I am on the road this month, now in Paris. For the previous three weeks, I have been teaching a course, “Social Movements, Publics and Politics,” at The New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. I also squeezed in, the weekend before last, work in Sofia, Bulgaria, consulting, along with Sandrine Kott, on a European Union research project “Regime and Society in Eastern Europe.” The research was from and on Bulgaria (Ivajlo Znepolski), Germany (Thomas Lindenberger), Hungary (Adam Takacs), and Poland (Dariusz Stola), studying “State and Society in Eastern Europe, 1956 – 1987.” While in Sofia, I had an opportunity to spend a few hours exploring the protests there, a chance to observe an exciting social movement confronting seemingly intractable problems. The protest, the research and the teaching were interestingly related: Here are some preliminary notes on the protest, as illuminated by my seminar and the reports of the European scholars.

I was at the protest on a Sunday, a slow day apparently. The protest routine: daily, people gather in front of the government building at 6:00 PM. There is a human ecology in the gathering. Friends meet each other at agreed upon places in the plaza and then march together to the Parliament building, attempting to disrupt the politics as usual. Informal groups with peer pressure keep the protests going. People come a number of days a week, visible to their friends and colleagues, as well as the nation and beyond: small group social interaction links with and fortifies the large social protest.

During the week, people gather in large numbers after work; on weekends, a smaller group gets together, perhaps a thousand or two on the Sunday I was there. Yet, it still was impressive, enthusiastic chanting and whistling, inventive placards, coupled with interesting discussions. I was there on the thirty seventh day of the demonstration, and it has continued (on day forty, there was violence). Through a few quick exchanges, I felt I had a sense of the general contours and direction of the movement.

The protesters are outraged by Parliamentary machinations, demanding the resignation of the present government, calling for new elections. They are trying to break a cycle of corruption, which has led to political and economic stagnation, and national impoverishment. Quite obvious to me: Bulgaria in 1989 had a much stronger economy than Poland. The reversal is now striking. Everywhere in Sofia, I could perceive the legacies of communism. Wroclaw more resembles Paris in comparison.

There are concerns that the present government is leaning towards Russia, away from Europe: thus along with the Bulgarian flag, the European Union flag is everywhere. There are hopes that if they keep the daily ritual going that in September, unions would join in. After the police broke up a protest blocking the Parliament building last Wednesday, there is hope that the European Union will somehow do something.

The protesters want to put an end to the national decline. Earlier in the year, there were anti-austerity protests, sparked by electricity price increases, leading to the resignation of the right of center government and elections in May that were quite inconclusive. Now, the socialist led governing coalition, including the socialists and the Turkish minority party (combining to have the support of 120 seats in the 240 seat parliament), cynically governs with the tacit support of a xenophobic nationalist party.

Cynicism provoked protest: the appointment of media mogul Delyan Peevski as head of the national security agency, the appointment of an oligarch to oversee, among other things, oligarchic corruption. Although he has resigned in response, the demonstrations continue, demanding new elections, seeking to form an electoral coalition of small parties who did not make it into parliament, hoping that somehow the distance between the political class and the broad public will be diminished.

Viewed from afar, the situation looks hopeless. The regime and society appear to be worlds apart, no matter which party is dominant. A rotation of leadership changes little. No election result would appear to have the potential to break Bulgaria’s downward spiral, supported by corruption, center, right and center. But looking closely, as was the common theme of my seminar and the EU research team, there is overlooked promise.

I was very impressed by the form of the protest. The demonstration has become a daily ritual for tens of thousands of citizens. They don’t all attend every day, nor do they bodily occupy a space, day and night (though there is a small occupation across from parliament). Rather they have made protest a regular aspect of Sofia’s everyday life. The regularity of the protests reminds me of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in their struggle against the Argentine Junta and its dirty war, although these protesters have no claim to martyred status. They meet daily rather than weekly. Everyday ordinary participation demonstrates democracy. Indeed it may help form democracy.

In my course and in my commentary with the European researchers on the topic of state and society in the good old bad days around the old Soviet bloc, I emphasized a key proposition of Hannah Arendt, my favorite political thinker. She maintains that in politics the means are an important part of the end. The way we do politics, the way we appear when we act politically, is an important consequential political fact. With this in mind, the creativity of the protesters, the way they are centered on the problem of politic cynicism and corruption, was very impressive. A young woman told me that in her judgment as the protests began she thought that a key sign of the seriousness of the protest would be if older people joined in. The presence of young and old together was quite striking. The fact that a medieval historian who clearly looked westward for his political inspiration and was liberal in the European sense of the term, underscored the importance of unions joining the protests, suggested to me a view of the common good that went beyond narrow orientation or interests. While the corruption is found across the political spectrum, this appears to be matched by protests that are across the social and political spectrums. A new alternative public is in formation.

