Democratic Insurrection: Constructing the Common in Global Resistance

Democratic Insurrection: Constructing the Common in Global Resistance

Daniel MurrayStanford University

AbstractThe central challenge for theorists and practitioners of radical politics today is to develop forms of action and organisation that account for the specificity of diverse local struggles and promote the free transformation of individual and collective subjectivities through political action, but also provide the means for collective action on a global scale. This article examines the radical democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe, post-sovereignty cosmopolitanism of David Held and contemporary anarchist theory, in light of participant research in contemporary global resistance movements. As none of these concepts can meet the challenges facing global resistance movements today or the demands of liberty and equality, ‘democratic insurrection’ is intended as both an alternative theoretical category and a practical tool for radical politics. Defined by a complex forum–affinity–network system, democratic insurrection is based on voluntary associations and the production of the common. By expanding the democratic moments of deliberation, decision and action across time and space, democratic insurrection allows for democratic practice and acts of resistance on a range of scales and organisational forms. Radical politics today demands the theorisation and practice of democracy beyond the state and insurrection beyond armed revolt. Democratic insurrection demonstrates the possibility of such theory and practice, but must still overcome the persistence of dominant power relations that continue to plague global resistance movements from within.

Keywordsaffinity group, anarchism, forum, network, insurrection, radical democracy

Forum Article

MILLENNIUMJournal of International Studies

Corresponding author:Daniel Murray, Stanford UniversityEmail: [email protected]

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

39(2) 461–482© The Author(s) 2010

Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co. uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0305829810384756mil.sagepub.com

462 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(2)

Introduction

Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.

–Ulrike Meinhof1

And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes revolution possible.

–Michel Foucault2

Democratic insurrection is a trammelled fence, a collective farm, an occupied university. It is indigenous communities struggling for autonomy in the jungles of Chiapas. It is a group of friends linking arms with PVC pipes that read ‘Climate Justice Now!’ It is global networks of communities joining in simultaneous resistance to domination. Democratic insurrection is resistance to democratic-capitalist states, which have emptied ‘democratic’ of meaning and replaced it with a palatable imperialism, an accepted aristocracy and pas-sive dependence. Seeking to overcome this perversion through a project of constructive resistance, democratic insurrection is a struggle ‘for humanity and against neoliberalism’.3

The central challenge for theorists and practitioners of radical politics today is to develop forms of action and organisation that account for the specificity of diverse local struggles and promote the free transformation of individual and collective subjectivities through political action, but also provide the means for collective action on a global scale. Merging forms of anarchist resistance and direct democratic practice, today’s dem-ocratic insurrections seek to meet this challenge through a system of open spaces for communication; small, temporary forms of organisation; and diffuse action networks. Each of these forms corresponds to general organisational types – forum, affinity group, network – and each form most clearly demonstrates a particular moment central to demo-cratic practice – deliberation, decision and action, respectively. Finally, these forms and practices produce and are produced by what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer to as the common – shared knowledges, narratives, affects and values – the link that connects these forms and practices, but remains open to continual redefinition.4

It has been said that ‘terminology is the poetic moment of thought’,5 but ‘democratic insurrection’ is intended as a concept tied to practice. By examining its component terms, I will develop ‘democratic insurrection’ as both a theoretical category and a practical tool

1. Ulrike Meinhof, Everybody Talks About the Weather … We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof, 1st edn (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 239.

2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 96.3. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or Zapatistas, have held several encuentros that they refer

to as ‘Intercontinental Encounters for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism’. Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism (London: Verso, 2003), 34.

4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, 1st edn (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), viii.

5. Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is an Apparatus?’ And Other Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1.

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for radical politics today. I will first address a number of methodological considerations, then move to articulating the concept of democratic insurrection, in relation to radical democratic and anarchist theory. Focusing on the multipolar form of radical democracy developed by Chantal Mouffe, the post-sovereign cosmopolitanism of David Held and anarchist rejections of organisation, I will argue that none of these radical concepts can meet the challenges facing global resistance movements today. Democratic insurrection, defined by a complex, open forum–affinity–network system, offers an alternative based on voluntary associations and the production of the common. Finally, I will examine a number of challenges faced by democratic insurrection and the persistence of dominant power relations within global resistance movements.

Situated Methods There is a growing trend among academics engaged in radical political activity to think critically about the relationship between the academic and the activist worlds and to develop methods that produce both a situated analysis of struggles at the ground level and research that is practically useful for those engaged in political activity.6 This article has been influenced by two of these emerging methods: movement-relevant theory and participatory political philosophy.

Douglas Bevington and Chris Dixon write:

Movement-relevant theory emerges out of a dynamic and reciprocal engagement with the movements themselves. This engagement not only informs the scholarship, but also provides an accountability for theory that improves the quality of theory.7

Similarly, Uri Gordon argues:

The process of generating anarchist theory itself has to be dialogical in the sense that both the people whose ideas and practices are examined and the people who are formulating theory on their basis must be involved in the process of theorising.8

Both methods seek to produce knowledge that is useful for the movements in which the researcher is engaged, emphasise reciprocity in knowledge production and have the potential to produce research that is more informed.

6. See among others: Ruth Reitan, Global Activism, 1st edn (London: Routledge, 2007); David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography (Oakland, CA: A K Press, 2009); Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive!: Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2007); Jeffrey S. Juris, Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber and Erika Biddle, Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization (Oakland, CA: A K Press, 2007).

7. Douglas Bevington and Chris Dixon, ‘Movement-relevant Theory: Rethinking Social Movement Scholarship and Activism’, Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 4, no. 3 (2005): 190.

8. Uri Gordon, ‘Practicing Anarchist Theory: Towards a Participatory Political Philosophy’, in Constituent Imagination, eds Shukaitis et al., 280.


This research was produced through both a critical engagement with academic literature, and participation in radical political activity. In September 2009 I participated in the resistance to the Group of Twenty (G20) Summit in Pittsburgh. In June 2010, I attended the US Social Forum in Detroit, where I participated in marches, rallies, assemblies and workshops on issues such as radical research, climate justice and direct democracy. Since December 2009, I have been an active participant with a direct action climate justice group in the San Francisco Bay Area, participating in direct actions and working groups that meet weekly to plan events, actions and develop the structure of the organisation. I have also been a member of several affinity groups that have participated in direct actions. Each of these levels of participation and my critical engagement with other activists at these levels have played a key role in the production of this research. It is with an eye to improving these political practices and organisations, as well as providing a better theoretical understanding for academics interested in these areas, that I produce this work.

Insurrectionary Uprising After a week of continuous fighting, the students of Paris took possession of the Sorbonne. We have decided to make ourselves the masters.

