialists. The Revolutionary Socialists, at: http://revsoc.me/-14474 (accessed April 12, 2017). The Socialist Innovation Current (2011). In Solidarity with the Revolutionary Socialists: Down with their State and Viva our Revolution. The Revolutionary Socialists Movement, at: http://revsoc.me/statements/18695 (accessed April 12, 2017). The Socialist Television, ‫ﺕ‬. (2013). Alternative Media and Labour Movement. Youtube, at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDI8KabM3L0 (accessed April 3, 2017). Taha, Y. (1989). Lenin. The Role of Journalism in the Foundation of the Revolutionary Party. The Spark ‫ﺍﻟﺸﺮﺍﺭﺓ‬, at: http://revsoc.me/-5913 (accessed April 14, 2017).

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Vaccari, C. (2007). Surfing to the Elysee: The Internet in the 2007 French Elections. French Politics, 6(1), 1–22. White, M. (2010). Clicktivism is Ruining Leftist Activism. The Guardian, at: www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/12/clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism (accessed April 14, 2017). Wolfson, T. (2014). Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left (History of Communication). Champaign:University of Illinois Press. Yousri, A. (2013). Why Do the Revolutionary Socialist Want to Demolish the State? The Revolutionary Socialists Movement, at: http://revsoc.me/politics/33223 (accessed April 12, 2017). ‫ﺍﻹﺷﺘﺮﺍﻛﻲ‬, T. S. (2011). The Revolution Does Not Demolish. It Constructs. The Revolutionary Socialists Movement, at: http://revsoc.me/politics/lthwr-l-thdmbl-tbny (accessed April 12, 2017).

PART II

Political spaces of the left

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5 HISTORICIZING THE GEZI REBELLION IN TURKEY Tracing revolutionary ideas in action Bora Erdağı

One of the main problems of historiography is to make history comprehensible and to use historical experience in favor of life itself. This is the main focus of polarization and tension between historians and theorists. Historians approach an era on the principle that every era has its own characteristics so when they try to name an era, they focus on its incidents, events, schemes and cultural aspects. These provide the data for naming the era, as long as they can be expressed in general terms. However, this is not as easy a task as it seems because naming is used for defining the unique features of both the past and the present. Therefore, naming is concerned with tradition. The events that are articulated to the body of knowledge lead the naming process to develop anew by invention or discovery. The new name finds its basis in the invention/ discovery that reforms the body of knowledge. Without this knowledge, historical events cannot be presented as reformations. The name itself indicates a period that will become a new era. For theorists, however, neither the periodizations of historians nor history itself correspond to a conceptual perspective. To them, history and its periodizations are abstract universal characteristics of the concept. Therefore, theorists are often skeptical of any knowledge of the era or everyday life. Thus, most theorists disregarded ethnological, anthropological and historical knowledge until the historiography as a field of study was founded. Critical thinking by both historians and theorists has influenced this notion of historiography. Accordingly, it is impossible to encounter a theoretical attempt that is not nourished by analyses of events and processes, and the naming of historians. I follow this tradition of historiography in this chapter.1 With the help of the principles and the tools of materialistic historiography, I try to analyze, understand, participate in and thus name a rebellion that occurred in Turkey in 2013. I primarily focus on the roots and development of the Gezi Rebellion while questioning similar historical processes. I aim to take a

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standpoint that can reveal the originality of the Gezi Rebellion as an event. In so doing, I keep in mind the following point: a historical event is always distinct and authentic; it always resists interventions; as it emanates from material social relations, it represents the concreteness of the life world and is also always temporal and spatial. The philosophy of history deals with a dilemma about knowledge of the event. One side is speculative history, which finds its prototype in Hegel and the retrospective view; the other side is historical narration, based on atomistic thought and Herder. I will try to by-pass this dilemma by organizing a dialectical text that corresponds to the subject of the article, i.e., the Gezi Rebellion in Turkey. Primarily, I try to demonstrate the materialist starting points from which the Gezi Rebellion progressed as a resistance. Subsequently, I try to specify the schemes that correspond to these starting points. In so doing, I aim to reconstruct the commonalities between the Gezi Rebellion and (revolutionary) ideas and potentials. While tracing these revolutionary ideas, the final section of the chapter reveals the Gezi Rebellion’s historical gestures, attitudes, and potentials.

Historicizing the Gezi Rebellion Istanbul is the religious, historical, economic, ideological, geo-strategic and cultural focus of Turkey. Hence, whoever wants to be in power in Turkey has to take the power in Istanbul first.2 This inevitably creates tensions as governments develop projects for Istanbul in order to promote themselves. However, the projects in question do not always correspond to Istanbul’s needs and usually appear as unnecessary interferences in the scene of the city. Projects that are not well planned and do not have public support also cause trouble for cultural and natural properties. More specifically, Taksim and Beyoğlu are crucial locations for Istanbul, just as Istanbul is crucial for Turkey. They are the thresholds, the gates, of Istanbul, and have been ever since the late Ottoman Empire.3 In almost every sense, Istanbul, Taksim, and Beyoğlu are the representative faces of the country. Hence, the project to reconstruct Taksim Gezi Park, which led to the Gezi Rebellion, is a perfect example of such government interference. Taksim’s Gezi Park is the largest public park and the only green area in what is probably the most populated section of Taksim and the surrounding area. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, relying on their electoral power and similar governmental experiences, decided to redevelop Gezi Park under the Taksim Pedestrianization Project (October 4, 2012). The most crucial part of this project is rebuilding Halil Paşa Topçu Kışlası, the artillery barracks built in 1806 and demolished in the 1940s. Gezi Park was built over an even larger area during the 1940s before being reduced to its present size through the efforts of various city mayors over the years. Conservative and Islamic movements have routinely expressed a desire to build a mosque in this part of the city as they continually criticize the vibrant nightlife of Taksim and Beyoğlu.

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However, the idea of rebuilding the Halil Paşa Topçu Kışlası was new. When the project was first announced to the public, officials first stated that Halil Paşa Topçu Kışlası would be used as a hotel and shopping mall, then a hotel and art galleries, suggesting that, in the long run, it would become a city museum. The fate of the project remains unclear and is awaiting the decisions of various courts and administrative bodies. It seems, though, that the Taksim Pedestrianization Project is on hold, meaning that Gezi Park is not yet lost.4 Most of what happened in the history of the space called Gezi Park is neither unique nor new. At least, it is no different from what happened in Baltimore (Harvey 2000: 113–145), or in Chinese cities (Harvey 2012: 57–65) or in London’s Hyde Park (Mitchell 2003: 1–15). As with these cases, Turkey’s AKP government is trying to leave its mark on Taksim and Beyoğlu through a symbolic structure in order to achieve immortality and inevitability. Previous historical experience shows that this desire is neither the first nor likely to be the last.5 However, the situation is also complex. For example, the government is also expressing, via this project, its acceptance of a neo-liberal conception of property in that the former object of desire,6 the mosque, has given way to a mall-hotel complex. One might say that the government is hoping to enjoy the best of both worlds: to resurrect former values and to make money out of it. In other words, its priority has changed from a public one of protecting and improving cultural and natural properties to a private one of commodification, marketization, and exchange. This corresponds well to the internalization of neo-liberal politics over conservative references. Thus, it is not possible to locate the Gezi Rebellion solely in relation to the symbolic and general perspective of the government because the banalization created by these perspectives can only be criticized politically. However, this is not sufficient to understand the process historically. In order to comprehend what happened in Gezi Park, one needs to shrink the scale to micro levels, as in materialist historiography (while also keeping general levels in mind); in analyzing what happened in Gezi Park in this way, I will focus on revising various ideas.7 The Gezi Rebellion broke out in June 2013 under the right-wing conservative AKP government that has been in power in Turkey since 2002. To the great masses in Turkey and to the broader international community at the time, the AKP had so far maintained consistent economic growth since 2007 and resolved the issue of military tutelage, which had been a longstanding problem in Turkey. The government had also aimed at making Turkey into a regional political actor and had already managed to make Turkey a member of the G20. How then did a redevelopment project for Gezi Park provoke such protests that they nearly brought down a so-called ‘successful’ government? To understand this, we should focus on some consistent political aspects of the AKP governments: namely, economy, law and state, everyday life and oppression. The economy had improved seemingly consistently as the government transformed the investment climate through radical legislation in favor of international investors to make everything available for international capital

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to exploit: from tax reductions to promotions; from deregulation of trade conditions to reorganizing state bidding laws; from promoting specific investment sectors (such as mining, energy, finance and construction) through special laws to permitting non-recorded money transfers or money laundering; from ignoring the environment and public health to making agriculture and stockbreeding dependent on outside financial sources. The AKP managed to avoid the recession of 2008 through hot money flows from the Gulf States, Iraqi Kurdistan, and North Africa, and was able to maintain economic growth. The integration of Anatolian capital into global markets partly protected Turkey’s fragile economy from the crisis. From the standpoint of workers, however, things were not as successful as they seemed: wage increases remained limited while income inequality increased. While the country as a whole got richer (national average income surpassed $10,000 a year), the majority could not benefit from the wealth.8 State welfare spending was limited, while the health and education systems were increasingly going under the direct control of corporations. Despite this, there was almost no significant opposition or protest, even though the people were losing hope that the economy would eventually develop in favor of the masses. One exception was the TEKEL Resistance,9 which erupted in 2009. Generally, however, the realities of instability and poverty were disguised by stable economic growth, despite the desperate conditions of the masses. Perhaps the most important achievement of the AKP government was to eliminate military tutelage and bring military actors to the court during its first and second terms, although the contributions of the United States and the European Union should not be ignored.10 Eliminating this tutelage gave the AKP the opportunity to take sole control of the state apparatus, which it achieved by reorganizing its public support, highlighting economic success, promoting Turkey’s prestige in the Arabic world and taking advantage of the weakness of the political opposition and civil society. These factors enabled AKP to take total control of the state apparatus and consolidate itself—which is when the problems began. From this moment on, all the forces, both domestic and foreign, that had supported this conservative-democratic government, began to withdraw their support: first liberals in Turkey, then the European Union, then various non-governmental organizations. Through its control of the state apparatus (specifically the military, police, intelligence services, legal system and other bureaucratic structures), the AKP positioned itself as an all-powerful government acting with raison d’état. Nourished by a new civil tutelage, AKP’s vocabulary became more intolerant, using terms like infidelity, enemy, and foreign powers. One of the most important qualities of the government had been its ability to by-pass laws that previously regulated Turkey’s legal system through the Omnibus bill, rapid expropriations, delegated legislation, transformations, and reassignments in the supreme board of judges and prosecutors and other institutions. These strategies cleared the way for what many considered to

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be tactical and strategic moves to maintain economic stability and to articulate Turkey’s place within global neo-liberal politics.11 This process also dragged the government into various attempts at reorganizing everyday life. Encouraged by conservative demagogues in the media, these efforts became general opinions used for manipulation by the government in its discourse of stability and structuring democracy. The government’s terminology, marinated with morality and religion, increased oppression through many interventions in everyday life: from new limitations on the consumption of alcohol and tobacco to regulations on abortion; from the supervision of cesarean sections to mandatory religious lessons; from early-age Quran education to agitations for freedom to wear the headscarf; from censorship and offences prosecuted under censorship laws to growing imprisonment of journalists; from internet supervision to interfering with how many children a woman ought to have; from forbidding mixed-gender student accommodation to a daily renting system. Without military tutelage, the police force became increasingly important and authoritarian. The results were quick to emerge in the form of arbitrary wiretappings, unjustified detention, and the normalization of arrests without trials. Given these circumstances, the masses began to react to the pressure for the first time and to openly express their discontent (Tombuş 2013: 312–327; Tuğal 2009). Based on the arguments above, it is reasonable to claim that, although the Gezi Rebellion broke out suddenly, it was also a manifestation of the accumulated oppression of society. That is, it was the awakening of different sections of society to their pauperization, precaritization, intimidation and oppression by the government’s state apparatus and by police power in particular. Thus, the reasons for the Gezi Rebellion lie much deeper, at the core of a significant social uneasiness, than the redevelopment project itself. This is why the protests surprised the AKP government.

From the Gezi Park protests to the Gezi Rebellion After the Taksim Pedestrianization Project was approved, the Taksim Gezi Parkı Koruma ve Güzelleştirme Derneği (Association for the Protection and Beautification of Taksim Gezi Park) immediately appealed the decision to prevent its execution and organized local demonstrations. Not many people paid attention to the project until May 27, the day that destruction of the park’s trees started, and May 28, the day when a Member of Parliament from Halkların Demokratik Partisi (People’s Democratic Party, HDP), Sırrı Süreyya Önder, struggled to halt the work. The crowd that gathered that day to support the protesters marked the beginning of the popularization of the protest. On the night of May 29, people’s awareness of the situation started to change as police forces occupied the park and burnt down the protesters’ tents. Reports of the incident over social media started numerous protests across the country so that a localized protest that began to protect a few trees turned into a nationwide resistance. Before May 29,

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a solution could have been found through the rule of law within the bounds of representative democracy. Just a response from the government to civil society’s demand for their right to the city and an attempt at negotiation would have been enough. However, this was not the case. From May 29 to June 14 there were acts of civil disobedience and protests arranged by civil society that resisted the redevelopment of public domains without asking their opinion. Until June 14, the experience of direct democracy, the codetermination mechanism that was revealed in Gezi Park, spread throughout Turkey and actualized through forums on the theme of ‘everywhere is Taksim; resistance is everywhere.’12 After meeting with the then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Taksim Solidarity, a group composed of the representatives of the major civil societal organizations that joined the protests, organized a forum open to the general public to share their impressions of the meeting. Collectives and individuals joined together and discussed the course of action. Taksim Solidarity announced the decision that came out of the forum: they were to continue the resistance until their demands were met. On June 15 police forces once again attacked the protestors occupying the park. The police used excessive force, showing protesters how brutal the repressive state apparatus can be. In fact, the government at first could not manage to assess the protests properly and avoided criticisms by circumlocutions. They tried to regain control of the masses by strategic moves but the result was unsatisfactory: the more police power increased, the more the resistance strengthened. This clearly contributed to turning the Gezi Rebellion into a resistance—its third phase, which continued until the forums were dissolved in August. Ulrike M. Meinhof explains the difference between protest and resistance using a comment by Fred Hampton, one of the leaders of the Black Panthers: Protest is when I say I don’t like this and that. Resistance is when I see to it that things that I don’t like any longer occur. The protest is when I say I will no longer go along with it. Resistance is when I see to it that no one else goes along with it anymore either. (Meinhof 2008: 239) From this point of view, it is not possible to approach the Gezi Rebellion as a collection of protests. That is to say, resistance is a massive rebellion that is not for one day, but day after day; not in a city, but everywhere; not a symbolic act, but a concrete one. The quantitative difference between protest and resistance is due to repetition in that the quantitative limits of protests are exceeded and transformed in resistance: manipulation turns into witch-hunts; simple police encounters turn into deadly battles; threats turn into violence. The vision of the destruction becomes clear. This kind of transformation naturally awakens polarization and total resentment so that it is no longer just a temporary controversy but a mutually-positioning clash of powers. As such, the Gezi Rebellion’s resistance is very similar to other rebellions, from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring’s Egyptian Revolution, in

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terms of its urbanized image, its ability to attract supporters across the country, and its management of social and political mobilization (Bookchin 1996–2003; Cassano 2013; Lissagaray 2012).13

The emergence of resistance: from sighing and murmuring to conflict The uneasiness of the kind growing in Turkish society under the AKP governments does not always lead to conflict but causes sighing and murmuring. As Sigmund Freud noted, civilization is already the source of uneasiness so uneasiness, sighing, and murmuring is familiar to everyone. However, the context of conflict is totally different: sighing and murmuring are sufferable for both the sovereign and the oppressed. Ernst Bloch uses these concepts while discussing the relationship between anger and idiocy. Bloch argues that people who lose their desire to enjoy life begin to mumble instead of sighing. Principally, enjoying life means being satisfied by the powerful one/system. Hence, for Bloch, sighing can be a sound of satisfaction (or be uttered in the hope of gaining satisfaction from the powerful one/system) whereas murmuring is a turning of one’s back on a vision that is getting more and more complex. Murmuring expresses negation as much as sighing represents positivity (Bloch 2009). During the first period of the Gezi Rebellion (before May 29), uneasiness expressed itself as sighing for there was still a possibility of negotiation. When the second period began (between May 29 and June 14), murmurings and the chaotic noise of the psychotic speech uttered in these murmurings infiltrated the Gezi Rebellion. Whereas sighing is a reaction to an inability that may be overcome, murmuring, which is based on insecurity rather than inability, can turn into conflict, just like the reactions of a teenager. This conflict is the horizon of a breaking point: by advancing from sighing to murmuring and murmuring to conflict, there is also, as it were, an advancing from childhood to teenage years and from teenage years to maturity. In other words, a birth, a beginning, a constituent move that is shaped in flesh and bones turn real. During this evolution from protest to resistance the Gezi Rebellion reacted against everything that came its way and ultimately rose while metamorphosing. This raised inability and insecurity to a new level that led to struggle as a confrontation or aggressive conflict. Whether it springs from awakening or from a search for life, conflict nourishes a possible alternative to domination. It is not important whether it finds its way through master–slave dialectics in the moment of the unhappy consciousness of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, or through Karl Marx’s assertion in The Communist Manifesto that history is the history of class struggle. These possible ways coincide at the point where conflict opens the door slightly to freedom. Bloch explained the movement in ‘From Sighing to Murmuring:’ The name of address of those who have caused [this movement from sighing to murmuring] and kept it going has in the meantime become

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fairly well known. Their dwelling-place is recognized however they put on a new disguise or seek false anonymity. And it is a very earthly one: very much a place of flesh and blood which has been seen through and is, therefore, in our power if we want it so—not simply above us. So this state of affairs could quite clearly be prevented—could even be used—by us and, by us alone. (Bloch 2009: 6) Bloch makes an interesting point in claiming that ‘this state of affairs could quite clearly be prevented—could even be used—by us and, by us alone.’ It is my contention that the prevention of this state of affairs is a starting point for the conflict. The historicity of the conflict corresponds to a certain level of comprehension: comprehending that maturity as an earthly state of existence in ‘flesh and blood’ is always conscious of what it is fighting against. With this comprehension, both criticism and constitutive movement shift from delusion to reality. The main problem, I would argue, for societies like Turkey that rely too much on custom is that they have difficulty making this transition from delusion to reality. In Turkey’s case, however, the Gezi Rebellion succeeded in that. If enlightenment is ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’ as Kant argues (Kant 2006: 17–24), then maturity/conflict is wo/man’s emergence from her/his teenage phase or murmuring. The Gezi Rebellion, therefore, marks the moment when those who emancipated themselves from their teenage phase moved towards maturity; or, better, these rebels began to experience a transition from delusion to reality, from murmuring to fighting against the now comprehensible enemy. The Gezi Rebellion meant the resistance of boys, girls, minorities, commons, teenagers and white-collar workers against the imagination of a government that was striving to be the parens patriae, father or big brother of its citizens.14 In modern society, citizens have some rights even though they are abstract while the sovereign has limits, and the balance between the citizen and the state is protected. Did the recent sovereign in power manage that? No. Instead, people declared ‘Don’t let it go any further!’ and ‘Individualization is a devastating act!’ Journalists close to Prime Minister Erdoğan reported that he seemed very disappointed during his North Africa visit from June 3 to 6. Why would a prime minister/parens patriae/father feel such disappointment? This was probably because of his resentment at not being acclaimed by part of society. As long as he was still acclaimed by the majority of society then the rebels of Gezi could be described as bad apples; to do otherwise would have been unimaginable. As the PM declared on June 16: ‘Worms must be destroyed or rehabilitated on behalf of the tree’s well-being.’ Yet, already seven people, six of them civilians, had died; 9,000 people, 8,163 of whom were civilians, had been injured, more than 10,000 people had been taken into custody, 156 arrested, and about 2.5 million people had protested against the government. The PM and the government expressed their hatred in strikingly harsh language: ‘I don’t know whether

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to eat them [the protesters] or rub them out;’ ‘If the game is not worth it, we can ignore our children like Noah did.’15 Indeed, the brutality inscribed in the comments of the PM and the government were arguably officially represented by their actions. In this context of the loss of the balance between the prerogative of the sovereign and the citizen, resistance proved itself to be a legitimate response of civil society against state oppression.

From tendencies of identity to class politics So far, I have tried to clarify some aspects of the Gezi Rebellion without focusing on its very actors. In this section, I try to focus on the actors and the political junctions, gaps, or cracks between these actors, and to specify who these rebels were. For the government and its supporters, the rebels were looters, pesticides, infidels, Armenians, Greeks, Zionists, collaborators of international powers; people living like pigs and experiencing sexuality like animals; people entering mosques with their shoes on and attacking headscarf-wearing women. For sympathizers, they were the Y-generation, educated youngsters, messianic rebels with their irony and positiontaking; anybody who has been subjected to peer pressure. The government and its supporters variously stigmatized the rebels as nationalists, secularists, elitists, marginal leftists and Ergenekon supporters.16 Interestingly, earlier descriptions focused directly on the protestors’ actions and identities while later ones focused on their political dispositions.17 Ultimately, these characterizations were insufficient considering the extent, dynamics, demands, and spatial-temporal conditions. Because the actors of the Gezi Resistance came from various layers of society, the resistance had different supporting beams. The most crucial was the so-called ‘new middle classes,’18 consisting of financiers, specialists, consultants, managers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, academics, NGO members, journalists, teachers, nurses, and officers—the ones who had benefited from economic growth. They maintained their everyday life within a culture of consumption related to their ‘lifestyle.’ They cared about their desires but also about environmental and technological issues and developments. Despite a media-wide blackout and other obstacles erected by the government, the protesters managed to communicate via social media. These urbanites did not depart from their sense of humor even while clashing with the police. Because nearly all were fluent in foreign languages, they helped forge public opinion internationally by presenting the truth. Their new class relations also enabled them to organize the masses, treat the injured and inform the media while standing up against the police interference. Various corporations and bar associations, the Chamber of Medical Doctors (TTB), Union of Chambers of Architects and Engineers (TMMOB), Confederation of Unions of Social Workers (KESK), Confederation of Unions of Revolutionary Workers (DISK), and other opposition NGOs provided extraordinary logistical support for protesters by building shelters, thereby proving how the rebellion was first and foremost associated with the new middle classes.

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This new middle class included citizens from various ethnic, cultural and religious groups. Their common ground was holding on to life individually. Before the Gezi Rebellion, they lived a seemingly apolitical existence but now they became obviously politicized through their everyday life experiences. This transformation enables us to collect more information on this class, which also has the potential to transform society from a community society based on artificial identities into a class society. Changing the scale of the analysis certainly does not make identities insignificant, but, without mentioning the new middle-class emphasis, it is not possible to understand this resistance. Just as Jacques Rancière notes, the politics of identity also refers to a crisis of the impossibility of identity. Rancière uses the expression ‘identity impossible’ for stating the subject while analyzing the concept of the ‘political’. Due to neoliberal politics, Rancière asserts, most of the identities that gain ever-increasing hegemony are no longer political, in Aristotelian terms. Rather, they exist as subjects as identified by free market conditions. From this point on, identities are beings of policy. The difference between the political and policy is a contrast similar to that between the real and the artificial or between use value and exchange value. Market conditions distribute equal discursive identities that cause universal recognition, validate people and insulate them from the tensions of the political field. People are boiled down to mere forms by universal categories. This also causes all subjectivities, experiences, and authenticities to be wasted. Therefore, encounters between identities and political fields cause major battles, as exemplified by the Gezi Rebellion. The solution to the problem of impossible identities lies, for Rancière, in reconstructing the political field. That is to say, these impossible identities have to reunite at the forefront that is immanent to their existence (Ranciere 2004). This is the reason why an analysis of the new middle class is needed in order to comprehend the Gezi Rebellion. But, first of all, we need very briefly our political history. The founding ideology of the Turkish Republic, i.e., Kemalism, as a continuation of the political imagination of the Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress) of 1908, attempted to begin the Westernization of the country. Until the 1950s, Turkey’s middle and upper-middle classes and the state elitists defended secularism, republicanism, Western-style modernization and the market economy in line with the founding ideology. As a result, discussions on the dichotomies of urban–rural and center–periphery dominated the analyses of modernization in Turkey. By the 1990s, however, due to the transition to multiparty politics, the rise of Kurdish politics, and neoliberalization, a new middle class identified by tradition, religion and local values, and ready to integrate with global capital, began to rise from the so-called periphery. This new middle class and the political movements that represent it gained power until they were able to overturn the existing dynamics of Turkish politics to their own advantage through successive AKP governments. Therefore, besides the old middle class loyal to the founding ideology, a new middle class had emerged that was conservative, mostly religious and loyal to a Turk-Islam tradition, yet always

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collaborating with the West (Çoşar and Yücesan Özdemir 2012; Tuğal 2009). The position and lifestyle of the middle classes involved in the Gezi Resistance had also been threatened by the emergence of this conservative new middle class. In a sense, it was a scene of shifting power from the old to the new middle classes. What then is the reason that brought the new middle class onto the streets? It was mainly problem-driven politics. That is, they were afraid of losing their everyday life practices and identities. When they experienced freedom and the politics of critical movements in the resistance, a change began. The new middle class joined this resistance either to save the trees or to start a revolution. More importantly, in Turkey, they were threatened by the government both through precaritization of working conditions and through the disruption of their everyday life patterns.19 This naturally brought these classes into an alliance with others that were also similarly threatened: specifically, the lower classes, as the natural addressee of all crises, as the ones always in an extraordinary situation, in other words, socialists that represented the proletariat, parties, journals, associations and other collectives. The fate of the process was shaped when different social layers united in one aim. Marketization not only increases proletarianization but also commodifies everything it touches. Hence, resistance against marketization unifies all these classes whose lives are determined by commodification and proletarianization. The minimum condition uniting the resisters of the Gezi Rebellion was to eliminate unlawfulness; while still unclear, the maximum condition appeared to be mainly to generalize political democratization. Even though they offer no concrete alternative to the government, the middle and lower classes created a totally new understanding: solidarity, multitude, accountability, direct representation, altruism, initiatives on public goods, encounters, freedom of thought and expression, gender equality, the struggle against hate crimes, and facing the historical persecution of minorities and atoning for them.

Political promises of the Gezi Rebellion I have attempted to delineate the transformational moments of rebellion within the reaction to the destruction of Gezi Park and to construct a historical progression, from sigh and murmur to conflict; from identity politics to class politics. At this point, I try to analyze this new phase. In order to do so, I shall focus on the similarities between other rebellions by explaining how these diverse rebellions realized their potential. I have already asserted that it is possible to trace similarities, such as historical gestures, between the Gezi Rebellion and pre-1968 Germany through Meinhof’s writings. Others have compared the rebellion with historical events like the Paris Commune, and current events such as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring or Stuttgart 21. Undoubtedly, all these analogies were established

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around political gestures, subjects, demands, and promises, but the main concern of the analogies is common: to historicize the Gezi Rebellion and demonstrate its unique position. Thus, before considering the Gezi Rebellion in terms of the events of 1968, I should explain my insistence on thinking about it in these terms. The events of 1968 had two important focuses initially: one in the USA and one in France. After protests spread internationally, Europe became the center. In May 1968, events in Paris began following a massive police response to student demonstrations. As Ian Birchall showed, the main problems were the substantial growth in the number of students compared with derogation on the labor market, unfair competition and decreasing quality of education. All these problems naturally increased student anxiety concerning the future and limited their life standards. The massive police response to demonstrations by students trying to voice their demands caused indignation in society and created sympathy towards them. While the May 1968 events and the Gezi Rebellion share many similarities thus far, they diverge in that the earlier events evolved into a general strike. In May 1968, unions and traditional parties had to acknowledge the civil unrest popularized by the students so they called a general strike. This empowered the masses, who now believed in their own strength and they gained support from international opinion. The general strike made two things visible: that private property and the right of the government to sovereignty had to be questioned. The general strike could have evolved into a crisis of global capitalism, leading to a new idea. However, this opportunity was lost due to the consensus strategies of the French Communist Party (PCF) and union bureaucracy, while radicals and creative strikers lost their roles. Nevertheless, a general strike provided a moment for politicization and mobilization. Moreover, in May 1968 as in the Gezi Rebellion, action committees were established by organized groups concerned with hygiene, medical response, nourishment, education, and communication. As the resistance became protracted, a lack of a revolutionary party caused the movement to break down. Birchall summarizes this as follows: A massive social movement can begin spontaneously; but for it to realize its full potential is quite another matter. The absence of a revolutionary party able to lead the challenge to the centralized power of the state was one of the main reasons why the enormous creativity and militancy developed in May 1968 was largely frittered away in June. (Brichall 2002: 33) Initially, the actors in the Gezi Rebellion were students, young people, and the urbanized middle class. As it progressed, the lower-middle-class masses joined. The gestures of resistance consisted of irony, creativity, fun, and attitudes of solidarity. The aim was transformed from saving some trees to

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realizing a new kind of politics that respects nature and society. The actors, gestures, and aims of May 1968 were nearly the same; the most crucial difference was the earlier rebellion’s use of the weapon of a general strike, which provided the power to revolt against global capitalism. May 1968 is thus distinct because of the way these demands were expressed. Similarly, even though the Gezi Rebellion expressed the resistance of the oppressed as did the Paris Commune, Petrograd Soviet and Barcelona Uprising, it differs drastically from these examples because it could not integrate the protestors’ macro-scale political demands into the rebellion. Similar patterns can be observed in the anti-capitalist movements of the 1990s, the Occupy Movements of the 2010s and the Arab Spring (e.g., Egypt and Tunisia). What makes the Gezi Rebellion resistance unique in Turkey’s struggle for democracy and revolution is its level of generality regarding actors, gestures, and aims. It represents the sharpest breaking point, in the form of a mass movement, in the history of modern Turkey, by giving the politics of resistance a permanent position. As Simon Critchley puts it: No revolution is going to be generated out of systemic or structural laws. We are on our own and what we do we have to do for ourselves. Politics requires subjective invention, imagination, and endurance, not to mention tenacity and cunning. No ontology or eschatological philosophy of history is going to do it for us. Working at an interstitial distance from the state, distance that I have tried to describe as democratic, we need to construct political subjectivities that are not arbitrary or relativistic, but which are articulations of an ethical demand whose scope is universal and whose evidence is faced in a concrete situation. This is dirty, detailed, local, practical and largely un-thrilling work. It is the time we made a start. (Critchley 2007: 132) It is possible to strengthen the politics of resistance, as Critchley argues, with the help of Walter Benjamin’s philosophical approach, for Benjamin lived between two world wars, analyzed how new Europe and America experienced this process and became a reference point for the intellectual defense of the Baader Meinhof Group and May 1968. However, before explaining how he can do this, it is apt to remember the politics of resistance that the Gezi Rebellion exposed: only ‘We’ can write history, as we are constructing our subjectivity, with our historical and social humor. Being in the here and now is waiting for our decision to write history.

From symbol to idea Benjamin moves from the exposed faces of history (streets, buildings, symbols, objects, fashion, toys, etc.) to reach the spaces, stammerings, pauses, fractures,

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junctions, fragility, and ecstasies hidden in these faces. By this, he tries to reveal the truth beneath the fetishism of the new. In this way, he reconstructs the relation between appearance and truth. Georg Lukács previously tried the same method through the logic of typification in his work on aesthetics (Lukács 1981). Benjamin understood that every era reproduces itself through certain prototypes, symbols, images, and ideas that are concrete expressions of thousands of experiences. The repetition and infinity in history, and the external view that comes after, bring back the masses from one infernal gap to another (Benjamin 1979; Murray 2007). Siegfried Kracauer (2005) shows this clearly in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Although the feeling of repetition and infinity spreads the feeling that the world is changing into a new one, for Benjamin, the world does not do this since the new is identical to itself; and the one that is identical to itself does not belong to existence. The understanding of history until now is thus nothing more than applause for the sovereign’s triumphs. Yet, the time we are living in marks an extraordinary situation. Sovereigns identify extraordinary situations as representing a loss of their right to triumphs and plunder. Thus, the crisis has a different meaning for sovereigns and the oppressed, as can easily be seen if the shell of the definition of crisis is opened. Crisis means the disappearance of expectations, a shift in the relation with the future, and the development of an attitude about protecting the existent. In this, crisis lets the people see how the expectations of the sovereign and the oppressed are quite different. Most importantly, it provokes a revolutionary attitude of developing ‘historical and social humor while constructing their subjectivity.’ What directed Benjamin’s attention to concepts and phenomena such as history, myth, fossil, nature, fetish, and commodity was his wish to reveal how it is possible to discover and reproduce this revolutionary attitude (Benjamin 2007; Morss 1989). For Benjamin, the oppressed have two advantages or weapons against the sovereign in an age of capitalistic reproduction, without needing a miracle: experience and recall. Experience is the practice that is here and now for adopting objects, events, every face of life, correlating concretely with them and constructing their history. Hence, every form of conformism produces its opposite. Recalling is another practice that causes the oppressed to discover their own traditions and activate self-confidence as social awareness, thereby enriching ideas of salvation and reconstruction. In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ Benjamin (1968) recalls the French Revolution’s attempt to introduce its own calendar and the rebels’ attacks on clock towers to stop the invariability of time as historical gestures: that sovereigns are wrong to assume the continuity of what happens and history. Revolutionaries and rebels will leave them with their failures by suspending the continuity of history and maintaining their own history with the possibility of their creative destruction; in this way, they will enable everyone to participate in life (Benjamin 2007: 249). While there were no clock towers around Gezi Park, other symbols were developed, many of which reflected the humor of the political subjectivization

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process (although occasionally some reflected alienation and insults). They were symbols that developed the opportunity of experiencing, recalling and historicizing. For instance, the rebels used a heavy-duty vehicle (brought earlier for redeveloping the park) to build a barricade for stopping police TOMAs (anti-riot water cannon vehicles), which they named POMA (anti-police heavy-duty vehicle). Thus, the sovereign’s apparatus that aims to progress in the continuity of history for its own sake turns into an element of a barricade for protecting rebels from an attack that interrupts this continuum. The rebels, including both men and women, opposed police tear gas and pressurized water laden with hazardous chemicals with poems, songs, slogans, and resistance. When this was not enough, they responded that they were in the ‘intifada’ through barricades that furnished the city streets. Such images represented how the rebels had become Turkey’s ‘Palestinians.’ Meanwhile, the government was busy destroying all negotiation channels. What the government was trying to achieve became clear: the victim can be said to have died from natural causes if there is no killer around. If the intent is to normalize what happened, one has to make the killer indistinct first. Accordingly, the government removed identification numbers from police helmets, sent its supporters onto the streets as armed paramilitary forces, gave unusual freedom to the police to use illegal force, and intensified its threats over mobilized groups. The rebels had to retreat both in order not to be criminalized and to escape the government’s hatred. For Benjamin, experience and recall—two apparatuses the masses use for reproducing the power that ends both the continuity of history and the extraordinary situation—are not salvation itself; they only generate the real content of the salvation. In the Gezi Rebellion, experience and recall made possible the advance of the salvation tradition. Had the rebels embraced what happened in the Gezi Rebellion with a struggle that did not submit to a pietism of memory or an asceticism of recollection, every memorial, recollection or experience would have contributed to the power that would eventually overcome the continuity of history or the extraordinary situation. Therefore, the thin line between salvation and utopia would have to re-draw the connection between everyday life and ideas. In other words, protecting the imagination of a fictional rather than a factual view of the symbolic causes would have highlighted utopia instead of salvation. Merely criticizing the government and repeating politics with a tendency of what ‘has to be’ with symbolic assets is not enough for salvation. The imagination that will end the triumphs of sovereigns has to be settled here and now. Therefore, in both the May 1968 events and the Gezi Rebellion, the appeal of the masses to an imagination that implies restructuring and salvation instead of symbolic politics is important. Benjamin tries to overcome symbolic politics by using metaphors and allegory as forms of vision because he thinks metaphors and allegory can loosen the rational limits of both the imagination and conceptual thinking. For Benjamin, reality becomes both readable and reconstructable through ideas. Ideas are identical as monads of a kind and an expression of all the processes of subject-creation toward living or

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individualizing as a constellation (Benjamin 2003: 57–60). Naturally, salvation is possible by recovering history and tradition from the illness of conformism (Benjamin 1979: 132–154, 157–159; Berendse 2003: 333–351; Leslie 2000: 208–235).

