Introduction: Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: Responding to the Challenges of...

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Radical democracy and collective movements today: Responding to the

challenges of Kairosalexandros Kioupkiolis and Giorgos Katsambekis

What is at Stake?

We take charge of the factory in terms of full self-management and workers’ control over both its productive and its administrative structures. the basic and central principle of the operation of the factory, of the struggle we conduct and the key term of our future plans is parity in participation and decision-making, horizontality and direct democracy. (vio.me. 2013)

this is how the workers of vio.me., a Greek industry specializing in metal constructions, proclaimed at the end of January 2013 their resolution to re-open the factory, to resume production and to self-manage it as part of a wider project that would combat the harsh economic crisis by way of expanding workers’ control. their venture can be seen as a landmark in the state of emancipatory struggles in present-day Greece as it signals the first actual endeavour in industrial self-management in a country lacking any such tradition. in effect, however, it stands for an entire series of cognate initiatives in collective self-mobilization across numerous fields, from media and farming co-operatives to autonomous health and art centres that labour under non-capitalist and non-statist principles of egalitarian participation and social solidarity.

the recent effervescence of social self-activity in crisis-ridden Greece has followed in the footsteps of the massive youth’s insurgency in december 2008 (see economides and monastiriotis 2009, Kalyvas 2010, Pechtelidis 2011)

and the ‘squares movement’ unfolding from may until august 2011. the latter mobilization set up collective assemblies in central squares across the country and pursued direct social self-governance, moving within the same spiral of democratic struggles for effective equality and ‘real democracy’ which set out from the Arab world and set finally foot in North America travelling through the european south. the ongoing experiments in horizontal self-management should give pause to think to all those who rushed to dismiss the autonomous politics of the 2011 squares as ineffective and doomed to fail on account of its aversion to



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Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today2

party disciplines, representation, unified identities, fixed programs and ideological definition. However, this is only one side of the coin.

On the flip side, a neoliberal state apparatus, ruled by a right-wing coalition government, is still in place and it is still visiting material devastation on deeply distressed middle and lower classes by implementing the dictates of global markets and international centres of neoliberal power which promote an upward redistribution of wealth. Basic liberal and democratic rights are routinely trampled, a neo-nazi anti-immigrant party is growing into the third strongest parliamentary force (Public issue 2013), police brutality is now reminiscent of authoritarian regimes, while the state resorts evermore to harsh repressive action against popular dissent and collective self-organization. there is thus a pressing need to engage with state power, representative institutions and national and global capital. the situation seems to urgently call for a politics of broad alliance building, governmental change, a cogent program of reforms and a cohesive and massive political force that can back up this program and re-order the balance of power in society. in other words, a Gramscian politics of hegemony and the construction of a forceful counter-hegemonic bloc are arguably more than ever required in order to arrest humanitarian disaster and social dislocation and to safeguard, among others, the various ventures in societal self-reconstruction which are now targeted by neoliberal police repression. this is why substantial portions of the electorate and progressive citizens have placed their hopes in a radical left coalition (syRiZa), catapulting it into the main opposition party in the current parliament. However promising the sparks of horizontal and multitudinous self-organization appear to be, the politics of concentration, programmatic unity, vertical representation and institutional power seems to retain its relevance, to say the least.

despite its idiosyncrasies, the Greek case offers just a vivid illustration of outstanding global dilemmas in democratic politics today. Back in 2011, it came to the notice of various observers that the worldwide civil insurgencies that kicked off in tunisia shared a set of singular features. the ‘arab spring’, the spanish indignados, the Greek aganaktismenoi and the occupy Wall street movement appeared to be leaderless and self-organized insurgencies of common citizens. their membership was socially and ideologically heterogeneous. they had no set agenda or ideology. they made intensive use of new technologies of social networking. and they were committed to the direct democratic participation of all in the procedures through which they deliberated and co-ordinated their actions. yet, as one of the foregoing observers, Paul mason, puts it today

disengagement from ideology and structure was to play a major role in the defeat or failure of the progressive movements in 2012 … egypt … is the clearest example of the revenge of the hierarchy: the revenge of the 20th-century ideologies that globalist, secularist netizens had convinced themselves would expire of their own accord. And while there are many specifics to the