–Students and Workers Committee for Action, May 19689

Insurrection has been a hallmark of anarchism as early as Proudhon, the 1848 Revolution and Paris Commune providing an example of its potential and an object for critical analy-sis.10 Bakunin, one of the major theorists of insurrection as violent struggle, laid the groundwork for what is now known as ‘insurrectionary anarchism’.11 Today, violence and insurrection remain critical and intensely debated aspects of anarchist theory and prac-tice.12 Though popular conceptions of anarchism often reduce the diversity of ideas and practices to black-clad youth smashing the windows of a Nike store, many anarchists view violent insurrection as the practice of a fringe group.13 Even insurrectionary anarchists demonstrate a far more complex conception of insurrection than mere violence, whether defined to include property destruction or not. In their incendiary pamphlet, The Coming Insurrection, the Invisible Committee promotes an expanded concept, arguing:

9. Fredy Perlman and Roger Gregoire, Worker-Student Action Committees: France, May ‘68 (Detroit, MI: Black & Red, 2002), 4.

10. Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (Oakland, CA: P M Press, 2010), 363, 658.

11. Joe Black, ‘Anarchism, Insurrections & Insurrectionalism: An Anarchist Communist Analysis’ (2006). Available online at: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/3430?save_prefs=true (accessed 13 October 2010)

12. Peter Gelderloos, How Nonviolence Protects the State (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007); Gordon, Anarchy Alive!, 78–109; Ward Churchill, Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America, annotated edn (Oakland, CA: A K Press, 2007).

13. Leonard Williams and Brian Thomson, ‘The Coming Insurrection’, Conference paper presented at the Western Political Science Association Conference, April 2009, 1.

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the goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible. It becomes irreversible when you’ve defeated both authority and the need for authority, property, and the taste for appropriation, hegemony and the desire for hegemony.… Destruction has never been enough to make things irreversible.14

Insurrection as destruction is meaningless without the transformation of individual and collective desire, subjectivity and social relations. Defining insurrection solely as armed revolt is both theoretically and strategically limiting. As political theorists Leonard Williams and Brian Thomson have recently written:

What distinguishes the insurrectionary trend in today’s anti-capitalist movements is less about the acts of resistance themselves and more about how these actions are perceived as part of a broader strategy for achieving social change.15

Derived from the Latin insurgere, insurrection is to ‘rise up’.16 From the slumber of passivity to active resistance, it is to take action, to stand erect above the earth. ‘To no longer wait is, in one way or another, to enter into the logic of insurrection.’17 One pam-phlet equates insurrection with ‘attack’, but even here not merely in the sense of armed revolt: ‘Attack is the refusal of mediation, pacification, sacrifice, accommodation and compromise in struggle. It is through acting and learning to act, not propaganda, that we will open the path to insurrection – although obviously analysis and discussion have a role in clarifying how to act. Waiting only teaches waiting; in acting one learns to act.’18 The defining feature of insurrection is its immediacy, but not merely an immediate overthrow of the state, as was the major contention between early Marxists and anar-chists, the former advocating a gradual transition to communism through socialism. Rather, insurrection can be seen as part of an active process of ‘building a new world in the shell of the old’.

In this sense, insurrection shares an affinity with the practice of direct action, which is popular in many movements that may not explicitly identify as anarchist. Unlike civil disobedience or protest, which are ultimately demands directed to an authority, and as such the recognition of that authority as legitimate, direct action is ‘the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free’.19 Blockading a lumber company from an old growth forest, sit-ins at segregated lunch counters and establishing a commune are all forms of direct action when they are not demands made to those with authority.20 Such actions may be interventions in unjust practices, regard-less of legality, or the construction of alternative institutions. Insurrection shares this

14. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009), 130–1.15. Williams, ‘The Coming Insurrection’, 11.16. Glynnis Chantrell, The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2002), 277.17. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 96. 18. ‘Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organising for Attack!’, Do or Die, no. 10 (2003): 259.19. David Graeber, Direct Action, 203.20. ‘Direct action’ is a notoriously ambiguous term. For a thorough examination of the controversy and

indeterminacy surrounding the term, see Ibid., 201–11.


sense of immediacy and action. Indeed, some have sought to expand the definition of insurrection even further considering for instance that ‘every petition and every motion for liberty of the press is already an insurrection, be it conscious or unconscious’.21 This conception of insurrection takes us far from the vulgar conception of smashed windows or armed revolt, but holds true to insurrection as ‘rising up’, the practice of freedom.

The work of Max Stirner provides an alternative conception of insurrection by focus-ing on the effect of insurrectionary practice on the individual.22 He writes:

Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the State or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequences a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men’s discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising, but a rising of individuals, a getting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions.’23

For Stirner, what is most essential to insurrection, and indeed anarchism in general, is individual empowerment and resistance. Insurrectionary acts themselves can indeed affect socio-political arrangements, arrangements that certainly play a criti-cal role in the production of disempowered and dependent subjects. But Stirner argues that the principal impetus for insurrectionary action is a discontent with one’s own subjectivity as produced by those arrangements and a refusal to accept their internalisation.

Influenced by the post-structuralist thought of Deleuze and Guattari, Saul Newman connects Stirner’s alternative insurrection with the concept of ‘becoming’. He writes, ‘Insurrection then is not about becoming what one is – becoming human, becoming man, as the [classical] anarchist argues – but about becoming what one is not. Stirner’s notion of individual rebellion involves, then, a process of becoming’.24 Newman interprets Stirner’s concept of insurrection as a rejection of internalised domination and an active appropriation of potentiality, rather than a ‘true humanity’ as a fixed essence. For Stirner (and Newman) it is socio-political arrangements, structures of domination, that produce subjectivity, but the target of insurrection is not only the arrangements themselves, rather it is their internalised form within the individual.

This interpretation of insurrection connects with the concept of direct action above in that individuals and communities rise up in action, producing new subjectivities and new self-arrangements in the action itself, rather than propaganda or protest that demand new arrangements. In this sense insurrection is action and its effect is empowerment. Action

21. Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own. The Anarchist Library, 289. Available online at: http://www.theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Max_Stirner__The_Ego_and_His_Own.html (accessed on 13 October 2010)

22. Saul Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007); Saul Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); A. Antliff, ‘Anarchy, Power, and Poststructuralism’, SubStance 36, no. 2 (2007): 56–66.

23. Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own. 321–2, emphasis in original.24. Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 67, emphasis in original.

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produces subjectivity as an insurrectionary becoming, rejecting the disempowered subject produced by dominating socio-political arrangements such as the state and capi-tal. But Stirner’s anarchism is particularly individualistic, celebrating the liberation of the ego. Democratic insurrection requires organisational forms and practices that ensure insurrection is emancipatory and expand its possibilities through movement-building.

Democratic without DemocracyMost people hate the government and love democracy. Anarchy: that’s just democracy without the government.

–CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective25

Examining the ‘radical democracy’ of Chantal Mouffe and its relation to global politics and cosmopolitanism, as well as the traditional anarchist rejection of democracy, I will argue that rejecting democracy as a state-form need not preclude democratic practices outright. Many anarchists today describe their practices as democratic, and it is in this sense that insurrection can be a liberatory practice of global resistance.

‘Radical’ DemocracyOver the past 35 years, Chantal Mouffe has been a tireless critic of the homogenising potential of both liberal democracy and authoritarian socialism, arguing for a radical transformation of democratic politics. While her theory of ‘the political’ and her commit-ment to pluralism have much in common with anarchism, Mouffe is reluctant to take her theories to their logical conclusion, limiting their truly radical potential. Through a cri-tique of Mouffe’s democratic theory, we will be able to more clearly develop the concept of democratic insurrection and its importance for global politics today.

Mouffe argues that in striving for or presuming consensus, politics today, namely the institutions of the state and the practices of professional politicians, in fact works to eliminate the political, the antagonistic relations between competing desires and demands. For Mouffe, ‘To take account of the political as the ever present possibility of antago-nism requires coming to terms with the lack of final ground and acknowledging the dimension of undecidability which pervades every order.’26 No order is ever total, but is always contested. This undecidability is not only a fact of socio-political relations, pre-cluding any possibility of a truly unified society, for Mouffe it is preferred as it respects the pluralism that is essential to liberty. In opposition to advocates of consensus politics and political theories that seek to move ‘beyond left–right’ or ‘beyond sovereignty’, Mouffe argues that conflict is constitutive of the political, and that rather than attempting to eliminate conflict through consensus, it must be institutionalised by developing legiti-mate channels open to conflicting political claims.

Contrasting her theory to liberal democracy and its contemporary global forms such as cosmopolitanism, as well as the classical Marxist and anarchist projects, Mouffe

25. CrimethInc., Days of War, Nights of Love (Atlanta, GA: CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective, 2003).26. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, new edn (New York: Routledge, 2005), 17.


follows post-structural thinkers such as Michel Foucault in rejecting the telos of a ‘soci-ety beyond division and power’.27 For post-structuralists and post-Marxists such as Mouffe, there is no outside to power; subjectivity is always already constituted by rela-tions of domination and resistance. Though power can function positively and produc-tively, and as such is not inherently repressive, Mouffe insists on the need for a ‘profound transformation of the existing power relations’,28 and posits radical democracy as a means to do so. Anarchists have always resisted the desire for a unified society, promot-ing autonomy rather than the authoritarianism necessary for such a project, and post- structural anarchist theorists such as Todd May, Saul Newman and Richard Day have made similar claims regarding both the impossibility of the large-scale consensus of a unified society and the persistence of power and division.29 Where anarchist thinkers part company with Mouffe is in her conception of hegemony.

Mouffe argues that accepting the undecidability of the political requires ‘recognizing the hegemonic nature of every kind of social order and envisaging society as the product of a series of practices whose aim is to establish order in a context of contingency. The practices of articulation through which a given order is created and the meaning of social institutions is fixed are what we call “hegemonic practices.’’’30 Central to these hege-monic practices and the political as constituted by conflict is Mouffe’s emphasis on ‘we’–‘they’ distinctions in socio-political relations. Building from Carl Schmitt’s concept of friend–enemy, Mouffe argues that collective identification is constitutive of political activity, but that it is the role of democratic politics to transform the enemy into the adversary, antagonism into ‘agonism’, defusing the potential of violent conflict.31

Importantly, subjects are produced by difference, any ‘we’ is produced by a ‘they’, what Mouffe refers to as a ‘constitutive outside’.32 This conception entails a radical plurality that aligns with contemporary conceptions of anarchism, privileging difference and free-dom, or ‘becoming’ as we saw earlier.

Translating this theory into political strategy Mouffe contends: ‘The radicalization of democracy requires the transformation of the existing power structures and the construc-tion of a new hegemony. In our view, the building of a new hegemony implies the cre-ation of a ‘chain of equivalence’ among the diversity of democratic struggles, old and new, in order to form a “collective will” a “we” of the radical democratic forces’.33

Mouffe challenges the role of class as the privileged site of contestation, pointing to gender-, race- and sexuality-based struggles, and calling for the cross-articulation of

27. Chantal Mouffe, ‘Democracy in a Multipolar World’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37, no. 3 (2009): 549.

28. Mouffe, On the Political, 52.29. Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania

State University Press, 1994); Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan; Saul Newman, Unstable Universalities: Poststructuralism and Radical Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2005).

30. Mouffe, ‘Democracy in a Multipolar World’, 549. This theory is originally developed in Mouffe’s early work with Ernesto Laclau. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

31. Mouffe, On the Political, 25.32. Ibid., 15.33. Ibid., 53, emphasis added.

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their demands through ‘chains of equivalence’ so as to construct a united front capable of effectively challenging the sources of domination. As with her conception of the polit-ical, this front cannot be fully unified, but is also constituted by conflict and indetermi-nacy. Mouffe rejects unipolarity both in terms of a conflict-free society and a single subject of resistance such as a class-based conception of the proletariat.

Mouffe is correct to displace the unipolarity and economic reductionism of class iden-tification as the only source of resistant subjects; such an account cannot account for the diversity of subjects and resistance struggles. But Mouffe merely replaces a single homogenising identity with several, presuming consensus within each of these struggles that simply does not exist. A mere glance at the history of the race and gender struggles in the US – the divisions between the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement, or Liberal and Marxist Feminism – makes this abundantly clear. Anarchists, on the other hand, reject hegemony whether promoted by neoliberals, Marxists or black feminists, viewing all hegemony as a limitation on difference and the liberatory potential of becoming.

Mouffe’s rejection of unipolarity and emphasis on the we–they of a conflictual politi-cal space establishes a false dichotomy between unipolarity and the we–they binary. In reality, individuals are members of many ‘wes’ based on race, gender, class, family, neighbourhood, bio-region and differences in values and ethics, to name a few. Further, though the production of a ‘we’ requires a ‘they’, it is possible to conceive of a ‘they’ with-out a ‘we’ in the strong sense posited by Mouffe. Rather than a single, collective ‘we’, global resistance movements emphasise their multiplicity. The challenge for democratic insurrection is to respect this multiplicity while identifying a common ‘they’. This mul-tiplicity of resistances to a common enemy is embodied in the Zapatista motto, ‘One no, many yeses’.34

Finally, Mouffe does note that her conception of plurality is not entirely open, requir-ing some degree of consensus. She writes:

Democracy requires a conflictual consensus: consensus on the ethico-political values of liberty and equality for all, dissent about their interpretation. A line should therefore be drawn between those who reject those values outright and those who, while accepting them, fight for conflicting interpretations.35

But Mouffe’s exclusion goes beyond merely accepting values such as liberty and equality, values at the core of anarchism as well. She clarifies:

A democratic society cannot treat those who put its basic institutions into question as legitimate adversaries. The agonistic approach does not pretend to encompass all differences and to overcome all forms of exclusions. But exclusions are envisaged in political and not in moral terms. Some demands are excluded, not because they are declared to be ‘evil’, but because they challenge the institutions constitutive of the democratic political association.36

34. Paul Kingsnorth, One No, Many Yeses (New York: Free Press, 2003).35. Mouffe, On the Political, 121, emphasis in original.36. Ibid., 120–1.