From standing man to utopia or salvation Utopia and salvation were analyzed continuously during and after the Gezi Rebellion resistance, accompanied by humor, creativity in the slogans and the ability to gather people from different regions. Following Benjamin, these are the dialectical images of the Gezi Rebellion resistance. Reflecting on the recalling and reminding acts of these images is the most important moment of historicizing. In Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, Benjamin (2002: 225) talks about dialectical images that he mentioned previously in his article ‘Surrealism’ (Benjamin 2006: 38). Surrealists used installation practices to provide salvation for enslaved objects. They tried to reorganize objects, components, or ideas from a determined positionality by applying a deconstruction to capitalism as a profane culture that internalizes hedonism and religion. For Benjamin, surrealists were the conductors of the Bolshevik Revolution by annihilating the objectifying effect of capitalism. Surrealism was an effort to block the liberation within capitalism, just as the Bolshevik Revolution was a revolution against exploitation and alienation. That is why, for Benjamin, the flaneur is a revolutionary subject, not because s/he ‘cannot integrate’ into the system but for ‘not integrating’ into the system. The flaneur is against the system under all conditions. No matter what, s/he is breaking down the system by remaining outside the relations of the sovereign classes that create domination (Benjamin 2006). This is similar to the definition of the constitutive subjectivity of the rebel in the Gezi Rebellion resistance, which is unclear unless discussed from a class perspective. The government, which suffered from this uncertainty, named the rebels in the Gezi Rebellion in terms similar to the flaneur, specifically as chapulcu. This term refers to people from the low and middle classes who have a chance of individual salvation through their abilities and cultural background. Yet somehow they act like Benjamin’s Baudelaire, trying to save society rather than individuality; night porters and garbage collectors, not gleams, invaded parks, not a refurbished city. Both the flaneur and Benjamin understand these happenings from an intellectual perspective, distanced from the surrealist’s pessimistic, insecure, nihilistic approach. For this reason, they avoid criticisms derived from moral effects. In other words, Benjamin’s melancholy is not nourished from conservative obscurantism or liberal elitist morality, for there is nothing to survive there. As the ones who do not believe in an existence nested in a system, they see that what must be saved is neither the past nor the unconcerned justice of the system; on the contrary, what has to be saved is the experience of humanity that has been oppressed by the triumphs of the sovereign, i.e., their history. During

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the Gezi Rebellion, religious, conservative, liberals and liberal leftists only used a language of ‘negotiation.’ What was the outcome of this negotiation? The stability of the politics that the government was pursuing. Let’s turn back to Benjamin’s images of dialectics. For Benjamin, these dialectic images deliver the historical relation of the oppressed and experience. They also deliver a refreshing memory in favor of revolutionary forces, for dialectic images are not speculative abstractions but concrete images that bind actions together. The ones who shot at clock towers, the organizers of the resistance behind the barricades in the Paris Commune, become integrated with the experiences of the one who managed to establish a swap market in Gezi Park. A retired old woman’s participation by bringing hot food to the rebels behind the barricades means nothing from a quantitative view; but from a view constructed through dialectic images, it is based on the conceptual establishment of altruism, modesty, empathy, sympathy, and struggle. Dialectic images provide a common ground realized in time, just like a storyteller’s act of interconnecting generations. For Benjamin, storytelling is threatened by depreciation and the shattering of the dream time. The reticence of soldiers returning from the front, the speechlessness of victims and witnesses surviving isolation and genocide camps, the rootlessness of the extraordinary condensation of immigration and immigrants, the invisibility of poverty and discrimination have crippled the reality full of the life or memory of dream time. It is not dreaming time anymore; it is the time of working as the time of capitalistic progression and consumption (Benjamin 2007: 83–110). That is why the storyteller turns towards memory and recall; the here and now has to give its place to the novelist who calculates free time at will. Consequently, capitalism values the novelist who produces a meaning apart from life over the storyteller who articulates nature and life. In this, capitalism provides the soil for the ‘destructive character’ that has no memory, but under all kinds of pressure rejects the scars of the past, shivers the aura and continues its life without doubt. As a political figure, the destructive character’s extreme identity is the ‘terrorist’ (Benjamin 1979: 157–159). That is to say, for Benjamin, whether you call them chapulcu or rebels, the actors of this rebellion were not terrorists but creative storytellers who affirm life and have respect for the common being in the tradition of the oppressed. The figure of ‘the standing man’ at Gezi Park is such a storyteller. By standing, ‘the standing man’ not only questions the sovereign’s time, he also finds time to think about the sovereign’s system.20 The naivety of the demonstration ruins the ‘terrorism’ discourse of the government, as well as stripping the sovereign by constructing an irony. In any case, the danger lies in the act through which the rebels join together and oppose the masses against a naked sovereign. This intersection is the moment when revolutionary ideas emerge towards utopia or messianic salvation from standing. This is why, for Benjamin, only a historical materialist can achieve messianic salvation (Benjamin 2007: 253–258). I need to focus on the metaphor of salvation in order to explain the state of the Gezi Rebellion resistance. Every metaphor of salvation is nourished by

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a negation of what exists. If this negation is overcome by a new social construction, a utopian salvation occurs in a classical manner. Utopia is the idea of purging the future from adverse accumulation about the past and present, occupying future rationality and imagination. It is a search for the companion of happening and what has to happen. But the messianic metaphor of salvation contains various uncertainties. It is uncertain who will be the messiah, and when and how this person will come. The certainty lies in where and how the messianic time is. That is, the messiah can only be known in messianic time. In other words, because messianic time focuses not on the future but on the here and now, it both makes itself possible and recognizes its messiah by struggle. If utopian and messianic salvation could be organized equably then maybe we have much more than a revolutionary melancholy.

From past and distant to here and now This chapter set out with the aim of historicizing the Gezi Rebellion. I aimed to present a way to trace this historic event both in history itself as experienced and in the tradition of the oppressed. I tried to organize the cumulative association of the historical events by referring to various analogies. That is to say, I explained why the Gezi Rebellion has to be evaluated as a real resistance, a conflict and a scene of class politics. Afterwards, by focusing on various experiences of May 1968 that bear the influence of both Benjamin and critical theory, I tried to explain how Benjamin’s revolutionary ideas can also be traced to the Gezi Rebellion. There are two main outcomes of this chapter that can be a source of inspiration for other work. First, every time a sovereign transforms the limits of life and the public sphere, it becomes necessary to actualize a new conception of history for the oppressed; naturally, every time the oppressed realize this transformation they have to activate a leap from protest to resistance, from a murmur to conflict. Due to this leap, history is the stage for revolutionary ideas, the creative subversion of resistance. The Gezi Rebellion has to be evaluated this way because, without achieving a revolution or a change of government, it penetrated, and is still penetrating, the history of the peoples of Turkey. Penetrating here means the legality of all kinds of struggle in order to free the oppressed till the end. What is illegal are the ideas and movements aiming to annihilate common wealth, property and heritage. Second, the lesson that comes from historicizing all the acquisitions that spring from defeat is this: When the resistance is belittled by revolutionary ideas, the oppressed get ready for a dynamic repetition. In other words, they repeat themselves by renewing in order to free themselves from any pulverization and oppression by sovereigns. This becomes the reality of history for the oppressed and the nightmare of the sovereigns. The melancholic spirit of the rebels comes from nourishment from this history because the rebel aims to

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realize the truth along with its struggle, to correlate the bond between what is necessary and what is possible, and tries to halt humanity’s rush towards the hellish void of progression. Melancholy, in a Benjaminian sense, is a moment of reckoning with sheltered history against the loss or discredit of the rebels’ demands, constitutive efforts and work. The melancholy of the rebel is a common power that enables a revolutionary leaping and re-joining of life. In this manner, the rebels of the Gezi Rebellion were not defeated along with the resistance. On the contrary, through their re-renewing common power, they are busy creating a different historical moment that will plant the uneasiness of history in the government’s face.

Notes 1 Abstractions or speculations without noticing the bond between history as story and history as theory are rhetorical expressions based on rational ability rather than explanatory and determinative. The expressions in question are an escape towards the theoretical, and of course an opposite attitude causes a superficial documentarism. Drawing on Ibn Khaldûn’s description of history, Alex Callinicos asserts that historiography can contribute to life as long as history is considered both as story and theory: ‘The inner meaning of history . . . involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanation of causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of events. [History] therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy’ (Callinicos 1995: 95). 2 According to TÜİK’s (Turkish Statistical Institute) population census data based on addresses, Turkey’s population is 74,724,269, nearly 18 percent of whom reside in Istanbul. Sixteen percent of the parliament is elected from Istanbul. The population density of the city is 2.392 people per square kilometer. Istanbul is the city that is still experiencing the most inward immigration. 3 Beyoglu was one of the most important examples of multiculturalism and modernization in the Ottoman Empire. The ancient peoples of the late Byzantine Empire as well as non-Muslims from Anatolia settled in this district. With improvements in international relations, foreign countries began to open their individual representative offices there. Over time, colorful social relations were strengthened. Thus, Beyoglu became a place where trade, finance, cultural interaction and social rejuvenation were deeply felt, yet also a place that experienced tension between East and West. Although Beyoglu sustained Western values, the influence of the empire was everywhere: during the terms of reformist sultans like Selim the Third, Mahmut the Second and Abdulhamid the Second, the development of Beyoglu gained momentum. These interventions have endured from the foundation of the Turkish Republic to the present. For a detailed social history of Beyoglu, see Gul, 2012. 4 Information about the Gezi Rebellion from May 27 was collected from the following newspapers, websites and research reports: Taksim Dayanışması (www.taksimdaya nismasi.org); everywheretaksim.net, bianet.org (http://tinyurl.com/ptea6ea), sendika. org (http://tinyurl.com/nwppjmq), t24.com.tr (http://tinyurl.com/qfyum68), demokrathaber.net (http://tinyurl.com/ml4xvs2), Hurriyet Daily News (http://tinyurl.com/ q6evx8n), Today’s Zaman (http://tinyurl.com/q2s397y), Radikal (http://tinyurl.com/ kkdaj3n), huffingtonpost.com (http://tinyurl.com/lpzlgkj), the Guardian (http:// tinyurl.com/kf397xm), jadaliyya.com (http://tinyurl.com/o6zv5pv), The New York Times (http://tinyurl.com/pedl32u), SAMER (http://www.ssamer.com/Raporlar/218), Metropoll (http://tinyurl.com/nrczhte), istanbulist.net (http://tinyurl.com/kqdefwk), GENAR (http://tinyurl.com/pbo5kj4), KONDA (http://tinyurl.com/meptjbk), SETAV

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5

6

7

8 9

10

11

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(http://tinyurl.com/nasfb4t), azadalik.wordpress.com (http://tinyurl.com/k9tntux). All websites were accessed on 15.01.2014. All of these arrogant labels, extravagance, and insanity match each other at a common level. The same mentality is observable in both the demolishing of the artillery barracks to create the park and vice versa: tearing up the public social memory, turning into a destructive character for restarting history. Istanbul faces a sudden rupture, an ectasis at the summit of patriarchal and hierarchical regulations. However, this situation cannot be limited to major projects like Kanal Istanbul, the third Bosphorus bridge (Yavuz Sultan Selim), the third airport or New Istanbul. Both history and politics pulse with examples of how the ectasis of destructive characters holding arrogant labeling, extravagance, and insanity have tagged while undermining society. The neoliberal wave that emerged in the 1980s in the capitalist world was reflected in Turkey in the privatization of state-owned factories and de-unionization in the first phase. In the second phase at the beginning of the 2000s, it was seen through the economic policies of several coalition governments that brought the finance and banking system under control, sold state-owned assets to private capital holders, largely contracted out the public employee system to private subcontractors, and allowed policies of flexibility and precariousness to gain momentum in labor laws. The first wave, in this regard, rolled back class-based opposition while the second wave permanently affirmed that the absolute primacy of capital in terms of free market conditions was permanent. This chapter tries to pursue a Marxist historicity that is apparent in the France Trilogy. However, the guiding spirit of my methodology is primarily the ‘microscience’ that comes from his dissertation, subsequently the materialist historicism that appears as the presentation and research method mentioned in the ‘Afterword to the Second Edition in German’ of Capital. See www.kendimeyazilar.com/p/gostergeler.html. TEKEL (the state Alcohol and Tobacco Monopoly) workers resisted privatization of the state monopoly and the precarious flexible work conditions offered to them as a result of the privatization. The resistance lasted from November 2009 to April 2010 in downtown Ankara, where the workers occupied one of the main streets with handmade nylon tents. The solidarity among workers from different parts of the country and their legitimate demands captured the attention of broader opposition groups who then stood in solidarity with the TEKEL workers. In turn, the AKP government denounced the resistance as illegal, attempted to question the legitimacy of the movement in the eyes of the public and manipulated the resistance through intimidation and humiliation. This resistance was significant for raising the awareness of the working classes in Turkey to increase precariousness in the workplace. See Metin Ozugurlu, 2011; Çoşar and Ozman, 2012. In its relations with Turkey, the USA openly supports governments in Turkey only insofar as their shared interests are not jeopardized. A concrete example is the reaction of the US authorities to the negative attitudes of EU countries towards Turkey regarding Turkey’s EU membership application. The US authorities declared that Turkey is an important strategic partner within NATO and needs to be treated as such. The EU, on the other hand, reveals its approach towards Turkey through the suggested programs and reports regarding the accession process. In particular, between 2003 and 2007, the EU supported the AKP government in its democratization reforms and in dismantling the Turkish military’s tutelage over civilian politics. Nowadays, however, relations with the EU have deteriorated following the Gezi Resistance and the AKP government’s response to the resistance. The AKP’s relative success in controlling the state apparatus caused a fall out with its former ally, the Gülen movement. Recently, this became a serious conflict after the government accused the Gülen movement of establishing a parallel state controlling the

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judicial system, stigmatizing them as ‘internal enemies.’ However, the masses showed no significant reactions to these transformations of the judicial system and the state. Although there were some exceptional struggles against hydroelectric plants and mines, they were not strong enough to develop an alternative political movement. 12 See www.taksimdayanismasi.org/forumlar. There are at least 40 forums in Istanbul related with Taksim Dayanışması. These emerged out of a need to disseminate and deepen the ‘Gezi Spirit’. Therefore, in order to understand the forums, one needs to understand this spirit, as it is called by the rebels, by looking at specific rituals, habits, repetitions and decision-making processes that are specific to the Gezi Resistance. The protestors, regardless of their class positions, political backgrounds, identities and gender roles, were able to meet their everyday life needs for free within the borders of the Gezi Park. Yet, at the same time, they made decisions and determined their common attitudes towards political power through societal decisionmaking processes that took place in an atmosphere of non-discriminatory deliberation and discussion. All decisions were reached through the direct participation of the protestors and their declaration of intention, not through representatives. In this regard, forums that later spread across the country in neighborhoods and other communities were attempts to create new decision-making processes based on people’s participation and to find solutions to problems relating to public benefit through solidarity and cooperation. They were able to determine the social needs and problems, and also in reproducing societal mechanisms as a relation among peers. Nevertheless, despite their revolutionary potential, the forums eventually became ineffective and disappeared (apart from a few exceptions). While the violent interventions of the government played a role in this, more importantly, it was not easy to popularize this new culture and tradition of deliberation among the masses. The forums were much more exciting for many while there was active resistance in the streets. 13 I should immediately note that Meinhof’s book, Everybody Talks about the Weather. . . We Don’t, which includes articles on Germany from the 1960s to 1970s, reads like a typical story from today’s Turkey. What Turkey has witnessed in the AKP governments’ management of the state apparatus and ideological mechanisms since 2002 can be seen as a repetition of history: during the 1950s, in Germany, the political maneuvers of the SDP and the CDU corroded democracy and the disarmament policies of the constitution of 1948, mutilating the content and the spirit of the constitution. It also simplified the government’s work as the government used it both to promote nuclear armament policies and eliminate all opposition. Every critical question exposed an unjust deal with each side of society being accused by the other: students by rectors, socialists and worker movements by fascists, the slaughtered by slaughterers. At the same time, newspapers blamed protesters for being unruly and causing trouble. They demanded the protesters be punished and tried to convince people to discriminate against them. They also considered left- and right-wing terror as equivalent while trying to create an incoherent equation between violence and contra-violence. Meinhof asserts that the resistance shook this new situation: ‘It has been documented that common decency is a shackle that can be broken through if those wearing the shackles are beaten and shot at. It has been documented that there are still people in this country who do not merely condemn terror and violence and [who] are secretly opposed to it and sometimes take a risk and open their mouths and do not let themselves be frightened; and there are also people who are willing and able to resist so it can be understood that business cannot continue as usual’ (Meinhof 2008: 240). The Gezi Rebellion witnessed everything that Meinhof documents, even ‘Water Cannons: Against Women, Too’ (Meinhof 2008: 214). 14 The KONDA research company conducted several surveys about the Gezi Rebellion. See http://tinyurl.com/kma9rwg for Bekir Ağırdır’s presentation on mapping participants/rebels.

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Employee Unemployed 18–29 age, total

Under high school

High school

University

Total

13,9 24,9 38,8

14,8 30,2 45,0

9,0 7,2 16,2

37,7 62,3 100,0

15 This expression cited (in meaning) from an interview with Prime Minister Erdoğan with Ülke TV on August 22, 2013. 16 In 2009, military high commanders, politicians, businessmen, and academicians were arrested and a lawsuit named ‘Ergenekon’ was opened, based on accusations that they founded and operated a terrorist organization called ‘Ergenekon’ that was preparing a military coup d’état to overthrow the democratically elected government. For some, this lawsuit was being pursued to end military tutelage over civilian politics, while others argued that the AKP government was taking revenge against the ancient regime and the status quo. Although the case has not been finalized yet, after more than five years of detention (and in some cases isolation) most of the detainees have been released. For further information on the case see H. Akin Ünver, 2009. 17 In these classifications, hate speech reaches a peak. The more that discrimination and marginalization are manifested in language, the more precise the difference between friends and foes becomes. Those that government labeled as traitors naturally plucked while trying to reconnect with the system. That is to say, it was the government that turned its back on negotiations. 18 In order to define the actors in the resistance, some used the term ‘new middle class.’ The main argument behind the ‘newness’ of the new middle class was that the middle class has a traditional content when considered as the starting point for analysis, yet its ethnology and hence its habitus have changed, so that we should talk about the ‘new’ middle class to include these changes in the analysis. See Emrah Göker, ‘Türkiye’nin Orta Sınıf Takım Adaları,’ http://istifhanem.com/2014/05/25/ortadasinifvar (01.10.2014). In addition, for discussions on the (new) middle class among Marxist academicians, see http://meseledergisi.com/tag/yeni-orta-sinif (01.10.2014); http://mese ledergisi.com/tag/orta-sinif (01.10.2014). 19 Please see note 6. 20 See www.duranadam.com for further information on the standing man.

References Benjamin, W. (1968) “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations. Hannah Arendt (ed.), New York: Schocken Books, pp. 253–264. Benjamin, W. (1979) One Way Street and Other Writings. Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter (trans.), London: NLB. Benjamin, W. (2002) “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, in Selected Writings (1935–1938), Vol. 3, H. Eiland & M.W. Jennings (eds.), Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 32–49. Benjamin, W. (2003) The Origin of German Tragic Drama. John Osborne (trans.), London: Verso. Benjamin, W. (2006) The Writer of Modern Life: Charles Baudelaire. Howard Eiland et al. (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Benjamin, W. (2007) Illuminations. Hary Zohn (trans.), New York: Schocken Books. Berendse, G.J. (2003) ‘Aesthetic of (Self)Destruction’.in Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe. Steve Giles & Maike Oergel (eds.), Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 333–351.

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Bloch, E. (2009) Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. Peter Thompson (trans.), London: Verso. Bookchin, M. (1996–2003) The Third Rebellions: Popular Movements in Revolutionary Era, London: Continuum, vols I–IV. Brichall, I. (2002) ‘France 1968: All Power to the Imagination’. in Revolutionary Rehearsals. Colin Barker (ed.), London: Haymarket Books, pp. 5–39. Callinicos, A. (1995) Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cassano, J. (2013) ‘The Right to the City Movement and the Turkish Summer’, Available at: http://tinyurl.com/lysvpca [accessed 15 January 2014]. Çoşar, S. & Ozman, A. (2012) ‘Neoliberal Politics, State and Privatization in Turkey: The Case of TEKEL’. in Capitalism and Confrontation: Critical Readings. Justin Paulson et al. (eds.), Ottawa: Red Quill Books. Çoşar, S. & Yücesan Özdemir, G. (2012) Silent Violence: Neoliberalism, Islamist Politics and the AKP Years in Turkey, Ottawa: Red Quill Books. Critchley, S. (2007) Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, London: Verso. Gul, M. (2012) The Emergence of Modern Istanbul: Transformation and Modernisation of a City, London: I.B. Tauris Publishers. Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Harvey, D. (2012) Rebel Cities: From Right to the City to Urban Revolution, London: Verso. Kant, I. (2006) ‘An Answer to Question: What is Enlightenment’. in Toward Perpetual Peace and other Writings on Politics, Peace, History. David L. Colclasure (trans.), New Haven: Yale University Press. Kracauer, S. (2005) The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leslie, E. (2000) Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, London: Pluto. Lissagaray, P.A. (2012) The History of the Paris Commune of 1871, London: Verso. Lukács, G. (1981) Essays on Realism. Rodney Livingstone (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meinhof, U.M. (2008) Everybody Talks About The Weather. . . We Don’t. Karin Bauer (trans.), New York: Seven Stories Press. Mitchell, D. (2003) The Right to The City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space, New York: The Guilford Press. Morss, S.B. (1989) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Murray, T.B. (2007) Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin: Experience and Form, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ozugurlu, M. (2011) ‘The TEKEL Resistance Movement: Reminiscences on Class Struggle’, Capital & Class, 35(2), pp. 179–187. Ranciere, J. (2004) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tombuş, H.E. (2013) ‘Reluctant Democratization: The Case of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey’, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 20(2), pp. 312–327. Tuğal, C. (2009) Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ünver, H.A. (2009), ‘Turkey’s “Deep-State” and the Ergenekon Conundrum’, Middle East Institute Policy Brief, 23 April 2009, pp. 1–25.

6 URBAN ACTIVISM AND TOURISTIFICATION IN SOUTHERN EUROPE Barcelona, Madrid and Lisbon Jorge Sequera and Jordi Nofre

Introduction Today, ‘the Tourist City’ faces numerous and enormous challenges (Judd & Fainstein 1999). This is of special relevance in the historic downtown areas of many cities worldwide, where the recent rapid expansion of the informal urban tourism accommodation sector is seriously challenging the governance of ‘touristified cities’ (OECD 2016). Particularly in Europe, the economic revaluation as well as the cultural, spatial and social revalorisation of the historic downtown quarters of many cities carried out since the mid-1980s have strongly contributed to transform the city center into a leisure-oriented consumption arena (Wynne & O’Connor 1998; Ritzer 2010). In turn, urban tourism has recently gained a central role in this process of ‘ludification of the city’ (Hannigan 1998; Baptista 2005). However, the recent touristification of the historic downtown quarters of many European cities, which is mainly based on the expansion of the (in-)formal tourism accommodation sector (Gottlieb 2013), is not without social, spatial and economic impacts. From a much broader perspective, the process of touristification (Ashworth & Page 2011) often involves a range of negative impacts such as (a) the rise of upward tensions in local real-estate markets, causing the growing spatial displacement of lifelong lower-class residents (Pixová & Sládek 2016); (b) the symbolic and material dispossession of residents provoked by the rapid touristification of their quarters (Janoschka & Sequera 2016; (c) the increasing marginalisation of ‘undesired’ presences, practices and consumptions through zero-tolerance policies of urban governance (Cummings 2015; Sequera, 2017); (d) the promotion of new forms of commodified and youthful hedonist leisure activities during nighttime hours that usually put pressure on community liveability (Hadfield 2006, 2009); (e) the demise of traditional retail and small-sized handcraft manufacturing, which are replaced by tourist-led businesses (González & Waley 2013; Schkack &

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Turnbull 2015); and, finally, (f) the relationship between ‘urban touristification’ (Ashworth & Page 2011) and other urban processes such as gentrification, as well as the promotion and implementation of ‘gentrification policies’ (e.g., Davidson & Lees 2005; Lees 2012; Sequera 2013, 2015, 2017; Slater 2013). Many authors suggest the recent touristification in central areas of the city often involves processes of gentrification and, therefore, the displacement of (especially elderly) long-term residents, which accounts for the rise of neighbors’ protests (e.g., Gotham 2005; Pareja Eastaway & Simó Solsona 2014; Cócola-Gant 2016). However, the recent rapid expansion of touristification shows some critical aspects that have often fuelled the rise of neighbors’ protests and local resistance in ‘the tourist city’. These protests are much focused on the negative impacts of touristification on the local housing market, the building of the city for tourism monoculture (Conti & Perelli 2007), the expelling of lower-class families from touristified local communities and the deterioration of community liveability (Nofre et al. 2018). With no doubt, both urban tourism and the (in)formal tourism accommodation sector have become critical focal points for neighbors as well as local, national and European authorities, since both processes bring together antagonistic interests, alliances and strategies among different local and transnational actors. In fact, lifelong (aged) residents, entrepreneurs, tourists and visitors, and municipal policymakers tend to merge in an increasingly livelier local arena for political debate on the critical impacts of the recent touristification of central areas in many European cities. This is of special importance due to the polarised nature of the debate ‘institutional’ versus ‘grassroots’. On the one hand the status of tourism and leisure in many European cities has dramatically changed in the eyes of urban policy-makers and local elites over the past few years. Alongside this, the European Commission has recently launched the Digital Single Market Strategy (2016),1 which aims at overcoming the current stagnation in the Eurozone by tearing down regulatory walls and moving from 28 national markets to a single one. As the EC foresees it, ‘this could contribute €415 billion per year to our economy and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.’2 However, there is no doubt that urban tourism has significantly contributed to not only revitalise the degraded historic quarters of some Southern European cities, especially since the decade of the 1990s, but also to provide jobs, entrepreneurship and (selfempowerment) opportunities for, e.g., young and young-adult skilled and unskilled long-term unemployed individuals. In parallel, ‘sharing economies’ related to urban tourism have recently acquired a central role in organizing the social and economic ordinary life of the ‘Tourist City’. Different local actors and social groups express a range of different, multifaceted, complex, non-linear stories, grammars, voices and discourses about both positive and negative impacts of the recent rapid expansion of (in-)formal urban tourism in their local communities. This comparative cross-national and transdisciplinary chapter intends to analyse the social and spatial impacts of the

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recent rapid touristication that has occurred in the city centers of three European cities (Barcelona, Lisbon and Madrid). By paying special attention to the range of strategies and conflicts among the collective action and resistance in relation to the rapid expansion of touristication that has occurred during the past few years in the central quarters of the cities selected, this chapter shows a critical approach oriented towards the urban social movements that are struggling for an inclusive urban coexistence of diverse social groups in the ‘Tourist City’. The work presented below is based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the last eight years (2010–2017) that has the aim to provide a theoretical and comparative analysis on the resistance to the Tourist City, as is currently being imagined, negotiated and developed among different and even antagonistic social actors.

A touristified city? The processes of urban renewal in several city-break destinations are much connected to speculative objectives of real-estate-related companies such as financial and insurance companies that, in some cases, hold real-estate investment funds. In this sense, outsourcing and thematization deploys a re-functionalization of the urban space as an enclave for the international financialization, producing profound spatial changes: new consumers, neo-urban tourists and high-skilled neighbors are colonizing the city center. Funds and resources in cultural and high culture infrastructures (museums of contemporary art, innovation hubs and cultural entrepreneurship, art galleries, etc.) become a major priority of the administration, creating an urban environment favorable to the establishment of creative clusters (Sequera 2017). Therefore, urban policies configure creative and cultural districts based on the commodification of art, counterculture, ‘artivism’ or multiculturalism. As follows, the elderly neighborhood inhabitants are relegated by these hegemonic cultures/knowledge (Sequera 2017). Urban city centers – which are often rich in experiences, knowledge and history – are the object of tourism as a social practice that is recreated under the legitimacy of being a ‘cultural tourism’ (Mazón 2001). The political and symbolical construction of the so-called ‘historical centers’ and the tourist gaze are crossed by certain myths, as a thematic park. This tourism economy is intimately related to urban renewal as a catalyst for real-estate speculation. While it would be related to the development of businesses and services derived from tourism (Herzer et al. 2015: 203), such an urban renewal is much based on the narrative construction of the ‘Past’, consciously ignoring the ‘other present’ history of the neighborhood, such as vulnerability, poverty or precariousness (Herzer et al. 2015: 217). Here rises a pivotal question to explore in the ‘Tourist City’: ‘What would be the meaning of this concentration of cultural and tourist facilities in some strategical neighborhoods of the city?’ One could argue it would be to ‘generate experiences,’ ‘becoming urban laboratories’ where all aesthetic ideas end up from a civility defined by good taste (Sequera 2017). The

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symptom of this paradigm can be found in the construction of ‘culture-place,’ new creative industry and culture making gaps for the penetration of contemporary capitalism. It is the artistization (Delgado 2008) of urban policies, a clear symptom of the reappropriation of the urban center for tourism. The authenticity of a place appears as a surplus value (Harvey 2009), where culture and economy are articulated for the (re)creation of territory with high cultural content. In this way, patrimonial policies – which in the first instance should protect identity and collective memory – have become the main economic catalyst in those urban areas, while the tourist appears as the main attractor (McCannell 2003). We refer to the urban production, creation and innovation, as well as to the cultural production, such as graphic design, visual art (cinema, photography, etc.), gastronomy, and science. In this sense, the concept of urban culture is recreated, looking for a ‘stamp’ of each city (Kanai 2014; Dinardi 2015) to be represented internationally through its innovations, fashions, trends and artistic exhibitions. Urban policies for global city centers shape the urban environment by taking advantage of these stimulus-laden places as one of the fundamental bases of the contemporary urban economy. This powerful urban economy, derived from the tourist sector, rehabilitates historic centers in order to attract heritage tourism (Betancur 2014), which lead to the segregation of the lower classes and their social practices. Consequently, the high transforming power that tourism has been portrayed as having is a dispositive to generate exclusive landscapes. Mass tourism collides with opposing forms of everyday life space uses, as an intangible force that disposes symbolically and materially, eradicating unwanted presence or social practices. Gotham (2005: 1099) called it ‘tourism gentrification,’ transforming a neighborhood as an exclusive enclave where businesses have settled and tourism has proliferated. Capital revaluation (Harvey 1989) and, once again, displacement provoked by the increasing urban tourism (Fainstein & Gladstone 1999) are key factors in this process. Therefore, the promotion of places for urban tourism can be considered a fundamental strategy of economic development, especially when the city is considered by politicians and urban promoters as an entertainment machine (Gotham 2005). As Rifkin (2002: 197) states, tourism is merely the commodification of cultural experience. This standardized tourism consumption has very specific spatial patterns, which follow marked routes and leave little profit outside these zones.

Resistance to the ‘Tourist City’ in Southern Europe In the previous section, the kaleidoscopic complex conceptual approach to the main conflicts generated by the touristification of central areas of European cities allows us to cross the barrier of an uncritical view of the tourist economy or its positive effects, submerging in the historical debate of the right to the city. It is the right of access, use and enjoyment of the city, or, in other words, the right to participate in the production of public space. Urban social movements

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seen as political and social subjects have the capacity to raise the negative consequences of neoliberal urban policies by proposing alternatives, developing actions or visibilising the urban injustices and inequalities (Chatterton & Pickerill 2010). Collective actions unmask public/private policy models. Hence, the analysis of neighborhood struggles appears as an attempt to counteract the effects of neoliberalism, as well as an unbeatable starting point to generate new social conditions in the neighborhoods through the multi-level spreading of solidarity and mutual support. This urban activism not only shows the incoherences and ruptures of capitalism (Holloway 2010), but also the creation of alternative networks of citizenship that face the current neoliberal cycle.

The case of Madrid The whole central area of the city of Madrid is suffering from this new speculative bubble, derived from tourism, as an economic engine of ‘inter-crisis’ (we speak of more than 18 million overnight stays for a total of 9 million visitors in a city of 3.5 million and more than 50% of tourist rental apartments (Insideairbnb 2017)). We take Lavapiés – a city center neighborhood – as a case study of the struggles against the touristification, in an advanced process of gentrification (Sequera & Janoschka 2015) and the main Airbnb neighborhood (Cabrerizo et al. 2016). In Lavapiés, the social complexity shows that the gentrification process has slowed down since the socioeconomic crisis began in 2008. First, the immigrant population has strong inter-ethnic commercial networks fixed in the territory, being 25% of the population. Second, there is a counterculture and anticapitalist movement that is rooted in the place, with strong inter-ethnic networks of solidarity, the defense of the right to housing, and a new resident with an unexpected profile (gentrifier and activist). And, finally, a real-estate crisis that has paralyzed this process of revaluation (rent gap), which has been reactivated from the reborn rental market and tourist rental apartments. The paradox of the gentrification and touristification process is that both are happening in the territorial epicenter of Madrid’s activism. From ‘la Red de Lavapiés’ (Lavapiés Activist Network), formed in 1996 to fight against an unsustainable public rehabilitation process as a main device for the process of gentrification, to the 15M movement and their demands for decent housing and struggles against family evictions (Abellán et al. 2012; Díaz-Cortés and Sequera 2015). These groups became especially strong in Lavapiés, starting with the Popular Assembly of Lavapiés, defending vulnerable groups, particularly in those years that police increased the raids against immigrants.3 Also, in the main squatter neighborhood since 1990s, more than 20 housing buildings act as social centers (Martínez López & Bernardos 2012), as ‘spaces of hope’ where prefigurative politics and alternative social practices are happening. These disputes in defense of the neighborhood (Maeckelbergh 2011) relaunch the power of urban social movements to claim a city for all. In that sense, those

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new residents who came to the heart of the rehabilitation of the neighborhood, joined against gentrification, despite having been used to the gentrified Lavapiés neighborhood (Novy & Colomb 2013). As early as 2016, and after the exhausting effort deposited in the creation of a municipalist platform (Ayuntamientos del cambio) by the left-wing social movements – that was able to win the municipal elections in Madrid after more than 25 years of conservative and corrupt government – antigentrification movements began to focus on the devastating effects of mass tourism. The slogans have changed to an ambiguous ‘el barrio para quien lo habita’ (the neighborhood for who to live in). In fact, this neighborhood is, once again, the one with a concentration of Airbnb flats, with 25% of the tourist housing of the District Center (Cabrerizo et al. 2016). In what follows, we highlight a campaign struggling against the effects of touristification called ‘Lavapiés, ¿dónde vas?’ (Lavapiés, where are you going?).4 This social network movement is based on three fundamental aspects. In the first instance, a powerful participatory diagnosis of the neighborhood was carried out after the passage of gentrification policies for more than 15 years, including during the economic crisis. This way of doing things collectively implies not only a systematization of reports and studies about the neighborhood, but also the creation of a strong neighborhood network capable of taking the next steps. Hence, ‘making community’ (parents’ associations, civil society, and anti-capitalist activists) created several walks mapping the ‘neoliberal plumber,’ pointing out the most conflictive spaces or spaces of opportunity that still exist in the neighborhood. The next step by this activist group, unlike the most disruptive actions that are being experienced in some neighborhoods of Barcelona, has sought to caricature the most negative effects of tourism on the territory. So far, four actions have been carried out: 1) ‘Lavapiés se subasta’ (Lavapiés Sales), a comic exercise in which it auctioned the neighbors’ ‘girls and boys, neighbors and neighbors of all ages, indigenous and migrants, feminists, traders, shopkeepers and shopkeepers, activists, shared flats, shopping carts . . .. Bring everything that no longer takes place in this new and elite tourist district and sell it to the highest bidder;’ 2) ‘el destierro del vecino’ (the exile of the neighbor), celebrated by the Carnival Party and trying to caricature a neighbor burial that ‘goes to the other neighborhood’ (in Spanish that means metaphorically ‘to die’); 3) ‘A demonstration for tourist rights’ where the tourists (disguised neighbors) demanded that the whole neighborhood adapt to their needs as visitors; and 4) mapping the Airbnb flats (ownerships, real estates, neighbors threatened by real-estate mobbing). The third stage, in which they are currently in the summer of 2017, wants to generate what they have called ‘containment policies:’ a jump from the shared diagnosis to generate a battery of tangible proposals. Aware of the difficulty of reversing the gentrification policies that have left a strong imprint in Lavapiés after almost 20 years (Sequera 2013), the neighbors wants to tackle these polyhedral problems: when they say containment, they refer mainly to

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paralyzing these policies or, at least, to slow down their speed and violence. They refer to the ability to curb all those potential transformations that we see that may occur, or with which we are living in the present and that have not yet been consolidated. In order to work and think collectively about these, they are preparing two lines of action: 1) the generation of public policies that today could paralyze some processes and force ‘the city council’ to implement these policies; and 2) self-organization, an autonomist capacity for decision-making in this territory, mainly in the implementation of a ‘Sustainable Lavapiés Plan,’ which, among other issues, would paralyze the construction of new hotels,5 touristification, and evictions.