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Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today 3

egyptian situation, 2012 closed with a foreboding that maybe the old forces – religion, fascism, stalinist communism, militarism – could revive and conquer elsewhere … now the movements are at a turning point … the real changes desired by those who protest are still only achievable by those prepared to wield hierarchical power: be it egyptian opposition leader mohamed el Baradei, President obama or Greek leftist leader alexis tsipras, waiting nervously in the wings. (mason 2013)

in effect, ‘horizontalism’, the negation of hierarchies, representation and closed ideologies, did not burst upon the scene of movement politics with the ‘arab spring’, the indignados and occupy. they have marked out various collective resistances which stood up against neoliberal globalization over the last 15 years, from the Zapatistas and the seattle protests onwards, giving rise ever since to endless theoretical and practical debates over the import of their ideological and political forms (Baiocchi 2004, day 2005, Holloway 2005, tormey 2005, Robinson and tormey 2007, thomassen 2007, newman 2011).

in early 2013, however, we seemed to stand at a critical juncture. Horizontal, swarm-like struggles for freedom and equality had fizzled out after their global momentum in 2011, the old neoliberal order still survived in a zombie-like manner which remained yet as blood-thirsty as ever, the need for a way out and forward was massively felt, but this way remained always obscure, uncertain, if not blocked forever. For global multitudes aspiring to greater justice and freedom for all, the practical dilemmas and political divisions were nonetheless the same as they have been in the last 15 years. ‘some advocate the necessity of a structured movement, while others propose a free federation of individuals as the best strategic choice’ (campagna and campiglio 2012: 2). contemporary political thought which reflects on the new stirrings and patterns of emancipatory movements reflects similarly (on) this split.

Among high-profile radical intellectuals, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek argue today that in 2011 we witnessed a re-awakening of history, a global popular uprising against the unlimited power of ‘a financial and imperial oligarchy’ (Badiou 2012: 5) which benefits from the regime of ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’ (Badiou 2012: 40, cf. Žižek 2012: 83–9, 127). However, although he recognizes the egalitarian and participatory impulses of these revolts (Badiou 2012: 64, 78–80, cf. Žižek 2012: 74, 77–8, 87–9), Badiou contends that they are still ‘blind, naive, scattered and lacking a powerful concept of durable organization’ (Badiou 2012: 5); ‘these protests are not generating the idea on which basis fidelity to the riot can be organized. Hence a vibrant indecision …’ (Badiou 2012: 47). Žižek reaffirms ‘the fatal weakness of the current protests’: they ‘express an authentic rage that remains unable to transform itself into even a minimal positive program for socio-political change’ (Žižek 2012: 78). To this end, ‘one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and realize them with whatever force may be necessary … communism … a new form of organization, discipline, and hard work’ (Žižek 2012: 82).



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on the other part of the divide, the equally prominent Hardt and negri counter in their recent Declaration (2012) that ‘the movements, in effect, already provide a series of constitutional principles that can be the basis for a constituent process … already becoming part of a new common sense. they are foundational principles that we already take to be inalienable rights’ (Hardt and negri 2012: 7). these include the horizontal organization of the multitude which enables collective participation in decision-making without hierarchies, as well as the pursuit of the ‘common’, beyond both public and private property (Hardt and negri 2012: 5–6).

The volume seeks to think through the foregoing conflicts and quandaries of egalitarian emancipation today by engaging with the debate around the horizontal multitude and the politics of hegemony (concentration of power, unification, representation) in contemporary political theory. The works co-authored by antonio negri and michael Hardt, Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), Commonwealth (2009) and Declaration (2012), stand out as keynote references in this controversy. the two writers are arguably the most popular and influential theorists of autonomous, participatory and non-representative politics in our times. In contrast to other major thinkers, such as Badiou and Žižek, they dwell on the singularity of present-day egalitarian movements and they strive to draw out the distinctive principles and promises that these movements themselves hold out for an effective renewal of democracy beyond the neoliberal order of capital and decaying representative institutions. their understanding of the ‘multitude’ involves a double gesture: on the one hand, they speak of a ‘multitude’ that seemingly is already out there, flesh and bones – from the French Banlieues and the argentinian piqueteros, to the spanish indignados and the us occupiers – and on the other they evoke a ‘multitude’ that ‘exists only on the drawing board’ (Robbins 2010: 10), that is in the making, a political project yet to come.