To this end, Mouffe rejects independent rule-making/governing bodies such as those of indigenous communities. Ultimately, ‘democratic political association’ for Mouffe is defined by allegiance to a particular set of institutions, not a set of values or ethico-political commitments. For all of her insistence on ‘the political’, it appears that, in the end, it is indeed ‘politics’ that is of utmost importance for Mouffe.

Though claiming to support a radical pluralism, Mouffe’s pluralism is limited by her statist commitments. She cannot accept the desire for pluralism in forms of socio-political association as legitimate, thus precluding the possibility of anarchism as a socio-political arrangement. Anarchism is a practice founded on values such as equality, liberty, delibera-tion and participation, Mouffe’s core requirement for a functional political sphere, but does not share her commitment to state institutions. In the end, Mouffe only conceives of plural-ism within the bounds of the liberal democratic state, and while Mouffe critiques liberal rationalism for its failure to acknowledge that identity is produced through difference,37 her ‘radical democracy’ is limited by the very same unifying forces: hegemony and the state.

Planetary PoliticsMovements for global resistance, of course, expand beyond the borders of nation-states, targeting transnational, international and supranational bodies, as well as the global hegemony of the US. A number of strains of International Relations theory offer similar critiques of US hegemony and the democratic deficit in transnational bodies. In her most recent work, Mouffe seeks to extend her conception of the political and its essential antagonism, arguing that there is an absence of antagonism in International Relations theory as there is in liberal theory at the domestic level, particularly in the cosmopolitan-ism proposed by theorists such as David Held.38 Both Mouffe’s and Held’s International Relations theory, share affinities with anarchist theory, but again through critique we will further develop our understanding of democratic insurrection.

Similar to her critique of consensus at the domestic level, Mouffe argues that unipo-larity is at the heart of many International Relations theories such as cosmopolitanism and theories that champion neoliberal hegemony. Against these theories, Mouffe posits a multipolar world that respects a diversity of interpretations of democratic ideals. She contends, ‘Democracy in a multipolar world could take a variety of forms, according to the different modes of inscription of the democratic ideal in a variety of contexts.’39 In keeping with her emphasis on pluralism, Mouffe emphasizes the diversity of contexts in the international realm and the impact of that diversity on democratic practice. Focusing on the value of individualism, Mouffe believes:

The kind of individualism dominant in Western societies is alien to many other cultures, whose traditions are informed by different values, and democracy understood as ‘rule by the people’ can therefore take other forms, in which for instance the value of community is more pregnant than the idea of individual liberty.40

37. Mouffe, ‘Democracy in a Multipolar World’, 550.38. Mouffe, On the Political, 90.39. Mouffe, ‘Democracy in a Multipolar World’, 556.40. Ibid., 557.

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A diversity of values demands a diversity of democratic practices and a democratic global order must respect this diversity.

However, here as at the domestic level, Mouffe is unwilling to take her theory to its logical conclusion. Again she returns to the dependence on hegemony to maintain social order. To overcome the paradox between resistance to unipolarity and what she sees as the inevitable antagonism between hegemonic relations, Mouffe contends ‘[t]he only solution lies in the pluralization of hegemonies. Abandoning the illusory hope for politi-cal unification of the world, we should advocate several big regional units with their different cultures and values’.41 Even more strongly she argues ‘[t]his is the only way to avoid the hegemony of one single hyperpower.’42 Again, Mouffe establishes a false dichotomy between unipolarity and multipolarity. Though she is right to abandon hopes of global unification, to contend that there is consensus on values and cultures at regional levels fails to acknowledge the diversity that exists within regions, nations or indeed communities. To reduce the diversity of cultures and values to ‘several big regional units’ is entirely inconsistent with her emphasis on plurality. Where would the borders of these regional units be drawn? How can one establish borders between cultures, particularly in a globalised world with countless diasporas and cultural miscegenation? It is difficult enough to agree on values with one’s family, let alone the diverse cultures of such a vast region as North America or indeed ‘the West’.

Mouffe’s emphasis on a diversity of values, cultures and interpretations of democratic ide-als is inconsistent with her idea of homogeneous regional units. Further, this inconsistency draws the limits of her domestic theory into focus. To take seriously the conflictual essence of the political, one must be prepared to see conflict all the way down. Identities do not con-glomerate around homogenising nodes such as race or gender. These identities intersect in countless ways producing complex singularities, social subjects ‘whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains different’.43 Mouffe is unwilling to take her own allegiance to pluralism to its logical conclusion and is thus unable to account for the true multiplicity of identities and socio-political associations. For anarchists, the freedom of asso-ciation and the open becoming of subjectivity are demanded by the values of liberty and equality. The political must be open and malleable if it is to account for this diversity.

Held’s theory of cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, seeks to transcend national sovereignty where Mouffe is unwilling.44 Held explains cosmopolitanism as the view that ‘human well-being is not defined by geographical or cultural locations, that national or ethnic or gendered boundaries should not determine the limits of rights or responsibilities for the satisfaction of basic human needs, and that all human beings require equal moral respect and concern’.45 Accepting this statement has radical implications for the place of

41. Ibid., 553.42. Mouffe, On the Political, 6–7.43. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York:

Penguin Press, 2004), 99. On intersectionality, see Leslie McCall, ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality’, Signs 30, no. 3 (2005): 1771–880; Patricia Hill Collins, ‘Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought’, Social Problems 33, no. 6 (1986): 14–32.

44. For a more extensive comparison between anarchism and the work of David Held, see Alex Prichard’s article in this journal.

45. David Held, ‘Restructuring Global Governance: Cosmopolitanism, Democracy and the Global Order’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37, no. 3 (2009): 537.


the nation-state in global politics, challenging the ontological privileging of the state in most political theory, international or otherwise. Anarchist theory echoes this challenge to state sovereignty, as well as the mutual responsibility among all humans.46 However, from this Held concludes that it is necessary to establish international laws and regulations to uphold and enforce these boundless standards, rejecting nation-states for what is essen-tially a global state. It is here that Mouffe objects to the tendency to unipolarity, and where anarchists similarly take issue. While anarchists agree with the basic premise, they draw the opposite conclusion, that no legal or political order can accommodate this infi-nite responsibility and equality, and that any effort to establish such an order is no less coercive and authoritarian than a system of states. Both Mouffe and Held emphasise inclusion, whether in a unified cosmopolitan order or a multipolar regional arrangement, while anarchists emphasise autonomy and voluntary association.