Barcelona6 On 27 August 2016, the anti/alter-capitalist neighbors’ association La Òstia hung a giant banner in La Repla, the most popular square (officially named Poeta Boscà Square), stating ‘Tourist, stay at hotels, the apartments are for living in’. Today, there is nothing to recall the popular futsal camp that in the early nineties existed in the middle of the square and was frequented by local youth. The square was remodelled between 2005 and 2007 together with the popular market that was located there. The rehabilitation of the Barceloneta Municipal Market turned this space into a gourmet food market. Today the square is a meeting point not only for some locals but also for tourists and international college students. Here in La Repla, leisure activities of the local youth have been marginalized and have given way to commercially led ways of experiencing the square. Interestingly, while tensions between different social actors in the quarter boomed in 2014 due to the rapid expansion of mainly illegal short-term rental apartments and the worsening of community liveability during night-time hours, since late 2000s many rallies and protest actions have taken place in Barcelona against the ineffectiveness of current local policies and municipal regulations in tackling and addressing the rapid expansion of the (un-)regulated touristification of the city. However, these protests should not be considered as isolated or even as solely the result of negative impacts derived from the recent touristification of the city. In Barcelona, political activism against the ‘neoliberalization of the city’ (Brenner & Theodore 2005) had its origins in late 1980s, when both the local administration and the Catalan regional government deployed a number of processes of urban renewal in the city, including in working-class suburban neighborhoods. For example, on 25 October 1990, in the neighborhood of Besòs Mar – which was built to house, among others, many families who had migrated mainly from Southern Spain after the Civil War (1936–1939) that had been living in slum areas surrounding the city – hundreds of neighbors clashed violently against police. This insurrection lasted five days, during which time the neighbors demanded the prevention of the construction of Olympic Gamesrelated equipment in the quarter and, instead, to use public funds to improve

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housing conditions and promote new-build social housing for the neighborhood’s children. ‘Besòs War,’ in local popular terminology, meant the last radical protest of neighbors’ associations in Barcelona in recent times. In fact, during earlier years of democracy, the social-democratic local administration silenced and/or deactivated most neighbors’ associations and local movements, which then had the power of addressing community-focused problems (Nofre et al. 2015). The Catalan Socialist Party (in a more-than-30-year coalition with left-wing independents, ecologists and eurocommunists) implemented local caciquism as a mechanism of social and political control in Barcelona with the aim of deactivating resistances against the Olympic City (1992) and the further internationalization (and later touristification) of the city (authors). However, political and social marginalization (and even repression) of anticapitalist activism since earlier years of ‘democracy,’ and especially during the golden years of turbo-economics in Spain (1996–2008), has given way to a reflourishment of left-wing political activism in the city by claiming ‘the right to the city.’ ‘New’ and ‘old’ political activists meet today in a new vibrant political arena where the new transnational topography of power(s) in the ‘Tourist City’ appear as the main objective to fight against and defeat. However, the recent protests that have happened in Barcelona against the touristification of the city highlight two main ways of understanding the nature of social protest in Barcelona: ‘performative protests’ (reformists), and ‘radical protests’ (revolutionaries) (Nofre et al. 2015). However, fieldwork conducted since 2014 allows us to see divergences and sharp divisions between reformist and radical anticapitalist protesters ‘fighting’ against the touristification of the city. The first group (reformists) are much connected to discourses, grammars and ‘performative protest actions’ carried out by transnational alter-globalization and altercapitalist movements, which contest globalization and neoliberal capitalism in a ‘positive’ way, that is, by proposing new assembly-based, participatory models of social, political and economic organization (Pleyers 2010). The second group (revolutionaries) are profoundly rooted in socialist and even anarchist movements of the Catalan capital that have emerged since the late nineteenth century (Kaplan 1982; Smith 1997; Oyón 2006). Even under today’s (alter?) capitalist Ada Colau’s administration, ‘invisibilization,’ denial, criminalization and police repression describe the Barcelona city council’s treatment of revolutionaries fighting against the touristification of the city. The two examples below exemplify such evident differences. The Neighborhoods’ Assembly for a Sustainable Tourism (Assemblea de Barris per un Turisme Sostenible, in the original) has ‘de-growth and desaturation’7 as its main objectives, related to mitigating the negative impacts derived from the (un-)regulated touristification of the city. They started to act against tourists by screaming and even intimidating them when protesters ‘occupied’ one of the tourist buses circulating around the city on 10 December 2016. Their protest actions were directly targeted at letting the tourists know they are not welcome to Barcelona because they ‘kill the city’s

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neighborhoods’ (‘No sou benviguts, ens esteu matant el barri,’ in the original). On 28 January 2017, nearly 2,000 locals rallied in the city center against the touristification of the city and the tourist-led gentrification of their neighborhoods. The rally was named ‘Occupy Les Rambles,’ and was convoked by more than 30 neighbors’, cultural and left-wing political associations, among them alter-capitalists like Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) and anti-capitalists like the anarcho-syndicalist CGT, and the rally ended with a manifesto pushing to achieve ‘an acceptable volume of tourism to foster a respectful coexistence with neighbors.’8 However, some protesters had banners stating ‘Tourist Go Home’ and ‘My home is not your home.’ Interestingly, recent violent actions deployed by anarchists groups (revolutionaries) against the Tourist City that have occurred in Barcelona also focus much more on the individual rather than on the capital. Among many actions that occurred in late 2016, some young anarchists belonging to the self-managed ‘Housing Office of Gràcia’ (which was created when they squatted in an early-twentieth-century building located in Plaça del Sol and which was sold in 2014 to build the first hotel to be opened in the neighborhood of Gràcia) broke the hotel’s façade windows on 27 December 2016, when the hotel opened its doors. They also painted the hotel’s façade with the words ‘Tourist Go Home.’ Equally, like the banners at ‘Occupy Les Rambles’, this ‘Tourist Go Home’ on the hotel’s façade dramatically clashes with the internationalism defended by most convokers (belonging to the left-wing spectrum of local politics). In turn, this could lead us to wonder if anti-touristification and/or anti-gentrification discourses, grammars and practices are much more centred on the individual and not in the capital. In other words, one could argue that they are profoundly connected with the rise of radical democracy promoted by somehow renewed neoliberal-friendly social democracy that transforms David Harvey’s ‘right to the city’ into ‘the right to my (white) city.’ As Manuel Delgado (2016) argues this new citizenism elevates the individual to his/her highest level of symbolic efficiency as a conceptual character, since s/he recognizes in him the image of a naked human being, without attributes, dull, only a cluster of potentialities of action and development. This ‘right to my city’ would therefore be the clearest expression of the rise of perilous ‘racist cosmopolitanism’ (Ibid.).

Lisbon Previous sections have focused on two case studies, Madrid and Barcelona, where tensions between different social actors resulting from the rapid and intense touristification of the city center have recently emerged as part of a

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global phenomenon affecting both well-established and emerging world tourism destinations (Colomb & Novy 2017). However, the case of Lisbon is of extraordinary singularity. First, a rapid abandonment of the city center by its inhabitants took place in the 1980s and 1990s, as they moved to peripheral areas of the city with much better housing and environmental conditions. In fact, this massive residential displacement responded largely to an earlier upward social mobility that was for a long time desired by many middle-class and middlelower-class families living in a then very degraded city center after decades of fascist dictatorship and poverty affecting a large part of the Portuguese society (Baptista et al. 2017). But, since mid-2000s, a growing number of middle-class families began to come back to live in the city center once some national and local programmes of urban renewal and socioeconomic revitalization were implemented, leading these areas to experience processes of commercial gentrification, student-led gentrification, and early touristification, like in the case of the Bairro Alto and Alfama neighborhoods, among others (e.g., Mendes 2006; Malet-Calvo 2013). And here appears the second extraordinary singularity of Lisbon that we would like to highlight: many of those who first showed their antagonist positions against recent ‘excessive’ negative impacts derived from the touristification of the city center are ‘newcomers’ who, in last decade, moved to formerly degraded lower-class neighborhoods of the city center like Alfama, Castelo, Mouraria, Cais do Sodré and Bica. Many of them were attracted by a retroscape (Brown & Sherry 2003) characterized by old buildings dating from the eighteenth century, tiny traditional bars smelling of tobacco and wine, very small groceries selling vegetables planted near Lisbon, romantic street lamps, the older woman in the window seat controlling ‘her’ street, etc. In this ‘vintage city,’ new residents become actors of the ‘colonization of the present by the past’ (Belk 2003: 23). Therefore, these young and young-adult highly-skilled professionals (especially scientists, liberal professionals, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs) are the main protagonists of the residential change in downtown Lisbon occurring during the last decade (Baptista et al. 2017). But equally, and interestingly, they are at the very heart of newly-emerged (anti/ alter-) touristification movements in Lisbon. Stop Tourist Apartments (Travar o Alojamento Local, TAL, in the original) is an initiative launched in March 2017 by Rui Martins, spokesman of the neighbors’ association of Areeiro, a middle-class neighborhood created in 2016. Travar o Alojamento Local is self-defined as an ‘inorganic movement of citizens and victims of tourist apartments.’9 The fact that this initiative emerges from the social fabric of a middle-class area of the city and not from any ‘touristified’ formerly degraded lower-class historical areas of the city center is very relevant to the topic we discuss here. In its manifesto, TAL demands the expansion of ‘social housing policies for local middle classes’ (points 1 to 4). The other four points urge the addressing of both national and local programmes regarding fiscal benefits for foreign real-estate investors (from the TAL Manifesto 2017), while point 9 denounces the intense and (un-)regulated touristification that has spread across all the city. Travar o

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Alojamento Local therefore proposes that the local administration must urgently: 1) increase taxation of tourist apartments; 2) establish new regulation similar to that undertaken in New York to limit rentals to 30 days; 3) reformulate procedures to transform family housing into short-term rental tourist apartments; and 4) ‘arrange municipal properties to transform them and therefore provide social housing to local middle classes’ (Ibid.). With no doubt, proposals launched by the TAL Manifesto are more reformist than revolutionary. The middle-class-oriented reformist agenda facing touristification in Lisbon is also quite evident in explicit leftwing social association movements and even among local scholars researching in the field of urban studies. ‘Live in Lisbon’ (Morar em Lisboa, in the original) is a public manifesto initially signed by 31 social, cultural, and neighbors’ associations, together with 42 Lisbon-based scholars from the fields of anthropology, geography, architecture, and sociology. The amalgam of associations and left-wing scholars signing the manifesto deserves our special attention. One of the associations signing Morar em Lisboa’s Manifesto is ‘Here People Live’ (Aquí Mora Gente, in the original). Created in 2010, Aquí Mora Gente is the neighbors’ association of Cais do Sodré, a former harbor quarter of downtown Lisbon that has recently experienced a social sanitation through public-supported expansion of gentrified nightlife (Nofre 2013). Aquí Mora Gente is mainly formed by newcomers who arrived in the early 2000s, attracted by initial plans to transform Cais do Sodré into a new vibrant middle-class London Soho-like cultural spot for the city. But it never was like the initial idea expressed by the then local administration, and it was only in 2011 when the city council fostered a new community intervention plan by revitalizing the area and transforming it into the most vibrant youth-oriented and tourist-oriented night-time leisure area of the city. It was then that the ‘newcomers’, many high-skilled liberal professionals, created Aquí Mora Gente. In turn, Academia Cidadã was born under the frame of massive protests in 12 March 2011 in Portugal against precarity and a no-future scenario for Portuguese young people (Fernandes 2017). According to its manifesto, Academia Cidadã ‘promotes the deepening of democracy, the dignity of the human person in its diversity, multiculturalism, interculturality and the construction of a universally free, just, conscious, critical, supportive and fraternal society.’10 Interestingly, Academia Cidadã counts on the official support of Lisbon City Council and the European Commission. One could argue that this information would be enough to highlight its reformist approach to facing tourism-related challenges in the city of Lisbon. However, other voices and protest grammars against this wide neoliberalfriendly social democratic vision of the ‘Tourist City’ in Lisbon have emerged over the last five years from both ‘new’ and ‘old’ grassroots groups and associations, although they are residual. Left Hand Rotation is a small artivist group, based in Lisbon since 2011, that denounces gentrification through artistic intervention in public space. In April 2014, the collective started its campaign ‘Terramotourism: Emergency measures in case of tourist earthquake’11 (Terramotourism: instruções de emergência em caso de transformação urbana produzida por sismo turístico, in

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the original), putting up posters in many buildings of the downtown neighborhood of Baixa against the expansion of hotels in the area. In April 2017, the collective presented Terramotourism, a 40-minute documentary on the urban change, spatial displacement and touristification in Lisbon city center that has occurred during the last three years. The session was held on 1 April 2017 in the Sociedade da Boa Uniao headquarters, a cultural association of the historical neighborhood of Alfama founded in earlier twentieth century and one of the most fundamental community institutions of the neighborhood. After the exhibition of the documentary, discussion between the attendees (some were elderly lifelong neighbors, some were adult neighbors, and others were young newcomers) took place. Questions raised in the discussion were the same as those that Alfama’s neighbors had been expressing in the last meeting held with Mr Miguel Coelho, President of the Civil Parish of Santa Maria Maior, a grouping of most of the historical neighborhoods of Lisbon city center, that is to say, the liberalization of state-protected housing rents for lowerclass elderly people and the impossibility of paying the new monthly rents in the current context of upward tensions in the local real-estate market due to the (un-) regulated touristification of the city. On the other hand, younger neighbors showed their very great concern in facing the impossibility of continuing to live in ‘touristified Alfama’ given their situation of long-term unemployment or (if they were lucky) labor precarity and exploitation. However, these are isolated voices that can count on no organized support by grassroots movements as in the case of Barcelona or Madrid as examined previously. The only anti-capitalist group that has debated on the negative critical impacts of touristification in Lisbon is RDA (Reguierao dos Anjos, in the original), who organized a debate on 21 April 2017 entitled ‘The capital (city) and The Capital’ (A capital e o capital, in the original). As its organizers state on the RDA’s website: [Touristification] elicits a profusion of opinions and positions as contradictory as they are strong. If on the one hand the discourse on the authenticity of the city easily bears on conservative contours, on the other hand it is unequivocal the operation of economic expulsion of some of its inhabitants and the incapacity of the social movements to respond to the situation. How to think about these transformations, their causes and social consequences, their political responses? How to think about the themes of gentrification, the “right to the city” and the emergence of metropolitan social movements? While in Barcelona anti-capitalists are fighting against tourism (and tourists) through direct (and sometimes violent) actions, in Lisbon they have just started to think about how to respond to one of the newest processes of neoliberalization of the city.

Conclusions – a comparative perspective The capitalist city is speculating 24 hours a day and responds to a complex process that may or may not be accompanied by gentrification. Thus, it seems

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that the impact of tourism is the new challenge so we have to rethink the city, both from academia and activism. We see how in recent years, in the absence of better economic models in times of crisis, both private and public initiatives have launched into the void behind urban tourism as an economic refuge. Nevertheless, we need rigorous studies that do not reduce the equation of the rise of prices or the displacement of people only to the tourist apartments. We see how, again, at the street scale, the production of the city is changing in a new turn by taking the tourist as the main consumer (target). We see how, in the neighborhoods with the highest rates of tourist apartments, the market is adapting to this new reality, responding to another consumer, not necessarily with a high capacity of consumption, but with other consumerist preferences for a leisure consumerism (restaurants, gift shops, gourmetization, etc.). In addition, there is an economy of precarious workers that flourish, in many cases, like a submerged economy: cleaners, plumbers working by the hour, tourist guides, gastronomic experiences, etc.12 As we have shown in this chapter, the urban movements against gentrification and touristification seem different depending on collective action traditions and on tourism pressures. In the first place, Madrid has autonomous anti-gentrification movements, which combine both concepts around the same grammar, urban speculation. For several years, these concepts (although controversial in their use) seem to have been helpful. In addition, after the entrance of municipalism in Madrid in May 2015, the approach seems to be twofold: a strategic coalition (although conflictive) between the city council and these social movements, looking for partial solutions to paralyze gentrification and touristification effects; on the other hand, their own autonomous diagnostics and alternatives, which promote sustainable and imaginative policies for the fight against speculation. In the second case, in Barcelona, although some campaigns converge with those of Madrid, from the entrance of municipalism and the strengthening of networks such as the ‘Assembly of neighborhoods for sustainable tourism,’ it seems that the autonomous formulas are eminently more about clash and riots than in Lisbon and Madrid. Despite the moratorium on hotel bidding and the prosecution of illegal tourist flats by the Ada Colau government, the autonomous movement has decided to take direct action against those whom they consider to be speculating in the Tourist City. Finally, the Lisbon case has been softer with these turistifying policies. Without a strong anchorage in historical neighborhood movements, or ambitious municipal policies against touristification, the only resistance is given by those high cultural capital groups, among which are scholars and politicians who raise their voices, or the highly qualified young neighbors who are organized for their expected ‘Lisbon Soho.’ In the meantime, the tourist industry is moving forward in a brilliant way through entire neighborhoods that have been bought to be used as tourist apartments, such as Alfama, the renovated Mouraria or Bairro Alto. Such antagonistic positions, adopted by the different actors and social groups affected and/or involved in the recent rapid expansion of urban

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tourism in the city center of many European cities, demand the urgent tackling and addressing of the complex non-linear interplay between the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1967; Harvey 2012) and an inclusive peaceful community liveability in ‘touristified neighborhoods.’ Nevertheless, such a critical situation in the governance of the ‘Tourist City’ has not found any feasible answer in the scholarly world. This would be largely due to two main issues. First, ongoing urban and tourism studies mentioned above do not offer enough theoretical, conceptual or methodological tools that may capture the whole complexity and multifaceted nature of the recent touristification of the city centers in many European cities. Second, works published to date about the touristification and even the Airbnbisation (Richards 2017) of the city center do not identify, examine or evaluate this urban process by bearing in mind the different voices, discourses, stories and actors involved and/or affected by the recent expansion of urban tourism in city centers. Thus, there arises the need to provide new theoretical and conceptual horizons and approaches on how the touristification of the city center appears as increasingly interconnected with a wide range of multi-sided urban processes and resistance.

Acknowledgement This work has been supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science & Technology (SFRH/BPD/115726/2016 and SFRH/BPD/108458/2015).

Notes 1 See: www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/02/eu-commission-backs-sharing-econ omy-uber-airbnb. 2 For further information, please see: http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/digital-singlemarket_en. 3 https://vimeo.com/26031055. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOJt0vYQ2qk. 4 https://lavapiesdondevas.wordpress.com. 5 https://stophotelplazalavapies.wordpress.com. 6 Some weeks ago, after having written this text, an anti-tourist and alter-capitalist group called ‘Ens Plantem’ (‘We Stand Firm’) carried out some violent actions against hotels and tourist symbols of the city like the city sightseeing bus (June– August 2017). Although their actions were rapidly condemned by all political groups represented in the city council (with the exception of the anti-capitalist party Popular Unity Candidacy), new informal groups have emerged by carrying out direct actions against negative impacts derived from the touristification of the city. One of the most remarkable informal groups is Raval en Acció (Raval in Action), formed by neighbors of the downtown quarter combating the increasing squattering of houses by petty dealers as result of soaring narcotourism in Barcelona. 7 For further information, see: https://assembleabarris.wordpress.com. 8 For further information, see: http://500x20.prouespeculacio.org/2017/01/barcelona-noesta-en-venda. 9 https://travaroalojamentolocal.wordpress.com/about. 10 Source: http://academiacidada.org/manifesto.

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11 https://vimeo.com/192243662. 12 There are pages like Trip4Real, where the tourist will pay for local experiences; or Taskrabbit, where the philosophy of interchange has also been monetarized; or precarious labor relations in peers.org, where job seekers will be able to look for work related to the tourist p2p economy.

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7 CHANGES AND CONTINUITY IN THE LEFT IN CHILE (1990–2017) Between the streets and institutions César Guzmán-Concha and Carlos Durán Migliardi

Introduction Several signs of change are noticeable in the field of the political left in Chile. These started to be apparent at the beginning of this century, and are related to broader changes in the party system. While the dictatorship (1973–1990) represented a turning point – or, properly speaking, a counter-revolution – for the socioeconomic structures of the country, the party system that ensued was very similar to the one prior to the coup d’état. Except for the marginalization of the Communist Party, the main players were basically the same, with the Christian Democratic Party playing a pivotal role in the balance of the whole system. The endurance of the party system over the second half of the twentieth century, despite the brutal changes introduced by the dictatorship, was a notable feature that was often used to argue the exceptionality of Chile in the LatinAmerican context. But at the beginning of the twenty first century, various changes in the party system became apparent. New groups emerge and others defect to the old parties of the right, the centre and the left. While the political offer expands, an increasing number of citizens increasingly abstain from electoral participation, in a process in which turnout rapidly falls to less than 50% in recent elections (2013 and 2016). In turn, citizens organize themselves, voicing demands that they consider neglected by political parties. Contentious collective action increases. Various groups are constantly present in the public arena targeting elites and institutions as responsible for a state of affairs that is deemed unjust. These multiple and contradicting trends in citizen participation affect the whole field of politics with results that are yet to be fully understood. Political parties attempt to react to this situation, but it is clear that a mismatch between politics and society has emerged (Roberts 2015). With a certain delay when compared with the region, Chile has started to experience dealignment of

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its party system. It is around this divide that this chapter describes and interprets the changes in the left in Chile over the last four decades. In this chapter, we describe the situation, trajectories and prospects of leftwing parties and groups in Chile, focussing on the period beginning with the massive student protests of 2011. In order to do so, we situate the Chilean case as an outlier in the context of the Latin American left turn that started with the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela (1999). We illustrate how a number of domestic and international factors explain the decline and weakness of the left since the restoration of democracy in 1990: the dissolution of a long-lasting alliance between the Socialist and the Communist parties; the adoption of consociational and moderate – transition to a “Third Way”-type ideology – strategies in the socialist party; the lack of political adaptation in the Communist Party; the dramatic decline of the labour movement; the exhaustion and successful repression of urban popular movements and other experiences of the revolutionary left, which had prospered during the dictatorship in shantytowns and popular neighbourhoods. Contradicting the elite consensus at the time, the massive student protests of 2011 (the Chilean Winter) made evident a fracture in the popular consensus about the socio-economic model and political institutions after two decades of stability and apparent social acquiescence. Interestingly, and unlike other episodes of social unrest that occurred around 2011 in other countries, this outbreak took place in a context of high economic growth and low unemployment. The exhaustion of the post-transitional consensus led to the emergence of various protest movements and left-wing groups that challenged the parties of the institutional left, which had prevailed over much of the last century. Here, we describe the characteristics of the most notorious groups that have emerged in recent years (their ideology and composition). We argue that they are not completely new but have deep roots with previous experiences, and we identify the opportunities and challenges that they face in the current period.

A brief overview of the left in Chile, 1973–2000 The radical left faced the reestablishment of democracy (1990) divided, weakened and marginalized. The traditional alliance between the Socialist and the Communist parties, which prevailed until 1973, dissolved in the 1980s as the process of ideological moderation of the socialists progressed and the party prepared its incorporation to a new alliance with the political centre. The Socialist Party (SP) led the majority of the left to governmental functions in an alliance with the Christian Democratic Party (CDP), while a minority led by the Communist Party (CP) and other minor forces remained outside and sought refuge in grassroots politics. But neither institutional nor grassroots politics helped these forces to revert an adverse political environment. On the one hand, democratic politics was so constrained by institutional and extra-institutional forces that the options for advancing progressive policies were limited. To become a government force, the SP had to accept the 1980 Constitution and a

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balance of power skewed towards the military and pro-business. But, on the other hand, the whole field of popular politics had been reshaped by the dictatorship reforms, thus hindering the options for a rapid reset of the field. Especially the labour unions, formerly a pillar of the left parties, were internally debilitated and deprived of most of their functions in the area of industrial relations. Three historical events had left their mark on the contemporary Chilean left: the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in 1973, the resistance to the military dictatorship (1973–1989), and the transition to democracy (1988–1990). Although more than four decades have passed since the coup d’état, and 27 years since the first democratic elections that gave a symbolic end to the authoritarian period, the influence of these historical events is still noticeable at the beginning of the twenty-first century. These events entailed dramatic controversies for the left, which have shaped the political cultures and strategic decisions of these groups in successive decades. Their effects can be observed both in the historical left (socialist and communist parties) and the area of the new left (groups and parties that have emerged in recent years). In a long-term perspective, the historical project of the left for most of the twentieth century was defeated with the military coup in 1973. This project can be characterized as one of incremental reforms aimed at increasing the role of the state in the economy and the incorporation of urban and rural working classes in society, and respect for democratic institutions and forms. While the historical parties of the pre-1973 Chile were not revolutionary parties in a strict sense – they didn’t want to overthrow the system but to win elections – they were ideologically committed to radical transformations in the economy, politics and society.1 A more radical left emerged in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution and the rebellious sixties. These groups (especially the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, MIR) were very active in grassroots politics, e.g., student unions, associations of the urban poor, and some labour unions, in particular in the manufacturing sector of large cities. They competed against the traditional parties of the left on all these fronts, and were reluctant supporters of the strategy of the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity, the coalition of parties that brought Salvador Allende to the presidency in 1970), but they supported the President. With the coup d’état, political parties were declared illegal and leftist militants became, without distinction, the main targets of persecution. They faced illegal detentions, exile, torture and physical extermination.2 The Communist Party and MIR adopted a strategy of armed resistance against the regime, although not in coordination. The socialists, instead, adopted a strategy of popular mobilization and pacts with the parties of the centre, in particular with the Christian Democrats. This strategy was the result of a broader critical analysis of the causes of the military coup. According to this analysis, the lack of a broader agreement with the centre had allowed the right wing to persuade the middle classes of the need of a military intervention. Given the historical

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characteristics of the party system (its structuration in three thirds of rather equal size: right, centre and left), any project of social transformation had to include the centre and the middle classes to be viable. The failure of the insurrectional strategy pursued by the communists (known as “masses popular rebellion”) consolidated the moderate approach that included negotiations with the regime and pacts with the Christian Democrats. Eventually, the transition to democracy occurred with few variations from the plan instituted in the 1980 Constitution. But the acceptance of the constitution implied more than just the acceptance of an institutional itinerary for the replacement of the military with civilians in state offices. The 1980 Constitution set clear limits for the public policies to be pursued by the civilian administration after the military left power. A number of provisions were purposefully designed to make difficult any substantive policy shifts. Among these provisions, the requirement of qualified majorities in parliament to approve changes on certain issues; a disproportionate attention to the protection of economic freedom and property rights in detriment to other types of rights; and countermajoritarian institutions such as a Constitutional Tribunal with ample faculties to rebuff parliament or government decisions.3 The establishment of a consensual democracy at the institutional level was coupled with intra-elite pacts at the level of the informal practices of government. This practice was called “democracy of consensuses” (democracia de los consensos). Through these pacts, the military and economic elites tamed the centre-left coalition Concertación’s initial aspirations to rebalance the system (Fazio 1996). These pacts went far beyond Pinochet himself, and extended to wider areas that included socio-economic policies and political issues. During the 1990s and 2000s, this mode of governmentality proved successful. The economy expanded at a rapid rate, especially in the 1990s. The government pursued pro-market policies with programmes such as the second wave of privatizations (1994–1999) and further reforms that created new opportunities for the private sector in a wide variety of areas (e.g., urban governance, highways, higher education) (Taylor 2006). The social indicators improved, with drastic reductions in poverty levels and other indicators of material deprivation, yet inequality remained high. Social policy reforms of the period (pensions, education, healthcare) ameliorated the worst effects inherent in the system (Garretón Merino 2013). However, they shaped a welfare model that resembles a marketplace of private providers competing to attract customers. In this context, the role of the state is residual in terms of provision, creating a two-tier system in which public services are aimed at citizens who cannot afford private insurances (Huber and Stephens 2012). Social contestation to this state of affairs was low in this period. Grassroots politics, which had been booming during the eighties, experienced a decline with the advent of democracy in the nineties (Moulian 2002). This decline was the outcome of various factors. The groups of the radical left experienced the transition to democracy as a historical defeat – a second defeat in less than 20

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years. For many activists, the reestablishment of democracy meant the possibility to recover a normal life after years of activism under stressful conditions. Moreover, hundreds of members of the parties of the centre left (socialists, Christian democrats and members of other minor parties) who had been activists in grassroots organizations, were called to occupy various offices in the central and local administrations in the first democratic government. These processes converged to provoke a de-mobilization effect at the grassroots level (Oxhorn 1994; Hipsher 1996), from which these groups would not recover. Labour unions entered the democratic period in a frail state. They were one of the main targets of the pro-market reforms of the dictatorship. Union leaders were persecuted and suffered political oppression. For the technocrats that carried out the labour market reforms, unions were seen as an interest group that impeded the functioning of free markets and whose faculties had to be demeaned. The Labour Code of 1981 allowed collective bargaining only at the shop-floor level (or at the level of the company), impeding sectoral or national negotiations. The coverage of collective agreements was reserved to those enrolled in the unions. Moreover, a number of barriers to join unions and form new unions were established. The institutional framework created during the dictatorship was almost untouched in the two decades following the reestablishment of democracy (Sehnbruch 2006). As a result, union membership has fallen to historic lows (10%) and collective bargaining covered less than 6% of the labour force (2012). The parties of the left (SP and CP) remained key forces in the national workers’ union CUT (Central Unitaria de Trabajadores), but, as the role of unions in national affairs continued to decline, CUT was unable to become a platform to promote redistributive policies nor to revitalise an alternative left. At the level of institutional politics, the traditional socialist–communist alliance, that brought them to power both in 1938 (Popular Front governments) and 1970, was now dissolved. The SP became a key member of the centre-left alliance, while the communists led the left opposition to the Concertación administrations. The socialists chose to pact with the Christian-democrats, forming the main axis of an electorally successful alliance that ruled the country between 1990–2010. The CP, instead, became an extra-parliamentary force. The party was unable to gather enough electoral support to effectively challenge the Concertación coalition. One of the causes of the marginalization of the radical left was the electoral system. This made it extremely difficult for actors (electoral lists) outside the two main blocs to obtain seats in parliament. The binomial system ensured that the second majority (right-wing bloc) would get over-represented, thus impeding the first majority (centre-left) to act in a oneside manner. Moreover, it penalized the lists that run against the two main blocs since only two candidates per district would be elected. To conclude this section, we observe that the reforms of the dictatorship were effective in dismantling the socio-economic and institutional environment in which the pre-1973 left had prospered. The centre-left administrations that

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followed did not repeal various of the most significant of the Pinochet-era reforms. They were successful in reducing poverty but couldn’t deal with inequality. These administrations adopted social policy reforms inspired by the liberal welfare state (focalization, means-tested programmes, centred in poverty) with limited components of basic universalism (Huber and Stephens 2012), but they didn’t challenge the market position of the major private providers (AFPs, ISAPRES, private clinics). The policy elite embraced an orthodox pro-market approach, which was apparent during the whole period. This sowed the seeds of a growing discomfort with the consequences of the market modernizations experienced by Chilean society over the last four decades.

The Concertación governments and the turn to the left in Latin America Garretón Merino (2013) has suggested that the centre-left alliance Concertación would be an example of the “pink tide” – i.e., the turn to the left in LatinAmerican societies and the electoral victories of left-wing leaders since the 2000s. According to Garretón, the Concertación would be an early example of a political movement that challenged neoliberalism, although of a different kind than the governments of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Cristina Fernández in Argentina. Other authors have adopted a similar approach, distinguishing between the moderate and radical examples of a turn to the left in the region (Castañeda 2006). As a matter of fact, Chile was governed by a centre-left coalition between 1990–2010. But, putting that aside, we argue that considering Chile as a case of the turn to the left (like Venezuela, Bolivia or Brazil at the time) is a mistake. The inclusion of Chile within this group is problematic for several reasons. First, the so-called turn to the left of the 2000s consists of the rise of political parties or civic platforms that represented actors systematically excluded from the centres of power for most of the twentieth century. These political movements succeeded in achieving a new status in national politics. In Bolivia, the victory of Evo Morales and the Movement for Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo MAS) in 2006 represented the incorporation of indigenous and segments of urban and rural poor into politics. In Brazil, the victory of Lula da Silva and the Workers Party in 2003 was the culmination of a sustained challenge of segments of the organized working class in alliance with other social groups. Such a process of political incorporation of groups systematically excluded from the state can hardly be observed in Chile after the dictatorship. Second, Latin-American citizens turned to the left as a reaction to deep political and socio-economic crises (Roberts 2015), whose origins can be found in the failure of the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Social contestation to the recipes advocated by the Washington Consensus was prolonged and intense, shattering the party systems that prevailed in the second half of the twentieth century in the region. In countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, the reshuffle of the party system was almost complete. In other

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countries, this change was partial or limited to certain areas, such as in Argentina. But, even in this case, the takeover of the Justicialist Party by a left-wing group inspired by non-orthodox economic ideas was crucial. The U-turn of Peronism, from the neoliberal blueprint of Menem in the 1990s to the post-neoliberal administration led by the Kirchners (2003–2015), is a case in itself. In Chile, instead, the party system remained fairly stable up to the mid-2000s, its main actors didn’t face any significant challenge (until 2011), and the economic approach of the Concertación was orthodox and aligned with the hegemonic thinking in economic sciences (Solimano 2012). And, third, the narrative that sustained the Concertación administrations was very different to those that accompanied and prompted the leaders of the LatinAmerican pink tide. The Concertación avoided populist strategies, aligning with the recipes of fiscal responsibility and contained public spending advocated by the main international financial agencies. Moreover, the Concertación sought partnerships with the major economic blocs (NAFTA, APEC) in a context of increased economic globalization, but dismissed regional schemes. The Chilean leaders compared themselves with Tony Blair or Bill Clinton, so put themselves into a third-way moderate type of politics. The movements of the left-turn, instead, embraced populist strategies and departed from mainstream economic thinking (although the actual extent of departure was less radical than what these governments would admit). These administrations challenged the authority of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and developed their own spaces of economic and political integration (ALBA, Mercosur), in a revival of the anti-imperialism and latino-americanism of the 1950s and 1960s. And while these movements were not, strictly speaking, revolutionary, their leaders were not afraid of using concepts like revolution, socialism and antiimperialism, and targeting capitalism or neoliberalism as responsible for inequalities and crises (Arditi 2008). As a matter of fact, the processes that explain the coming to power of leaders such as Lula, Morales, Chávez and the Kirchners can be observed in Chile only recently: increase in the levels of social contestation, dissatisfaction with neoliberal policies, dwindling support for mainstream political parties, dealignment of traditional party systems. While major mass uprisings took place in various countries of the region in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Chile can be well depicted as an island of political stability and stable economic management. The student protests of 2011 changed the whole picture in rapid and profound ways. Thus, contextual factors that facilitated political change in other countries are playing a role in Chile in recent times.

The approach of the Communist Party The Chilean CP was not immune to the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) and its effects on the communist movement worldwide. But, while this crisis debilitated the party, splinter groups were never strong enough as to constitute

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a real threat. A number of notable members left the party, some joined the ranks of the Socialist Party or the PPD (Partido por la Democracia, an instrumental party created in 1987 to allow members of illegal left parties to compete in elections), and many others retired. As a result, the CP didn’t feel the urge to update its ideology or address the mistakes of real existing socialism. The electoral performance of the CP and its allies was modest, in presidential, parliamentary and local elections alike. The presidential candidates backed by the party obtained 4.7% in 1993, 3.2% in 1999, 5.4% in 2005 and 6.2% in 2009. In parliamentary elections, the left coalitions supported by the CP obtained between 5–7% of the vote, but no seats. Since Guillermo Teillier took office as party chair in 2005, the Communist Party pursued a policy of approaching the centre-left coalition. In the presidential and parliamentary elections of the 1990s and 2000s, the CP competed against Concertación and the right-wing alliance, forming electoral platforms that included other small parties of the left plus personalities (such as defectors of the Socialist Party or intellectuals). These platforms couldn’t elect MPs, partly due to the effects of the electoral system, which penalized the communists even in districts that were historically favourable to this party. Despite significant presence in student federations (such as FECH and FEUSACH), and a sustained leadership in workers’ unions, especially the strong teachers’ unions (Colegio de Profesores) and the combative union of externalized workers in private and public copper mines (Confederación de Trabajadores del Cobre), the party was unable to revert its marginal position in the post-1990 party system. But, thanks to pacts with the Concertación (omission in key districts), the CP got its first three MPs in 2009. The communists’ approach consisted in creating the conditions for an enlargement of the centre-left coalition. The enlargement would include the CP and other minor forces of the left. A new agreement with the forces of the centre-left was seen as the only way to overcome the situation of political blockade derived from the lack of majorities in parliament. According to the communists, this agreement would allow parliament to take on board issues postponed by the former governments of the centre-left and pass new policies more aligned with a pro-distribution approach. The CP welcomed and greeted the protests of 2011. Its members were actively participating in these protests and some of the most important leaders of the student movement were party members (e.g., Camila Vallejo, Camilo Ballesteros). However, in coherence with its strategy adopted prior to 2011, the party continued to approach the Concertación.