on the other side, political theorists such as ernesto laclau, chantal mouffe and Slavoj Žižek take their bearings from Lacan’s psychoanalysis, Derrida’s deconstruction, schmitt’s political thought and other sources to put forward counter-hegemonic strategies and formations that could oppose and supplant the global dominance of neoliberal regimes. they try to think anew the modern politics of hegemony, seeking to reconfigure the key categories of sovereignty, representation, state, leadership, power and antagonism which make up its core. they acknowledge the ineradicability of antagonism, power relations and hegemony in the constitution of society, as opposed to the possibility of a world where power relations, hegemony and emerging hierarchies just cease to exist. in this strand of thought, hegemony becomes a core element of any social movement and collective project for radical change and, in effect, of any attempt to theorize political action.

By contrast, the group of thinkers represented by michael Hardt and antonio negri, as well as by Richard day, John Holloway, saul newman and manuel castells, to note but a few, favour non-statist and non-representative forms of democratic politics, which dismiss top-down power relationships and work



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through a multitude of social agents who collaborate equally and directly in open horizontal networks, producing autonomously determined relations, ideas, feelings and programs. they identify these non-hegemonic, egalitarian modes of self-activity as the main innovation of actual democratic praxis and uphold them as efficient processes of social and political transformation.

the guiding intention of the edited volume is to search for the contours of a political praxis that can effectively expand equal freedom in our times by probing recent instances of collective mobilization, such as the indignados and the occupy Wall street movement, by delving into their innovative practices and logics, and by wrestling with relevant theoretical discussions and elaborations. the focus is set on the argument between the autonomous, biopolitical ‘multitude’ of Hardt and negri and the critiques of this conception that have been advanced by Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Žižek in the name of a renewed politics of hegemony or the ‘people’. this debate has provided the stage for some of the most rigorous and insightful attempts of political theory to reflect on the politics of equal freedom in our days.

the horizontal, non-representative networks of autonomous multiplicities, on the one hand, the struggles of popular blocs that claim to represent universal interests and strive to impose their sovereign will, on the other, offer two alternative ways to make sense of democratic agency and the strategies of social transformation today. Which of these divergent schemes sheds more light on salient recent manifestations of democratic militancy? Which of these competing approaches can help to foster egalitarian emancipation across the globe under the particular conditions of our historical present? these questions furnish the pivot of our collection of essays and its concerns. the volume enquires into the relative merits of the contending conceptions of political organization and change; their deeper understandings of subjectivity, agency, society and the world at large; the place of ethics and utopian imagination in their vision of egalitarian politics; their ability to adequately grasp the real passions and energies of social action in our era.

the edited volume features new essays authored by contemporary political theorists who have already made major contributions to the debate or currently pursue critical research in this field: Benjamin Arditi, Richard Day and Nick montgomery, Jodi dean, saul newman, Giorgos Katsambekis, alexandros Kioupkiolis, andy Knott, marina Prentoulis and lasse thomassen, Paul Rekret, and yannis stavrakakis.

Finding our Bearings

the key terms of the debate in contemporary political thought have been set by a number of landmark interventions that we will sketch out here in brief outline as a way of framing the discussion and of opening it up to further elaborations.



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1. Jacques Rancière, ‘The people or the multitudes?’