Anarchism and DemocracyAnarchist critiques of democracy are numerous, focusing on the state’s production of a ruling class, a concentration of power that persists in democratic states as in any other. In his 1890 treatise Anarchy, Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta writes: ‘Democracy is a lie, it is oppression and is in reality, oligarchy; that is, government by the few to the advan-tage of a privileged class’.47 More recently, Peter Gelderloos has stated that:

Our closer analysis of this system we call ‘democracy’ has led us to the following hypothesis: at its base, democracy is an authoritarian, elitist system of government designed to craft an effective ruling coalition while creating the illusion that the subjects are in fact equal members of society, thus in control of, or at least benevolently represented by, government policy. The fundamental purpose of democracy, same as any other government, is to maintain the wealth and power of the ruling class.48

For anarchists, as well as Marxists, democratic states serve to maintain the power of the bour-geoisie. But unlike Marx, who contends that the state is an instrument of a particular class and that there is the potential of a state that can lead to a society free of domination, anarchists reject the strong link between the economy and the state, arguing that a socialist state will not wither away, but rather self-perpetuate as a form of domination. For anarchists any state-form is a form of domination, whether controlled by a dictator, the proletariat or ‘the people’.49

Contemporary anarchist anthropologist, David Graeber, further critiques the illusion that choice and opinion in democracies produce more egalitarian societies.50 In many liberal democratic theories such as John Rawls’s, in which individuals make political decisions from an ideal ‘original position’ behind a ‘veil of ignorance’, interests are

46. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: New York University Press, 1972).47. Errico Malatesta, Anarchy, rev. edn (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 2.48. Peter Gelderloos, ‘What Is Democracy?’ The Anarchist Library, 13. http://www.theanarchistlibrary.org/

HTML/Peter_Gelderloos__What_is_Democracy_.html, paragraph 1. (accessed on 13 October 2010)49. Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 20–8.50. Graeber, Direct Action, 319.

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believed to pre-date the political process;51 individuals are asked to don the veil of igno-rance with pre-formed opinions. Anarchists such as Graeber, as well as proponents of deliberative democracy, reject the idea of pre-formed interests, contending that interests are shaped by the political process itself and the collective discussion and deliberation it entails.52 As Graeber writes, ‘In the process of deliberation – any political deliberation, really, though consensus process is designed to maximize this – everyone is changing their minds constantly, learning new information, identifying with different perspec-tives, reframing issues, measuring and weighing considerations in different ways’.53

Like insurrection for Stirner, democratic practice can also be transformative action.For some anarchists, the rejection of democracy goes deeper than a mere rejection of

the state-form. While they may promote the production of the common, some reject all organisations. As we saw above, Max Stirner urges that we place ‘no glittering hopes on “institutions’’’. Others, however, view organisation and movement-building as of central importance.54 Generally, anarchists discuss organisation in two senses, the coordination of actions (insurrectionary or otherwise) and mobilising populations to action. Many anarchists fear that formal organisations will lead to hierarchies or a sacrifice of goals in order to main-tain the organisation itself, but the distrust of organisations need not lead to a rejection of all organisation. As Saul Newman argues, ‘Revolutions and insurrections – even those which seek the abolition of the state – are political events which must be made; spontaneity requires conscious organization and political mobilization.’55 Some anarchists put total faith in the power of insurrections to order themselves spontaneously and mobilise populations through example. Others criticise these practices as vanguardist. And the cleavage grows.

Similarly, the rejection of democracy as a state-form need not preclude democratic practices in their entirety. Indeed, many anarchists promote forms of direct or absolute democracy beyond the state. As the ex-workers’ collective CrimethInc., writes, ‘Anarchists use democracy – but we don’t let democracy use us’.56 The ideals of equality, liberty, participation and deliberation that are central to the democratic tradition do not, in fact, conflict with anarchist theory or practice. One could argue, and many have, that it is rather the democratic state that conflicts with these ideals. Democratic practice and anar-chism place importance on participation, but not merely the passive freedom to participate – which is so often felt to be a useless, isolated act of voting every four years – but the active mobilisation of participation, the development of new democratic practices that encourage and entice through empowering forms of participation, that are relevant and

51. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Original Edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 118–23.

52. For theories of deliberative democracy, see Joshua Cohen, ‘Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy’, in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, eds James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 69.

53. Graeber, Direct Action, 320.54. See, for example, Joel Olson, ‘The Problem with Infoshops and Insurrection’, in Contemporary Anarchist

Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy, 1st edn, eds Randall Amster et al. (London: Routledge, 2009), 35–45; and Ryan Harvey, ‘Are We Addicted to Rioting?’ Available at: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/09/27/18623480.php (accessed 13 October 2010)

55. Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism, 6–7.56. CrimethInc. Ex-worker’s Collective, ‘Fighting for Our Lives’ (Salem, OR: CrimethInc. Free Press) 9.

Available online at: http://crimethinc.com/tools/downloads/zines.html (accessed 13 October 2010).


empowering to communities. As Graeber puts it, the question for anarchists is, ‘when and on what level are structures of collective decision-making required?’57

Democratic InsurrectionDemocratic insurrection is insurrection aimed at liberating space for truly democratic practices. It is insurrection through democratic practices based in deliberation, decision and action. It is a democratic rejection of vanguardism and elitism – democracy not as a state-form, but a practice of collective decision-making. Democratic insurrection is pro-duced by and produces the common, shared material resources and the results of social production, such as shared knowledges, affects, values and understandings.58

The Invisible Committee has discussed the concept of the common extensively in their pamphlets, ‘The Call’ and The Coming Insurrection, defining it similarly as both material and social. While insurrectionary anarchists and anarcho-communists are often at odds, the Invisible Committee seeks to bridge this gap through the common. They write, ‘We believe there is no revolution without the constitution of a common material force’ and that ‘As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of communisation, of making common such-and-such space, such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge. That is to say, the elaboration of the modes of sharing that attaches to them. Insurrection itself is just an accelerator, a decisive moment in this process’.59 Democratic insurrection produces the common in the sense that it produces shared understandings, values and narratives, but also the expro-priation of material resources as common. For the Invisible Committee, the state and capital are divisive and isolating forces that destroy the common. They argue that, ‘against the partisans of existential liberalism, we refuse to view this [the end of capital] as a private matter, an individual issue, a question of character. We start from the cer-tainty that this link depends on the construction of shared worlds, on the sharing of effec-tive means.’ And further, ‘We have been sold this lie: that what is most particular to us is what distinguishes us from the common. We experience the contrary: every singularity is felt in the manner and in the intensity with which a being brings into existence something common.’60 Though defined by difference, as argued by Mouffe, this difference is mutu-ally constitutive and linked through the common. Difference need not be divisive; it is precisely through difference that the common is possible.

