Hardt Michael - Assembly

Here poetry equals insurrection.

Aim Csaire

The script is by now familiar: inspiring social movements rise up against injustice and domination, briefly grab global headlines, and then fade from view. Even when they topple individual authoritarian leaders they have been unable thus far to create new, durable alternatives. Save few exceptions, these movements either have abandoned their radical aspirations and become players in the existing systems or have been defeated by ferocious repression. Why have the movements, which address the needs and desires of so many, not been able to achieve lasting change and create a new, more democratic and just society?

This question becomes all the more urgent as right-wing political forces rise and take power in countries throughout the world, suspending normal legal procedures in order to attack political opponents, undermining the independence of the judiciary and the press, operating extensive surveillance operations, creating an atmosphere of fear among various subordinated populations, posing notions of racial or religious purity as conditions for social belonging, threatening migrants with mass expulsion, and much more. People will protest the actions of these governments, and they are right to do so. But protest is not enough. Social movements also have to enact a lasting social transformation.

Today we are living in a phase of transition, which requires questioning some of our basic political assumptions. Rather than asking only how to take power we must also ask what kind of power we want and, perhaps more important, who we want to become. Everything turns, as Hegel says, on grasping and expressing the True not only as Substance, but equally as Subject. We must train our eyes to recognize how the movements have the potential to redefine fundamental social relations so that they strive not to take power as it is but to take power differently, to achieve a fundamentally new, democratic society and, crucially, to produce new subjectivities.

The most powerful social movements today treat leadership as a dirty wordand for many good reasons. For more than a half century activists have rightly criticized how centralized, vertical forms of organization, including charismatic figures, leadership councils, party structures, and bureaucratic institutions, become fetters to the development of democracy and the full participation of all in political life. Gone are the days, on the one hand, when a political vanguard could successfully take power in the name of the masses; the claims of political realism and the presumed effectiveness of such centralized leadership have proved completely illusory. And yet, on the other, it is a terrible mistake to translate valid critiques of leadership into a refusal of sustained political organization and institution, to banish verticality only to make a fetish of horizontality and ignore the need for durable social structures. Leaderless movements must organize the production of subjectivity necessary to create lasting social relations.

Instead of dismissing leadership completely we should start by individuating its core political functions and then invent new mechanisms and practices for fulfilling them. (Whether this still is called leadership matters little.) Two key leadership functions are decision-making and assembly. To guard against the cacophony of individual voices and the paralysis of the political process, the thinking goes, leaders must be able to bring people together in a coherent whole and make the difficult choices necessary to sustain the movement and ultimately to transform society. The fact that leadership is defined by a decision-making capacity presents a paradox for modern conceptions of democracy: leaders make decisions at a distance, in relative solitude, but those decisions must in some sense be connected to the multitude and represent its will and desires. This tension or contradiction gives rise to a series of anomalies of modern democratic thought. The ability of leaders to assemble the multitude demonstrates this same tension. They must be political entrepreneurs who gather people, create new social combinations, and discipline them to cooperate with one another. Those who assemble people in this way, however, stand apart from the assembly itself, inevitably creating a dynamic between leaders and followers, rulers and ruled. Democratic leadership ultimately appears as an oxymoron.