Responding to a question posed by the French journal ‘multitudes’ about the way he uses ‘the people’, Rancière maintained that this concept is constitutive of politics (Rancière 2010). it is a generic name for processes of political engagement which, by enacting an egalitarian principle, disrupt established modes of social and political representation. For Rancière, politics always involves the opposition of one people to another. this is something that the notion of the multitude fails to grasp because it fears any negatively defined politics. For Rancière, the social body is intrinsically divided and ‘the people’ stages this ineradicable ambiguity. By contrast, the multitude is a subject unmarked by separation. it is a ‘communist’ subject in the sense that it denies politics as a separate sphere. it sees politics as the expression of the nature of everything, the nature of unity. By dismissing the negativity of political subjects, the multitude becomes a power of affirmation akin to Marx’s ‘productive forces’. the multitude is thus part of a long endeavour to broaden that notion, imputing a ‘productive force’ to every form of activity that acts to transform a state of affairs. However, Hardt and Negri’s ethics of productive affirmation seem to clash with the empirical manifestations of various contemporary ‘multitudes’, from crowds fleeing the genocide in Rwanda to Arab crowds applauding the twin towers carnage. ‘are all multitudes “good” or “true” multitudes’? and ‘how is it that the actions of the multitude become political’?

2. Ernesto Laclau, ‘Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?’

ernesto laclau’s argument takes issue with the function of ‘immanence’ in Hardt and negri’s account of the multitude (laclau 2001). He takes his cues from Rancière’s foregoing conception of the ‘people’ as the subject of politics, where ‘politics’ implies a disruptive process which challenges established identities and norms. laclau castigates the absence of negativity, lack, antagonism, exclusion and hegemony in the analysis of Hardt and negri. their notion of a global ‘multitude’ whose unity is grounded in a natural propensity to revolt entails that there is no need to organize dispersed struggles and to strive for a political synthesis of divergent demands. laclau asserts that politics becomes unthinkable in this frame of thought, as Hardt and negri assume the possibility of an unmediated universal agent who is not politically constructed. What is lacking in their work is any theory of political articulation and subjectivity. Hardt and negri construe the enemy (‘empire’) as a general and abstract entity, and they assume that a dispersed multitude will naturally rise up against it. These ideas conflict with a social reality in which all struggles are struggles of concrete social actors vying for particular objects against particular enemies. laclau endorses eventually certain political propositions formulated by Hardt and Negri, but he finds their project inadequate and incoherent as it is relies on theoretical categories which impede its realization.



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3. Giorgio Agamben, ‘The biopolitical fracture of the people’

in an excursus in his Homo Sacer, Giorgio agamben (1998: 176–80) has argued against a conception of the ‘people’ as a unitary subject which stands in opposition to the multitude and its biopolitics. For agamben, the modern people are inherently split and biopolitical from the outset. in modern european languages, ‘people’ names both the sovereign political subject and the class – the poor, the disinherited – which is excluded from politics, de facto or de jure. This semantic ambiguity reflects an oscillation intrinsic to the function of the concept in Western politics: the People as a whole and sovereign political body is opposed to the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy, oppressed bodies. ‘People’ is a polar concept indicating a complex relation between two extremes. In this notion, one can identify the pairs which define, according to Agamben, the original structure of politics: the bare life (‘zoe’) of the excluded people and the political existence (‘bios’) of the included People. the ‘people’ carries thus intrinsically a biopolitical fracture which entails a series of political effects. at the one pole, the People exists, but it is not fully realized and it must be purified through exclusion, blood etc. at the opposite pole, the people must negate itself in order to exist politically.

a civil war divides thus originally the ‘people’ that is bound to oscillate between reaction and progressive revolutions or popular fronts. this struggle between the two ‘peoples’ has gone to extremes in modern times, when the people became the sole sovereign and their misery and exclusion appeared as an intolerable scandal, turning into key political categories. our age is the methodical attempt to overcome the scission by eliminating the excluded people in order to produce a single and unified people. This intent explains both the obsession with development and the extermination of the Jews so as to rid the German Volk of the biopolitical fracture. But the effort to wipe out bare life leads to its opposite, transforming the entire people into a biological body that must be infinitely purified. We need to recognize the fundamental fracture in order to arrest the fluctuation of the people and to put an end to the civil war that divides the cities of earth.