As noted earlier, the central challenge for anarchists, and practitioners of radical poli-tics more generally, is to develop forms of organisation and action based in the empower-ment of insurrectionary ‘becoming’ and pluralist difference championed by both Stirner and Mouffe, but also to provide the means for collective action capable of challenging domination on a global scale. Democratic insurrection as a concept seeks to overcome the insurrection–organisation binary by emphasising the open spaces for communication;

57. Graeber, Direct Action, 237.58. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, viii.59. The Invisible Committee, ‘The Call’. Available online at ‘The Anarchist Library’: http://theanarchistlibrary.

org/HTML/Anonymous__Call.html, emphasis in original, Proposition III, Scholium, paragraph 27. (accessed 13 October 2010)

60. Ibid., Proposition VI, Scholium, paragraph 10, emphasis in orignal.

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small, temporary forms of organisation; and diffuse networks for action that already exist in the movements of global resistance, produced by and producing the common. These forms correspond to general organisational types – forum, affinity group, network – which are actualised in multiple forms within radical political action, and demonstrate the three moments central to democratic practice – deliberation, decision and action, respectively. Let us briefly examine each of these in turn.

Spaces of DeliberationEarlier, I discussed the anarchist rejection of choice as a democratic principle, as it assumes that interests are static and precede the political process. Instead, many anar-chists emphasise deliberation and discussion as a transformative process through which interests are shaped. Deliberation is a process in which each strives to recognise the merit in another’s argument, to understand the reasoning behind their preference, and in this understanding, opinions and indeed subjectivities are transformed; the common is pro-duced and strengthened through the production of shared meanings, goals and values. Deliberation takes many forms within global resistance movements, such as anarchist convergences and book fairs, and global, regional and local social forums.

The World Social Forum (WSF) was established in 2001, as an ‘open and inclusive public space’,61 that is purely deliberative. As the WSF Charter of Principles states, ‘The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlink-ing for effective action.’62 The Charter makes clear that the forum’s central function is to serve as a place where individuals, groups and movements can deliberate. This process of deliberation is open, in the sense that it is not exclusive, all are free to par-ticipate, but the process is also open in the sense that it is not conclusive. The delibera-tion that is at the core of the forum does not necessarily lead to decision. Certainly, there is nothing to preclude certain groups from deciding to take decisive action while at the forum, but, in theory, the forum’s central function is open-ended deliberation on alternatives.

Resisting large-scale decision-making bodies, the Invisible Committee argues, ‘An assembly is not a place for decisions, but for talk, for free speech exercised without a goal’.63 Open deliberative spaces like the social forum are intended to be precisely such places for talk, assisting in the production of the common that can serve as the basis for democratic insurrection. Further, the global nature of the forum presents an opportunity for the production of the common that is not as heavily constrained by space, establish-ing links that extend the common rhizomatically,64 laying the groundwork for future interaction. As the participation of individuals in global resistance movements is marked

61. Hank Johnston, Culture, Social Movements, and Protest (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 183, emphasis added; Donatella della Porta, ‘Making the New Polis’.

62. Reitan, Global Activism, 259.63. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 122, emphasis in the original.64. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis,

MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5–25.


by a ‘density of multiple and plural associational membership[s]’,65 the forum may play a critical role in facilitating the rhizomatic network structure necessary for democratic insurrection on a global scale.

Decision through AffinityDecision is the most demanding moment in truly democratic practice and is the most diffi-cult to separate from the other moments, particularly deliberation. As we saw above, delib-eration can exist without decision; decisions, on the other hand, cannot be viewed as democratic without a process of deliberation. When decision is the end goal of deliberation, the process becomes exponentially more complex. A collective process that values the pref-erences of all members equally and produces a decision to which all members can agree, requires that the scale of the group remain quite small. In many anarchist communities, deci-sion is reached through an arduous process of deliberation or consensus-building. Here con-sensus is not seen as passive acceptance to the status quo, the empty ‘politics’ described by Mouffe, but refers instead to the institutionalisation of conflict and its management for coop-eration rather than competition. All members of the group are expected and encouraged to participate in the process of consensus-building, through which interests and values are transformed, as discussed earlier. Not only do all participate in the deliberation process, each must also give their final approval. Instead of a majority vote, which concentrates power in the hands of a particular group, consensus decision-making provides all participants with the power of veto; all participants may ‘block’ a proposal, preventing it from ratification. This negative measure serves to ensure that all have had the opportunity to participate and that the proposal has been deliberated adequately. The ‘block’ is ultimately a final check on these earlier phases of the process, ensuring the collectivity of the decision.

In anarchist practice, affinity groups are considered ‘the elementary particles of vol-untary association’,66 such association being one of the basic principles of anarchism. Affinity groups are ‘formed out of a shared desire to accomplish a specific task … and oriented to achieving maximum effectiveness with a minimum of bureaucracy, infight-ing and exposure to infiltration’,67 Such tasks generally centre on protest events, direct actions or insurrections, and may include anything from blockading intersections to col-lective farming. These groups, generally composed of five to 20 individuals, are founded on ‘friend-like relationships’.68 The size of the group and nature of the relationships, with stronger obligations and mutual respect than isolated participants in an action or insur-rection, make the complex process of consensus-building a manageable task, as there are typically a common set of values and experiences that such a process requires. However, many affinity groups are transient. They are formed to accomplish a specific task or project

65. Massimiliano Andretta, Donatella Della Porta, Lorenzo Mosca and Herbert Reiter ‘Global, noglobal, new global. Le proteste contro il G8 a Genova’, Roma, Laterza, 2002 quoted in Della Porta, ‘Making the New Polis’, 191.

66. Graeber, Direct Action, 288.67. Day, Gramsci is Dead, 25.68. Kevin McDonald, ‘From Solidarity to Fluidarity: Social Movements Beyond “Collective Identity” – The

Case of Globalization Conflicts’, Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 1, no. 2 (2002): 109–28; Francis Dupuis-Déri, ‘Anarchism and the Politics of Affinity Groups’, forthcoming, 12.

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and often cease to exist immediately after, whether the task is completed successfully or not,69 mitigating the anarchist concern about the dangers of permanent organisations. However, the attendant forms of the common may prove more permanent and can be resuscitated in future group formations.

Action in CommonIn our conception of democratic insurrection, insurrectionary action happens at numerous levels. Affinity groups do not merely make decisions and call it a day; they act on these decisions. Similarly, the deliberation in the open space of the social forum can also lead to action, though the Charter precludes that this action be taken in the name of the forum. But action in common does not require deliberation or collective decision-making amongst the entire community. Nor does it require any explicit consensus-building pro-cess. Action occurs without deliberation or decision, but through the common, forming a dense network of actors.