The 2011 crisis and the realignment of the political field A year before the most important cycle of social mobilizations unfolded, the political field seemed fairly stable: the 2009–2010 presidential elections had resulted in an unprecedented alternation (after two decades of Concertación

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coalition governments) in a context of absolute stability, without any outbreak of social turmoil or political scuffling. In political terms, a period of continuity led by four governments of the same coalition came to a close; the process that led to the dissolution of the cleavage democracy-dictatorship, which had defined the framework of political interaction since Pinochet’s defeat in the 1988 referendum, consolidated and, finally, the right completed its path to being a real governmental alternative (Tironi 2010). In the first round of the 2009 presidential elections, the left had found a space to present itself through one of three candidacies: on one side, former President Eduardo Frei, a Christian Democrat, who represented the most genuine traditions of the Concertación coalition and was its official candidate; on another, Jorge Arrate, former socialist leader and Government Secretary who stood for a leftist coalition – Together We Can (Juntos Podemos) – headed by the Communist Party and other small groups of the traditional left; and, finally, socialist Congressman Marco Enríquez-Ominami, a well-known member of the Concertación elite, son of the slain MIR leader Miguel Enríquez, who expounded a political rhetoric that sounded very attractive to the leftist groups which held critical views of the previous Concertación administrations and saw in him an expression of renewal and change. That being the general picture, the results of the first round attested to a traditional left limited to a marginal representation (6%), that contrasted with Marco Enríquez-Ominami’s successful performance (20%), an outsider candidate that nevertheless managed to electorally capitalize on the climate of political disaffection that surrounded Frei’s candidacy, who obtained a meagre 29% of the votes against 44% attained by Piñera’s rightist candidacy. In this way, the climate of social disenchantment and the growing rift between the citizenry and the Concertación governments did not translate into any consistent political emergence of groups on the left. The rightist candidate’s victory showed that civic discontent with the ruling elites could be better interpreted discursively when it was posed as challenging a “way of management” rather than a meaning and direction. Without doubt, Piñera’s insistence on “efficiency” as the answer to the social problems and demands defeated the powerless rebuttal of the model made by the groups of the left that were not part of the Concertación’s camp. The reasons put forward to explain the ending of the Concertación governments’ political cycle and the right’s electoral victory are diverse and include: the official coalition’s inability to interpret correctly the transformations that its own modernizing zeal imposed on the citizenry, the inevitable weakening of the cleavage authoritarianism-democracy on which it built its civic majority, the numerous tactical errors that precluded articulating a strong and novel presidential candidacy and led to insist in the candidacy of former President Eduardo Frei’s worn-out and unpromising persona, the unforeseen sudden emergence of the “díscolos” (fractious or unruly) and with them the powerful candidacy of former Concertación congressman Marco Enríquez-Ominami, and the end of

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the previous advantage of having been victims of and opposition to Pinochet’s dictatorship (Tironi 2010; Hunneus 2014; Varas 2014). Nevertheless, the truth is that, under the aegis of a discourse that invoked the need for a change in the management of public institutions, emphasized by the exhaustion of ideas and deeds after four Concertación governments as well as the technical skills of its own prospective governing team, the right’s campaign was able to position itself in a political arena in which the civic demand on the political field had basically resulted in a requisite for “efficiency”, “sound management”, oversight and control of corruption and the provision of measurable results. In a context highlighted by the presence of a “political class” that fundamentally disregarded discussing the societal model, and a citizenry that “suffered” or “enjoyed” its standard of living, ascribing its successes and failures to individual endeavour, it was only natural that the cleavage dictatorship/democracy, distinctive of politics in the decade 1990–2000, would water down to an opposition between efficiency/inefficiency clearly favourable for the right, skilful in ridding itself of its pro-dictatorial burden. In this stage where the right moved forward, the diverse forces of the left, on the contrary, displayed an inability to put up their standing on the public scene. Besides the faction that had partaken in the Concertación’s defeated and wornout project, the left wavered between those that placed their stakes – unsuccessfully – on the electoral strife (as was the case with Jorge Arrate and Marco Enríquez-Ominami) and other groups and actors that fought for the structuring of a socio-political space outside of the electoral field of dispute, but that, with rare exceptions, didn’t achieve enough public visibility so as to build a place of effective political development. In this fashion, on 11 March 2010, an administration of the right finally took charge of the government and its settling in was a clear manifestation of the defeat suffered by the progressive and transformative stances that the leftist area represented. A right sector that, guided by a discourse of efficiency and technical capability for addressing the Chilean people’s social discontent, managed to build a politico-electoral majority and uphold the political grammar of the status quo, in this way blocking the path for the emergence of critical discourses. The earthquake in February 2010 – that hit the country a few days before Piñera took charge as the new President – aided this focus on the criterion of efficiency that distinguished the new administration. In this way, “the new manner of governing” (the slogan of the Piñera administration) pervaded the public agenda, a promise in the light of which the citizenry stood expectant, in a state of faithfulness that, with the spectacular rescue of the miners trapped underground for months in a mine in Copiapó in October that same year,4 reached its peak.5 This technocratic hallmark, distinctive of the Piñera Administration, seemed to consolidate the process of de-politicization and technocratization of the political field in Chile, a trend that had already begun during the Concertación governments, and that allowed the sustaining of high levels of governability and

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political stability. These expectations, however, were shattered very soon by a succession of factors that led not only to the failure of the Piñera Administration’s refoundational yearnings, but also triggered a process of political and social crisis that Chile is still going through. Among these factors was the adding up of a series of “non-imposed errors” on the part of the Piñera Administration, an over-exposure of the presidential persona that hindered his own authority, and the appearance of weak points that revealed growing critical views of the government’s technocratic character from inside the ranks of the right. Finally, and no less important, the activation of an unprecedented cycle of social mobilizations, starting at the end of 2010, provoked in the Piñera Government a crisis so large in scale that, along with triggering a frenzy of Cabinet changes and the return of the “old guard of the hard right” to the front lines, brought about a feeling of immobility and of loss of the governmental agenda that was very clear in the eyes of public opinion. Regarding this phenomenon, whose highest expression was the cycle of student mobilizations in 2011 (Donayre and Igan 2011; Durán 2012), several analyses have been presented concerning the causes that gave rise to it as well as the degree of responsibility that the Piñera Government bears for its origins. Beyond that, however, the truth is that – in consideration of its future consequences – the activation of the social protest was the most profound among the three factors pointed out. Because, against the prevailing view that saw in the right’s electoral victory in 2009 the ultimate establishment of a managerial and anti-politics discourse, the political drift wound up opening the doors for the activation of what, without any doubt, can be considered a new cycle of politicization of Chilean society. A cycle defined by discontent, the will and desire to participate and the incremental contestation of some of the cornerstones that constitute the foundations on which the Chilean political and socioeconomic model of the last 30 years stands.6 Ultimately, the cycle of social mobilizations of 2011–2012 not only impacted Sebastian Piñera’s governmental performance, but also subverted what had become one of the pillars of governability in Chile in the decade 1990–2000, namely, the political elites’ proven capacity to manage social demand efficiently, blocking in this manner the activation of politicization processes capable of intervening in the political status quo. Curiously, then, what was envisaged to be the epitome of the a-political technocracy created the conditions for a re-politicization process whose reach and fate are still open, but that, no doubt, severely altered the high levels of governmental efficiency that characterized the post-dictatorial political drift. In this way, paradoxically, Piñera’s Government constituted a point of inflexion due to the unfulfilled expectation in the capability of the managerial logic to administrate public policy efficiently. Probably, it was the last effort to control by technocratic means a political process that was already being encroached by underground developments and discontent, the interpretation of

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which by the political elites, in light of the evidence at hand, was not very adequate. From then on, there opened a new political cycle still in the process of structuring.

A new cycle and opportunities for the left As we’ve set out in the previous section, Sebastian Piñera’s Government constituted a political juncture defined by the irruption of the largest social mobilization cycle seen in Chile since the cycle of protests against the dictatorship halfway into the decade of 1980. A social mobilization cycle that resulted in a deep fracture after a long period of post-transitional stability, and led to – among other consequences – the reconfiguration of the political field in Chile. First of all, this reconfiguration expressed itself in a substantial modification in the field of meanings and oppositions present in the political arena. If at the beginning of Piñera’s Government the fundamental cleavage established in the political field was the opposition efficiency/inefficiency (evidently favourable for the right), and the main topics of civic concern focussed around crime, jobs and economic growth, towards the end of his government the issue of education had become one of the major citizens’ concerns. Likewise, new meanings such as “universal rights”, “gratuity” and “end to profits” were installed in the political agenda, strongly eroding the once impenetrable post-transitional political grammar, characterized by the highlighting of the dual imperative of political stability and the allegiance to a socio-economic model whose bases had been naturalized. In second place, the seeds were sown for the end of the Concertación and its replacement by a new coalition, the Nueva Mayoría (New Majority). In fact, this new alliance resulted from a political articulation that revolved around the persona of Bachelet, and which was structured on the basis of an array of discursive shifts whose goal was to appropriate the context of representational crisis that was begging to become evident, and at the same time incorporate new contents and actors. All that, along with the immeasurable incentive that carried a presidential candidacy – former President Bachelet’s – that had great chances of being successful. The most important innovation in this new coalition was the incorporation of the Communist Party, no doubt the main political organization of the left at that moment. In this way, the previous Concertación gave way to a new coalition that included at least some representatives of the traditional left. Having diagnosed the beginning of a “new political cycle” (Ottone 2014), the new Bachelet Administration managed to appropriate, in part, the reformist aspirations put forth during the protest cycle in 2011, emphasizing the struggle against inequality and luring to her side the claims and demands of the left. The secretariat of Women’s Affairs was given to a party member (Claudia Pascual) in 2013, and later the party would get its second secretary in Social Development (Marcos Barraza). Other party members were appointed as vice-secretaries

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and many others as (high level) policy advisors in the public administration, although their presence was more significant in a few divisions including the Ministry of Education. The party also increased its presence in the lower chamber to six members (out of 120). Although the CP was a clear minority within the government, the party expected that this presence could help to tip the balance to the left in the Bachelet Administration. These expectations, however, were short-lasting. After a year of piecemeal achievements realized through a series of reforms in some areas, the Bachelet Government had to confront several critical situations related to accusations and investigations that harmed the President’s most cherished attribute: probity. Beginning with the exposure of influence peddling by some of the President’s most direct relatives, and leading to the opening of investigations concerning practices of “irregular financing” going on in politics, these situations eroded not only the President’s popularity, but also the ruling block’s internal cohesion. The initial alignment of the different political organizations that formed the Nueva Mayoría with the President’s reformist agenda was followed by the gradual and systematic erosion of the coalition, and the surfacing of weak points and internal dissent which, all added up, led to the dismissal of any possibility of successful implementation of the Government’s programme that had been promised to the country in the 2013 elections. In this manner, what at the start was seen as the auspicious conformation of a new political coalition capable of attracting some of the ideals and demands proper of the left, resulted in the unfolding of a government with big political deficits, weak internal cohesion and an inability to uphold the reformist narrative that stood at its origins. One after another, the actors that had shown themselves expectant with the initial governmental agenda drifted away, giving opportunity for the opening of a political space on the left flank of a government that, in spite of having incorporated the Communist Party, could not cover it.

The Broad Front and the conformation of a new left After the experience of visibility and public exposure of the students’ demands in the mobilization cycle in 2011, the assertion of a wide and diverse range of social demands, and the establishment in the public sphere of a political discourse contesting the pillars of the Chilean economic and social model, the conditions that would allow the modification of the political field started to look more and more favourable. The many shortcomings in the implementation of the reforms included in the agenda of the Bachelet Administration and, in addition, the deep internal discrepancies over the speed and direction of the reforms put before the nation by this administration, were creating a sensation of “political emptiness” in terms of the absence of representation of the social demands activated during Piñera’s Government. These factors, plus a series of contingent situations, opened a space in which a diverse range of political organizations converged, giving shape to a new

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political referent shared by most of the groups linked to the ideals of the left that did not take part in the governing coalition, though it is not exclusive to only them. This political referent, the Broad Front (Frente Amplio), has experienced a speedy growth since its formalization in January 2017, to the point that it was capable of taking part in the electoral process of that same year, putting forth a joint parliamentary list and presidential candidacy. One of the most important milestones in the constitution of the Broad Front (BF) was the formation in 2016 of the “Emergent Pole” (Polo Emergente), a coordination of political organizations that started to debate systematically over what steps should be taken in the conformation of a new political actor that could become a serious challenge in the institutional field. The organizations that constituted this political space were Nueva Democracia (New Democracy), a group headed by the renounced communist militant and labour union leader Cristian Cuevas and composed of activists that took part in different leftist groups, including the Unión Nacional Estudiantil (National Student Union) and the CREA Foundation; Izquierda Libertaria (The Libertarian Left), an organization whose birth lay in the articulation between the Frente de Estudiantes Libertarios (Libertarian Students Front) and a range of trends and militants who shared libertarian ideals; Revolución Democrática (Democratic Revolution), a political organization that rose under Giorgio Jackson’s leadership (Giorgio Jackson was one of the leaders in the student mobilizations in 2011 and has been a Congressman since 2013), characterized by its circumscribed proximity to Bachelet’s political project; Convergencia de Izquierdas (Convergence of the Lefts), a political organization constituted mainly of former socialist cadres; and the Movimiento Autonomista (Autonomist Movement), an organization headed by former student leader and Congressman Gabriel Boric, that was born as a splinter group – in May 2016 – of the organization Izquierda Autónoma (Autonomous Left), which has had a notorious protagonism in the educational conflict and is endowed with a diverse range of student leaders who enjoy a lot of presence in the mass media. Soon after, this referent was joined by the Partido Humanista (Humanist Party), a 30year-old organization composed of a numerous set of cadres who have a long history as political and social activists. Shortly after the constitution of the Emergent Pole, another set of organizations, which included the Partido Ecologista Verde (Green Ecologist Party), PODER Ciudadano (Citizens’ POWER, an organization composed of cadres stemming from different leftist groupings), Izquierda Autónoma (Autonomous Left), and Partido Igualdad (Equality Party, an organization constituted around a political discourse linked to the urban poor and shantytown dwellers), converged in a political referent touted in the media as “el otro Frente” (“the other Front”), which, at the end of 2016, established a relationship link with the Emergent Pole with the aim of establishing a new political space. Most of these groups and organizations have their origins in the political field of the left, although a few exceptions can be seen, as in the cases of the

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Green Ecologist Party, the Humanist Party and Citizens’ POWER, organizations that coalesce around a shared search for overcoming the cleavage left/right. In all the other cases, the organizations have – most of them – risen in the midst of the social mobilizations during the past decade, some of them with older ideological roots originating in the historical tradition of the Chilean left, but generally showing deep differences relative to the traditional organizations – Socialist Party and Communist Party – both in their way of doing politics and their position in the political field. Towards December 2016, this set of groups, joined by the centrist Partido Liberal (Liberal Party) and the Partido PAIS (PAIS Party, constituted out of a series of splinters from the Socialist Party), formalized their relation with a sequence of encounters that concluded in the implementation, in January 2017, of a political and programmatic meeting where for the first time the name Broad Front was officially used. The path that led to the constitution of this new political space, hegemonized by forces of the left, was a complex one and not exempt of diverse strains. Nevertheless, the sole achievement of the formalization of a coalition of political groups unified with the aim of disputing – from the left – the political-institutional field gives account of a set of important processes and changes pertaining to the characteristics that gave its identity to this very diverse camp of the Chilean left. Let’s detail some of these processes and changes. First of all, the Broad Front came to life against the trend of particularism that has characterized most of the organizations that constitute it. With a few exceptions, represented basically by the legal parties, the trend that distinguished many of the organizations that came together in this space was, precisely, the refusal to structure political referents that would transcend, on one hand, the sectoral identities (basically, that of students) and, on the other, the ideological certainties, that constituted them. In this sense, the structuring of the Broad Front represented the will to build an ample political space that could be joined even by organizations and traditions that didn’t belong to the left’s world outlook. In second place, the Broad Front aimed, from the beginning, to achieve a series of goals that included taking part in the institutional-electoral dispute. In many cases, this goal appeared for the first time, which led to the appreciation of its strategic meaning in politics. This was due in part to the changes brought about in the electoral system (that opened a window of opportunity by promising expectations of success substantially above those that existed under the old binomial electoral system), and also by the new context of general disrepute of the political elite as a result of the scandals surrounding the investigations of “irregular funding” of political campaigns and political exercise that had been brought to light since the middle of 2014. In third place, the Broad Front has shown high degrees of articulation with recent social struggles that have demonstrated its ability to dispute the traditional

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hegemony that the Communist Party has enjoyed in this area. Its ample representation and action in the student movement and in some unions, like the teachers’ union, bear witness to new ways of linkage between the political and the social fields that demonstrate substantial changes relatively unknown by the traditional left, and this ignorance is one of the symptoms of its deep crisis. Even though the Broad Front is still a minority force, there is enough evidence to ascertain that its potential for growth will allow it to seriously dispute the political space on the left. In this context, tensions between the Broad Front and the communists became apparent. While a number of activists saw the 2011 events as opening opportunities for the appearance of new political actors that could challenge the dominant bloc of power since the 1990s, the communists saw a slightly different picture. Camila Vallejo, one of the leaders of the student movement in 2011 and prominent party member, explains the party’s approach: When Michelle Bachelet emerged as a candidate that could make converge several political forces and sum up more parties behind a program that accepted [our] demands, then we said we have an option here. We came from a recent experience of attempting to generate an alternative force of the left, a third alternative, the We Can Together alliance [Juntos Podemos, between 2004–2009] which did not achieve good results. And nothing indicated that we [the left alone] could do better this time. (interview with one of the authors, 2015) At the base of this controversy lies a disagreement in the diagnosis of the political moment. For the communists, the Chilean Winter reinforced the need for a government of “new-type” that could substitute the right-wing Piñera’s administration. Once this goal was achieved, the task of the left was to influence the decisions of the government through a combination of means. Indeed, the communists’ thesis was known as a “strategy of influence”. This strategy assumes that the main adversaries are the right-wing parties, and that the reformist forces must engage in negotiations and pacts with other actors in order to isolate or counterweight the conservative forces. This thesis assumes that the left is a minority within the government alliance, hence social mobilizations are necessary to push forward these reforms. These actions must put pressure on the state in order to offset the conservative forces that are also part of the New Majority.7 Instead, for the left organized in the Broad Front, the limited progresses of the Bachelet Administration were enough evidence of the inability of such a strategy to deliver substantive reforms. According to the Broad Front, a new autonomous force of the left was a requirement to advance a progressive programme of changes. This path shows how the birth of the Broad Front reveals, ultimately, a turning point in the means of action and a strategic unfolding of the left in Chile. Despite the fact that there have been a number of precedents of alliances and attempts to articulate the left since 1990 – most of them resulting in failures – the Broad Front

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shows prospects for an unprecedented constitution of a new political actor with the potential to generate an identity capable of transcending the parts that compose it. Occupying the political void created by the incorporation of the Communist Party into the Nueva Mayoría and by the tremendous difficulties that the Bachelet Administration has had in sustaining the vitality of the reformist discourse that brought her to the presidency, the Broad Front is beginning to appear as a referent before the social groups critically disposed against the political, social and economic model that has dominated the country since the return to democracy. Thus, a key to its possible success and/or consolidation lies in its capacity to attract and mobilize the segments that abstain from voting (about 50% of the electoral roll), especially the young and the lower classes. Given the low rates of turnout, their incorporation to the electoral process can redraw the balance of power much more than swings or redistribution of voters from the old to the new left.

Conclusion In light of the trajectory of Western countries with strong communist parties during the second half of the twentieth century, the emergence of the Broad Front as an alternative to the CP in Chile shouldn’t be seen as a surprise. In comparative perspective, the lack of such a force since 1990 could well be considered an anomaly.8 The emergence of the Broad Front in Chile as a platform of various groups from different ideological backgrounds, resembles the appearance of other platforms or coalitions in other countries where the CP had leading roles in the past. In these cases, these groups wouldn’t go so far as to merge into a new political party because of a long history of rivalries and fractionalization. Instead, they chose an organizational form that allowed them to preserve their identities while maximizing their ability to compete in elections. Each group admitted that they were too small to make any substantive difference in national politics by acting alone. This line of strategic reasoning can be seen in projects such as Izquierda Unida in Spain or, more recently, Syriza in Greece. The shift to a proportional electoral system in 2015, to be applied for the first time in the elections of November 2017, also partly explains this development. The electoral reform enlarged electoral districts, with districts electing between three and nine MPs, in a lower chamber that grows to 155 members. The senate, in turn, elects 50 members now (from 38 before the reform). The reform of the electoral system was a demand long sought by all extra-parliamentary forces since the end of the dictatorship. Its replacement with proportional representation (D’ Hondt method) largely met the expectations of those who demanded an electoral reform over the last decades. Under these conditions, the extraparliamentary left and other groups have incentives to compete as they see that they can get a piece of the cake now. These changes, combined with the adoption of a more pragmatic approach towards institutional politics among

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the groups that belong to the Broad Front, can help to consolidate this actor as a relevant player in national politics in the years to come. But it is difficult to make predictions as these are ongoing processes. As long as the communists keep seeing its alliance with the socialists and the centre-left as the key to retain access to government positions, the possibilities of an alliance between the communists and the Broad Front in the short to medium term are small. Moreover, the criticism of the Bachelet Administration and the Broad Front’s intention of competing in all electoral districts – including those where the CP is presenting candidates – has had consequences in the relationship with the communists. Unless major changes occur – e.g., the electoral collapse of the centre-left in successive elections, or the break of the alliance between the Christian Democrats and the socialists – the prospects of a rapprochement between the Communist Party and the Broad Front (or any other actor of the alternative left) are uncertain. But any agreement doesn’t depend only on incentives or calculations. These two areas represent two different political cultures with historical roots in Chilean politics, which have clashed on several occasions in the past. Well established political cultures change at a slower pace than other components of political systems.

Notes 1 Salvador Allende named it as “the Chilean way towards socialism”, as opposed to the insurrectionary way represented by Cuba. 2 According to the official commissions created by the Chilean state to identify the victims of state violence between 1973–1990, there were 3.065 deaths and more than 40.000 victims of torture and political imprisonment. 3 Pinochet himself remained as chief commander of the army until 1998 when, as former chief commander, he became non-elected senator, designated by the National Council of Security. 4 www.cbc.ca/news/technology/chilean-mine-rescue-watched-by-millions-online-1.871115. 5 In November 2010, only to point out one fact, the Government’s approval ratings exceeded 63%, according to a study by the Chilean polling agency Adimark, and standing out was the appraisal of governmental attributes such as efficiency, energy, authority and ability to solve real problems. To review the monthly public opinion studies on the Government’s approval, see www.adimark.cl. 6 The last UNDP Human Development Report (2015) focuses precisely on this phenomenon of the politicization of society in these last few years. Taking into account the well-known distinction between “politics” and “the political”, the Report argues that there is an inversely proportional relation between the growing civic repudiation of institutional politics and the incremental approach to direct deliberation and action regarding political themes and problems. 7 In the XXV congress of the party, the party chairman Guillermo Teillier explained that the reforms of the Bachelet administration “are the result of the struggles of the masses, of organized segments of the working class, students, people in their communities and other social organizations, which in some periods have created moments of significant convergence, which materialize in the New Majority and the come to power of these forces [in 2014]”. 8 European countries that had strong communist parties have seen the emergence of parties of “new left” after the fall of the Berlin wall: Rifondazione Comunista in Italy,

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Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal, Izquierda Unida and more recently Podemos in Spain, and France insoumise, are all examples of parties that have emerged as political alternatives to the more orthodox communist parties.

References Arditi, Benjamin (2008) ‘Arguments About the Left Turns in Latin America: A Post-Liberal Politics?’ Latin American Research Review 43(3): 59–81. Castañeda, Jorge G. (2006) ‘Latin America’s Left Turn’. Foreign Affairs, May 1. Available at: www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/south-america/2006-05-01/latin-americas-left-turn. Donayre, Renzo and Pilar Igan (2011) Conflicto estudiantil en Chile: la educación en debate. Available at: http://revistas.ojs.es/index.php/revistaestudiosandinos/article/ view/324. Durán, Carlos (2012) ‘El acontecimiento estudiantil y el viraje del proceso sociopolítico chileno’. Observatorio social de América Latina 31: 39–60. Fazio, Hugo (1996) El Programa Abandonado. Balance Económico Social Del Gobierno de Aylwin. Santiago: LOM Ediciones. Garretón Merino, Manuel Antonio (2013) Neoliberalismo corregido y progresismo limitado: Los gobiernos de la Concertación en Chile, 1990–2010. Santiago: ARCIS. Hipsher, Patricia L. (1996) ‘Democratization and the Decline of Urban Social Movements in Chile and Spain’. Comparative Politics 28(3): 273. Huber, Evelyne and John D. Stephens (2012) Democracy and the Left: Social Policy and Inequality in Latin America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hunneus, Carlos (2014) La democracia semisoberana. Chile después de Pinochet. Santiago: Taurus. Moulian, Tomás (2002) Chile actual: Anatomía de un mito. Santiago: LOM Ediciones. Ottone, Ernesto (2014) ‘Cambio de ciclo político’. Estudios públicos 134: 169–184. Oxhorn, Philip (1994) ‘Where Did All the Protesters Go? Popular Mobilization and the Transition to Democracy in Chile’. Latin American Perspectives 21(3): 49–68. Roberts, Kenneth M. (2015) Changing Course in Latin America. Party Systems in the Neoliberal Era. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sehnbruch, Kirsten (2006) The Chilean Labor Market: A Key to Understanding Latin American Labor Markets. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Solimano, Andrés (2012) Chile and the Neoliberal Trap: The Post-Pinochet Era. New York: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Marcus (2006) From Pinochet to the ‘Third Way’: Neoliberalism and Social Transformation in Chile. London: Pluto Press. Tironi, Eugenio (2010) Radiografía de una derrota. O cómo Chile cambió sin que la Concertación se diera cuenta. Santiago: Ubqar. Varas, Augusto (2014) El gobierno de Piñera. Santiago: Catalonia.

PART III

Hegemony, the state and extra-parliamentary politics

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8 INSTITUTING MOMENTUM Maia Kirby

Introduction The year 2015 was unusual in British politics. In May, the Labour Party lost a general election and, as a result, an internal leadership election was triggered. At the last minute, a candidate most thought very unlikely to get on the ballot paper, let alone win, managed to get enough MPs to nominate him. The previous leader, Ed Miliband, had brought in a system that allowed people who were not members of the Labour Party to become ‘supporters’, a system in which each member or supporter had a vote of equal weighting, and trade union members would need to opt-in rather than opt-out of a vote (Wintour 2014). In what was an extraordinary political moment, thousands of largely unconnected individuals signed up to vote for Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing candidate. Many of these also came together to volunteer for his campaign. In the snap general election of 2017, the Labour Party under Corbyn increased its share of the vote by 10.3%, equivalent to 21 more seats (BBC 2017). This was in no small part a victory for the campaign group set up to organise Corbyn supporters, Momentum. Nearly a quarter of all UK Facebook users viewed Momentum’s election videos during the campaign. Canvassing numbers doubled as more than 100,000 unique visitors used Momentum’s canvassing website ‘My Nearest Marginal’ to find out details on canvassing sessions and even to arrange lifts to get to them. Three thousand activists attended Momentum’s canvassing training sessions and, on election day, just under 10,000 Momentum activists helped get the vote out (Rees 2017b). In October 2015, in the wake of Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour Party, Momentum was established as a limited company, registered by a man named Jon Lansman, a parliamentary researcher for the late Labour MP Michael Meacher (Angell 2015). Volunteers, who had been central to Corbyn’s

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campaign, believed that the energy that was generated by the leadership campaign needed sustaining if Corbyn was to survive the hostility of the media and pressure to resign from within the party. The contact list of 120,000 built up over the campaign was to be vital in keeping Corbyn supporters together under one banner. By collecting a vast list of those favourable to a socialist leadership, Momentum has managed to draw together a broad coalition of the Labour left as well as those not previously involved with any parliamentary party. In addition to its size, its campaign methods were shown to be particularly effective. Using phone-banking and social media it has brought traditional campaigning methods up-to-date, and gathered together a standing army of support for socialist policy. Although Momentum has been going for only two years, this is a good moment to review its history. In this short period those involved have attempted to address some of the major challenges facing the left: rehearsing battles that the left has fought internally before, negotiating new technologies that could transform the way in which the left organises, and navigating Momentum’s unusual position both in and out of mainstream politics. Using articles and blogs as well as interviews with local Momentum activists, I have found that a picture emerges of a unique period of political transition. Momentum is perhaps late on the stage of a general reawakening of the left across the Western world, and one of several new left-wing political organisations that have sprung up across Europe in the age of social media. In Greece, the left-wing party Syriza was victorious in the 2015 general election (New Statesman 2015). In Spain, Podemos, a loose organisation of activists, now populist party, won 20% of the vote in Spain’s 2015 general election (CaseroRipollés, Feenstra and Tormey 2016). Italy’s Five Star movement and the Pirate Party in Iceland have also both made considerable in-roads (BBC News 2016; Watkins 2016). More recently, parties that had been dominated by the centre were challenged by candidates from the left. In the United States, Bernie Sanders saw a groundswell of support for his bid for the Democratic nomination in 2016, and in France, Benoît Hamon, an advocate of universal basic income, was victorious in the Socialist Party’s primary for the French presidency (Bush 2017). Furthermore, the veteran left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose campaign was not based in any political party, managed to secure 19% of the votes in the first round of the 2017 election campaign, not far behind the selected candidates for the second round. Amongst young voters, he was the clear winner (Aublanc 2017). These organisations and left oppositions buck the trend of what has been a long-term general decline of the parliamentary left. Over the last few decades left-wing political energy has been channelled into social movements with the idea that you can change the world without taking power (Holloway 2002). One of the key defining characteristics of these movements was the way in which they were organised. This could largely be described as a lack of formal structure – or horizontalism,1 the rejection of hierarchical institutions and

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representative democracy generally. Instead, these networks sought to promote democratic spaces where decisions were taken by consensus. One of the earliest and most successful examples of this was the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s. In the late 1980s and 1990s movements calling for action on climate change and global justice spread internationally in what has been called the ‘alterglobalization movement’ (Fominaya and Cox 2013). More recently, following the global financial crash of 2008, waves of protest began in North Africa and the Middle East and spread through cities of Europe, the US and South America. The ‘Arab Spring’ of 2010 saw revolutionary uprisings in several countries. Regimes were overthrown and all bar Tunisia plunged into violent power struggles (Brownlee, Masoud and Reynolds 2014). In Europe the following year, 6 to 8.5 million people of the ‘Squares Movement’, also known as ‘15-M Movement’ or ‘Indignados Movement’ took to the streets in Spain (RTVE.es 2011). Simultaneous ‘Squares Movements’ took place in Greece and, earlier in the year, mass protests occurred in Portugal. In these demonstrations, millions took to public squares to protest austerity measures (Werbner et al. 2014). Later in the year, ‘Occupy Movements’, starting in New York City, spread to 951 cities across the World, most in North America and Europe (Rogers 2011). Public spaces were transformed into hubs of political activity. Activists set up tents, installed libraries and makeshift kitchens, and met in general assemblies or working groups to discuss politics. This was ‘prefigurative politics’: the enactment of utopian ideals in the present (Gledhill 2016). Rather than being set up as alternatives to these movements of recent decades, the new political organisations seeking parliamentary power are both products of and interwoven with them. Podemos was founded out of the Spanish Squares Movement (Fominaya 2014) and Syriza successfully allied itself with the Greek equivalent movement and gained popularity (Katsambekis 2016). Momentum itself brought together the old Labour left with activists who had been involved in the UK Occupy movement and other anti-austerity drives dating back to the 1980s. According to one Momentum member, the Momentum project was a re-ignition of the socialist movement, which had emerged in 1985 in response to the defeat of the miners’ strike. This movement had put on several grassroots conferences to discuss socialist policy. Many of the same activists were drawn to Momentum, alongside a whole new generation (Jillian 2017). Negotiating this marriage of ‘movementism’ with a parliamentary route to power is one of the great challenges these organisations face. This is particularly true for Momentum, which found a home in the Labour Party. At the point of the 2015 leadership election the party had suffered two general election defeats and seen its vote share rapidly diminish over the previous two decades (Travers 2014). Internally, the party had for a long time been split between those who considered themselves ‘centre-ground’, organised under another limited company that operated within the Labour Party called ‘Progress’, and

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those who considered themselves socialist. Many of the latter had left the party during the period of Tony Blair’s government. Following Corbyn’s victory in the leadership election the party’s membership more than doubled from 190,000 members in 2014 to over half a million by the summer of 2016 (Jones 2016). With an influx of thousands of new members, these internal oppositions would be more evident than ever; members of Progress and others in the party were openly hostile to Momentum and what they called ‘far left entryism’ (Elgot 2016). Momentum organisers were quite clear early on that they intended to transform the Labour Party into a social movement. This was to be something of a challenge as the traditional structures of parliamentary parties, and certainly those of the Labour Party, were highly bureaucratic and slow to change in contrast with the more horizontal structures of social movements. James Schneider, one of the central Momentum organisers, in an early interview, considered Momentum as a sort of antidote to this lethargy, describing his vision of the organisation as a ‘permanent mobilisation’ (MacAskill 2016). Clearly Momentum has already been highly successful. Yet the question of creating permanence in this mobilisation remains unresolved. The process of instituting Momentum is ongoing at the time of writing, and indeed has been far from straightforward. From its inception, it has been navigating the traditions, tensions and competing visions of its participants, a proportion of whom have played a part in previous left-wing organisations, protests and movements. But the internal divisions within Momentum, and the various competing structures that we will explore in more detail, are perhaps symptoms of a greater dilemma. The concept of an institution called Momentum appears to have an element of internal contradiction. With their often lengthy decision-making processes and the entrenchment that comes with permanent employees, institutions may in fact be more readily associated with sluggish bureaucracy. The development of Momentum can be viewed in terms of this contradiction, for at the heart of its internal debates is the question of how to capture and progress the energy generated by the sudden and unexpected reawakening of the left in Britain.

‘I had been looking forward to the National Committee. After all, how do you democratically “start” a grassroots movement?’ (Walker 2016) Whilst Momentum was a direct result of the spontaneous rally of the left behind Corbyn, it was initially established as an organisation by a relatively small group of people and thus first needed to link itself to the new largely unorganised body of Corbyn supporters. This would raise questions, particularly amongst veterans of the left such as Jacqueline Walker quoted above, on how the organisation was going to retain the spontaneity that had brought it into being, its ‘grassroots’ credentials, whilst building internal structures.

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From the point of its launch in October 2015, supporters of the Corbyn leadership campaign were invited to register their email addresses with its successor Momentum. Simultaneously, local Momentum groups began popping up across the country, some of these were initiated by central Momentum organisers, whilst others were begun by local activists who then made contact with Momentum HQ (Nicki 2016). Activists at the centre of Momentum, which was at this point still only a limited company, set up an office in Euston in the Transport Salaried Staff Association (TSSA) building where Corbyn’s leadership campaign had been stationed (MacAskill 2016). In this National Office, in the last months of 2015, volunteers busied themselves with organising activists for a mass voter registration drive in the face of changes to the electoral register. This was in addition to organising around a bye-election in Oldham and campaigns against bombing Syria. By the end of the year plans were being made to introduce a governance structure to the organisation to facilitate the relationship between the largely autonomous local groups and the national organisers, to raise funds to allow for the national group to employ permanent staff and to give the organisation a claim to internal democracy (Team Momentum 2015). Unlike the Occupy movement, which famously refused to make demands, Momentum’s first and foremost aim was to support the victory of the Labour Party in the then anticipated 2020 general election. This required campaigning and the propagation of socialist policy. To be sustainable, and not wholly reliant on donations and the voluntary work of those able to afford time to the organisation, a steady income was needed. It thus appeared necessary to establish Momentum as a membership organisation, to which members paid a monthly subscription. The question of how one ‘starts’ a grassroots movement is in some ways a consideration of the potential contradiction between a movement and traditional political parties or organisations. Clearly by this point Momentum already had a power structure: it had a base where the central participants organised from, it had social media accounts and, crucially, it had a large list of contacts that were in the ownership of one man (Lansman). Thus the decision to ‘democratise’ was a way to increase the influence of those involved at a local level. But the institution of a formal structure, or the awarding of official roles of varying degrees of importance to individuals, would seem to be the validation of a nongrassroots element, as grassroots is a term often used to describe activists at the lowest rung of an organisation. This fits uneasily with the horizontalism of social movements. One of the key knock-on effects of creating a formal power structure was the requirement of those involved to define what Momentum was and what its relationship was to be with the Labour Party. For the creation of an organisation of which people were members mirrored the Labour Party itself and potentially provided an alternative to it. It was then crucial to ensure that Momentum stayed dedicated to the electoral victory of the Labour Party and at the very

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least did not include members of rival parties or those hostile to the Party. Some basic level of exclusivity needed to be defined. Not only did Momentum then need to outline its relationship to the Party and eligibility to be one of its members, but also crucially how these decisions would be made. At the end of 2015 a Launch Reference Group made up of four MPs, Jon Lansman and Councillor Sam Tarry began the process of organising a structure for this purpose. At this point they moved away from the horizontal organisation of movements entirely, drawing instead on traditional structures of Labourism. A National Committee to be made up of two representatives from Scotland, Wales and each of the nine English regions, two from each national trade union and representatives of established Labour left organisations, and two for each group of equality representation including black and ethnic minority (BAME), women, Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT), youth and disability would meet in the new year (Team Momentum 2015). Local groups were asked to elect delegates to regional networks and, from these groupings, further delegates would be elected onto the National Committee. There were in total 52 delegates to the meeting that was held on 6 February 2016 (LabourList 2016a). The delegates to the National Committee were given three options: first, that only Labour Party members could be Momentum members and thus play a role in the creation of its internal structures. Second, that all Momentum members would be Labour Party members but all supporters could participate in local groups, save those from hostile political organisations, and, third, Momentum membership would be open to anyone who did not support an organisation that stood candidates against Labour. Twenty-seven delegates voted for the final option, 18 for the second. The delegates also voted against a proposal to ban the sale of newspapers of other left-wing organisations as well as electing a steering committee (Walker 2016). Although a delegate system had been chosen to institute Momentum as a membership organisation, which was more akin to the structures of traditional political parties, these delegates chose a membership option that was broadest and most in line with the inclusivity of social movements. This was possibly due to the relatively high proportion of delegates who themselves were not Labour Party members. The decision meant that, rather than simply being the left’s answer to Progress, Momentum was envisaged as a broad movement that was both in and out of mainstream politics. Nonetheless, the creation of a membership and governance structure gave the group a certain rigidity that, to some extent, negated the flexibility and potential to grow offered by less defined groups.