4. Chantal Mouffe, ‘Critique as Counter-Hegemonic Intervention’

setting out from the question ‘What is critique?’, chantal mouffe (2008) draws on her adversarial model of politics and the theory of ‘hegemony’ in order to deconstruct Hardt and negri’s immanentist approach and to propose another model of social critique which is more appropriate for radical politics. mouffe suggests that political opposition by way of multitude’s ‘desertion’ and ‘exodus’ is an inadequate form of political action because it is grounded in a flawed understanding of the political, which underplays the ineradicable dimension of antagonism. By contrast, mouffe maintains that political articulation is a necessary moment of collective action and that we cannot count on the immanent



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or natural propensity of the ‘multitude’ to resist. mouffe puts forward a different strategy of resistance and political change which stems from the different ontology underlying her approach. While the post-hegemonic theory of Hardt and negri assumes the possibility of a world without hegemony, without power relations and social antagonisms, where the ‘multitude’ will achieve an ‘absolute democracy’, mouffe calls into question the very possibility of a fully reconciled society and insists on the ineradicability of antagonism and power.

5. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Deleuze without Negri’

In this argument, Slavoj Žižek (2008: 364–74) questions the sharp dichotomy that negri sets up between political representation and the free, direct expression of multitudinous movements. Žižek contends that an unmediated, full self-government of social movements is impossible, as the gap between power and the multitude is irreducible and cannot be overcome. Popular movements require, in effect, the operation of party and state mechanisms, which provide the necessary framework for collective mobilization by securing social stability. the lesson to be drawn from historical failures such as the cultural Revolution in china is that we should give up on the utopian hope that the ‘expressive creativity’ of collective action could fully dominate the field of politics. We should ask instead what kind of representation should be established in the place of existing liberal-democratic regimes. adequate forms of representation furnish the requisite conditions and make room for the free expression of collective creativity.

Žižek recalls Kautsky and Trotsky’s arguments in the revolutionary literature on ‘dual power’, which claim that the interaction between social self-organization, national assemblies and ‘leaderships’ enables the articulation of social interests. He ends with a plea for a democratic ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, whereby those in power will twist the space of power in favour of the poor and the excluded, following the lead of chávez and morales’ governments in latin america today.

6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘Kairos of the multitude’ and ‘Exodus from the Republic’

in the last volume of their trilogy Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009), Hardt and negri (2009: 165–78, 301–6) responded to various critiques of the ‘multitude’ by affirming that the latter is not an immanent force which emerges spontaneously from within the capitalist empire and will achieve automatically its exodus and the creation of a new autonomous world. the ‘absolute democracy’ of the multitude is a political project which calls for the construction of a collective subject and its political organization in order to bring forth political events. the multitude is proposed now as an adequate concept for the political articulation of a project of emancipation under the conditions of biopolitical production, where hierarchical structures with centralized leadership and substantial unity are no longer desirable or effective.



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important objections to their idea of the multitude have focussed on the capacity of this collective body to engage in sustained and efficient political action or they have questioned the emancipatory character of the multitude, claiming that it is fully incorporated into the contemporary mechanisms of capitalist domination. To such criticisms Hardt and Negri answer, first, that the multitude actively constitutes itself as a horizontal multiplicity which is capable of making decisions and of taking action without being directed by a hegemonic force. evidence for this can be found in the actual collaboration of horizontal autonomous networks in biopolitical production which generates new ideas, relations and programs. the particular forms of organization that will be instituted by the multitude will ultimately demonstrate its egalitarian, democratic nature. yet, the production of the common (of shared ideas, relations, affects etc.) through horizontal collective interaction in our biopolitical economy already indicates how full equality, freedom and plurality are intrinsic to the constitution of the multitude and the further development of its productive forces.