The typical actions of global resistance movements are large-scale acts of resistance, such as ‘summit-crashing’, Global Days of Action or revolts like those in Greece during December of 2008. At these actions, activists and organisations from around the world converge on a single point or act simultaneously in multiple locations, communicating through networks of list-serves, websites and cell phones. As interventions, these actions seek to ‘disrupt or even destroy established patterns, policies, relationships or institutions’,70 such as the functioning of the World Trade Organization (WTO). While not controlled by individual organisations, these actions are by no means void of organi-sation; planning and organisation may take months, but the nature of this planning pro-cess is such that there are few if any centralised decisions. When affinity groups do gather prior to the event, they may do so in the form of a consulta or spokescouncil. In the former case, groups share their plans for action. Perhaps one group has decided that it will blockade a particular intersection, another group has decided to use a certain level of militant tactics such as tearing down a fence at a particular location. These various plans are coordinated in such meetings. There is no committee that decides which actions should or should not take place, but organisation is essentially facilitation to ensure that all are informed and that coordination can occur where necessary and effective. In the case of a spokescouncil, there is more collective decision-making, but only at the most general level. Each affinity group elects a proxy to serve as their spoke, and these spokes agree on a set of basic principles governing action in the most general way, often while the other members of the affinity group are present. This may include limiting the level of militancy, but increasingly activists promote a ‘diversity of tactics’ and reject restric-tions on action, further limiting the amount of decision-making that occurs outside of the affinity group.

These large-scale actions are the most visible moment of democratic insurrection. Given the nature of the enemy – capitalism, the state and all forms of domination and

69. McDonald, ‘From Solidarity to Fluidarity’, 115.70. Gene Sharp, quoted in John Lofland, Protest: Studies of Collective Behavior and Social Movements

(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1985), 264.


hierarchy – action must be taken on a large scale. These actions reveal the potential large-scale coordination of democratic associations beyond the state and hegemony. These insurrections may not stem directly from a single collective decision, but rest on the development of the common at other moments in the process. Deliberation at the forum and decision within the affinity group, produce the common necessary for action in the network.

Forum–Affinity–NetworkWe have focused here on the three key moments of democratic insurrection – deliberation in the open space of the forum, decision within the friend-like affinity group and action through a network of weak links. These are practices of resistance to the domination of capital and of hierarchy in all forms. In this sense they are a negation of the dominant paradigm, but they are also attempts to actualise new forms of the political. Let us take a closer look at the practice of democratic insurrection, its organisational structure and its spatial and temporal features.

As we have seen, each of the three moments is best suited to a particular scale and organisational form. Taken individually each of these forms has their limitations. The forum is well-suited as a space for open discussion and deliberation, but the scale is far too large for a consensus process that guarantees the equitable participation of all members. The affinity group, on the other hand, based on ‘friend-like relationships’ carries with it the shared values and obligations necessary for the arduous process of consensus-building, but alone can accomplish little in the face of global problems. Finally, the network is capable of global action, but lacks the ability for deliberation or decision-making.

The forum, affinity group and network each fills a particular role in democratic insur-rection, but within global resistance movements none of these structures is entirely iso-lated from the others. As such, we must also consider these elements as a system: forum–affinity–network. Within this system, democratic practice is possible at a range of scales, complexities and intensities, forming a rhizomatic structure of socio-political relations. Developing their theory of the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari write:

In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states.71

Unlike the centred form of cosmopolitanism proposed by David Held or the polycentric (‘multipolar’) form proposed by Chantal Mouffe, democratic insurrection is a diffuse, acentred and non-hierarchical assemblage of democratic relations and practices. This allows free and open relations between individuals and also proves to be an effective form of resistance as it is nearly impossible to contain.72 To conceptualise democratic

71. Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus, 21.72. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2000).

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practice as limited to a single plane or the state as the principal site of interaction limits the potential for democratic relations to exist in a multiplicity of forms.

Also contrary to Mouffe and Held, who attempt to theorise a stable set of institutional arrangements, one of the key features of relations formed in democratic insurrection is their impermanence. In democratic insurrection, all associations are voluntary; individu-als link and de-link at will. Reflecting on his experiences with anarchists during insurrec-tions in Greece in 2007,73 Gelderloos contends that ‘organizations should be temporary, tied to the need they were formed to address, and they should be overlapping and plural-istic. Otherwise, they develop interests of their own survival and growth that can easily conflict with the needs of people.’74 However, the distrust of organisations can also lead to what Jo Freeman has called the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’.75 Based on her experi-ence in the US feminist movement, Freeman argues that ‘structureless groups’ are a fic-tion and are in fact organised by informal structures that can be even more dominating than formal structures. Freeman argues that formal structures are necessary, but makes a number of suggestions to mitigate the potential of hierarchies, such as rotating positions and limited duties. Similarly, in democratic insurrection formal structures are necessary, but they need not be permanent. Indeed, formal structures can serve to mitigate hierar-chies even in temporary organisations.

The Persistence of PowerWhile democratic insurrection opens new possibilities for action and organisation, pro-motes the free transformation of individual and collective subjectivities through political action, and provides a means for global collective action, it faces a number of limitations. Within the social forum, affinity groups and action networks, systemic inequalities can lead to multiple obstacles to democratic insurrection.

Since its inception, a lack of equitable participation has plagued the social forum. Local organisations and individuals, as well as those with the time and resources to travel, typically white activists from the Global North, are disproportionately represent-ed.76 However, the establishment of regional fora has allowed for wider participation and the forum has also established various financial assistance programmes to assist in the travel funds for individuals who may otherwise be unable to attend. These strategies have improved the inclusiveness of the forum, but have not overcome these challenges entirely. Deliberation, more generally, faces its own limits. The quality of the delibera-tion depends upon the quality of the discourse and the unevenness of discursive skills can work to limit equal access to deliberation or equal power in the deliberative process. As political theorist Joshua Cohen notes, ‘Deliberative democracy requires attention to

73. Gelderloos’ reflections pre-dated the fully fledged insurrections in December 2008, following the killing of Alexandros Grigoropoulos by a police officer. In 2007, tensions between anarchists and police were high in relation to proposed education reforms, tensions contributed to the outbreak of the 2008 insurrection.

74. Peter Gelderloos, ‘Insurrection vs. Organization: Reflections on a Pointless Schism’ (2007). Available at: http://www.infoshop.org/library/insurrection-vs-organization.html, paragraph 16.