‘Spheres of autonomy’ (Harry 2017) While the National Committee was making major decisions, local Momentum groups were forging on in various directions. Many had already been grappling

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with the uncertain marriage of parliamentarianism and movementism. At one inner-city Momentum launch meeting there were clear tensions. On the one hand there were those who were long-standing members of the Labour Party, likely to be members of the existing left-wing bloc, the Labour Representation Committee, who saw themselves as the custodians of the Labour left, and on the other new members who had never been part of the Labour Party, or exmembers of the party who had left in the Blair years (Nicki 2016). Across the country activists from a very small group of revolutionary socialists, the Alliance for Workers Liberty, attended Momentum meetings. In attendance too were members of the Socialist Party – an organisation made up of ex-Labour Party activists who had been involved in ‘Militant’, a socialist group active in the mid-1970s and early 1980s until they were expelled from the party in 1986 (Harmer 2014). Many who came along to meetings had never been involved in politics before. Across various localities, Labour Party members, Socialist Party members, trade unionists and members of the Alliance for Workers Liberty came together in what was bound to be, initially, a ‘fragile alliance’ (Thomas 2015). But, despite an initial rocky start in the first meeting of this inner-city Momentum group, subsequent meetings enjoyed more success as the branch began to develop its own culture, in this case along the lines of the participatory and consensus-driven politics of the Occupy Movement. With little to no agenda, members proposed topics for discussion and the large group broke into smaller groups, each joining the topic they wished to discuss: be it working within Labour, cuts to the local hospital or the closing down of a local leisure centre. For Nicki,2 a member of this local group, Momentum provided a space for political engagement unlike that on offer in the Labour Party, her ward being largely resistant to change. There was a freedom of action and the option to take decisions by consensus (Nicki 2016). For another Momentum member, Harry,3 his involvement in Momentum was focussed around the promotion and development of pedagogy and political education. He had first experimented with this at university, ‘taking philosophy out of the institution’ (Harry 2017). Many other local Momentum groups held equally outward-looking and creative meetings. There have been educational events,4 public film showings,5 quizzes,6 picnics,7 phone bank parties,8 gigs,9 and many other events. In Bristol, Momentum has set up an ‘Economy Hub’ for public engagement in economic affairs, as well as developing a canvassing app to help in election campaigns (Bristol Momentum n.d.). In Hackney, a reading group was set up to read and discuss political works (Momentum Hackney 2017). In March, individuals involved at the Momentum headquarters teamed up with activists from the Brick Lane debates10 as well as other movements to build on an idea of creating a conference to run alongside Labour’s in the September, called ‘The World Transformed’ (Harry 2017). In June 2016, the mass resignation of shadow ministers following the referendum to leave the European Union, and the subsequent challenge to

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Corbyn’s leadership, led to something of a renaissance of some local Momentum groups, the attendance of which had been declining. In Nicki’s group, attendance doubled from 30 to 60 (Nicki 2016), in places like Southwark it tripled (London Regional Momentum Meeting 2016). Nicki (2016) described a renewed sense of solidarity and modest gains for the left within her CLP. From this new energy, off-shoots emerged. In June Momentum Football was set up, which attracted a crowd of more than 200 to an event during the European Championship (Harry 2017). In September two mothers in Stroud launched Momentum Kids, providing activities for children so their parents could attend political events (LabourList 2016b). The World Transformed, conceived of in March, would begin on the day of Corbyn’s re-election, bringing together a great number of people and even gaining good press, unusual for the left. Harry described how the energy from Corbyn’s re-election fed into the event, and its success then fed the next project, Take Back Control, which saw discussion, performance and cultural events put on in areas that predominantly voted to leave the European Union (Harry 2017). Harry (2017) described these off-shoots as ‘spheres of autonomy’ that allowed their organisers freedom from centralised control. The World Transformed began to work out their own internal structures, maintaining their independence from, and to a certain extent de-emphasising their association with, the brand ‘Momentum’ by regarding the relationship as a partnership. In such a way many local groups and off-shoots of Momentum were developing horizontal and participatory structures. Officially, local groups were not entirely left to their own devices. In order to be ‘verified’, Momentum Headquarters required certain positions to be filled. This included two key contacts, at least one female, two social media managers, at least one female, a data manager and preferably Labour Party engagement officers (Momentum n.d.). Each off-shoot and group also relied to a certain extent on support from central Momentum. Particularly in the early days of Momentum, who you knew was a key part of the structure. Having contacts with the headquarters gave organisers access, not only to influential figures who could be asked to attend events, but crucially to publicity (Harry 2017). But, nonetheless, for the most part local groups operated independently and developed with a great deal of autonomy. This meant that groups not only organised different events, but also had differing relationships to the nascent central structures of Momentum. Some sent motions relating to policy to their regional groups and the National Committee, while some did not draw up motions or take any votes at all. For any further centralising initiative this would pose some difficulties, as motions revealed divergent visions of Momentum. In Lewisham, the local Momentum group passed motions in opposition to local Labour councillors. Others sent motions to the National Committee or to Corbyn’s team in support of Momentum policies such as opposition to Trident and support for migrants’ rights (London Regional Momentum Meeting 2016). This revealed that, for some, Momentum was an organisation with a degree of independence from the Labour

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Party that could act as a pressure group, whilst, for others, Momentum was a vehicle for simply aiding the left’s operations within the party. In the seats in the centre of the room were the anti-OMOV [one member one vote] delegates – more likely to be older, Trotskyist, seasoned in farleft factions, not in the Labour party . . . it was like a doughnut of desire for change, with a sticky centre of angry socialist stalwarts. (Murray 2016) It was the arrangement of the first Momentum conference, at which decisions were to be made on its constitution and internal structures, that was to bring the divergent ideas on Momentum to a head. Laura Murray, one of two women’s representatives to the National Committee, described the factions as, on the one hand, those from Trotskyist organisations who believed the conference ought to be organised by delegates from local meetings and, on the other, those from the Labour party who wanted decisions on the conference to be opened out to all members through online balloting. These factions that had been present in early form in the first National Committee meeting, most visible in the vote on membership options (Walker 2016), had hardened by the end of the year. This factional power struggle was to mark out the navigation of a contemporary historical juncture. Across the globe the question for the left was how to overcome the mass-apathy that had plagued it for many years, how to adapt to the new technologies available, that to some extent circumvented traditional obstacles of communication, and how to create fluidity and adaptability, that is momentum, in their structures. The factional dispute over the future of Momentum would be played out between the Steering Committee and the National Committee. In October, a meeting of the Steering Committee, which had not met while focus was on the second leadership election during the summer, was called with only 21 hours’ notice. At this meeting the next National Committee meeting, which was to be on the organisation of a Momentum conference, was postponed and it was decided that conference proposals would be determined by One-Member-OneVote (hereafter OMOV) (Bush 2016). When the National Committee did meet, they overturned the decision of the Steering Committee on OMOV, voting instead for a delegate system whereby local groups would elect delegates to attend the conference, and they elected a conference arrangements committee of seven members to organise the event. Ahead of this meeting, the Momentum office had launched a digital platform called ‘MxV’, designed to enable direct participation by all Momentum members in drawing up and supporting proposals to shape the future of the organisation. This was, by a small margin, rejected by the National Committee (Wrack 2016). The split between those who favoured a form of e-democracy and those who believed in the importance of having traditional structures, was a product not only of the ambitious attempt to unite the various factions of the left, but also of

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the political landscape across Europe more generally. Attempts to marry parliamentarianism with movementism were in many ways inspired by the possibilities offered by social media and enhanced communications. However, the options tested by various parties across Europe had their own drawbacks. In the case of Podemos, it has been argued that their system of e-democracy has led to more and more centralisation at the expense of the local groups, or ‘circles’ as they are known. Those with more popular social media profiles and a wider network were more likely to be selected. Advocates of the delegate system in Momentum used the case of Podemos to argue that e-democracy promoted passive participation, or ‘clicktivism’, and centralised control. With no power to dictate structures, local groups would lose their purpose and go into decline and thus each decision made would be done without collective deliberation. Those who remained active may feel demoralised, as if they were carrying out actions they had not voted for (Wrack 2016). On the other hand, delegate systems similarly favour the re-election of the most zealous and outspoken participants, as well as those without mobility problems, long or antisocial working hours or carer responsibilities. Elections dependent on face-to-face meetings also may not be the most efficient way of adapting to events and changing circumstances. E-democracy proponents argued that attendance at both Labour Party and Momentum meetings was too much of a time commitment for most people and, furthermore, many people did not like sitting through long and boring meetings. This was described by Michael Walker in conversation with Aaron Bastani (Bastani and Walker 2016) as the different conceptions of Momentum as, on the one hand, a ‘primary’ and, on the other, a ‘secondary’ organisation; for those outside the Labour Party it was the primary vehicle for political change, for those in the party it was a secondary organisation, with the Labour Party as the main space of political action. The split has been characterised more crudely. Delegate-structure proponents have been called Trotskyists who see Momentum as an opportunity to expand the influence of their own sect, or an older generation of hardened political activists for whom Momentum was the beginnings of a new political party, in which they intended to recreate structures that had already been shown to have failed in the past (Murray 2016). Those who support e-democracy were characterised as members of a Lansman clique wanting to centralise Momentum under their control (Labour Party Marxists 2017a). For delegate-structure supporters, the belief that Lansman wanted to take control of the organisation was confirmed when the Momentum office took matters into their own hands after losing the key votes on e-democracy at the National Committee meeting. Following the decision taken by the National Committee to proceed with a delegate structure for Momentum’s first conference, the Momentum office prepared a survey to be sent around the membership through which to gauge support for e-democracy. Forty per cent of the membership responded to the survey, 80% of these responses were pro-OMOV. On 10 January 2017, the Momentum Office, after emailing the Steering Committee for

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their approval, imposed a constitution and dissolved both the Steering Committee and the National Committee (Team Momentum 2017). Momentum’s inaugural conference was to be focused on training and discussion. The new constitution revisited membership eligibility, giving Momentum members six months to become members of the Labour Party. A new governing body was to be instituted called the National Coordinating Group (NCG), with representatives from trade unions and other left-wing organisations as well as a handful of members voted in by OMOV. A ‘Members’ Council’, made up of members chosen at random every six months, was established to keep the NCG up to date with local activities. In addition to this an online platform would allow for members to put proposals to the NCG. Five per cent or 1,000 members’ support would be needed to put items on the NCG agenda, 10% of the membership would be needed to put a vote out to all members on the proposal, with a 30% response rate to pass (LabourList 2017). The imposition of the constitution was met with some anger. Some Momentum members, those of the Alliance for Workers Liberty for example, were unable to become Labour Party members, others had been expelled from the Labour Party for their involvement in left-wing organisations and would now no longer be able to continue in their Momentum membership. The numbers required for a rule change, or even for a proposal to be considered, were criticised as too high (Local Momentum Meeting 2017). At the time of writing, the greatest number of supporters of any proposal stands at 229, less than a third of what it needs to be to reach the National Coordinating Group (MxV n.d.). Some similarities were clearly visible with the experience of Podemos in the election of this Coordinating Group. Those not on a slate (of either pro-OMOV or anti-OMOV) received far fewer votes (Bastani and Walker 2016; Momentum 2017; Rees 2017a). For these reasons, and others, the new constitution was denounced in various blogs and publications as a coup initiated by Lansman to consolidate his power over the organisation (Labour Party Socialist Network 2017; Labour Party Marxists 2017b). Those hostile to the constitution organised their own conference, setting up a group called ‘Grassroots Momentum’. Two hundred or so met in London on 11 March 2017. This conference was initially envisaged as a delegate event, where observers could attend but not vote. However, many Momentum groups had not met to elect delegates and, no doubt due to the circumstances of the conference, early on, delegates voted to allow everyone to participate. Matt Wrack, leader of the Fire Brigades Union, was the main benefactor of the event and several small left-wing organisations were present, including the Alliance for Workers Liberty, and several activists from the newspaper Socialist Appeal, Workers’ Power, the Labour Party Marxists, the Labour Representation Committee and the Labour Party Socialist Network. In the morning of the conference, attendees voted on motions and heard speeches from striking workers. After lunch the agenda was successfully challenged from the floor and the afternoon was spent discussing the nature of ‘Grassroots Momentum’ (Labour Party Marxists

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2017b). The conference was, in one account, split between those who wished to leave Momentum altogether, those who wished to stay in Momentum while creating parallel structures and those who wished to stay but to continue to openly criticise what they saw as the limited politics of the Corbynites (Coates 2017). The conference voted on the internal structures of the group, voting to form a steering committee of 15–20 members (Labour Party Marxists 2017b). This conference was to sit in stark contrast to the conference arranged two weeks later by the Momentum office. The larger Momentum conference, of around 500 people, took no motions and had no voting at all. Instead the event was framed around unity, with participatory workshops and activist training. There was no policy up for debate, rather the left’s standing army was being prepared for campaigning, with a focus on branching out into communities rather than getting caught up in internal squabbles either with ‘Grassroots Momentum’ activists or with the right wing of the Labour Party (Momentum Conference 2017). The differences in the two conferences showcase the split between the two visions of Momentum well. The main Momentum conference borrowed most from the participatory politics of movements such as Occupy, whilst reaffirming the primary goal of parliamentary success. This is perhaps at the expense of policy discussion, although the Labour Party is envisaged as the main space for political debate. In contrast, the grassroots movement favoured the examination of policy to create a body that can pull the Labour Party to the left, even if it takes longer than the electoral cycle (Labour Party Marxists 2017b). In many ways the former is the most adapted to the new political landscape. Much discussion and networking can happen online, while conferences can generate new energy for campaigning. As the process of instituting Momentum demonstrates, institutions tend to solidify. Although there was a relatively long period where the organisation operated autonomously, this space was soon eroded by a perceived need to coalesce and formalise structures. From below, those who favoured traditional structures naturally took to the role of delegate more readily, from above there was a desire to give permanence to the employees and early movers of the organisation. The option to forgo formal structures, however, would not necessarily result in a longer-lasting movement. As sociologist Jo Freeman (1973) wrote of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s, unstructured movements still had hidden networks of power, formed through friendship groups and other social determinants. The difference between the unstructured movements and the structured ones was that, in the latter, those who held power in the movement were held accountable to the wider group. ‘Structurelessness’, she contends, is not a problem in movements devoted to consciousness-raising, but ineffective when organising to a specific end. In his book on the Occupy movement, David Graeber (2014) found, in contrast, that even though unofficial power networks did emerge, lack of formal structures prevented these from becoming too solidified. Occupy, of course, was much shorter lived and did not

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have a specific objective. Clearly, in the case of Momentum, there is a requisite for longevity and, for Momentum HQ at least, a fixed goal of securing the election of the Labour Party. Thus the lack of early structure was perhaps felt more acutely when there was a great deal of work to be done but no agreed method or means to do it. The dispute over the forms these official structures would take, however, was just as much a power struggle between two elites as it was a thorough attempt to avoid the alienating and hierarchical tendencies of institutions. On the principles outlined by Freeman to create democratic structures, the new Momentum constitution has not yet secured a wide enough allocation of tasks or distribution of authority. Information and access to resources are by no means equal (Freeman 1973). This is not to say, however, that Momentum is the replication of yet another institution or movement destined to fail. For all its faults, well documented by Freeman (1973), the Women’s Liberation Movement was a highly successful social movement. Activism can and does change the cultural and political landscape. Since the 2017 snap general election the debate over the future of Momentum appears to have been dropped. The stimulus of an election, with the prospect of reward for political activity, had the effect of galvanising support and renewing the energy that is so vital for the organisation. This is partially why Momentum is currently continuing on an election-footing, using the remains of this enthusiasm to mobilise in expectation of another snap election, by targeting top Tory seats and replicating the canvassing successes of the 2017 election campaign. If, however, the present minority government manages to secure itself and political inactivity sets in again, Momentum may well see the return of debates over its internal structures. Even so, Momentum’s intertwined local networks will probably survive both the vicissitudes of its own attempts to institutionalise itself and the vicissitudes of national electoral politics and will continue in some form to be a vehicle for promoting and sustaining left-wing activism. The left has been boosted in recent months in local Labour Party branches and CLPs and this could foster more resistance to cuts, privatisations, evictions and other enactments of social injustice. These networks may also continue to encourage events, meetings, performances, and even local institutions that practice pre-figurative politics. The history of Momentum so far is part of a greater international story of political transition emerging in response to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the onset of social media. The debates on the structure of Momentum, which have also been seen in other left-wing parties across Europe, are important in shaping the left’s response to this period of change. Most pressing of all is the question of how to sustain a movement and utilise new communication technologies effectively. Many, particularly younger activists, shun face-to-face meetings in favour of online politics using social media platforms as a means of informal organisation. Social media not only offers a horizontal platform for political engagement but it is also a method to reach out to people and grow. It also removes aspects of

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physical domination, allowing more marginalised groups to have a stronger voice (Gledhill 2016). Jeremy Corbyn groups on Facebook, the largest of which has more than 70,000 members in conversation with one another, keep activists in a state of perpetual mobilisation. These groups provide, in part, an antidote to the periods in the electoral cycle when political victory seems out of reach, by keeping supporters informed and engaged at a low level of time and energy commitment. It may be that the future for the left is in these informal networks, which have the capacity to re-invent themselves.

Notes 1 From the Spanish ‘horizontalidad’ used in Argentina during 2001 uprisings (Sitrin 2012). 2 Pseudonym used. 3 Pseudonym used. 4 Hackney, Lewisham, Ealing Momentums (London Regional Momentum Meeting, 2016). 5 Ealing Momentum (London Regional Momentum Meeting, 2016). 6 Camden and Haringey (London Regional Momentum Meeting, 2016) Dundee (Momentum Dundee 2016) and Hastings (Momentum Hastings 2017). 7 Camden, Wandsworth, Southwark (London Regional Momentum Meeting, 2016), York (York Momentum 2016), South Devon (South Devon Momentum 2016) and no doubt in many other places. 8 Hounslow (London Regional Momentum Meeting, 2016). 9 South Birmingham Momentum (South Birmingham Momentum 2016). 10 A left-wing collective that hosts social and educational events.

References Angell, R. (12 October 2015) Welcome, Momentum, and Here’s Some Friendly Advice. LabourList [online]. Available at: http://labourlist.org/2015/10/welcome-momentumand-heres-some-friendly-advice [accessed 29 April 2017]. Aublanc, M. (24 April 2017) Présidentielle: 30% des Jeunes Auraient Voté pour Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Selon L’Institut Ipsos. 20 Minutes. [online]. Available at: www.20minutes. fr/elections/presidentielle/2055691-20170424-presidentielle-30-jeunes-vote-jean-lucmelenchon-selon-institut-ipsos [accessed 28 April 2017]. Bastani, A. and Walker, M. (7 December 2016) WTF Momentum? Novara Media [online]. Available at: http://novaramedia.com/2016/12/07/wtf-momentum [accessed 26 April 2017]. BBC News (30 October 2016) Iceland Election: Pirate Party Triples Seats. BBC News [online]. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37813564. BBC News (9 June 2017) General Election 2017 Results. BBC News [online]. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2017/results/england. Brownlee, J., Masoud, T. and Reynolds, A. (2014) The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bush, S. (28 October 2016) Jon Lansman Branded ‘Autocratic’ as Momentum Splits Turn Acrimonious. New Statesman [online]. Available at: www.newstatesman.com/politics/ elections/2016/10/jon-lansman-branded-autocratic-momentum-splits-turn-acrimonious [accessed 26 April 2017].

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Bush, S. (6 February 2017) Who is Benoît Hamon? New Statesman [online]. Available at: www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2017/02/who-beno-t-hamon [accessed 26 April 2017]. Casero-Ripollés, A., Feenstra, R. and Tormey, S. (2016) Old and New Media Logics in an Electoral Campaign. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 21(3): 378–397. Coates, A. (2017) Momentum Grassroots Conference: Why Much of the Left Keeps its Distance. Weblog [online]. Available at: https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2017/03/ 16/momentum-grassroots-conference-why-much-of-the-left-keeps-its-distance [accessed 29 April 2017]. Elgot, J. (14 August 2016) Tom Watson Claims Proof of Far-Left Planning to Infiltrate Labour. The Guardian [online]. Available at: www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/ 14/documents-prove-far-left-planned-to-infiltrate-labour-says-tom-watson [accessed 29 April 2017]. Fominaya, C. (29 May 2014) ‘Spain is Different’: Podemos and 15-M. OpenDemocracy [online]. Available at: www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/cristina-flesherfominaya/%E2%80%9Cspain-is-different%E2%80%9D-podemos-and-15m [accessed 29 April 2017]. Fominaya, F. and Cox, L. (eds) (2013) Introduction: Rethinking European Movements and Theory. In: Understanding European Movements: New Social Movements, Global Justice Struggles, Anti-Austerity Protest. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–5. Freeman, J. (1973) The Tyranny of Structurelessness [online]. Available at: www.jofree man.com/joreen/tyranny.htm [accessed 26 April 2017]. Gledhill, J. (2016) Collecting Occupy London: Public Collecting Institutions and Social Protest Movements in the 21st Century. In: Pickerill, J., Krinsky, J., Hayes, G., Gillan, K. and Doherty, B. (eds) Occupy! A Global Movement (1st ed.). Abingdon: Routledge, p. 67. Graeber, D. (2014) The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (1st ed.). London: Penguin Books. Harmer, H. (2014) Longman Companion to the Labour Party, 1900–1998 (1st ed.). Abingdon: Routledge. Harry. Interviewed by: Kirby, M. [10 January 2017]. Holloway, J. (2002) Change the World without Taking Power (new ed.). London: Pluto. Jillian. Interviewed by: Kirby, M. [20 January 2017]. Jones, O. (2016) Mass Membership Alone Doesn’t Make a Social Movement. The Guardian, 27 July [online]. Available at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/27/ mass-membership-labour-social-movement-community [accessed 26 April 2017]. Katsambekis, G. (2016) Radical Left Populism in Contemporary Greece: Syriza’s Trajectory from Minoritarian Opposition to Power. Constellations, 23(3): 391–403. LabourList (14 January 2016a) Momentum Prepare to Elect First National Committee. LabourList [online]. Available at: http://labourlist.org/2016/01/momentum-prepare-toelect-first-national-committee [accessed 26 April 2017]. LabourList (19 September 2016b) Momentum Kids Aims to Make Politics “Child-Friendly”. LabourList [online]. Available at: http://labourlist.org/2016/09/momentum-kids-aims-tomake-politics-child-friendly [accessed 26 April 2017]. LabourList (11 January 2017) Momentum Constitution – Read it in Full. LabourList [online]. Available at: http://labourlist.org/2017/01/momentum-constitution-read-it-in-full [accessed 29 April 2017]. Labour Party Marxists (12 January 2017a) Momentum Branches and Groups Protest against the Coup. Labour Party Marxists [online]. Available at: http://labourpartymarx ists.org.uk/momentum-branches-protest-against-the-coup [accessed 26 April 2017].

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Labour Party Marxists (15 March 2017b) Momentum Grassroots Conference: Against Jon Lansman, for What? Labour Party Marxists [online]. Available at: http://labourpartymarx ists.org.uk/momentum-grassroots-conference-against-jon-lansman-for-what [accessed 26 April 2017]. Labour Party Socialist Network (10 January 2017) An Email from Jon Lansman to the Momentum Steering Committee. Labour Party Socialist Network [online]. Available at: http://socialistnetwork.org.uk/2017/01/10/an-email-from-jon-lansman-to-the-momen tum-steering-committee [accessed 29 April 2017]. Local Momentum Meeting (2017) 4 February. London Regional Momentum Meeting (2016) Unite the Union Building, London, 17 December. MacAskill, E. (8 March 2016) At home with Momentum: The Rise of ‘Corbyn’s Shock Troops’. The Guardian [online]. Available at: www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/ mar/08/momentum-corbyns-shock-troops-labour [accessed 26 April 2017]. Momentum (17 February 2017) Candidates and Statements [online]. Available at: https:// vote.peoplesmomentum.com/candidates [accessed 29 April 2017]. Momentum Conference (2017) 119 Floodgate Street, Birmingham, 25 March. Momentum (no date) Guidance on the Internal Structure of Momentum Groups [online]. Available at: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/momentum/pages/973/attach ments/original/1486398971/B.GuidanceontheInternalStructureofMomentumGroups. pdf?1486398971 [accessed 29 April 2017]. Momentum Bristol (no date) Momentum Bristol [online]. Available at: www.momentum bristol.org [accessed 29 April 2017]. Momentum Dundee (24 November 2016) Momentum Dundee. Facebook. Available at: www.facebook.com/events/701745303314178 [accessed 26 April 2017]. Momentum Hackney (28 February 2017) Momentum Hackney. Facebook. Available at: www.facebook.com/events/367599420275392 [accessed 29 April 2017]. Momentum Hastings (16 January 2017) Momentum Hastings. Facebook. Available at: www. facebook.com/events/1158325217591529 [accessed 26 April 2017]. Murray, L. (5 December 2016) Momentum vs. Inertia. Medium [online]. Available at: https://medium.com/@lauracatrionamurray/momentum-vs-inertia-e525c8f9e217 [accessed 26 April 2017]. MxV (no date) [online]. Available from: https://mxv.peoplesmomentum.com/proposals? order=confidence_score&page=1 [accessed 29 April 2017]. New Statesman (26 January 2015) Anti-Austerity Party Syriza Wins Greece’s General Election. New Statesman [online]. Available at: www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/ 01/anti-austerity-party-syriza-wins-greece-s-general-election [accessed 29 April 2017]. Nicki. Interviewed by: Kirby, M. [12 September 2016]. Rees, E. (17 February 2017a) Momentum Election Results, (noreply@peoplesmomentum. com). E-mail to: Momentum Members. Rees, E. (9 June 2017b) This is Spectacular, ([email protected]). Email to: Momentum Members. Rogers, S. (14 November 2011) Occupy Protests around the World: Full List Visualised. The Guardian [online]. Available at: www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/oct/ 17/occupy-protests-world-list-map [accessed 26 April 2017]. RTVE.es (6 August 2011) Más de seis millones de españoles han participado en el Movimiento 15M – RTVE.es. RTVE [online]. Available at: www.rtve.es/noticias/ 20110806/mas-seis-millones-espanoles-han-participado-movimiento-15m/452598.shtml [accessed 26 April 2017].

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Sitrin, M. (Spring 2012) Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements. Dissent Magazine [online]. Available at: www.dissentmagazine.org/article/horizontalism-and-the-occupymovements [accessed 26 April 2017]. South Birmingham Momentum (10 September 2016) South Birmingham Momentum. Facebook. Available at: www.facebook.com/events/170933353314639 [accessed 26 April 2017]. South Devon Momentum (28 August 2016) South Devon Momentum. Facebook. Available at: www.facebook.com/events/287056248339556 [accessed 26 April 2017]. Team Momentum (24 December 2015) Seasons Greetings and End of Year Reflections from Momentum, ([email protected]). E-mail to: Momentum Supporters. Team Momentum (10 January 2017) Momentum Moving Forwards, ([email protected]). E-mail to: Momentum Supporters. Thomas, M. (2015) Momentum: Welcome and Worries. Workers’ Liberty [online]. Available at: www.workersliberty.org/node/25713 [accessed 26 April 2017]. Travers, T. (1 December 2014) Declining Support for the Conservatives in the North and Labour in the South Means Outright Majorities Will be Less and Less Likely [online]. Available at: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/declining-support-for-the-conser vatives-in-the-north-and-labour-in-the-south-means-outright-majorities-will-be-lessand-less-likely [accessed 26 April 2017]. Walker, J. (1 March 2016) Momentum, Activists have their Say at Last. Labour Briefing [online]. Available at: http://labourbriefing.squarespace.com/home/2016/3/1/m7bm8y vayumkf5kdp5rkjnzz9uoo65 [accessed 26 April 2017]. Watkins, S. (2016) Oppositions. New Left Review, p. 98. Available at: www.newleftreview.org. Werbner, P., Webb, M. and Spellman-Poots, K. (eds) (2014) Introduction. In: The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wintour, P. (31 January 2014) Ed Miliband’s Labour-Union Shake-Up to ‘Let People Back into Politics’. The Guardian [online]. Available at: www.theguardian.com/politics/ 2014/jan/31/ed-miliband-labour-union-funding-shakeup [accessed 29 April 2017]. Wrack, N. (6 December 2016) A Positive Outcome: Report of Momentum National Committee – Labour Party Socialist Network. Labour Party Socialist Network [online]. Available at: http://socialistnetwork.org.uk/2016/12/06/report-momentumnational-committee [accessed 26 April 2017]. York Momentum (21 August 2016) York Momentum. Facebook. Available at: www. facebook.com/events/533892066815333 [accessed 26 April 2017].

9 THE WORKERS’ PARTY IN BRAZIL The achievements, challenges and tragedies of a left-wing party in the global South Rogério G. Giugliano and Jacques de Novion

Introduction The Workers’ Party (PT) is the largest left-wing political party in Brazil and Latin America.1 It has 1,583,000 registered members and holds the second largest parliamentary representation in the Brazilian national assembly.2 The PT has a unique history and structure within the Brazilian constellation of political parties and few parallels when compared with other progressive organizations in Latin America.3 Our party is different because it’s democratic: in it, the lower base is in charge. It is different because it is present in all the struggles of popular movement, instead of appearing only in times of election. It is different because it respects and defends the autonomy of popular organizations. A party of masses, broad and open, based on the workers of the city and the countryside, the Workers’ Party (PT) is also different because of its political objectives. We fight for the construction of a democracy that guarantees workers, at all levels, may lead the political and economic decisions of the country. A leadership that acts according with the interests of the workers and through their root organizations. For all these reasons, our party cannot be born done and ready to go. It grows and develops altogether with the fights of the workers. Fights that did not start today, nor did they begin yesterday, but rather have taken important steps in recent years, imposing the need to unify the movements that occur in different factories or popular neighbourhoods, in different professional categories and in different regions of the country. The experience gained in the course of recent struggles has also shown the workers that their specific struggles, however large, do

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not ensure a realization of their achievements due to the centralization of the political decision-making power. The workers understood then that this could only be achieved through their own political participation in the decision-making process.4 In this extract from the 1980 initial party programme, the PT asserts itself as a different kind of party because of its internal democratic structure and the intrinsic connection with popular organized movements. As Guidry (2003) states, the PT is not just another labour party formed as an electoral branch of trade unions and federations. Three factors collaborate towards this perspective: first, in spite of a strong connection with the Brazilian labour organizations, the PT’s social base is much broader and, at the time of its constitution, included a significant part of a very diverse range of Brazilian organized social movements. As a direct consequence of this, the party maintains since its foundation a great level of autonomy in the face of trade unions and confederations. Second, its ideological profile is heterogeneous, being composed of several strands of the Brazilian progressive perspectives and thoughts. Finally, due to the previous points, the party’s internal organization had to be developed in a way that could accommodate this diversity. An inclusive participative decisionmaking structure was established based on multiple forums and instances of debate that could be engaged with by the all forces that composed the party lines. This configuration, at least in principle, was constituted in order to give voice and power to the party’s organic foundations. Bernardo Kucinski – one of the Brazilian intellectuals most identified with the Workers’ Party – together with Sue Branford, chose to use the expression “Carnival of the Oppressed” (Branford and Kucinski 1995) as the title of their book about the PT. With this metaphor the authors compare the party to the popular Brazilian festivities recognized for bringing together the multicultural diversity of Brazilian society on the streets of the country in inclusive celebration. The apparent chaos of people and groups that dance and play to the sound of Afro-Brazilian rhythms forms, to the eyes of the attentive observer, massive flows of people that dispute and occupy public spaces without abdicating creative diversity. The coming together of this diverse range of social movements is a product of the singular historical moment in which the party was constituted. The PT is actually a radical democratic broad front of popular organizations that opposed the dictatorship installed in Brazil between the years 1964 and 1985 embedded in a political party (Samuels 2004). The social movements that came to compose the initial base of PT were already firmly engaged in the process that led to the overthrow of the Brazilian military dictatorship years before the first meeting that led to the foundations of the party, as can be exemplified through the so-called authentic unionism5 and the progressive sectors of the Catholic Church. Once formally established, the PT started a continuous process of strengthening its position in the Brazilian

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national political life, a trajectory that culminated with the presidential victory of 2002. The path to power began with the role played by the party in the ABC factory workers strike6 and the “Direct Elections Now!” (Diretas Já!) movement that brought together thousands in favour of a universal voting system in the country during the last phase of the military junta rule. Another important historical milestone is the party’s participation in the new democratic constitutional assembly of 1986–1988 when the PT had its national parliamentary debut. Immediately after the development of the so-called citizen constitution7 of 1988 the PT continued to gain power within Brazilian society during the first direct election to the presidency that took place the coming year. At that time, the PT overcame the traditional progressive parties of Brazil and made its way to the second round of the presidential elections. Although defeated by a conservative candidacy through a small margin of votes, the party consolidated itself at this moment as a major political player in the post-dictatorship Brazilian national political arena (Hunter 2010). Beyond the constitution of a united front of progressive movements, the PT represented a new form of party organization for the Brazilian left. Its internal decision-making process broke with the rigid hierarchies that marked the communist parties and the personalism of the Brazilian traditional labour-left that had its origins in the 1930s Varguista period.8 The central committees, the submission to union agendas and leadership, and the governmental dependency9 were replaced by a plural and ideologically heterodox party structure based on a continuous clash-conciliation dialogue between unions and non-traditional movements. Student organizations, feminists, anti-racism groups, liberation theologians and peasant movements – all of which today feature strongly in the configuration of the contemporary left – were already active within the party lines at that time. To accommodate this diversity the PT structured a complex internal process that sought, at least initially, to establish a “bottom-up” decision flow (Partido dos Trabalhadores 2017b). The path leading up to the arrival of the PT as the national power in 2003 imposed many transformations on the initial organization and ideals of the party, most of them in an effort to expand its electoral base. The socially and politically conservative Brazilian society presented a difficult challenge to the PT’s national power aspirations: how to attract part of the country’s traditional political forces in order to gain enough votes to win a presidential election? The perception of this necessity grew during the party’s history. Despite the initial electoral achievements marked by multiple regional victories and the broad base of support within the left, the PT was hit by successive defeats in its search for national power. Even throughout the 1990s, the height of neoliberalism in Brazil, the party failed to reach the Presidency of the Republic despite

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the economic and social crisis that stained the Washington Consensus conservative government led by Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Faced with this situation, the party’s internal majority, headed by its main leader – Lula da Silva – started a set of transformations that slowly disfigured the original democratic structure and decision-making processes composed of consultations with party affiliates, in order to de-radicalize the PT and construct more ample alliances with other political forces in Brazil. This included, in some cases, even the expulsion of some more radical left-wing tendencies that disagreed with the transformations in progress. Nowadays, because of this movement, part of the original spirit has been lost and many of the internal groups already dispersed from the broad front are now establishing their own political parties.10 These changes cannot be considered a total misconfiguration, since elements of its initial characteristics, albeit to a lesser extent, remain in the organization of the party. Nevertheless, this strategy proved to be an electoral success and in 2003 a national government chaired by Lula da Silva, founder and main party leader, was elected by a coalition of forces that included some conservative groups of the Brazilian national political scene. The government reproduced, in an odd way, the PT’s internal formulation. The administration was organized in the form of a broad, diverse and often contradictory congregation of political forces. An experience of conciliation between capital, labour, social movements and local elites was established and, surprisingly, was able to put forward a set of compensatory social policies of great impact while maintaining a mix of neoliberal and developmental economic agendas (Goldstein 2016). The Workers’ Party took advantage of the experience acquired throughout its own history to shape a unique form of public administration in Brazil. The broadening of the party’s connections wasn’t exclusively a consequence of the search for a larger electoral base. In a smaller degree it was also an imposition coming from the institutional configuration of the Brazilian political system. Two characteristics deserve mentioning. First there is a profound disconnection between regional, legislative and executive voting. Traditionally, voters tend to endorse candidates of different parties and ideologies in each of these levels. Second, and as a result, the Brazilian political sphere is composed of a myriad of parties and groups that are forced to arrange post-electoral alliances in order gain a minimal condition of putting forward an administration. These characteristics are added to the configuration of Brazilian institutional relations, which requires major parliamentary support for any administration to achieve some level of governability. This imbalance is inherited from a constitution that was initially designed for parliamentarianism but, at the last moment, was improvised towards a presidential structure. As expected, this internal contradiction leads to a stronger necessity for compositions within political groups and, in the case of the PT, reinforced the demand for an approach with the national elite. Therefore, in order to deal with this double challenge, the PT organized a national government marked by a complex

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process of negotiation and internal conflict, including ministries headed by representatives of grassroots social/popular movements coexisting with others headed by agro-businesses/patronage leaders. President Lula da Silva, an able negotiator and charismatic leader, was successful in conducting the internal disputes that happened throughout his governments. Some more left-wing analysts perceive this as a betrayal of the initial progressive stance of the party, meanwhile others analyse this strategy as the only way that a left-wing party could survive in the highly plutocratic Brazilian political sphere. Even with this complex and somewhat chaotic internal structure, the PT was capable of shaping and implementing within its government public policies that sought, on a national scale, to fight poverty and inequality and, on an international scale, to expand Brazil’s dialogue with the other actors in the global South. The effort towards the intensification of South–South relations is another distinctive aspect of PT’s actions in Brazilian history. Since the 1990s, in its both regional and national governments, the party saw itself increasingly entangled in participatory and dialogical experiences in tune with the global trend of intensification of South-South relations. Indicators of this movement are the expansion of the Brazilian diplomatic network and the constitution of (and/or insertion in) international forums, fronts and institutions that led Brazil to participate in initiatives of regional integration of the global South, including some that could be characterized as counter-hegemonic coalitions. Despite the electoral success of achieving four consecutive national victories, the conciliatory strategy reached its exhaustion. Ironically, when the PT’s political coalition achieved its largest majority in the national parliament, a movement constructed upon extremely biased accusations of corruption led to the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff. The PT and the social movements linked to the party considered this process a parliamentary coup. In a more analytical perspective, the ousting of Rousseff must be perceived as mere surface to much deeper social and political issues that include regional disputes, gender and class prejudice, the external political/economic scenario, structural corruption imposed by PT on non-productive investment gains and the continuous inconformity of the subaltern Brazilian elites with PT’s national and international success. Together with this change, the country now lives with the re-emergence of the extreme right and a continuous institutional instability that is deepening as this text is being written. This chapter contains some broad lines of the history of the Workers’ Party with a focus on the path to and the fall from power and its unique approach to global South. The main proposition is to raise some hopefully important analytical issues based on the challenges faced by this unique global South left-wing party. In order to achieve these broad goals, the text will build upon a structural hypothesis: the radical democratic experience that characterizes the party’s foundation is one of the keys for the understanding of the successes, the

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uniqueness and the failures of this global South left-wing political party that managed to rise and persist for 13 years in national power in an extremely authoritarian, conservative and unequal society that is Brazil. This chapter has no intentions of presenting any final diagnostic argument about the PT, especially since many of the consequences of the party’s actions and history are still on going. Despite the imminent difficulties of dealing with contemporary issues, the party’s trajectory can provide important grounds for an issue-based discussion that may contribute towards understanding the challenges and paths of the contemporary left in post-colonial societies.