New Interventions in the Debate: The Contributions of the Volume

Benjamin arditi, in his contribution,1 sets off from laclau and mouffe’s early elaborations to challenge their post-marxist hegemonic account of politics. arditi maintains that their re-reading of hegemony eventually elevates the latter from the status of a form of politics among others to the very essence of politics as such. this becomes more obvious in laclau’s later solo work. arditi argues that the absence of an outside-of-hegemony eventually renders it the only possible horizon of politics, defying its own contingency. Moreover the conflation of hegemony with politics seems to close the conceptual space for any other kind of politics that does not entail hegemonic practices/articulation. in his effort to illustrate alternative modes of political articulation outside or beyond hegemony, he draws on lyotard’s notion of linking and utilizes examples such as the argentinian uprisings of december 2001 or the theme of the ‘new international’ as formulated by Jacques derrida, to sketch out what he calls ‘post-hegemony’ or networked politics. He finally turns to rival theoretico-political paradigms and projects offered by theorists such as Beasley-murray, Hardt and negri, virno, Holloway and Hakim Bey to further consolidate his argument. viral and networked forms of politics become here key moments in the conception of a politics beyond (and within) hegemony.

day and montgomery construct their chapter as a letter to a Greek anarchist so as to render elaborate theoretical questions more accessible to those who mobilize for radical social and political change in their everyday lives. their main argument

1 An earlier version of Benjamin Arditi’s chapter has already appeared in print (arditi 2007) but the author has updated and revised his essay for this volume.



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is ‘that neither the People nor the multitude is appropriate’ for understanding and theorizing the collective actors involved in the latest prominent movements across the world, but also in the ones to come. What they propose instead is a theoretical reevaluation of both People(s) and multitude(s) from an indigenized, feminized and localized perspective. More specifically, they delve into the ambiguities of the multitude, as seen from an indigenist perspective. against Hardt and negri’s dismissal of identities, they maintain that ‘certain identities (such as indigenous nationalism) can be vehicles for radical transformation and exodus from empire’. in their view, People and multitude ‘are more or less identical’, since – one way or the other – they ultimately remain ‘excessively hegemonic in their orientation’, limiting thus the scope for alternative possibilities. according to day and montgomery, what we need is an open ethos of agonistic critique that can be receptive to all kinds of subversive practices, even if that means rejecting our own political or (meta)theoretical ‘dream’.

Jodi dean, for her part, makes the case that the ‘people as the rest of us’ should be put forward as the subject of a renewed idea of communism.2 this would realize the sovereignty of the people as a divided and divisive collective agent, whose lives and work are now exploited and expropriated by financial capital. compared to the ‘proletariat’, the ‘people as the rest of us’ is a more pertinent designator of the collective subject of anti-capitalist struggle today. Production in many Western countries has shifted away from industry and manufacture towards services, organized labour has collapsed and many rich individuals today do not possess the means of production. dean argues also against the pertinence of Hardt and negri’s ‘multitude’ on the grounds that this stagesan all-inclusive subject at the cost of antagonism. By contrast, Rancière’s conception of the people as ‘the-part-of-no-part’ designates an excluded or oppressed collective agent who interrupts the established social order. accordingly, ‘the people as the rest of us’ challenge the hegemonic structures, and their inclusion requires the creation of a different social order.

class struggle remains the essential name of the fundamental social antagonism between the rich and the rest of us. However, this antagonism is no longer integrated into a teleological narrative which made communism the future of humanity. the sovereignty of the people is always uncertain and incomplete, stemming from what we do in creating our world rather than from any objective and full knowledge. and ‘the many’ is always open and cannot totalize itself in a fully present communal subject. agamben has shown this non-identity of the people, although he tends to confound the opposition within the people. the challenge for an antagonistic people who pursue their collective self-governance ‘is in the development of enduring forms of egalitarian association through which we can make ourselves into the people we want to be’.

2 Jodi Dean’s chapter is a revised version of a chapter in her last book, The Communist Horizon (2012: 69–118).



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saul newman, in his contribution, sets out to unsettle the various divisions that have been articulated around the multitude/people discord (hegemony/biopolitics, transcendence/immanence), claiming that today we must think beyond such dualisms in order to properly grasp the new autonomous forms of politics. as most other contributors, he takes his empirical bearings from contemporary prominent mobilizations across the globe, like the tahrir event in egypt or the occupy movement in the us, which are seen as paradigmatic of a new politics of autonomy that charts an alternate path outside representative politics and the institutions of the state. newman suggests that in these movements one sees neither the People awaiting a leader, nor the biopolitical multitudes, but something entirely different and new. Here he draws upon postanarchist theory and the notions of ‘exodus’ and ‘insurrection’ to explore the implications of this new form of politics, which he paradoxically designates as ‘a politics of anti-politics’. He concludes by suggesting that novel forms of mobilizations, like the occupy movement, can give us a glimpse ‘of an autonomous political life which will be our future terrain’.