75. Jo Freeman, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17 (1972–3): 151–65.76. Jackie Smith and Marina Karides, Global Democracy and the World Social Forums (International Studies

Intensives) (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 49–60.


encouraging deliberative capacities, which is, inter alia, a matter of education, information, and organization.’77 In a society of growing inequality, the prospects of such education being equitably distributed are dim and thus deliberative power is skewed to those with access to education, information and organisation.

Similarly, affinity groups and the process of consensus decision-making may not be free from domination and hierarchy, as these have been internalised through socialisa-tion. An affinity group may have no formal hierarchy, but this does not preclude the existence of informal hierarchies that shape the decisions of the group. The formal con-sensus process is designed to minimise this problem, but this power imbalance is diffi-cult to eradicate. For instance, a racially diverse consensus-based group may aim for full participation, but if it is only the white, heterosexual males that are actually participating in the deliberative process, the equality for which the structure aims has missed its mark. Such a formal structure often contains certain roles that must be filled, such as facilitator and note-taker, and the assignment of these roles can reinforce social hierarchies. As women have historically been relegated to clerical work, it is easy for such biases to carry over into this setting, relegating females to note-takers and males subtly guiding deliberation as facilitators. Further, the tight-knit in-culture of affinity groups can be experienced as alienating to newcomers or those with differing cultural backgrounds or produce exclusionary groups of relatively homogeneous activists.78

Finally, at the level of networks, access to networks requires communication technol-ogy resources, which are still unavailable to large parts of the world, as well as the time and resources to travel to large-scale insurrectionary events. The actions themselves are also limited. A central goal for many of these large-scale actions, beginning with Seattle, has been ‘Shut them down!’ but this has only occurred on a few occasions. Even when this goal has been achieved, the tangible effects amount to little more than a more secluded and secure summit next time. The WTO has moved meetings to high-security, inaccessible locations such as Doha, Qatar, essentially eliminating any direct threat pro-tests could have on its running. Even actions that do not require travel or technology can elicit charges of vanguardism and elitism. Developing the common in open, deliberative spaces can mitigate this, but such open communication is not always possible in urgent or dangerous situations.

More research is necessary to examine the limitations of these democratic moments and the persistence of forms of domination within democratic insurrection. Extended, collaborative participant research can reveal the continued transformation of these prac-tices. To what extent are affinity groups actually free of domination? What prevents its eradication? How do power relations function positively, productively and equitably within the forum–affinity–network system?

ExodusIn her explicit rejection of challenges to democratic institutions, Mouffe reveals the importance of the territorial integrity of the state or the regional units of a multipolar

77. Cohen, ‘Reflections on Deliberative Democracy’, 249.78. Ibid., 336–54.

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global democracy for her theory. Similarly, Held’s cosmopolitanism moves beyond the state, but only to secure the entire globe as the realm of liberal democracy. Democratic insurrection, on the other hand, seeks to liberate space for truly democratic practices, without seeking to control territory in the traditional revolutionary sense of controlling the state. As the Invisible Committee writes:

The territorial question isn’t the same for us as it is for the state. For us it’s not about possessing territory. Rather, it’s a matter of increasing the density of the communes, of circulation, and of solidarities to the point that the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to all authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the territory.79

In democratic insurrection, the free associations between individuals and communities overlap, or are superimposed, unbound by the borders of nation-states or regional units. Aided by rapid developments in information and communication technologies, insurrec-tions are no longer localised. Days of Action occur on the national, regional and global levels. The Greek uprising of 2008 led to insurrectionary action in multiple cities across Europe and Latin America.80 Meetings of global bodies such as the WTO, International Monetary Fund and G20 meet resistance at every stop. Rather than unified or parsed into local or regional units, democratic insurrection seeks to expand rhizomatically.

For Mouffe and Held, the main political goal is inclusion, in the state or ‘cosmopol-ity’. Indeed, as the Invisible Committee rightly remarks, ‘It is from the abandonment of any secessionist aim that the absurdity we call the left was born’.81 Rather than inclusion, anarchists and autonomous Marxists such as Hardt and Negri promote secession, separa-tion and exodus. As Negri claims:

[Capitalist] totality is a texture in which we find ourselves and in which we must separate ourselves in order to exist – but it is the intensity of the separation, the force with which antagonism is recognized, that constitutes us as singularities – as subjects.82

Like Stirner’s conception of insurrection, separation produces new subjectivities. These secessions produce holes in the fabric of the state, externalities within the totalising space of state-capitalism. It is these externalities that are linked through the common, forming the rhizomes of democratic insurrection.

The concept and practice of democratic insurrection requires us to theorise democ-racy beyond the state and insurrection beyond armed revolt. The term ‘insurrection’ has been applied to a range of diverse practices in the history of anarchist thought and prac-tice, but at its core it is the practice of freedom, rising up in resistance to internalised domination. Though Stirner’s insurrection is strongly personal, domination is global. It

79. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 108, emphasis in original.80. Nick Squires In Athens, ‘Greek Protests Spread to European Cities’, Telegraph.co.uk, 11 December

2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/greece/3709695/Greek-protests-spread-to-European-cities.html (accessed on 13 October 2010)

81. The Invisible Committee, ‘The Call’.82. Quoted in Alberto Toscano, ‘Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri and the Subject of Antagonism’,

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2009): 77.


flows with capital and the pervasive power of the state. Individual resistance is an important step towards emancipation, but it is not enough to overcome the challenges facing the planet today. Democratic practice is necessary to build the common that can link indi-viduals and communities across borders, burning holes in the suffocating fabric of Empire and forging rhizomes of resistance.

I have attempted to show how a rejection of democracy as a state-form need not pre-clude democratic practices or the ideals of liberty, equality, participation and delibera-tion. Contrary to Mouffe’s distinction between we–they democratic insurrection posits resistance as a struggle between ‘one no, many yeses’. Neither a multipolar global poli-tics nor a unipolar cosmopolitanism can account for the radical pluralism in subjectivi-ties and desires for association. The rhizomatic relations of democratic insurrection, on the other hand, are constituted by this diversity, multiplicity and singularity.

We have seen insurrection as both resistance to domination and a radical becoming through difference. These alternative conceptions mirror the alternatives necessary for democratic practice on a global scale. The open deliberative spaces, small, temporary organisational forms and globally networked actions are imperfect, but provide a win-dow into the possibilities of democratic insurrection. These forms of action and organisa-tion promote the free transformation of individual and collective subjectivities through political action, but also provide the means for global collective action on a global scale. Offering an alternative to the reformist dependence on democratic institutions and unsus-tainable forms of violent revolt, democratic insurrection is a tool for building a new world in the shell of the old, for constructing the common in global resistance, for destroying the bonds of domination and for emancipating subjectivity.

Author Biography

Daniel Murray is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. He is active in climate justice and labour organising in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Democratic Insurrection: Constructing the Common in Global Resistance

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