From the foundation to the coming to power in three moments Foundation The constitution of the Workers’ Party (PT) was closely linked to the specificities of the historical and political process that developed over the second half of the twentieth century in Brazil. At that moment Latin America and the Caribbean underwent a shift in patterns of integration-security11 (Novion 2014). The new hegemonic doctrine succeeded a pattern largely based on anti-communism and bipolar disputes that ranged between the 1950s and 1980s and with profound effects all over the region. The Latin-American macro-region emerged from the previous period with practically no democratic history and with a political structure almost subjected to local elites linked to the Northern hegemonic interests, and lived through two different authoritarian waves. Between the 1920s and 1950s, the region was swept by populist dictatorships such as Anastásio Somoza’s in Paraguay, Jorge Ubico’s in Guatemala, Omar Torrijos in Panama, Fulgencio Batista’s in Cuba, Papa Doc’s in Haiti, Getúlio Vargas’s in Brazil, among others. After a brief interval in which some countries implemented direct elections, a new format of authoritarian rule started to spread throughout the region between the decades of the 1960s and 1980s (sometimes reaching the beginning of the 1990s). In this period, an effort by local elites and international hegemonic actors directed to oppose nationalist/protectionist governments and the advance of progressive left-wing movements led to the proliferation of civil-military dictatorships, especially throughout the south-cone of the continent (Boesner 1996; Calloni 1999, Rosenman, 2013). It was within the last phase of this second wave of authoritarian rule and curtailment of civil liberties forced upon Brazil from 1964 onwards that the project to constitute the PT emerges. More precisely, the Workers’ Party is a product of the second half of the 1970s when the country witnessed the disarticulation of the left-wing armed struggle promoted by the clandestine organizations reminiscent of the pre-coup political parties and movements. At that time, Brazilians lived through the intensification of torture and the political repression of opposition groups together with the worsening of the economic

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situation caused by the international oil crisis. These were some of the conditions that allowed for the development of a new civil resistance organization as an alternative path to the authoritarian regime in the form of a broader and peaceful struggle for the re-establishment of democracy in the country. Several important social and political organizations derived from within this new stage of the fight for civil and political rights in the country. Among them, the landless movement,12 the authentic trade unions,13 the re-edification of the student unions14 and the organizations from the progressive wing of the Catholic Church15 began their emergence towards the prominent place in Brazilian society that they have held up to now. High unemployment, inflation and a growing dissatisfaction with the military dictatorship prompted strikes called by the labour movement in the industrial belt of São Paulo from 1978 to 1980,16 planting an important milestone for the country’s fight towards democracy. The same workers from the automobile factories that mobilized against precarious labour conditions and authoritarian rule ended up also edifying a new format of trade unionism. This movement broke away from the labour organizations that were mostly captured by employers and aligned with the dictatorship, and also from those controlled by traditional populist trade unionism that existed before the military coup. The Authentic Unionism (or new syndicalism) was a key player in the promotion of convergence with the other sectorial political movements towards a national agenda for democracy. The alliance forged between trade unions and the so-called ‘new social movements’ sought to incorporate sectorial demands with the traditional classist/socialist left-wing approach of the communist parties. This congregation, that would only be seen in other labour organizations in most Latin-American countries in the 1990s, constituted the social base for the foundation of the PT. It was also in the scenario prompted by the ABCD strikes that there emerged many new political leaders still active in contemporary Brazilian politics, among them a metallurgical worker called Luis Inácio Lula da Silva17 (Aarão, n.d.) who would become PT’s first elected Brazilian president. In summary, the rising demand for democracy and political openness that can be noticed in Brazilian society by the end of the 1970s started within the struggles against the precarious life conditions, social stagnation and economic crisis. In this scenario, the creative dialogue between labour organizations and social movements gave birth to the Workers’ Party (1980) and constitute the two major banners of the party: democracy and development with social justice. According to Lincon Secco (2011), the tripod of organizations that sustained the initial steps of the PT included the Authentic Unionism, the progressive sectors of the Catholic Church and the remnants of the clandestine movements of resistance against the dictatorship. This perspective, although numerically correct, does not grasp the true multiplicity of groups that gathered around the foundation of the party, which bought together the peasants and land-less movements, left-wing intellectuals and student organizations.

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This diverse group of movements could not be united without a party structure that reflected the multiplicity of the PT’s base. In other words three major challenges surrounded the birth of the Workers’ Party: the fight for democracy and improved economic conditions, the congregation of multiple and diverse social movements that ranged from the unions to sectorial progressive movements, and the development of an internal dynamics that could accommodate this wide range of components. The PT’s founding manifesto from 10 February 1980 acknowledges these challenges. It states a critical view of the so-called officialist/traditionalist/ government-aligned unionism, presents a critical stance towards “real socialism” and also the totalitarian practices of the left. Together with these declarations the Workers’ Party emerges claiming to be an organization built from the ground up that aims to promote democratic socialism.18 The Workers’ Party is a voluntary association of citizens that seeks to fight for democracy, plurality, solidarity and political, social, institutional, economical, legal and cultural transformations aimed at eliminating exploitation, domination, oppression, inequality, injustice and poverty, with the goal of building a democratic socialism. (Statute of the PT, Article 1, 1980)19 Because of the diverse spectrum of democratic forces and social movements that composed the Workers’ Party and the multiplicity of ideological progressive left-wing orientations, the PT resembled more of a broad political action front than the traditional political party. This assemblage originated an active and critical political organization, where a continuous circulation of ideas occurred within an internal structure composed of a network of local cells (Núcleos Base).20 These structures were instrumental in order to bring politics closer to the traditionally alienated private spaces of Brazilian society as well as to work environments. Through this path, the party and the social movements that composed it were able to lead a simultaneous process of political education and action, crucial to the construction and exercise of democracy in the noninclusive Brazilian political tradition. Ideological differences, the party’s positioning towards public issues and its political thesis were openly debated in its internal network and unity was forged through delegate voting in national meetings. This level of internal debate and bottom-up decision-making had no parallel in Brazilian politics. At the time of the foundation of the PT a new intellectual-political-social project had to be constructed from the ruins of failed attempts at direct armed confrontation with the entrenched national elites. The party was conceived to enact a political action that was called within the PT “the democratic and popular21 alternative”. This perspective was strongly influenced by the thoughts of a part of a group of left-wing intellectuals, economists, historians and sociologists. The party profited immensely from the ideas and perspectives of

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some of these progressive academic traditions. The educational policies supported at the beginning of the party’s history were based on the works of Paulo Freire, who was one of the founders of the PT and an active member. On the economic front, the party was very influenced by some of the most progressive dependency-theorists, like Francisco de Oliveira, Maria da Conceição Tavares, Aluisio Mercadante, Plinio de Arruda Sampaio and Florestan Fernandes. The last one, considered by many to be the father of Brazilian “academic-scientific” sociology, was elected to be one of the PT’s representatives in the national constitutional assembly and was twice a congressman in the Brazilian lower chamber. The power strategy of the Workers’ Party is connected with the sociological perspective of Fernandes. His theories, influenced by Marxist thought, were in part dedicated to understanding the uniqueness of the class structure in post-colonial periphery countries, especially in Latin America. According to his writings, Brazil and the Latin-American countries witnessed the different class roles and relations from Europe. For Fernandes, the Brazilian bourgeoisie, because of its dependent condition, is not perceived as a modernizing social-revolutionizing force, but rather as a class embedded with a racist reactionary spirit and an adversity to transformations (Fernandes 2005). The bourgeois path to overcome its own peripheral condition of subalternity was to submit large parts of Brazilian society to the condition of double exploitation. In post-colonial societies the workers were submitted not only to the oppression of local elites but also to the predatory centre-periphery relations. Ruy Mauro Marini referred to this condition as super-exploitation. The Latin-American bourgeoisies were more aligned with the traditional aristocratic backward elites, then a capital-driven modernizing class, and the military dictatorship was a product of this social composition. The failure of the left-wing armed resistance demanded a new non-revolutionary strategy towards a socialist society – a term adopted very loosely within the PT. In order to start a progressive transformation or development of Brazilian society, Fernandes argues for the necessity of a progressive party that should be electorally sustained by the Brazilian organized social movements. Once in power, social change would be pushed for based on a constant pressure from organized popular movements. A dialectical relation between party and organized civil society was to be the base of the strategy to confront the entrenched Brazilian elite. The PT understood itself as the political organization that would serve as a buffer between the traditional elite and social movements (Fernandes 2010). The PT can unlock this political space, inserting in the clashes the junction of race and class. And so on – each social movement may take on defensive and offensive roles, as long as the party, which can fuse the frustrations and the needs for change, upholds its historical duties.22 Based on this strategy, in the 1980s the PT lived its initial building process. During this period, mainly through the actions of the unions, progressive groups

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of the Catholic Church, and many other organized movements, the party expanded its influence and intervention capability with the general public and incorporated an important sector of Brazilian society in the struggle for democracy. Meanwhile, other allied progressive organizations arose from the same historical landscape, such as the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (1983) and the Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores (1986). The so-called slow and gradual democratization of the country23 allowed for the formal registry of the Workers’ Party in 1982 as well as the insertion of the PT in the cross-party “Elections Now” (Diretas já!) committee, which was organized the following year to spearhead Brazilian society’s push for immediate and free presidential elections. This massive and plural struggle didn’t achieve its immediate goal and a general election only happened in 1989. Nevertheless, it was an important step toward re-establishing some democratic spirit in a deeply authoritarian society. The dictatorship formally ended in 1985, but re-democratization arrived in a slow, controlled, limited, indirect and partial manner with the concealment of State repression and terrorism together with pardons for its collaborators.24 Although many countries in Latin America held Truth, Justice, Remembrance and Reparation Commissions, with varying results, in Brazil this procedure was only initiated in the year 2011 during the presidency of Dilma Rousseff, herself a participant of the resistance that was arrested and tortured. All these factors are indicators of the level of complacency of the majority of Brazilian society with authoritarian rule, the lack of a democratic culture and conservatism. Nevertheless, the PT was able to enact a path that led a left-wing progressive party to power only a few years after the fall of the last dictatorship in the country. During its first decade of existence (1980s), the PT was successful in promoting steady political and social gains. A broader base of support was established beyond the labour and popular movements, especially among middle-class professionals, public servants and non-factory private sector workers, consolidating its stance as a mass movement. On the formal political front, the party started to collect important electoral achievements since Gilson Menezes became the first Brazilian PT mayor in the industrial city of Diadema (1982). The first state capital to see a PT-led government occurred in 1985 in the regional election won by Maria Luiza Fontenele in Fortaleza. Lula himself was the most voted-for representative for the National Constituent Assembly that was initiated in 1986 and Luiza Erundina was elected mayor of São Paulo, the largest and most important city in the country in 1988. These gains, among others, consolidated the Party’s presence in the country’s democratic framework and allowed for PT’s first experiments with public administration.25 The advance achieved through the action of this united front of social movements led to the PT’s surprising participation in the first post-dictatorship

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general direct presidential elections (1989). The campaign happened at a time when the country was immersed in hyperinflation, economic stagnation, external debt and high interest rates that caused an extreme scenario of impoverishment and unemployment that subjected large parts of the population to the threat of hunger. This extreme social vulnerability of large portions of the Brazilian population contrasted with the elevated levels of wealth sustained by national elites that benefited from the dictatorship, and this opened a path for the success of the Party’s message to the Brazilian electorate. These critical conditions are called by many analysts the “lost decade” or “lost generation”, reflecting the evident lack of future expectations in Brazilian society and a widespread desire for change. The PT, with only nine years of existence, prevailed among 22 candidacies for the presidency and reached a high enough percentage of votes to accede to the runoff for the presidential seat. The first Lula candidacy was backed by a coalition called the Popular Brazil Front that was able to aggregate most of the progressive and leftist Brazilian parties in the second round of the presidential elections. At that time, the party presented its most radical political narrative in which the PT proposed to implement its original format of democratic socialism. Despite the defeat by a small margin the new party gained its place at the centre of the national power dispute and positioned itself as one of the main forces in the re-accommodation of power in the recently re-democratized Brazil. At that moment the PT also secured its status within the left, counting with a broad, active and organized social base in almost all sectors of Brazilian society that led to a strong capacity of popular mobilization and experiences in public administration. According to Secco (2011), within this initial phase of emergence and consolidation of the PT, two moments can be singled out. The first, which he names “formation”, lasted between 1978 and 1983. The second he calls “the social opposition”, and this occurred between 1984 and 1989. During the period the Workers’ Party formally constituted itself and paved its way towards the position of major alternative to the political organization of the traditional left and to the authoritarian elites. This social opposition phase reached its peak with the presence of the PT at the second round of the first post-dictatorship direct elections in Brazil, and is characterized by the widening and strengthening of the party’s electoral base within more progressive sectors of Brazilian society. At this moment the party positioned itself as a clear challenge to the rule of the national elite and its subaltern positioning in the world stage. From this moment on, the PT consistently increased its legislative representatives and its portfolio of local governments. The growth of the party’s presence in the Brazilian institutional political sphere started to impose profound changes on the Workers’ Party. Secco (2011) refers to this transition as passage from a social opposition to the condition of parliamentary opposition party. In order to intensify its presence in Brazilian

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political institutions the PT needed to amplify its electoral base; we call this process the institutionalization phase, along with the transformations lived by Brazilian society that ended up by forcing a new character on to the party.

Institutionalization In the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War and with the advance of neoliberalism, new challenges were imposed on the global South. Latin America and the Caribbean were strongly affected by a Northern-originated flow of social and economic prescriptions that were imposed worldwide. The perception of a unipolar world was reinforced by a discourse of inevitability and victory over history. Neoliberalism was the exclusive and definite alternative to the region’s continuous hyper-inflationary economic crises. Among the main societal changes imposed at that time were the dismantlement of the social protection structures and policies of the state, the imposition of the so-called Washington Consensus and, in substitution of anti-communism, continental security was fragmented in issues like the anti-narcoterrorism doctrine that remains strong in the region to this today. Together with the so-called war on drugs, most LatinAmerican societies witnessed the criminalization of critical voices and social movements and the security forces were reclassifying political struggles as common crimes (Messari, in Gomez 2004, Ceceña 2004, 2006; Novion 2014). As with most Northern-originated societal formulas towards the global South, neoliberalism sought to position itself as a de-territorialized universal recipe that could disregard historical, economic and social diversities (Giugliano 2017). The spread of neoliberalism throughout the Latin-American macroregion during 1990s caused the worsening of the social indicators and contributed to the weakening of labour organizations. Because of the PT’s origins and economic objectives these factors also prompted important changes to the Workers’ Party and its power strategy. The party continued to grow as an electoral force, winning several regional elections and consolidating itself as the main parliamentary opposition to neoliberalism in Brazil. To achieve these results in the face of the challenges described above, the party enacted a de-radicalization of its political discourse, a significant change in its internal structure, and sought broader alliances, including with conservative segments of Brazilian society, in order to push towards national power. This institutionalization found a strong internal resistance and caused a deep ideological debate that went on throughout the second half of the 1990s. Although it’s important to recognize the multiplicity of internal political strands within the party, two general orientations can be identified at this time of PT’s strategic reformulation. One path pursued a more power-oriented pragmatic political perspective and the adoption of a social-democratic ideological orientation that could attract a larger electoral base within the conservative Brazilian society. The groups attached to this positioning fought for a more vertical

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hierarchical internal party organization and a smaller role for grassroots networks in the party structure as a way to impose this de-radicalized discourse on the left-wing party base. The party’s left-wing groups sustained another strategic perspective. These sectors defended the maintenance of the initial bottom-up decision-making process, a clear socialist orientation, a very selective alliance policy and the strengthening of its grassroots network structures. The majority of the party, led by Lula and José Dirceu,26 aware of the need to increase the electoral base to lead the party to the presidential seat, defended and eventually won the internal dispute. The internal disputes caused deep fractures and some of the more radical political factions were expelled and a gradual disarticulation of the grassroots cells was enacted in favour of a more top-down decision-making structure, breaking the initial horizontal democratic mechanisms (Harnecker 1994). In this way, the PT gradually migrated from direct-action and the participatory democracy that characterized its social opposition phase, towards a continuous and institutional quest for electoral representativeness that marks what Secco calls the “parliamentary opposition” stage (Secco 2011). The de-radicalization of the party originated ideas and proposals that were more accessible to Brazilian society as a whole, demystifying its positions for the parts of the population still affected by the fear and propaganda of the Cold War. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s the macro-region of Latin America and the Caribbean experienced the peak consequences of the spread of neoliberalism. The sharp increase in poverty and high inequality rates was paired with a diminishing state capability. In Brazil this crisis scenario weakened the labour organizations and the country’s industrial production at the same time as it strengthened popular demands for political change. The non-labour social movements increased their presence and power within the party and gained influence enough to impose a more multi-sectorial perspective on the PT’s national project. The strengthening of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), the Homeless Worker Movement (MTST), and the Afrodescendant, Quilombola and Indigenous organizations are examples of this phenomenon. If the Workers’ Party were constituted only by unions the PT would have felt more intensely, as many labour parties did around the world, the negative impacts of the weakening of trade unions. The PT’s larger and more diverse social base helped the party to continue to represent a major part of Brazilian politics. An important consequence brought by these internal changes can be noticed beyond the Brazilian national political arena. The groups that gained strength within the party lines at that moment were also the ones in Brazil that began to interact with globalized social struggles. This process led to the creation of international forums that eventually converged into networks and transnational movements. The World Social Forum, the Cúmbre de los Pueblos, the Forum of São Paulo and Via Campesina are some examples (Ceceña 2004, 2006; Porto Gonçalves 2006).

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These networks open a path for closer connections between diverse movements of different countries and regions generating significant counter-hegemonic fronts in the face of the continued imposition of neoliberal agendas throughout the global South. At this point the PT started to compose, although sometimes in an indirect mode, the supranational opposition to the initiatives of hegemonic integration such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), Dignity Plans, Colombia (I and II), PueblaPanama, Mexico, Peru, South American Regional Integration Initiative (IIRSA), the Mérida Initiative, among others (Novion 2014). In summary, by the end of the 1990s, the party had embarked on two interrelated processes that had profound consequences. First, a process of migration from a social opposition to a parliamentary opposition made significant links to the Brazilian social/political scenario. At the same time, the PT went through a process of internationalization prompted by the connections that some of its composing social movements established with global heterodox progressive networks. One outcome of this double movement was a split within the PT. On one hand, a decision-making body formed by the electoral leadership and, on the other, the social base linked to the social movements. On many occasions this split resulted in conflicts that ended by widening the gap between both sides. Nevertheless, the maintenance of this fracture ensured the continuation of the relations between party and social movements, even if through a less radical democratic formula. The growing parliamentary representation also allowed for a broader insertion of the party within the reality and perceptions of Brazilian society. This greater visibility gradually led to the increase of administrative experiences both in municipalities and state governments. At the same time, the party’s grassroots maintained a strong line of communication with the organized popular movements of Brazilian society. These elements, coupled with the worsening of the neoliberal crisis, gradually prepared the PT for its rise to national power in 2003, but laid a great toll on the initial concept of the party (Martins 2016).

The national power The Workers’ Party, in its 37 years of existence, took part in all direct presidential elections since the end of dictatorship. From 1989 to today there have been seven presidential elections in Brazil and in all of them the PT candidates led the main left-wing electoral alliance. In the first three polls since the re-democratization (1989, 1994 and 1998) the party retained consistently the second place in the dispute with the hegemonic internal conservative sectors. Faced with the 1998 defeat, the party leaders, especially the majority group led by Lula, perceived that to achieve a national victory it would be necessary to expand the electoral base even further. It would be imperative to reach out to

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the more conservative sectors of the population and to part of the national elite discontent with the neoliberal orthodoxy and more open to a nationalist development project. In 2002, for the first time, the coalition led by the PT included traditional centre-right parties. José Alencar, a businessman from a political party with close ties to the Christian evangelical churches and voters then occupied the position of vice president. Nevertheless, the enlargement of the electoral base was not the only reason that demanded the rapprochement with part of the traditional groups. The Brazilian political system does not present high rates of ideological affiliation27 and there are a large number of political parties.28 This leads to a situation in which a one-party majority is rare in Brazilian chambers and even electoral fronts often make fragile governing alliances. Therefore it is not uncommon that executive office holders depend on representatives from different parties to compose their parliamentary base, configuring what many analysts call a coalition-presidentialism. Establishing minimal levels of governance and governability are even more difficult for left-wing government within the traditionalist Brazilian local and regional political environment. The demand for an amplified electoral and parliamentary base led to the endeavour, through this dangerous path of composing a government, of very diverse ideological and social groups. The consequence, as stated by Hernan Bruera (2015), was that the necessity of maintaining equilibrium between the social forces within the alliance was a central aspect of Lula’s first two terms. The governability dilemma faced by Lula – defined as the need to balance conflicting interests that occur between strategic actors, both allies and opponents. (Bruera 2015: 20) This situation cannot be seen as a mere internal matter of the formal political system. Still, according to Bruera, governability equates in social terms to different groups being sufficiently represented so that a minimal level of legitimacy is achieved (Bruera 2015: 61). The PT-led electoral coalition was itself a broad front of political groups propelled by the dissatisfaction with the economic consequences of neoliberalism and able to form a government that made possible only some of the party’s original agenda. As an administration it largely reflected Brazilian society and made the changes that were actually possible for a left-wing party leading a broad coalition in a traditionalist country. In summary, the political front composed of progressive social movements, through the institutionalization process, de-radicalized its discourse and thus amplified its own base, permitting also the formation of a larger political alliance in order to deal with the challenge of governability. The consequence of this scenario was a national government marked by a constant conciliatory dialogue with both society and parliamentarian groups that narrowed the

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possibilities for imposing more radical changes. This does not mean that the PT didn’t enact important shifts both towards a less unequal economy and to the country’s democratic political configuration. But they were undoubtedly less ambitious than initially planned by the party. There can be little doubt that the shift between the Brazilian Popular Front (1989) and the Coalition of President Lula (2002) made for a strong and successful electoral strategy. But the institutionalization, the de-radicalization and the dialogue with broader sectors of society disrupted the radical democracy that organized the social movement front that characterized the party in its beginning. Nevertheless, even with all this process of adaptation and change, the first national government was a large success in economic and social terms. In turn, these results led to a significant rise in Lula’s popularity and the further expansion of the governing coalition towards traditional elites by the incorporation of even more regional parties and conservative social groups. When the PT-led coalition took office, the major challenge that the Workers’ Party had to face was a dire economic scenario. The previous governments of Fernando Collor, who kick-started the neoliberal trajectory in Brazil and who was impeached on corruption charges (1990–1992), and the two terms of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who consolidated the neoliberal economic and societal model in Brazil, caused a serious legacy of unemployment, poverty and slow growth. The social crises felt at the time also contributed to the electoral success of the Workers’ Party narrative of change and stimulated part of the local elite to accept some level of alliance with the left. Once it occupied the higher post of the executive branch the PT inherited what was called at the time the double “cursed legacy”.29 On one hand, there were the consequences of the downsizing of the state, high interest rates, the advance of privatization processes, a funding crisis in public health and education, high unemployment rates and elevated levels of poverty. On the other, the already historical problems of Brazilian society, which remained unsolved during the neoliberal governments of Collor and Cardoso: the high concentration of land and wealth, intense social conflict in the countryside, high rates of class, race and gender violence, and regional inequality. This scenario was not restricted to Brazil. The diffusion of neoliberalism and the subsequent crisis caused similar symptoms throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Comparable situations can be noticed, in different intensities, in Argentina after Carlos Menem, Peru after Alberto Fujimori or Mexico after Salinas de Gortari. The electoral reaction to neoliberalism can also be seen as a macro-regional phenomenon in which a wave of progressive, developmental or postneoliberal parties (Preciado Coronado 2013; Sader 2013) were installed throughout Latin America. The response varied in intensity from to country to country, ranging from the twenty-first century socialism implemented in Venezuela and the BeinVivir in Bolivia and Ecuador to the so-called new developmentalism experimented with in Brazil. In international politics, the de-radicalized class

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conciliation politics put forward by the Workers’ Party, together with positive results from the implementation of a wide range of successful social policies, granted a new positive status for Brazil in the global scenario (Chavez 2007). The PT-led government coalition approach to the economic problems in Brazil was enacted through the promotion of internal development based on government investments, pro-poor social policies, systematic minimum wage rises and the spread and diversifying of Brazilian foreign commercial relations. During the 12 years of PT’s national administrations the party succeeded in securing at least two fragile balances. First, between national developmental strategies that benefited economically the Brazilian elite in parallel with the implementation of social policies. Second, the party was able to sustain a fragile equilibrium between conservative and progressive components of the government and in parliament. It’s not the intention of this chapter to explore in detail the national government headed by the PT. Many authors, books and articles are already dedicated to the achievements and failures of the Workers’ Party administration. It suffices for the objectives of this chapter to present some broad analytical lines that can contribute to an understanding of how a left-wing party faced challenges and enacted solutions in a way that led it to power and guaranteed a relative level of accomplishment in a conservative global South society. Many of the issues that have been brought to light so far seem to point to a strategy of success based in apparently impossible conciliations. The union of labour with heterodox social movements, intense internal democracy in parallel with institutionalization, the maintenance of a progressive agenda together with a search for a broader electoral base and a government of class conciliation with growth and a social agenda. An intense level of democratic spirit and negotiation abilities were necessary to enact this carnival of the oppressed. Nevertheless, this conciliatory strategy generated much criticism among more progressive sectors and movements within Brazilian society. The underlying complaint directed towards the PT by these groups was that the effort to guarantee governability undermined the necessary structural changes that the party proposed during its initial steps (Vieira 2012). To the eyes of these groups the popular-democratic strategy composed of a social-oriented government backed by social movements as a peaceful path to a democratic and more egalitarian society fell short of its ideal goals. As we can see in the evaluation of Bruera: As various scholars have pointed out, Lula’s government failed to establish broad-based and far-reaching participatory mechanisms comparable to those that the party launched at the subnational level, thus diverging from the so-called “PT way of governing”. The social achievements obtained by Lula were not only managed without threatening “privileged interests” or the existing order, but also no significant levels of social mobilization. (Bruera 2015: 34)

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After four consecutive national election victories and 14 years occupying the higher executive post in the country the power project headed by the Workers’ Party came to an abrupt end. The impeachment of President Dilma Roussef in the second year of her mandate, in a process denounced as a parliamentarian coup by the PT and most of the social movements allied to the party, started a radical dismantlement of the policies and governing model implemented by the party over the years. At this moment it is impossible to produce any complete analysis of the events that are in motion because it is still a process in full swing. It is a door that must be left open for future analysis. Nevertheless, some of the important questions can already be roughly sketched. The larger questions that the Brazilian left will have to deal with are how and why a power project that had relative success, high levels of popularity and positive social-economic indicators could be so easily ejected from its major electoral post. Nevertheless, two other issues in synchrony discussed in this chapter must be asked. First, it will be imperative to question why a party in power for more than 14 years and with such profound roots in Brazilian civil society was unable to react – both on the streets and on institutional levels – in a way that it could counterbalance its opponents. One of the factors that enabled this scenario relates to the party’s original composition as a broad front of social movements. During the national administration, the separation between the social base and the party bureaucrats and parliamentarians that served to organize the party while maintaining link with the social movement was undone. In an effort towards constructing a conciliatory government composed of the diverse social sectors that sustained the party, the main leaders of grassroots social movements were incorporated into the administration. More than that, many of the social movements allied to the PT started to participate institutionally in government bodies designed to promote the democratization of the state. The result of this merger was a decreasing necessity/ability for social pressure by the organized sectors of Brazilian society once the popular organizations could channel demands directly to the state. Dialectically, the incorporation of social movements into the administrative structure allowed for the advancement of public policies but simultaneously reduced the influence and contact of these movements with their own base and also with non-organized portions of the population. In a way it may be hypothesised that the original plan of ascending to power with a continuous pressure from the organized social movements couldn’t be sustained with the level of embeddedness between the state and the popular organizations that occurred during the PT governments. Second, it is important to return to one of the classic issues of left-wing literature and question the limits of a class-conciliation government. As already expressed, the PT was born from the ashes of a failed attempt at armed confrontation with local elites that happened during the military dictatorship that occurred from 1964 onwards. A national scenario of a victorious reactionary

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bourgeoisie allied with traditional elites in order to profit from a subaltern position that Brazil occupies led to the abandonment of the armed struggles. From then on, hopes of a transformative action rested on a strategy of allying an intense social pressure from organized social movements to the electoral victory of a left-wing party. In order to pursue the electoral part of this strategy and to obtain some level of governability, the PT had to enlarge its social and parliamentary bases. Taking into account that it was within the government alliance that emerged the forces and votes that enabled the 2016 coup, any analysis of the factors that brought down the PT’s power project cannot abstain from addressing the issue of the limits of a class-conciliatory strategy. The social improvements, the economic growth, internal popularity and the international prestige were not enough to impede the violent reaction of the Brazilian elite. The failure of Brazilian institutions, especially Congress and the justice system, to uphold republican and fair processes together with relentless anti-left propaganda enacted by the communications oligopolies seem to be key elements in the further analysis of the subject in hand. Beyond the immediate focus of this chapter, endless other questions will also need investigation, like the level of capturing by the local elites of the national institutions, the role of the corporate press in Brazil, the structural corruption in Brazilian public services and electoral process, the regional power struggle within Brazilian local elites and the role of international political players and organizations.