yannis stavrakakis takes issue with the biopolitical argument that has been advanced against Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony, first, from the perspective of the real of class struggle, and, then, in terms of habitus and affect. in sketching the genealogy of this line of critique, he starts off from the first criticisms addressed to post-Marxism and discourse theory in the 1980s and early 1990s by marxist commentators like norman Geras, to move on to contemporary critics like Richard day, scott lash and Jon Beasley-murray, who attempt to challenge the theory of hegemony on the grounds of a ‘revenge of the real’ variously conceived. after drawing an outline of the various critiques against laclau and mouffe, he then moves on to a deconstructive reading of the arguments put forth by the advocates of post-hegemony. He endeavors, finally, to dismantle post-hegemonic discourses by highlighting the latest developments in laclau’s theory and his embrace of the affective side of hegemony and lacanian theory.

Paul Rekret shifts the debate to a deep ontological terrain. He suggests that the decline of working class struggles in an era of ‘general retreat’ has driven both negri and laclau to plunge into political ontology, assuming that our capitalist present makes manifest the latent ontological trends and grounds of the past. their work articulates these underlying processes in divergent manners, positing them as the basis of a potentially expanded antagonism in our times. laclau lays out an ontology of discourse whereby any hegemonic formation is politically constructed, partial, precarious and open to conflict and change. Negri puts forward the multitude as a fundamental constituent power, the source of all social construction, whose urge for freedom and creativity exceeds any constituted order. contra laclau, there is already a direct antagonism between the constituent force of the horizontal multitude and the constituted power of capital which requires no articulation. Both thinkers advance ontological axioms which lie beyond verification.

moreover, insofar as their alternative approaches to social struggle are fully immersed in contending ontologies and the debate between them is conducted on



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this deep-lying level, two adverse consequences follow. First, there is no possibility of compromise or reconciliation between their conflicting political orientations, contrary to what has been claimed and pursued by certain theorists, including some contributors to this volume. second, all the socio-political phenomena that cannot be grasped in the terms of their ontological accounts are condemned to obscurity.

in his contribution, alexandros Kioupkiolis argues that the various recent proclamations of the death of ‘hegemony’ construed as the politics of identity, ideology, totality, the party and the state apparatus, representation and hierarchical, top-down power, are premature. egalitarian democratic struggles should drastically reconfigure rather than simply discard basic axes of hegemonic politics, while the latter should be recast beyond recognition in order to assume the form of a multitude that resists hierarchies, homogeneity and ideological closure. to promote radical equality and freedom in our times, the aim should be an agonistic hegemony of the multitude that strives for openness, plurality, singularity and direct social self-direction, but exerts power against the various forces of domination and does not repress its representative functions, instituting political processes of open representation that are accessible to all. ‘the challenge we are facing is to bind together the energetic and direct democratic “contraction” of the people with political processes of accountability and institutional control by society at large. through such procedures, the dismantling of alienated sovereign representation and the institution of assemblies of collective self-governance open to all could be coupled with circuits of communication and answerability to social majorities.’

Giorgos Katsambekis, in his turn, intervenes in the debate between hegemonic and post-hegemonic conceptions of political agency by laying out an argument on two levels. First, on a theoretical level, he seeks to engage with the controversy between laclau and mouffe, on the one hand, and Hardt and negri, on the other, introducing a deconstructive reading of what he regards as a restrictive binarism between ‘the people’ and the ‘multitude’. He maintains that this opposition, especially when taken in an absolute sense, prevents us from tracing out possible lines of convergence between the two approaches, since it supresses the possibility of a mutual engagement or mutual ‘contaminations’. He goes on, then, to test his theoretical arguments by way of an empirical analysis which explores the movement of the aganaktismenoi in Greece. in his view, this movement is exemplary of what he calls a ‘multitudinous people’, a notion through which he seeks to work out an alternative to false dilemmas and oppositions.