PT in the Latin-American context and the global South The formation of a broad social movement party, the institutionalization path that led the PT to national power and its governability strategy are three of the major elements that can help to explain the ascension to power and the challenges faced by the Workers’ Party in Brazil. Although these aspects do not suffice as an exhaustive comprehension, they do lay the ground for some of the unique aspects that led a left-wing party to the higher executive office in Brazil’s traditionally conservative and highly plutocratic postcolonial society, and with hardly any democratic history. Even considering the tragic end of this experience and the important historical lessons that will certainly come from the fall of the PT from the presidency, in context, it still can be seen as a story of success for the Brazilian progressive camp. However, the road to power does not encompass one important aspect that has become increasingly significant for the left in southern postcolonial societies, which can also be linked to the actions of the Workers’ Party. The PT has developed throughout its history actions in the international sphere that in many ways connect with its own formation and organization, and also to the larger challenge of establishing stronger links between actors from the global South. The main objective of this section of the chapter is to provide some broad lines

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about the international actions and relations established by the PT and its national governments. Among critical thinkers a long-standing debate has been going on about the subaltern position that the ex-colonies still play in the global scenario. Many have been the conceptual narratives that attempted to comprehend the nature, format and paths to overcome the hegemonized relations between the north and the south. Dependence, modernity/coloniality, subalternity, postcoloniality, hegemony/emancipation and liberation are just some of the conceptual directions that have been explored in order to address these issues. Although very diverse in nature, they all seem to point to an intellectual effort to understand the structures of global dominance and to identify the possibilities to enact counter-hegemonic struggles. Latin-American progressive social thought has dedicated considerable effort to explore the necessity of southern integration and the role to be played by social movements as emancipatory actors. Two of these perspectives had important influence over the formation of the PT. First, mainly through the progressive Catholic groups that integrated with the party, theorists of liberation such as Enrique Dussel advocated for an emancipation path for Latin America in the name of social justice (Dussel 1992). On the economic front, especially through the influence of Florestan Fernandes, Maria da Conceição Tavares, Aluísio Mercadante and Guido Mantega, a view of development was established within the party connected to left-wing dependency theories. The influence of these lines of thought over the Workers’ Party leadership added to the internationalization enacted by the social base of the party that contributed to the PT’s international awareness. The pre-disposition inherited from these factors led the national governments headed by the Workers’ Party to act towards the intensification of southern relations already on-going on the periphery of the contemporary world system. This process encompasses the development of multiple spheres of dialogue (economic, technological, social and military) and also a wide range of actors. Embodying the metaphor developed by the geographer Milton Santos in which the global space is presented as a theatre of flows (Santos 2002), the emergence of the South may be seen as an intensification of direct exchanges between southern countries and stakeholders, allowing for a diversification of flows in the global arena (Giugliano 2017). Still, according to Santos, these flows can be hegemonizing, hegemonized or counter-hegemonic in nature. The widening of south–south relations is a multiple and diverse process and cannot be embedded in just one of Santos’s categories, nevertheless many progressive authors and left-wing organizations envision these transformations as an opportunity for counter-hegemonic struggle. As said by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2008), a sociologist that has close ties with the PT, the exhaustion of the northern hegemonized relations has opened the way to increasing direct relations between southern actors. For him, a new epistemic ground is being laid for a more horizontal global dialogue. In

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his own words, a southern global epistemology approach proposes a more inclusive exchange between global actors and could point to what he calls a new ecology of knowledge that could lead towards a possibility of ample reconfigurations of global power relations. It’s within this framework in which south–south relations are seen as a path to counter-hegemonic struggle that some of the more original international efforts of the PT can be identified (Santos & Paula 2009). The initial international connections established by the party happened, as we mentioned earlier, through the 1990s and the early 2000s. The social movements that composed the base of the party promoted a process of internationalization through networks that linked global social movements that were critical to the hegemonic globalization model. It was not an intentional or planned approach, but was well received and supported at least by a significant part of the party’s structure. The major event that epitomized this movement was the backing that the party provided for the formation of the World Social Forum (WSF). It is important to stress that the PT itself didn’t compose the WSF and wasn’t responsible for the coming together of the movements that did integrate it. Nevertheless, some of the founding social movements that did were also in the party’s broad front and it was a Workers’ Party municipality government that provided the ground support for its first global meeting. In 2001, the Workers’ Party held the government of the city of Porto Alegre at the moment that neoliberalism was in a steep decline in Latin America, driven by the crisis in Russia and Argentina. It was at this point that, in order to antagonize the World Economic Forum of Davos and to discuss alternate patterns of a global future, that the World Social Forum was founded. The social movements that were part of this effort coined the slogan “Another World is Possible” and a first charter was signed. The organizers envisioned a plural and horizontal space of dialogue that could bring together hundreds of social movements. The first meeting produced a charter that was signed by the following social movements: ABONG, Brazilian Association of Non-Governmental Organizations; ATTAC, Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens; CBJP, Brazilian Justice and Peace Commission; National Council of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB); CIVES, Brazilian Business Association for Citizenship; CUT, Central Trade Union Confederation; IBASE, Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Studies; CJG, Center for Global Justice; MST, Movement of Landless Rural Workers. Most of the Brazilian movements that signed the charter were strongly connected with the PT, especially the MST and CUT. The WSF is essentially a front of social movements and was conceptualized as a radical democratic dialogical space to confront the established power. The original charter of the forum presents elements that focus on the formation of broad fronts of debate as counter-hegemonic action, as we can see in the sections below:

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1. The WSF is an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, [and the] free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society centred on the human person. 5. The WSF brings together and interlinks only organisations and movements of civil society from all the countries in the world, but intends neither to be a body representing world civil society nor to exclude it from the debates it promotes, those in positions of political responsibility, mandated by their peoples, who decides to enter into the commitments resulting from those debates.30 This configuration has a direct parallel with the initial formation of the PT, which explains in part why the party maintained so much support for the WSF. Although the World Social Forum is not a product of the actions of the PT, nor was it intentionally mirrored on the party’s configurations, but the channels of interactions between the two organizations was intense. More than that, both can be seen as a new way of composing progressive forces in the contemporary reconfiguration of social struggles. In this kind of progressive front both traditional left-wing ideological groups and labour organizations were connected with the rising sectorial and heterodox collectives. The relations between the PT and the World Social Forum were mostly forged by the internationalization of its socially organized base. Although indirect, this experience was instrumental in establishing networks between the party leaders and the various global progressive movements, and contributed to shape the actions of the party’s national governments. In continuing editions of the WSF, representatives of the progressive wave that swept Latin America from 2000 to 2010 were called as keynote speakers and extended their support to the initiative. Lula da Silva, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Nestor Kirshner and José Mujica are just some of the names that attended the WSF meetings. It is difficult to assess the exact level of influence that this connection between the PT and the WSF had in the international actions that were taken after Lula da Silva won the 2002 presidential elections. Nevertheless, a continuous effort to intensify relations with other southern states can be clearly identified, which indicates at least some degree of continuation between experiences. Within the institutional and formal activities of international politics, the development of economic and political relations between nations of the global South is a process that has been slowly gaining ground for some decades now. Nevertheless, Brazil’s participation in this process before the arrival of the Workers’ Party in power can be considered timid at most. Until the 1980s, the country was considered an essentially closed society, even in relation to its

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nearest neighbours. Political, economic and cultural exchanges with the rest of the world were basically restricted to a handful of countries of the global North,31 following a logic inherited from colonial subordination. The expansion of unmediated relations between Brazil and the other actors of the global scenario started only from the 1980s with the trade agreements with the Middle East and Latin America, and with the neoliberal economic liberalization of the 1990s. Before that, the country did not participate in the anti-systemic international movements of the global South, such as the non-aligned countries, and maintained an attitude of apparent neutrality during the course of the Cold War. This amounted, in practice, to a no-challenging position towards the hegemonic forces on which it was economically dependent. As perceived by the dependency theorists, Brazilian national interest was reduced to that of a restricted internal elite that benefited from its subaltern economic and political position (Marini 1977). Even the timid attempts to shift from this condition had been met with intense reaction from the internal elites, as happened in the 1930s, in the nationalistic and populist era of Getúlio Vargas and in the 1960s military coup that ended a short-lived labour government that had been installed in 1962. The arrival of the Workers’ Party to national power promoted a movement towards a more autonomous insertion of Brazil in the international public sphere, breaking with the traditional path of neutrality or disguised subordination. Three actions can be cited as hallmarks of this movement promoted by the PT during its administrations. First, the expansion of embassies in the countries of the global South, second, the increase in the volume of trade with the global South partners and, third, the insertion of Brazil in political/economic blocs that sought to strengthen the position of global South countries in the face of the hegemonic powers of the North. It is important to note that this increasing closeness with the so-called global periphery did not occur at the expense of the historical, social and economic connections between Brazil and the central capitalist countries. The strengthening of relations with the other actors is rather a parallel flow occurring alongside the relations of subordination and hegemony traditionally established throughout Brazilian history. By adopting this dual international path, the PT at the same time contributed to the intensification of South–South relations without endeavouring a direct confrontational attitude with the North. This course of action is coherent with PT’s internal strategy of conciliation and was considered a moderate approach in comparison with the more confrontational Latin American left-wing governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. Another important characteristic of dialogue with the global South promoted by the Workers’ Party was that it occurred on two simultaneous levels. First there was an effort to strengthen regional integration with Latin America and

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with Portuguese-speaking African countries in recognition of the common historical links that bound Brazil with the two macro-regions. The expansion of relations with both regions was developed through participation in forums and alliances, technical cooperation, the internationalization of Brazilian companies and the increase in trade flows. Added to these efforts, the PT-led government created two universities dedicated to these integration blocs.32 It’s important to reaffirm that this does not certify that these actions were successful in their objectives, nevertheless they do testify towards the intentions and actions promoted by the national governments led by the PT. The acceptance of this official narrative and actions was unequal, even between left-wing analysts. Authors identified with a more radical anti-capitalist critique, like Raul Zibechi (2012) who perceived Brazilian actions within the framework of Rui Mauro Marini’s (1977) concept of subimperialism. For them, this movement sought to establish unequal relations between Brazil and the other actors in Latin America and Africa. However, the intellectual sectors closer to the Workers’ Party understood this approach in terms of relationships or strategic partnerships for development (Garcia 2008a, 2008b; Sader 2013). In addition to this regional dimension, there is also a wider range of relations between Brazil and some other key actors in the global South. In this regard, the PT governments sought a significant increase in relations with Asia, Eastern Europe and South Africa, through enlarging trade and the commitment to strategic alliances such as BRICS and IBSA. As stated before, an indicator of this effort promoted between the years 2003 and 2015 was the increase in the number of Brazilian embassies in countries of the global South. Until 2002, Brazil had 91 embassies and 150 consular posts, concentrated mainly in the northern countries and Latin America, in which worked around 990 diplomats. During the national government led by the Workers’ Party, 41 embassies were inaugurated, while diplomatic posts jumped from 150 in 2003 to 227 in 2013. This represents a sharp growth in the Brazilian diplomatic network under the PT administrations. Most of this expansion occurred towards countries of the global South.33 The increasing number of Brazilian diplomatic missions does not necessarily represent a success in expanding the network of Brazilian international dialogues. In order to make that statement, it would require a qualitative evaluation of these interventions and the relationships developed through these diplomatic units. However, this growth can be considered another element of an effort towards a greater role on the international stage and in the search for more room for participation and dialogue in the global landscape. The expansion of diplomatic representations was accompanied by an increase in the volume of commercial transactions and the strengthening of economic ties with the southern nations. This process does not imply the reduction of trade relations with the North, but the proportional increase of the relations with the South. The table below (Table 9.1) contains some examples of the evolution of Brazilian trade with countries of the global South.

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TABLE 9.1 Evolution of Brazilian Exports with the global South between the years 2002–2014

Commercial partner/region or country from the global South

2002Exports in billions of US dollars/year

2014Exports in billions of US dollars/year

MERCOSUR Africa Central America and Caribbean China

4 2,3 1,3 3

25 9,7 5,8 43

Source: MIDIC – Ministério da Indústria, Comercio Exterior e Serviços, 2017.

Nevertheless, the most compelling indicator of the intentions of the PT-led governments can be found in the field of international politics. Throughout its time in power the Workers’ Party promoted the insertion of Brazil in a number of agreements, forums and transnational alliances that seem to indicate a commitment towards some degree of southern emancipatory projects. Again, the mere signature of or participation in these initiatives doesn’t guarantee any alteration of the subaltern position that post-colonial societies occupy on the global stage. But at least it indicates a willingness, unseen in Brazil before the PT national governments, to move in this direction. The Brazilian insertion in this kind of initiative occurred at both a regional and on a more broad global scale. Brazil strengthened and advanced in cooperation agreements within the MERCOSUR and participated in the creation of the Union of South-American Nations – UNASUR, and the Community of Latin-American and Caribbean Nations – CELAC. It is also true that Brazil’s foreign policy remained distant from the most radically anti-hegemonic initiatives in the macro-region, such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America. Similarly to its national policies, PT sought a less confrontational path to not antagonize the established powers. In the broader global South sphere, Brazil entered into the two blocs that represent the most clear attempt at strengthening the position on the global power stage. The BRICS and IBSA strategic blocs are aimed at promoting development, advancing mutual dialogue and promoting a bloc-like positioning in some global issues. The countries that compose these blocs, although regional powers and important actors in counter-balancing the 2007/2008 financial crises, are very diverse in their political structures, economic and social structures and in environmental awareness. However, even if they cannot be seen as a coherent counter-hegemonic initiative, they can certainly be perceived as a clear sign of diversification of global flows and the promotion of alliances that allow for a more equal dialogue between the South and the global North.

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Conclusion As stated earlier, this chapter does not intend to present definitive conclusions about the Workers’ Party, especially since many things referred to throughout this chapter are still on-going. More than that, many of the initiatives, such as international agreements signed between 2003 and 2014, are suffering a deep setback at the hands of the government that took national control after the parliamentary coup that impeached the last Workers’-Party-elected president Dilma Rousseff. Still, some aspects of the trajectory and performance of PT seem relevant to the debate of the contemporary left. First, there is the formation of the Workers’ Party that was initially composed of a broad front of social movements. This type of composition seems to be re-enacted more frequently in present times by left-wing organizations both in the north and the south. The Spanish Podemos and the Bolivian MAS appear to present similar structures. A second important debate that can be extracted from the PT experience is about the relationship between social movements and progressive governments. In the case of the PT, the strategy adopted was that of a close contact between these two poles. Once the party reached the national government leaders of the movements were brought into the administration and the popular organizations saw their participation and dialogue with the state take on more formal and productive expressions. While this relationship was able to impose progress in various fields of Brazilian reality, it meant a weakening of the bonds of these movements with their social base. Another relevant aspect that can be derived from the PT’s history is the capacities of left-wing-led governments to impose structural social transformation. The Workers’ Party’s electoral strategy was to include conservative groups in an effort to reach the presidency and also to ensure its governability and capacity of governance. In the PT’s case this proved to be a double-edged sword that led to the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that through this strategy the PT managed to implement economic policies that archived some important results, such as poverty and income concentration reductions. Finally, the international actions of the PT seem to be a fertile field for further analysis. The efforts for diversification and intensification of dialogue and exchange with multiple actors of the global South deserve careful consideration. These actions were initiated through the social movements that composed the PT and that participated in the internationalization of social struggles. When in government the Workers’ Party continued to put forward this alternative agenda, both at regional and global levels, especially through strategic alliances. Evaluations of the success or failure of this course of action in the global space are still open for debate. To some it represents mere efforts of integration under the capitalist order, to others it is an opening path to counter-hegemonic struggles. Either way, they point to important reorganization of the global dialogue and the progressive action on the world stage.

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Notes 1 Source: Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, 2016. 2 Among the 513 representatives that make up the Brazilian Federal Chamber today the Workers’ Party has 58. 3 The major parallel with the PT’s structure in Latin America is the Uruguayan Frente Ampla that was founded in 1971, came to power in 2004 and is also composed of multiple left-wing groups and social movements. 4 Source: Fundação Perseu Abramo, Historical Documents Archive https://fpabramo.org. br/csbh/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/04/02-programa_0.pdf (assessed 14/02/2017). 5 “Authentic unionism” or New Unionism are terms associated with union groups that were involved in the struggle with the military dictatorship and the foundation of the PT. The end of the dictatorship was very influenced by the strikes carried out by this movement in the automotive industrial centre of the country located in a region of the state of São Paulo known as the “ABCD”. At this time, the labour leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or simply Lula, began his journey to become a national leader and, later, President of the Republic. 6 Between the years of 1978 and 1981. 7 Despite the intense participation of the Party in the writing of the Constitution, by a decision of the majority within the party PT did not sign the final version of the document due to disputes related to conservative changes imposed by a conservative alliance then called “Centrão”. 8 Varguismo is a political movement inspired by the leadership of Getúlio Vargas, Brazilian President and dictator in the years 1930 to 1945. A contradictory figure, he had sympathy for Italian fascism, repressed and persecuted communists, while also confronting the traditional elite of São Paulo. A part of the Brazilian progressive movement identifies with Vargas for having implemented labour laws that, in Brazil, represented an improvement in working conditions in a country still living with the consequences of slavery abolished in 1888. 9 Since the Getúlio Vargas government, during which labour laws were implemented in Brazil, unions established an organic relationship with the state, especially because of the financial dependency of union taxes. Getúlio Vargas, who had fascist sympathies, based legislation implemented in Brazil on the “Carta del Lavoro” of Benito Mussolini in Italy, which sought to co-opt the unions to the interests of the state/nation at the expense of class objectives. 10 In the elections of 2014, among the five major candidates for the presidency, three had already participated, at some point, in the building of the frames of the Workers’ Party. 11 The macro-regional integration-security features five different phases, which define the relations between the US hegemony and the rest of the continent. 1. Pan-Americanism – Dollar Diplomacy (Big Stick); 2. Inter-Americanism, Doctrine of the Good Neighbours; 3. Inter-Americanism, Counter-insurgency Doctrine; 4. Alliance for Progress, anticommunist doctrine; and 5. the current Neoliberalism, anti-Narcoterrorism Doctrine. The temporal and spatial dynamics of each period depends on the characteristics of each country in which it was applied. 12 The MST, Brazilian Land-Less Movement, is one of the products of this scenario. To this day they remain within the social movements that support the Workers’ Party. 13 The Unified Workers Central, CUT, is the most powerful confederation of workers and unions in Brazil and a strong supporter of the Workers’ Party. 14 The National Student Union, UNE, was reorganized in this period after being severely hit by the military dictatorship. Many of its leaders were arrested, disappeared and tortured. The organization’s national headquarters in Rio de Janeiro was demolished and transformed into a parking lot. 15 The part of the Catholic Church connected to the Theology of Liberation played an important role in defying the military dictatorship and supporting the persecuted.

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16 The strikes of the ABCD Paulista (1978, 1979 and 1980), referring to the industrial metropolitan region of São Paulo, composed of the cities of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, São Caetano and Diadema. 17 José Cicote (president of the St. André’s metalworkers’ union), Henos Amorina (president of Osasco metalworkers’ union), Paulo Skromov (union of leatherworkers), Jacó Bitar (oil workers of Campinas), Olívio Dutra (bankers of Porto Alegre), among others. (Aarão, p. 02). 18 Manifesto of the Foundation of PT, available on the official website of the party: www.pt.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/manifestodefundacaopt.pdf(5/22/2017). 19 Official website of the Workers’ Party:www.pt.org.br/estrutura-partidaria. Perseu Abramo Foundation: https://fpabramo.org.br (5/22/2017). 20 The formation of local cells constituted a form of organization within the party’s base, where militants remained organized permanently. This space was used for debates on the conjectural political reality, for the definition of positions and proposals, as well as an important channel for education, information, activities and everyday action. 21 This terminology has no theoretical ambition. This is the term originated from the Workers’ Party documents, therefore a self-definition that seeks to synthesize the initial ideals perceived by its own guild. 22 Excerpt from text produced by Florestan Fernandes for the 1991 Workers’ Party national meeting. 23 Slow and gradual was the model sustained by the military sectors in the face of social pressure to end the dictatorship. They sought a mild kind of return to democracy. The allowing of progressive organizations and the amnesty are symptoms of this movement. This military group that advocated the “slow and gradual” transition faced more radicalized sectors within the military that proposed a harder crackdown on the democratic movement. 24 In order to guarantee the safe return of the hundreds of Brazilians in exile, many progressive forces in the country adhered to the amnesty movement that led to an official policy of pardon to state actors involved in torture, murders and disappearances and also to former members of the armed resistance to the dictatorship. 25 Official website of the Workers’ Party: www.pt.org.br/nossa-historia (5/22/2017). 26 Political leader and founder member of the PT, José Dirceu has a special place in the recent history of Brazilian political life. Originally from the student movement of the 1960s, he distinguished himself as an important student leader in the fight against the civilian-military dictatorship. He lived underground, went to prison, took armed action and was part of the group of political prisoners released in exchange for the ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick (1969). In the return of the democracy, he becomes one of the leading active members in parliament and holds the position of Chief Minister of Staff during the Lula government. He was involved in corruption cases, convicted, and recently condemned to house arrest, although there are many questions regarding lack of evidence. 27 We refer to the fact that Brazilian voters largely do not vote in the same political forces in the legislative elections for representatives and in the presidential electives. There are many hypotheses as to the causes of this particular Brazilian electoral behaviour. Among the most popular theories are the personalism of the country’s political culture, the lack of ideology in voters and the regionalist character of political interest concerning the representative vote vs a national perspective that organizes the logic of presidential election. 28 In the Brazilian political system, because of electoral laws, the possibility for coalitions in proportional elections and the absence of percentage barriers of representation and party loyalty generates a picture of an amazing multiplicity of parties in the chamber and the federal Senate. To get an idea of the current legislature (2014–2018) the Chamber of Deputies has 28 political parties.

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29 Term used by Lula to define the economic and social conditions in Brazil when he took over the presidency. 30 Source: Original World Social Forum Charter, version 2001: www.universidadepopular. org/site/media/documentos/WSF_-_charter_of_Principles.pdf (accessed 12/03/2017). 31 It is important to note we do not state that Brazil was not reached by or did not reach out to other countries of the global South. However, even these relationships were mediated by the Northern developed countries. The dialogue with India, for example, was done via London. 32 These are: UNILAB, University for International Integration of the Afro-Brazilian Lusophony and UNILA – Federal University for Latin American Integration. 33 Source: MRE – Ministério das Relações Exteriores do Brasil, 2017.

References Aarão, R. D. (n.d.) O Partido dos Trabalhadores - Trajetória, Metamorfose e Pesrpectívas. Available at: www.historia.uff.br/culturaspoliticas/files/daniel4.pdf. Boesner, D. (1996) Relaciones Internacionales de América Latina: Breve Historia, Caracas, Editora Nueva Sociedad. Branford, S. & Kucinski, B. (1995) Brazil, Carnival of the Oppressed, London, The Latin American Bureau/Russel Press. Bruera F. G. B. (2015) El Partido de Lo s Trabajadores y El Dilema de la Gobernabilidad en Brasil, Ciudad de México, Fondo de Cultura Economica. Calloni, S. (1999) Operación Cóndor Pacto Criminal, Buenos Aires, La Jornada Ediciones. Ceceña, A. E. (2004) Hegemonías y Emancipaciones en el siglo XXI (Colección Grupos de Trabajo). Buenos Aires, Clacso Libros. Ceceña, A. E. (2006) Los Desafíos de las Emancipaciones en un Contexto Militarizado, Buenos Aires, Clacso Libros. Chavez, D. (2007) Hacer o no hacer: los gobiernos progresistas de Argentina, Brasil y Uruguay frente a las privatizaciones. Nueva Sociedad, 207, pp. 63–79. Dussel, E. D. (1992) El encubrimiento del otro. Hacia el origen del “mito de la Modernidad”, La Paz, Plural, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Colección Academia No. 1. Fernandes, F. (2005) A Revolução Burguesa no Brasil, São Paulo, Globo. Fernandes, F. (2010) Leituras e Legados, São Paulo, Global. Garcia, M. A. (2008a) A Opção Latino-Americana. Brasilia, Interesse nacional – abril/ junho 2008. Garcia, M. A. (2008b) Nuevos gobiernos en América del Sur. Revista NUEVA SOCIEDAD No 217, septiembre-octubre de 2008. Giugliano, R. G. (2017) Espacialidades como caminho para de-colonização do desenvolvimento. In Rosales, M., Z. Garai and F. Martín, Tensiones (pos)identitarias, desarrollo y derechos procesos de (des)(re)territorialización en américa latina, 1st ed. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, pp. 65–75. Goldstein, A. A. (2016) Los Gobiernos de Hegemonía Del Partido De Los Trabajadores (PT) Y Los Medios De Prensa. Estudios Políticos (Medellín), 48, pp. 94–114. Guidry, J. (2003) Not Just Another Labor Party. Labour Studies Journal, Spring, 28(1), pp. 83–108. Harnecker, M. (1994) O Sonho era Possível: a história do Partido dos Trabalhadores narrada por seus protagonistas, São Paulo, Casa América Livre.

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Hunter, W. (2010) The Transformation of the Workers’ Party in Brazil (1989–2009), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Marini, R. M. (1977) Cuadernos Políticos n. 12, Ciudad de México, Ediciones Era. Martins, J. de S. (2016) Do PT das Lutas Sociais ao PT do Poder, São Pualo, Contexto. Messari, N. (2004) Existe um novo cenário de Segurança Internacional? In Gómez, J. M. América Latina y el (Des)Orden Global Neoliberal. Hegemonia, contra-hegemonia y perspectivas, Buenos Aires, CLACSO. Novion, J. (2014) Hegemonía, Integración y Seguridad en las Américas en princípios del siglo XXI, Caxambú, 38o Encontro anual da Associação Nacional de Pós-graduação e Pesquisa em Ciências Sociais (ANPOCS). Available at: file:///Users/jacquesnovion/ Downloads/JacquesNovion_Hegemonia%20(1).pdf. Partido dos Trabalhadores (2017a) Estatuto do Partido dos Trabalhadores, Fundação Perseu Abramo. Partido dos Trabalhadores (2017b) Plano de Ação Política e Organizativa do Partido dos Trabalhadores para o Período 1986–88, Fundação Perseu Abramo. Porto Gonçalves, C. W. (2006) A Globalização da natureza e a natureza da globalização, Rio de Janeiro, Civilizacao Brasileira. Preciado Coronado, J. (2013) Escenarios posneoliberales frente a la VI Cumbre de las Américas. Revista InterNaciones, Guadalajara, Universidad de Guadalajara. Rosenman, M. R. (2013) Tiempos de Oscuridad. Historia de los golpes militares en América Latina, Madrid, Akal. Sader, E (org.) (2013) Lula e Dilma: 10 anos de governos pós-neoliberais no Brasil, Brasil, Boitempo, FLACSO. Samuels, D. (2004) Las Bases Del PT. América Latina Hoy (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca), 37, pp. 63–80. Santos, B. de S. (2008) Conocer desde el sur, Lima, Fondo Editorial de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales Universidade Nacional Maior de São Marcos. Santos, B. de S. & Paula, M. M. (2009) Epistemologias do Sul, São Paulo,Cortez Editora. Santos, M. (2002) A Natureza Do Espaço, São Paulo, EdUSP. Secco, L. (2011) História do PT, Cotia-SP, Aliança Editorial. Vieira, R. (2012) O transformismo petista: considerações acerca das transformações históricas do Partido dos Trabalhadores no Brasil. Memorias: Revista Digital de Historia y Arqueología desde el Caribe, 9(17), pp. 1–58. Zibechi R. (2012) Brasil potencia. Entre la integración regional y un nuevo imperialismo. Bogotá, Ediciones desde abajo.

10 SCIENCE, HEGEMONY AND ACTION On the elements of governmentality Werner Bonefeld

Introduction There is only one reality. The world as it exists is not true. It is false. It is false because the satisfaction of human needs is not at all what capitalism is about. What counts is the profitable accumulation of some abstract form of wealth, of money that yields more money. Failure to make a profit entails great danger. To the vanishing point of death, the life of the class tied to work hangs by the success of turning her labour into profit as the fundamental condition of achieving and sustaining wage-based employment. The alternatives are bleak. The struggle to sustain access to the means of subsistence and maintain labour conditions is relentless. Yesterday’s profitable appropriation of some other person’s labour buys another Man today, the buyer for the sake of making a profit, on the pain of ruin; the seller in order to live. What can the seller of redundant labour power trade in its stead – body and body substances: how many for pornography, how many for prostitution, how many for drug mules, how many for kidney sales? The critical theory tradition of Marxist critique holds that the macroeconomic calculation of the unemployed as economic zeros is not untrue. It makes clear that the life of the sellers of labour power really ‘hangs by’ the profitability extraction of surplus value (Adorno 1990: 320). Labouring for the sake of a surplus in value is innate to the concept of the worker. She belongs to a system of wealth in which her labour has utility as a means of profit. Sensuous activity not only vanishes in the supersensible world of economic things, of cash, price, and profit. It also appears in it – as struggle for access to the means of subsistence. The ‘movement of society’ is not only ‘antagonistic from the outset’ (p. 304). It also ‘maintains itself only through antagonism’ (p. 311). That is, class struggle is the objective necessity of the false society. It belongs to its

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concept. Class struggle, and class consciousness too, is a constitutive element of the governmentality of the false society. The critique of political economy as a critical social theory emerged in opposition to the traditional Marxist insistence about the proletariat as an ontologically privileged class of historical transformation (Lukacs 1971).1 In contemporary analysis, the traditional certainty about unfolding processes of socialist transformation has given way to arguments about capitalism as manifesting either a capitalist hegemony, which is referred to as neoliberal capitalism, or a working-class hegemony, which is referred to as either planned economy, welfare capitalism, or simply anti-austerity (see Panitch et al. 2011; Callinicos 2012; Blyth 2013; Lapavitsas 2018). In this argument, the interests served by capitalist society are determined by the balance of social forces that govern through the state. In contrast to the critical tradition, which argues that capitalism establishes a definite mode of social labour and that the ‘abolition of hunger’ requires therefore a ‘change in the relations of production’ (Adorno 1976a: 62), the traditional approach argues for counter-hegemonic struggles to secure the interests of workers in capitalist development.2 In the order of presentation, the traditional Marxist account comes first. It is followed by an argument about hegemony. The first section focusses on the Althusserian account. It is the theoretical foundation of the contemporary ideas about counter-hegemonic struggle. The conclusion summarises the argument with reference to governmentality as a critical concept.

Practical humanism and activism: Althusserian notions and beyond Louis Althusser famously declared that Marx’s critique of political economy is a work of theoretical anti-humanism and proclaimed for a politics of practical humanism to set things right (Althusser 1996: Chap. 7). In his Introduction to the French edition of Capital, he made two important observations that focus his anti-humanist stance succinctly (Althusser 1971). First, he argued that the philosophical idea of alienation of the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 does not have anything to do with the ‘economic’ Marx as the founder of scientific socialism. He therefore rejected the ‘theory of reification’ as a projection of the theory of alienation of the early Marx onto the ‘analysis of commodity fetishism’ ostensibly at the expense of the scientific character of Marx’s account (Althusser 1996: 230). Second, he argued that Capital develops the conceptual system of scientific Marxism, not as a critique of capitalism as an existing reality, but as a means of comprehending history in its entirety (Althusser 1971: 71–2). According to Althusser, Marx’s study of capitalism led him to the discovery of the general economic laws of historical development that manifest themselves in the structure of the capitalist economic relations. Marx’s Capital is thus seen to present the general economic laws of the forces of production in the historically specific modality of the capitalist social relations.3

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In distinction to the critical tradition, which recognises capitalist society as a historically specific mode of a social reproduction, Althusser identifies society as a social relationship founded on natural laws of economic necessity. He thus conceives of science as a discourse without a subject and sees the late Marx as a scientist who analyses the manner in which the transhistorical forces of economic nature make themselves manifest in capitalist economy (Althusser 1971: 160). He thus argued that one can recognise Man only on the condition that the ‘philosophical myth of Man is reduced to ashes’ (Althusser 1996: 229). Nicos Poulantzas reinforced this view when he conceived of scientific Marxism as a radical break from the ‘historical problematic of the subject’ (Poulantzas 1969: 65). Clearly, the presumption that transhistorically active forces of production manifest themselves in historically concrete social relations calls for analysis of the socially specific modality of transhistorical matter. In this view, the human subject really is a mere metaphysical distraction to the scientific discovery of the general economic laws in the historically overdetermined structures of capitalist society.4 The most fundamental economic law is the inescapable necessity of labour. Labour as transhistorical necessity is defined by its metabolism with nature. Capitalism is therefore viewed as a historically specific modality of this necessity of labour and criticised as an anarchic, haphazard and entirely disorganised manifestation of transhistorical necessity. In this tradition, there can thus neither be a critique of production nor a critique of labour. Instead, it offers a ‘theory of production’ defined by technical relations combining factors in material production, and it offers a theory of labour defined by its enduring quality as the labour of social reproduction in general and by its specifically capitalist modality.5 In the traditional Marxist view, the critique of the capitalist modality of labour entails the demand for its socialist substantiation through economic planning by central political authority. ‘Freedom’, as Engels (1983: 106) put it, ‘is recognition of necessity’. In the Althusserian account the capitalist modality of labour is characterised by the law of private property. Private individuals possess a legal title to factors of production. In the words of Étienne Balibar (1970: 233), ‘the economic relations of production appear . . . as a relation between three functionally defined terms: owner class/means of production/class of exploited producers’. As argued previously, the transhistorical forces of production are seen to manifest themselves in the form of historically specific social relations, which, as Clarke (1980: 60) points out critically, are ‘mapped on to production by the legal connection of ownership of means of production’. As an account of political economy, it defines the class character of society on the basis of the legal title to the factors of production, from which the classes derive their revenues – rent for the owners of land, profit for the owners of the means of production, and wages for the seller of labour power.6 Capitalism is seen as a fundamentally private organisation of labour based on the legal title of the owners of the means of production to the product of labour. At the same time, this private character of labour organisation is fundamentally social in character since everybody is in fact working for each other. The connection between the

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private organisation of labour and its social character is established by the market, which brings the many private labours into contact with each other on the basis of price competitiveness, establishing points of sale and purchase that involve interaction between multiple social forces, which are co-existing and interpenetrating in a tangled and confused manner, and which are thus anarchic, uncontrolled, unplanned and crisis-ridden.7 Whereas social laws can be changed, the laws of nature cannot. The question of socialism thus becomes a question of the rational organisation of the natural necessity of labour, from the capitalist anarchy of the ‘uncontrolled, unplanned, and crisis-ridden’ market relations to its socialist rationalisation. The socialist task is to revolutionise the rule of private property, which accords legal entitlements to the product of labour to identifiable individuals, transforming the social modality of the natural necessity of labour from the private ownership of the means of labour into public ownership, securing collective goals and achieving the satisfaction of needs by means of central planning by public authority.8 Althusser’s view that Capital is not a critique of capitalism as a living process but rather a scientific study of the capitalist anatomy of general economic laws is therefore apt – as a succinct characterisation of the traditional view that the capitalist social forms have a basis in nature and express thus a natural quality (see Althusser 1971: 71–2). The idea that society is in the last instance determined by historically active general economic laws is in its entirety tied to existing conditions.9 Instead of the critical notion that ‘concepts are moments of the reality that requires their formation’ (Adorno 1990: 11), the Althusserian notion of the natural necessity of labour holds that concepts are generally applicable scientific instruments, which are capable to dissect and analyse every society at all times and places as distinct manifestations of abstract economic laws. Historical materialism conceived dogmatically as a science of some general economy laws reflects existing society under the spell of identification, which includes the idea that the specific manifestation of the economic laws depends on the power of the social forces that act upon them. This view suggests a radical separation between thought and reality. Callinicos (2005) offers a cogent articulation of this separation. He advocates that the Marxist method of analysis amounts to a sophisticated version of the science of knowledge, which hypothesises society as an ‘as if’ of theoretical construction.10 Theoretical knowledge appears as an hypothetical figure of speech, an ‘as if’, which is corroborated by empirical analysis that falsifies or verifies the proposed theory of society. This appearance is, however, deceitful in that the real world is mirrored in its theoretical hypothesis. That is, the science of knowledge posits the idea that the real world is, say, regulated by a competitive market structure and then applies this idea to capitalist markets, with conclusive effect, though questions remain as to whether the freedom of competition has in reality not trans-morphed into a freedom of monopolies. The supposition of thought as an independent instrument of knowledge about natural economic necessities releases society from critical scrutiny. Rather than asking about the conceptuality of capitalist wealth, it not only

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reads capitalist social nature back into history but, also, conceives of the social laws of capitalist economy as historically overdetermined modalities of natural economic forces. The social nature of the capitalist relations is thus naturalised.11 That is, the Althusserian school understands the economic laws of capitalist society as historically overdetermined derivatives of natural laws, and then analyses the manner of their mediation in the social world of inter-subjective actions, comprising class-relevant and other social interests, and finally it examines what it calls the hegemonic strategies of the competing social interests to ascertain emergent political opportunity structures for the conduct of hegemonic strategies that act through the state to achieve their specific objectives.12 The scientistic supposition of society does not comprehend society. It merely describes it abstractly as an hypothesised unit of analysis; depending on the balance of the social forces that act through the state it can be either this economy of labour or that economy of labour. The scientific statement that capitalism is, in the last instance, determined by the general economic laws of development, is as hypothetical in its view of society as the statement that their specific modality is contingent upon the power of the social forces that act through the state. Marx’s critique of Proudhon focussed on this simple point. Proudhon substituted the critique of capitalism for a critique of the capitalist, seeking to free capital from the capitalist so as to utilise the power of capital for the benefit of a just and fair society, investing in society. In its practical dimension, scientific socialism is on the lookout for opportunity structures for the establishment of a socialist hegemony. It views miserable conditions as contingent upon the hegemony of the capitalist interests and battles for the establishment of a counter-hegemony, tilting the balance of class forces in favour of the perceived interests of labour. The critique of the existent society as a manifestation of capitalist hegemony leaves the category of capital not only entirely untouched by thought, it also elevates ‘capital’ as a thing beyond critique. Indeed, capital appears to be no more than an economic mechanism that can be made to work for this social interest or that social interest – in the end, it is the balance of the class forces that decides for which social interests capital functions! Rather than touching the category of capital by thought, it identifies social misery as a contingent outcome of an unfavourable balance of class forces and calls for sustained social struggle to shift the balance in favour of the class tied to work, securing the class interests of workers in labour economy. Social misery is thus understood as an entirely avoidable occurrence. Misery and dispossession do not therefore belong to the conceptuality of capitalist wealth. They are the social consequence of hard-nosed class politics, and can thus be overcome by a determined effort of counter-hegemonic struggle(s). Scientific Marxism does not think out of society. Instead, it thinks about society with an analytical grasp that, akin to a photographic representation of reality, identifies the capitalist social relations with their appearance. Its grasp of society is thus entirely faithful to the observable empirical facts that posit

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society in its immediate being, which ‘is pure appearance . . . of a process running behind its back’ (Marx 1981: 64). As a science of economic processes without subject, it dissolves Man as the subject of her own social world into the ‘substance’ of her economic inversion. ‘The illusions of such a consciousness turn into dogmatic immediacies’ (Adorno 1990: 205). That is, its critique of bourgeois society naturalises capitalist society as an historically over-determined manifestation of some trans-historical materiality of labour, implicates the capitalists for the defects of the established system of labour, and proclaims to know ‘what needs to be done’ to achieve a progressive labour economy. Whilst Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism leaves society untouched by thought, his practical humanism proclaims for progressive ends in abstraction from society, rejecting ‘all discrimination, be it racial, political, religious’. It ‘is the rejection of all economic exploitation and political domination. It is the rejection of war’ (Althusser 1996: 237). With Althusser, the humanisation of social relations is the purpose and end of the critique of political economy. However, and in distinction to Althusser, the effort of humanising is confronted by the paradox that it presupposes the existence of inhuman condition. Inhuman conditions are not just an impediment to humanisation but a premise of its concept. Althusser’s practical humanism manifests therefore the illusion of his science of society without a subject. It posits society as an ‘as if’ of civilised social relations, against which it measures the irrational, exploitative, discriminative relations of a bloodied world. Devoid of a conception of the actual relations of life, his practical humanism belongs to a tradition of normative order thinking that does ‘not talk about the devil’. Instead it ‘looks on the bright side’ (Adorno 1978: 114).13 As argued by Horkheimer (1985: 84), the blind spot of dogmatic thought is predicated on the idea that society is a process without a subject. It thereby accommodates its thought to those same ‘objective conditions’ that render the social individuals mere personifications of those same economic categories that its practical humanism denounces as ‘exploitative’, ‘discriminative’, ‘violent’, ‘unfair’ and ‘irrational’. The dogma of the false society is that there is no alternative to it, that is, its falsehood is righteous. The ‘practical humanist’ endeavour to create a just and fair capitalism belongs to the concept of the false society. It proclaims that the false society can be righted by counter-hegemonic action for the benefit of the producers of surplus value, and it is because of this that it too becomes righteous. It denounces capitalist society abstractly and without further ado looks on the bright side, depicting counter-hegemonic normative orders with, at best, moralising fervour or, at worst, political ambitions for the exercise of political power. Activist endeavour to make capitalism work for the workers is entirely conventional in its strategic calculation of the electoral market place and dogmatic in its righteous condemnations of the existing state of affairs. Indeed, the theory of hegemony belongs to the governmentality of capitalist society, which works on the principle that conditions ought to be better and will be better if government were to intervene into labour economy for the sake of – supposedly – practical humanist ends.14

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On hegemony15 For a hegemonic theory of society the notion of socio-economic necessity is an affront. It smacks of economic determinism, excludes the ideas of contingency and construction, creation and effort, and suggests dogmatic reduction of society to economic effect. Yet, the theory of hegemony is entirely founded on the presumption that the economic structure of society is a natural phenomenon. It does not question the necessity of an economy of labour. It rather argues for a differently configured mode of economic organisation. As a natural phenomenon, economy is identified by its structural properties, the study of which characterises the domain of system theory. Complementing the system theory, a theory of social action accounts for the behaviours and conflicts that characterise the subjective properties of human agency in the life-world.16 In traditional social theory, society is seen either as a system of (invisible) structural properties or as a world of social action, and the perennial question is therefore whether society as an economic system is dominant or whether society as an action is decisive. However, the idea that society exists twice, once as (economic) nature/ structure and then as (acting) subject, reproduces in thought the appearance of society as a split reality of structure and struggle.17 The dualism of thought is however more apparent than real. Given the choice between society as economic structure and society as action, social theory unerringly sides with the mischief of society as a naturally structured thing, as system. However, society as a natural system that is independent from the human subjects who comprise society, cannot be comprehended as such; at best its effects can be analysed as instances of social contingency, which establish opportunity structures for the pursuit of distinct hegemonic strategies.18 Hegemony is not a critical concept. Its grasp of society is traditional: it views society as a condensation of natural necessity in historically specific social modalities. Hegemonic theory is characterised by the attempt at constructing a connection between society as (economic) system and action. It argues that the modality of the systemic forces is contingent upon a balance of social power between distinct social groups that battle for hegemony to secure their economic interests. The theory of hegemony is a stand-point theory – it looks at and judges society from a specific world-view, be it the view of the ecologist, humanist, labourer or indeed the capitalist.19 It is usually associated with the progressive left, which made the theory of hegemony its own. Crudely put, it rejects the hegemony of the capitalist interests, demands the hegemony of the Many and identifies the Many with the Party as the organisational form of a political practice for humanist ends. It posits its political demands as universalhuman in character, argues for social struggle as the means of shifting the balance of class forces in favour of the supposedly universal interests of the Many, and leaves the category of ‘capital’ entirely untouched by thought. What really does it mean to say that the class tied to work has to become hegemonic in capitalism? Is capital really an economic means that is corrupted by the

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capitalist interests? In its practical dimension, I hold that the struggle for hegemony amounts to ‘ticket thinking’. It views society as divided into competing social interests and undertakes to build up the capacity of its ‘ticket’ to articulate and present its particular ‘group’ interests as the general interest of society. The ticket requires brand recognition to bolster its claim that it represents the rightful demands of the social majority. Instead of concrete demands that derive from the specific ‘group interests’, the universal appeal of the brand depends on the articulation of powerful idealities that signify the purposefulness and righteousness of its course as incarnation of the general interest. Fundamentally, the group comprises an ideality of social friends and presents a coalition of interests. It requires leadership to achieve cohesion, constant contestation with the declared social foe to establish purposefulness, and construction of a unifying theme of articulation to sustain its voice and make itself heard. The politics of hegemony is as much about mobilisation as it is about demobilisation, representation and leadership. Akin to the idea of a plebiscitarian leadership democracy, it sets out to capture the ‘masses’ by projecting virtuous claims about the moral integrity and universality of their supposed interests, proclaiming that the coming of the ‘democracy’ of counterhegemonic friends will make things good for them as the true national being. Innate to the politics of hegemony is the identification of an ideality of friends, which as such do not exist. They come together as friends by contesting the projected ideality of some supposed common foe – the capitalist, the banker, the speculator, the imperialist. Critique of economic categories is suspended and frowned upon. What is needed is counter-hegemonic economic regulation to secure the interests of the dispossessed traders in labour power in national economic development. Indeed, the argument that in this society the employment of dispossessed producers of surplus value depends on the sustained profitability of their labour is anathema. It smacks of capitulation to the capitalist economic interests.20 Counter-hegemonic thought posits the people as righteous, demands government in the interest of the Many, requires the investment of money into the productive activity of the nation to secure the employment, welfare and prospects of a national labour force within the boundaries of a national economy as the foundation of a system of inter-national relations between independent national states. By putting forth a programme of social transformation without thought about the conceptuality of capitalist wealth, of money that yields more money, ticket thinking ‘looks on the bright side’ and proclaims falseness. Its falsehood is not untrue. It identifies the existing conditions of misery and makes it seem as if they present a mere pathology of capitalist wealth. Its appeal is ideological; ticket thinking projects the idea that misery is an entirely avoidable capitalist situation, which can be overcome by courageous politicians who oppose the interests of the ‘self-interested elites’ and govern for the benefit of the national social majority. For the sake of electoral success, it discounts the critical insight that the dispossessed labourer is the essential precondition of the capitalist social relations (Bonefeld 2011). Instead, it supposes that all would be well if

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only government were to stand up to the capitalist interests and their imperialist backers. This stance articulates an objective illusion. The illusion says that the profitable accumulation of money that yields more money does not really count; what counts is the satisfaction of human needs. It says that the failure to make a profit entails no threat to social reproduction; what counts is not profit but human beings. It suggests that the life of the class tied to work does not hang by the success of turning her labour into profit as the fundamental condition of achieving wage-based access to the means of life; what counts is goodness. It says that debt is not a mortgage on future surplus value; what counts is consumption. It rejects as absurd that useful things that cannot be turned into profits are burned; what counts is use-value production. It rejects as unfounded the insight that in the capitalistically organised social relations of production, ‘the needs of human beings, the satisfaction of human beings, is never more than a sideshow’ (Adorno 2008: 51). It opposes capital as money, M. . .M’. Instead it considers money as means of purchasing commodities (C. . .C) and demands that money be put into the pockets of workers to strengthen their purchasing power, connecting them more firmly to the means of subsistence. The exchange of labour power (C) for money (M) that is then exchanged for means of subsistence (C), C. . .M. . .C, is, however, a function of M. . .P. . .M’. Profitable employers purchase labour power. Unprofitable employers do not. Profit is a means of avoiding bankruptcy. The illusion of the epoch suggests that profits do not matter. What matters is the well-being of workers. The politics of counter-hegemony condemns the capitalist form of wealth, money that yields more money, and demands that government should intervene to transform the dynamic of capitalist reproduction for the benefit of workers. The illusion of the epoch confuses the reality of capitalism with its (illusionary) promise of a freedom from want. The illusion of the epoch identifies what really counts and, yet, does not recognize the very society that it rejects abstractly. The reality of its illusion is the perpetuation of myth – that resolution to misery is imminent if only reason were to prevail over self-interest; and then ‘a storm is blowing from Paradise’ and the hope in the rescue of humanity from economic compulsion is seemingly blown away. In fact, its promise has been illusionary all along – it belongs to a politics from which, ostensibly, it was to move away from. In reality, therefore, the party of the Many trains the working class to ‘forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice’, which indeed it has to in order to establish itself as an electorally viable contender for power. In Benjamin’s language, the proponents of counter-hegemony are ‘soothsayers’ (Benjamin 1999: 249, 252, 255). Only a reified consciousness can declare that it is in possession of the requisite knowledge, political capacity, and technical expertise not only for resolving capitalist crises but, also, to do so in the interests of the dispossessed. For the sake of progress, it barks in perpetuity and without bite. Instead, it sniffs out the miserable world, from the outside as it were, and puts itself forward as having the capacity, ability, insight and means for securing conditions. The politics of

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hegemony describes the theology of anti-capitalism. Theologically conceived, it is devoid of Now-Time. Instead, it views the present as transition towards its own progressive future, promising deliverance from misery amidst ‘a pile of debris’ that ‘grows skyward’ (Benjamin 1999: 249).21 At best, it transforms the protest against capitalism into electoral gain. At worst, it radicalises its stance into a moral crusade against the identified wrongdoers, with potentially deafening consequences. The theory of hegemony does not recognise the conditions (Zustände) of misery. It identifies deplorable situations (Mißstände). Deplorable situations call for resolution by means of a social activism that challenges This misery and That outrage, seeking to alleviate and rectify This and That. What, however, are the social preconditions that constitute the necessity of This poverty and That misery? Adorno (1972) rejects activism for this and that as a pseudo-praxis that struggles against this and that but leaves the conditions that render this and that entirely untouched. In this way, ‘activism’ is not only affirmative of existing society. It also deceives itself that, however bad the situation, something can be done by this or that policy and by this or that technical means. Counterhegemonic thought does not recognise capitalist conditions. It only identifies malevolent situations. The activism against this or that situation is delusional in its view of society. It demands that capitalist society should not care for profit. It should instead care for the dispossessed. In its essence, activism for this cause or that cause is a political advertisement for some alternative party of government. It transforms the protest against a really existing misery that blights the life of a whole class of individuals into a selling point for political gain. Ticket thinking feels the pain of the world and offers solutions. Ticket thinking feeds on what it condemns. It condemns this miserable situation and that shortcoming with righteous indignation and an eye for power.

Conclusion: on governmentality22 Neither the capitalist nor the banker, nor indeed the worker, can extricate themselves from the reality in which they live and which asserts itself not only over them but also through them, and by means of them. Society as economic subject prevails through the individuals. Money does not only make the world go round; its possession establishes the connection to the means of life. The struggle for access to the means of life is a struggle for money – it governs the mentality of bourgeois society. What a misery! In the face of great social wealth, the dispossessed producers of surplus value struggle for fleeting amounts of money to sustain themselves through the sale of their labour power. Indeed, making ends meet is the ‘real life-activity’ of ‘living labour activity’ (see Marx and Engels 1978: 154). Therefore, ‘to be a productive labourer is . . . not a piece of luck’ (Marx 1990: 644). Nor is it an ontological privilege that is accorded to workers as the living promise of a post-capitalist civilisation. The struggle for money (as more money) governs the mentality of

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bourgeois society as, seemingly, a thing in-itself. Money is time and time is life. ‘Illusion dominates reality’ (Adorno 1976b: 80) and it does so because ‘[e] xchange value . . . dominates human needs and replaces them’ (ibid.). The individuals carry the bond with society in their pockets. The contemporary opposition to austerity opposes the manner in which the economic surplus is distributed and is strenuous in its demand that capitalist wealth should not be sustained by taking money out of the pockets of workers. Instead, wealth should be redistributed from capital and labour and, one might add, this redistribution is good for the economy too – commodity markets depend on sustained consumer demand. Instead of sustaining financial capitalism, money is to be invested in the productive activity of the many; it has to employ workers and create employment opportunities, making work pay. Anti-austerity struggle is the said means of shifting the balance of class forces to secure the ‘institutional transformation’ that will make money the servant of the working class (Callinicos 2012; Panitch and Gintin 2015; Mason 2016). In this argument, class struggle is invoked not as a struggle to abolish the class society – but rather as a means towards the further development of a labour economy that satisfies the class interests of its workers. It envisages socialism as a social factory. Whichever way one looks at it, to be a member of the working class is a great ‘misfortune’ (Marx 1990: 644). Even its proponents demand that it works! In distinction to the counter-hegemonic demand for the further development of the productive forces in a supposedly socialist, or post-capitalist, labour economy, there really is ‘tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one should go hungry any more’ (Adorno 1978: 156). In order to unlock the governmentality of money, the critique of the relations of production is key. For the buyer of labour power, profitability is a means of avoiding bankruptcy. For the producer of surplus value, the sale of her labour power is the condition of access to the means of subsistence. The profitable extraction of surplus value is a condition of future employment. For the sake of making a living the producers of surplus value are under the compulsion to achieve a contract of employment, which entails not only daily struggle for securing the means of subsistence by means of wage income. It entails also competition amongst the sellers of labour power to achieve and maintain that income. For the seller of labour power, competition is not some abstract economic law. Rather, it is experienced in the form of precarious labour markets and pressure to secure the profitability of her employer as the basis of achieving sustained employment. The effective exploitation of her labour power is the most fundamental guarantee of sustaining her labour market position. Competition is not a category of social unity. It is a category of social disunity. Class society exists in the form of individualised commodity owners, each seeking to maintain themselves in competitive, gendered and racialised, and also nationalised labour markets where the term cutthroat competition is experienced in various forms, from arson attack to class solidarity, and from destitution to collective bargaining, from gangland thuggery to communal forms of organising subsistence-support, from strike-breaking to collective action.

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Innate to the existence of a class of dispossessed sellers of labour power is the struggle, collectively and against each other, or both, for access to the means of subsistence to satisfy basic needs. The struggle of the working class is one for wages and conditions; it is a struggle for access to the means of life and for life. They struggle against capital’s ‘were-wolf’s hunger for surplus labour’ and its destructive conquest for additional atoms of unpaid labour time, and thus against the reduction of their life to a mere time’s carcase – and they struggle for security of employment. They struggle against a life constituting solely of labour-time and thus against a reduction of human life to a mere economic resource – and they labour for the profitability of their employer as the best possible guarantee of sustained employment. They struggle for respect, education and recognition of human significance, and above all for food, shelter, clothing, warmth, love, affection, knowledge, time for enjoyment and dignity. Their struggle as a class ‘in-itself’ really is a struggle ‘for-itself’: for life, human distinction, life-time and, above all, satisfaction of basic human needs. The working class does not struggle for socialism. It struggles to make ends meet, for subsistence and comfort. It does all of this in conditions in which the increase in material wealth that it has produced pushes beyond the limits of its capitalist form. Every so-called trickledown effect that capitalist accumulation might bring forth presupposes a prior and sustained trickle up in the capitalist accumulation of wealth. And then society ‘suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence’ (Marx and Engels 1997: 18). For the sellers of labour power, economic consciousness is an unhappy consciousness. This is the unhappy consciousness of the struggle for the means of subsistence. It is this struggle for subsistence that makes the working class the depository of historical knowledge. Instead of thinking about society with a claim to power, one needs instead to think out of society, out of the daily struggle to make ends meet, insurrections, revolts, strikes, riots and revolutions, to recognise the smell of danger and the stench of death, gain a sense of the courage and cunning of struggle, grasp the spirit of sacrifice, comprehend, however fleetingly, the density of a time at which the progress of the muck of ages almost came to a standstill.23 Class struggle ‘supplies a unique experience with the past’ (Benjamin 1999: 254). Whether this experience turns concrete in the changing forms of repression as resistance to repression or whether it turns concrete in forms of repression, is a matter of experienced history. There is as much experience of history as there is struggle to stop its further progress. The dispossessed do not struggle for abstract ideas. They struggle to make a living. ‘Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies’ (Adorno 1978: 102). Class struggle is therefore not a positive category. Rather, it belongs to a world that is ‘hostile to the subject’ (Adorno 1990: 167). For the dispossessed traders of labour power, society really is a struggle for access to ‘crude and material things’ (Benjamin 1999: 246). The critique of class society finds its positive resolution only in the classless society,

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not in a ‘fairer’ class society. Adorno’s dictum that ‘society remains class struggle’ (1989: 272) does not express something positive or desirable. Rather, it amounts to a judgement on the existent conditions of misery. Paraphrasing Marcuse (1967: 61), workers ‘have to be free for their liberation so that they are able to become free’. What really would it mean to establish a society in which wealth is not money as more money but, rather, freely disposable time, and in which the introduction of a labour-saving machinery neither makes the labour of some redundant nor intensifies the work of others but, rather, reduces the social labour time required to satisfy individual human needs? The contemporary debate about communising is about the establishment of a society in which wealth is freely disposable time. There is as much communising as there are individuals who struggle for it in freedom from a governmentality that recognises the labourer as an economic necessity.

Acknowledgements This chapter derives from a lecture at the seminar ‘Teoria Critica y Politica’, held at the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (Madrid). The lecture appeared in Spanish in 2016 (Bonefeld 2016a). I am grateful to all participants for their helpful comments and advice. Particular thanks are to Jose Zamora and Silvia Lopez.

Notes 1 According to Lukacs, the proletariat is both beset by false consciousness – it struggles to secure its economic interests – and free from it. He says that the proletariats’ humanity and soul have not been crippled by the society in which they, as dispossessed producers of surplus value, struggle to make ends meet. For Lukacs, the (Leninist) party is the organizational form of the soul of the worker. It represents its true consciousness based on scientific insight. For a critique of Lukacs along these lines, see Grollios (2014; Adorno 1980). 2 In Habermasian critical theory the struggle for counter-hegemony is to achieve the promises of reason through communicate action – parliamentary speeches and public speech acts. See also Honneth (2010: 10) for an argument that bourgeois society contains within itself the ‘promise of freedom’ from want. 3 See also Alfred Schmidt (1969). For Schmidt, too, the Marx of 1844 does not illuminate the Marx of Capital. However, the Marx of Capital illuminates the Marx of 1844. Althusser’s valid critique of the ‘abstract humanism’ of the early Marx does not imply that the Marx of the critique of political economy is anti-humanistic. Rather, the ‘economic’ Marx is the humanist Marx because his critique of capitalist society seeks to decipher the actual relations of life in their inverted form of a relationship between economic things. The critique of political economy does not reveal transhistorical economic laws of nature nor does it argue on the basis of some abstract human essence that in capitalism exists in alienated form. The humanism of the late Marx lies in the conception of capitalism as comprising a definite form of social relations. On this point, see also Bonefeld (2014) and Schmidt (1983). 4 In Adorno’s judgement, dialectical materialism is a ‘perverter of Marxian motives’. He criticises it as a ‘metaphysics’. It denies, he says, the ‘spontaneity of the subject, a movens of the objective dialectics of the forces and relations of production’ (Adorno 1990: 355, 205).

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5 For a succinct critique, see Postone (1993). 6 As Clarke (1980, 1992) and Schmidt (1983) have shown, the tradition of Althusserian Marxism derives from classical political economy. 7 This is how Bob Jessop sees it in his neo-Poulantzarian account of state power (Jessop 2008: 178). 8 In contemporary socialist argument, the struggle for hegemony is about the restructuring of the economy ‘in the interest of labour’, for the sake of ‘employment’, and in the interest of ‘better conditions’ for workers, including the ‘distribution’ of wealth, the achievement of ‘economic growth, and employment in the longer term’. The struggle for counter-hegemony is to overcome ‘wage restrain’, gain ‘control of the financial system’, ‘rebalance core economies’, ‘nationalise banks’, ‘recapture [national] command over monetary policy’, ‘facilitate workers participation in confronting the problem of debt’, ‘impose capital controls’, ‘regain [national] control over monetary policy’, pursue an ‘industrial policy’ to ‘restore productive capacity’, etc. (Lapavitsas, 2011: 295–296). Saad-Filho (2010: 255) summarises central planks of this argument well when he identifies socialism as a system that, instead of capitalist investment into money for the sake of more money, invests in the working class. That is, the ‘abolition of capitalism’ (Saad-Filho 2010) entails its replacement by a system of a centrally planned labour economy (Panitch, Albo and Chibber 2011; Panitch and Gintin 2015). For critique, see Bonefeld (2012a). See also Rogers (2014) and Grollios (2016). 9 This point is most strongly made by Horkheimer (1992: 246). 10 For a critique, see Arthur (1986: chap. 10) and Bonefeld (2012b). 11 On the conceptuality of capitalist wealth as critique of definite social relations, see Holloway (2015). On the distinction between natural nature and social nature, see Schmidt (1971). 12 This further development of the idea of hegemony belongs to Bob Jessop (1985). 13 In our time, the bright side view condemns contemporary capitalism abstractly as neoliberalism and demands the establishment of a non-neoliberal capitalism that is about the achievement of egalitarian socio-economic objectives (see, for example, Brown 2015). In distinction neoliberalism does not corrupt capitalism. It rather articulates it in theological terms (see Bonefeld 2017). See also note 8. 14 In the meantime, right-wing populism has come to the fore as an electorally viable nativist critique of so-called neoliberal globalisation. It articulates the idea of a national economy as a perverted alternative to the world market society of capital. Nativism does not admit of knowledge, only of acknowledgment. Since the early 1990s, state-centric critiques of globalisation helped to revive nationalist perspectives as allegedly progressive in character. For critics, see Radice (2000) and Bonefeld (2006). 15 The proper title of this section is ‘From Adorno’s negative ontology of capitalist social nature towards the apologetic ontology of capitalism as a dynamic structure of competing hegemonic strategies’. 16 On system and life world in Habermas’ social theory see Reichelt (2000). In traditional Marxism, these Habermasian terms are called structure and struggle. 17 The so-called dialectics of structure and struggle is not helpful. It explains neither structure nor struggle. In fact, it moves in vicious circles as it hops from structure to struggle, and back again, from struggle to structure; and instead of comprehending what they are, each is presupposed in a tautological movement of thought; neither is explained. On this, see Bonefeld (2012a). 18 On this in relation to structuralist tradition, see Bonefeld (1993). 19 See Heinrich (2012) and Bonefeld (2014) for a critique of stand-point theory. 20 Elements of the argument about the populism of the new left (in Spain) draw on Seguin (2015). On the populism of the new right, see Müller (2016). 21 Now-time is Benjamin’s conception of a time at which the progress of the muck of ages comes to standstill. Now-time rejects the present time, which heralds the future as the being of its own becoming.

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22 The term governmentality was coined by Foucault (1991). It describes the function of government as a political practice of conducting the conduct of the governed. In the Marxist literature, Lenin offered perhaps the most decisive account of ‘governmentability’ when he argues that the post-revolutionary state will wither away ‘owing to the simple fact’ that socialist Man ‘will become accustomed to observing [the elementary rules of social intercourse] without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state’ (Lenin 1918/1999: 51). The state, thus, withers away on the conditions that socialist Man has internationalised the conduct of government. For a critique, see the contributions to Bonefeld and Tischler (2002). 23 The notion of thinking out of history, rather than about history, derives from Adorno’s negative dialectics, which argues that for thought to comprehend society, it needs to think out of society. For him, thinking about society, or about history, amounts to an argument based on hypothetical judgements that treats society as an ‘as if’, leading to dogmatic claims about its natural character. On this, see Bonefeld (2014). The idea of history as a standstill of progress is Benjamin’s (1999). On class struggle as category of social reproduction, see Bonefeld (2016b).

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INDEX

1973–2000 in Chile 107–111 1968, May 76–77 Academia Cidadã 98 activist research 16–17 activist wisdom 16–17 adaptability, Citizens UK 40–42 aesthetics and urban renewal 90–91 AKP party see Justice and Development party Alencar, J. 158 Alinsky, S. D. 29 Althusserian notions 174–179 anti-capitalism 94–96, 183 anti-deportation movements 9–27 Aqui Mora Gente (Here People Live) 98 Arrate, J. 114–115 artivism 98–99 Assemblea de Barris per un Turisme Sostenible 95–96 asylum markets 20, 21–22 asylum rights 9–27 Authentic Unionism 150–151 authoritarian rule 149–150 autonomy within Momentum 132–140 Ayuntamientos del cambio 93 Balibar, É. 176 Barcelona, Spain 94–96 ‘Besòs War’ 95 Birchall, I. 76 Bloch, E. 71–72 blogs 50

BNP see British National Party Brazil: Latin-America context 162–168; ‘lost decade’ 154; trade unions 150; Workers’ Party 144–173; World Social Forum 164–165 Brexit see EU referendum BRICS 167–168 British National Party (BNP) 11 Broad Front (BF) 119–122 Bruera, F. G. B. 160 Capital 175–177 Catalan Socialist Party 95 CDAS see Committee to Defend Asylum Seekers CDP see Christian Democrat Party CELAC see Community of Latin-America and Caribbean Nations Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT) 110 chapulcu 80–81 Chile 106–124; 1973–2000; 107–111; 2011 crisis 113–117; Broad Front 119–122; Communist Party 107, 112–113, 117–118; Concertación governments 111–115; “masses popular rebellion” 109; military coup 108–109; new left 118–122; Nueva Mayoría 117–118; Piñera 114–117; re-democratisation 109–111; student protests 107; trade unions 110 Chilean Winter 107

192

Index

Christian Democrat Party (CDP), Chile 107–108, 110 Christianity and anti-deportation movements 12 Citizens UK 28–46; adaptability 40–42; background 29–30; faith-based groups 34; ideology 37–40; image management 40; membership model 31–37; organisation 40–41; religious ethos 34; scripting 41–42 civil-military dictatorships 149–150 class politics: critical theory 185–186; Gezi rebellion 73–75; Workers’ Party, Brazil 152 ‘clicktivism’ 58–59 Committee to Defend Asylum Seekers (CDAS) 11 Communist Party (CP), Chile 107, 112–113, 117–118 Community of Latin-America and Caribbean Nations (CELAC) 168 community organising: Alinsky 29; Citizens UK 28–46 COMPASS contract campaigns 19–23 compassion 13–14 Concertación governments 111–115 consistency, Citizens UK 40 containment policies 93–94 Corbyn, J. 127–128; see also Momentum corporate welfare state 23 coup d’état, Chile 108–109 CP see Communist Party creative destruction 78–80 Critchley, S. 77 critical theory: class politics 185–186; governmentality 183–186; hegemony 180–183; humanism 174–179 cultural tourism 90–91 CUT see Central Unitaria de Trabajadores Cyber Left 52 delegate-structure proponents 136–137 democracia de los consensos (democracy of consensuses) 109 democratisation: Brazil 153–155; Chile 109–111 deplorable situations (Miβstände) 183 Deterrence policies, UK 18 digital media: benefits and harms 58–60; Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists 47–62; internal communications 52, 53–54; organisational structures 55–56; publicity 53, 54–55 Digital Single Market Strategy 89

dogma of the false society 179 dramaturgy 40 economic consciousness 185–186 e-democracy 135–136 Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists 47–62; digital benefits and harms 58–60; digitalisation effects 54–60; internal communications 52, 53–54; members’ vision 56–58; Publicity Committee 53 electoral strategy of Workers’ Party 157–162 engagement in Citizens UK 31–37 England: asylum rights 9–27; community organising 28–46; corporate welfare state 23; Momentum 127–143 Enríquez-Ominami, M. 114–115 Equistone 22 e-socialists.net website 50 EU referendum 133–134 Europe’s migration industrial complex 22–23 event focus, Citizens UK 35 exclusion and Citizens UK 33–34 experience 78–80, 90–91 exports from Brazil 167–168 Facebook 50–51 faith-based groups in Citizens UK 34 false society 179 Fernandes, F. 152 fetishism of the new 78 flaneur 80 Fontenele, M. L. 153 formation of Momentum 127–143; see also Momentum foundation of Workers’ Party 149–155 freedom 176, 185–186 Frei, E. 114 French Communist Party (PCF) 76 From Sighing to Murmuring 71–73 ‘front stage’ management 40 G4S see Group 4 Security gentrification 89, 91 Gezi park, Turkey 65–87 Gezi rebellion 65–87; 1968 76–77; AKP party 66–69; class politics 73–75; identity 73–75; neoliberalism 66–68, 74–75; oppression 68–70; political promises 75–77; protests 69–71; resistance 70–73; salvation 81–82; symbolism and ideas 77–80; utopia 82 governmentality 174, 183–186

Index

Grassroots Momentum 137–138 grassroots movements, Momentum 127–143 Grayling, C. 21–22 Group 4 Security (G4S) 17–23 habitus, Citizens UK 35–36 Halklarin Demokratik Partisi (HDP/ People’s Democratic Party) 69–70 HDP see Halklarin Demokratik Partisi hegemony 180–183 Here People Live (Aqui Mora Gente) 98 historical centres 90–91 historiography of Gezi rebellion 65–87 horizontalism 128–129 humanism 174–179 humour: Gezi rebellion 78–80; urban activism 93 hyperinflation, Brazil 154 IBSA 167–168 identity 73–75 ideology 37–40, 42 image management 40 immigration 9–27 institutionalisation: Momentum, UK 127–143; Workers’ Party, Brazil 155–157 institutional membership 31–37 internal communications in Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists 52, 53–54 internet: benefits and harms 58–60; Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists 47–62 Iskra 57 Istanbul, Gezi rebellion 65–87 Jomast Developments 23 Juntos Podemos 114 Justice and Development (AKP) party 66–69 Kemalism 74 knowledge production 14–21 labour, natural necessity of 177 Labour Party, Momentum 127–143 Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) 156 La Òstia 94 ‘la Red de Lavapiés’ (Lavapiés Activist Network) 92 Latin-American context, Workers’ Party, Brazil 162–168

193

Lavapiés Activist Network (‘la Red de Lavapiés’) 92 Lavapiés, Madrid 92–94 Left Hand Rotation 98–99 legitimacy 17 Liberal Party (Partido Liberal), Chile 119–120 liberation 186 Lisbon, Portugal 96–99 Live in Lisbon (Morar em Lisboa) 98 Living Wage 30 local groups: Momentum 132–140; Workers’ Party 151 location of Citizens UK events 35 ‘lost decade’, Brazil 154 ludification of the city 88 Lula da Silva, L. I 147, 150, 153–154, 157–160 Madrid, Spain 92–94 manifesto of Workers’ Party 151 Marxism: governmentality 183–186; hegemony 180–183; scientific 175–179 masses popular rebellion, Chile 109 May 1968 76–77 Members Council, Momentum 137 membership, Citizens UK 31–37 Menezes, G. 153 Methodism 12 Miβstände (deplorable situations) 183 migration 9–27 migration industrial complex 22–23 military coups in Chile 108–109 military dictatorship in Brazil 149–150 MIR see Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria mobilisation, asylum rights 11–13 Momentum 127–143; autonomy 132–140; building of 130–132; EU referendum 133–134; factions 135–138; ‘Grassroots’ 137–138; One-Member-One-Vote 135–137 Morar em Lisboa (Live in Lisbon) 98 movementism 129–130 Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) 108 MST see Landless Workers’ Movement murmuring 72 Murray, L. 135 National Coalition of Anti Deportation Campaigns (NDADC) 11 national Coordinating Group (NCG) of Momentum 137

194

Index

natural necessity of labour 177 NCG see national Coordinating Group NDADC see National Coalition of Anti Deportation Campaigns negotiation, Gezi rebellion 81 Neighborhoods’ Assembly for a Sustainable Tourism (Assemblea de Barris per un Turisme Sostenible) 95–96 neoliberalism: Barcelona 94–96; Gezi rebellion 66–68, 74–75 new left, Chile 118–122 new syndicalism 150–151 Notog4sYorkshire 19–21 Núcleos Base 151 Nueva Mayoría (New Majority) 117–118

Publicity Committee of Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists 53 publicity, digital media 54–55 public pedagogy 14–17

Occupy Les Rambles 96 Offer, A. 9–10 One-Member-One-Vote (OMOV) 135–137 oppression: Brazil 149–150; Gezi rebellion 68–70; hegemony 180–183; weapons against 78–80 organisation: Alinsky 29; Citizens UK 40–41; digital media effects 55–56; Momentum 130–132; Workers’ Party 146–147 ORS Service 22

Rancière, J. 74 RDA see Reguierao dos Anjos recall 78–80 re-democratisation: Brazil 153–155; Chile 109–111 reformists in Barcelona 95 Reguierao dos Anjos (RDA) 99 religious ethos of Citizens UK 34 representation in Momentum 135–137 repression: Barcelona 95; Gezi rebellion 70 resistance: Gezi rebellion 70–73; touristification 91–99; vs. protest 70 retroscapes 97 revolutionaries in Barcelona 95–96 revolutionary newspapers 56–58 Revolutionary Socialists 47–62; digital benefits and harms 58–60; digitalisation effects 54–60; internal communications 52, 53–54; members’ vision 56–58; Publicity Committee 53 RevSoc.me website 50, 54–55, 57 Rousseff, D. 148

Palestinian Intifada 49 parliamentary opposition, Workers’ Party 156 participation in Momentum 135–137 Partido Liberal, Chile 119–120 PCF see French Communist Party People’s Democratic Party (HDP) see Halklarin Demokratik Partisi Piñera, S. 114–117 “pink tide” 111–112 police use of force in Gezi rebellion 70 political actors 23 political economy of south Yorkshire 10–11 political identity, Citizens UK 37–40 political promises of Gezi rebellion 75–77 politics of compassion 13–14 Popular Assembly of Lavapiés 92–93 Porto Alegre, Brazil 164 Portugal, Lisbon 96–99 power: Citizens UK 35–36; Gezi rebellion 78–80; Workers’ Party 152 proletarian culture 9–10 promises of Gezi rebellion 75–77 protests: Barcelona 94–96; Chile 107; Gezi Park 69–71; vs. resistance 70 PT see Workers’ Party

salvation, Gezi rebellion 81–82 Santos, M. 163 scientific Marxism 175–179 scripting in Citizens UK 41–42 shadow states 23 Sheffield, UK 9–27; see also South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Rights Action Group six-day training courses, Citizens UK 36 Soames, R. 22 social centres 92–93 social imaginaries 78–80 Socialist Party (SP), Chile 107–108 social media 50–51, 58–59 social misery 178 societies of purpose 9 solidarity campaigning 24 Sousa Santos, B., de 163–164 Southern Europe: Barcelona 94–96; Lisbon 96–99; Madrid 92–94; touristification 88–105 South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Rights Action Group (SYMAAG) 9–27; activist research and wisdom 16–17; asylum markets 20, 21–22; COMPASS contract campaigns 19–23; compassion

Index

13–14; G4S 17–23; mobilisation 11–13; public pedagogy 14–17; solidarities 24 SP see Socialist Party Spain: Barcelona 94–96; Madrid 92–94 ‘spheres of autonomy’ 132–140 squatting 92–93 standing man, Gezi rebellion 80 Stop Tourist Apartments (Travar o Alojamento Local) 97–98 structures in Momentum 135–138 student protests in Chile 107 subalternity, Brazil 152 super-exploitation 152 surrealism 80 SYMAAG see South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Rights Action Group symbolism: Gezi rebellion 77–80; urban activism 93, 98–99 Taksim, Istanbul 65–87 Taksim Solidarity 70 TAL see Travar o Alojamento Local Terramotourism 98–99 theatre of flows, Brazil 163, 166–167 tourism gentrification 91 tourism monoculture 89 touristification 88–105; Barcelona 94–96; Lisbon 96–99; Madrid 92–94; resistance 91–99; urban renewal 90–91 trade unions: anti-deportation movements 12–13; Brazil 150; Chile 110 Travar o Alojamento Local (TAL/Stop Tourist Apartments) 97–98

195

Turkey: AKP party 66–69; class politics 73–75; Gezi rebellion 65–87; Kemalism 74; neoliberalism 66–68, 74–75 turn to the left, Chile 111–112 UAF see Unite Against Fascism Unidad Popular 108 Unite Against Fascism (UAF) 12–13 United Kingdom (UK): asylum rights 9–27; community organising 28–46; corporate welfare state 23; Momentum 127–143 urban activism 88–105; Barcelona 94–96; containment policies 93–94; Lisbon 96–99; Madrid 92–94 urban renewal 90–91; Barcelona 94–95; Lisbon 97 utopia and Gezi rebellion 82 Vallejo, C. 121 Varguista period 146 Workers’ Party (PT) 144–173; electoral strategy 157–162; foundation 149–155; institutionalisation 155–157; Latin-America 162–168; manifesto 151; Núcleos Base 151; organisation 146–147; parliamentary opposition phase 156; World Social Forum 164–165 working class, proletarian culture 9–10 World Social Forum (WSF) 164–165 WSF see World Social Forum