in his chapter, andy Knott explores political space and representation in light of contemporary theoretical debates and political movements. drawing on his discussion of uK uncut and occupy, he makes the case that both laclau and Hardt and negri capture aspects of recent political developments, but laclau offers a more compelling account of the actual expansion of political space and the new, more complex practices of representation. laclau dwells on the pluralization of public spaces and the partial representations of the social, which are partial because there is no unified, transparent ground of society as a whole, and plural because there are many public spaces and novel political forms of representation beyond the



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party. to become politically effective, such partial representations should coalesce into a ‘chain of equivalences’. this welds them together and partly represents them as a whole, in the way that a chain of different demands can constitute the politics of a unified people against the ‘establishment’ through an ‘empty signifier’ (‘justice’, ‘democracy’ etc.) which constructs and represents their unity. Hardt and negri, by contrast, speak for a politics beyond representation and dismiss the notion of representations in the plural. Representation is inherently tied up with the transcendent one of the modern sovereign by way of a ‘disjunctive synthesis’, which ‘connects the citizens to government and at the same time separates them from it’.

uK uncut shows, however, that contemporary movements provide sites for direct participation while also retaining a representative function which expands and pluralizes public space in laclau’s terms. they seek to offer an alternative forum of representation that will affect political debate but they also intervene in traditional loci of representation, trying to influence government and politicians. occupy, on the other hand, illustrates internally a leaderless, horizontal, networked mobilization which is opposed to formal representation and assumes the ‘multitude’ form theorized by Hardt and negri. externally, though, its encampments and participants claimed to represent the interests of the 99 per cent of the population, as their central slogan neatly indicates.

Prentoulis and thomassen engage with the ‘square movements’ in Greece and spain, setting out from the observation that these mobilizations aspired to alternative forms of economic structure and political organization, using ‘autonomy’ and ‘direct democracy’ as a counterpoint to defunct parliamentary politics and the traditional left. this revived an old debate between marxists and anarchists over the most pertinent ways to pursue socio-political and economic change, pitting autonomous, decentralized relations against hegemonic agents and representational hierarchies. Prentoulis and thomassen make the case that both ‘autonomy’ and ‘hegemony’ are necessary to grasp and promote emancipation, dismissing any either/or dilemma. For them, the key question is what form hegemony after Gramsci and multiplicity after anarchism will take, and they explore it by grappling with the autonomous (Hardt and negri) and hegemonic (laclau) strands in contemporary post-marxism along with an inquiry into the square movements.

Hardt and negri denounce representation and hegemony as one-way relations that leave the multitude passive. For laclau, representation and hegemony are necessary conditions for the construction of a collective will and political antagonism, but they always fail, so there is always an unstable negotiation between verticality and horizontality. looking into the communication networks and the organization structures of the indignados and aganaktismenoi movements, Prentoulis and thomassen argue likewise that there is a mutual contamination of autonomy and (non-populist) hegemony, horizontality and verticality. spaces of resistance must be instituted and defended. exclusions, hierarchies and privileged centres in the networks follow as a result. But these are constantly challenged by



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the protesters’ discourses of autonomy and horizontality. Horizontal and vertical processes take place within the horizon of laclau’s hegemony, but horizontal democratic mobilizations may indeed radicalize the direction of democratic politics.

No Final Conclusion – Back to Politics!

after the apparent eclipse of the ‘square movements’ in 2012, at the time of writing the final touches (June 2013) we are witnessing a resurgence of autonomous popular resistances across the globe, from turkey to Greece and Brazil. their occurrence should serve as a foremost critical reminder to political theory and practice, and we would like to end on this inconclusive note. direct social mobilizations re-emerge frequently in history as unpredictable ruptures that upset the normal order of things and their linear reproduction. Hence, no putative final verdicts about the efficacy, the prospects and the forms of social movements and radical politics are certain to withstand the test of political temporality. this critical note calls on us to infuse political thought with some commendable political virtues: modesty, uncertainty, receptivity to difference and readiness to revise our theses in response to the challenges of kairos.

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Introduction: Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: Responding to the Challenges of...

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