The two key propositions of my Wroclaw course: the new “new social movements,” the movements of and after 2011, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and beyond, are distinctive in the way that they constitute diverse independent publics, and a key to their success is maintaining the diversity: something that tragically has not happened in the Arab world. In Bulgaria, there still is promise.

In the EU research project, an overall basic finding is that social changes, changes in the way people live and interact with each other, have a way of shaping even the most repressive regimes. Regime action has a way of creating social forces beyond their control (Stola). Expertise has a way of significantly limiting political – ideological mandates (Lindenberger), and philosophy and critical thinking are imperfectly controlled by ideology and political repression: cultural creativity has a way of persisting even under the most repressive conditions (Tokacs and Znepolski). While I lack the knowledge to know how this might lead to the next move in Bulgarian development, the social vitality, good humor and openness of the protesters, combined with their resolute democratic action, provide grounds for hope. The sort of creative political action I observed long ago on the Polish political scene (before, during and after Solidarność) is now observable in Bulgaria.

I am preparing my class on the new “new social movements” this week. I will be giving it at The New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland in July. I am excited and challenged about the course, happy to be returning to our institute, which has a long history, related to the topic of my class. The seminar, also, will be an attempt to thoroughly address the complex issues in my May Day post.

In that post I noted the media obstacles OWS faced on May 1^st. Neither the serious, nor the sensational media portrayed a meaningful popular demonstration, a national commemoration of May Day demanding social justice. While some might see this as a kind of conspiracy, I, as a matter of principle, don’t, or rather won’t until I consider alternative explanations. In the summer seminar, I hope to explore the alternatives with an international student body. Here’s an overview, which is informing my preparation.

Social movements have generally been understood in two ways. They have been seen as non-institutional means of a group of people to pursue their common interests and achieve their shared goals. The traditional archetype for this is the labor movement. Alternatively, social movements have been seen as not only interest focused, but as well, and perhaps more importantly, as non-institutional means for the formation of a group with common identities, concerned with supporting the identities and acting upon them. Civil rights movements, the women, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender movements, environmental movements and the like, are understood as being newer kinds of movements, “new social movements.” To tell the truth, I never quite understood why the new social movements were considered new. They, like labor movements, emerged in the nineteenth century. They, like the traditional movements, pursue interests. And the traditional movements, like the new ones, are about identity. Yet, I know this is not central. Rather we need to note that new and old movements are not only about the pursuit of interests. Movements are important ends in themselves for the people who create and are active in them.

And clearly, this is still the case. Social activists in Tahrir Square in Cairo and in Zuccotti Park in New York have specific ends, and the demonstrations in these places also create identities that are as significant as the ends the demonstrators are seeking. But something else is important, quite apparent in these and other such places around the globe today. The coming together based on some shared concerns with different identities and even different goals has been a common feature of the movements in our most recent past. The demonstrators occupy a space and the way they do so, the way they interact with each other is an important end of the movement. The form of interaction, as well as the identity and interest content, is central.

Coptic Christians and Muslims protect each other with mutual respect in Egyptian demonstrations in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt. Radical anarchists and conventional trade unionists hung out at Zuccotti Park last fall and in Union Square on May Day. Their political ends may be different, radical critics of the American Dream, along with those who want to keep the Dream alive, but they have figured out ways to find common purpose and joint actions. The new “new social movements” are first about that commonality, the creation of independent public space, in New York and beyond, people with differences working together in the name of the 99%, creating an alternative free public space.

Communicating from this space to the dominant media and mainstream publics is a fundamental challenge, now evident for the Tahrir democratic activists and OWS. The quality of their public character, its social media constitution that facilitated the formation of the movement, also presents problems for moving beyond the newly constituted public space. Leading spokespersons are not evident, a strength but also a weakness, nor are clear ends and demands forthcoming. The new sensibility and purpose of the new “new movements” can get lost, as it was in New York on May Day, as is happening as the Egyptians are about to go to the polls to elect a president.

The summer seminar will be an exploration of this. We will try to discover any common cause of the movements. Is it the state of global capital and the breakdown of neo-liberalism? While I have my doubts, we will discuss the works of observers suggesting this. I think that there is a generational dimension to the emergence of the new movements: we will discuss my depiction of the “wisdom of youth” and reconsider the sociology of generations. We will analyze precedents such as the American civil rights movement and Solidarność in Poland. The old distinction between new and traditional social movements revealed as much about the old as the new, and we will consider the way the creation of independent publics were central to movements past as well as movements now.

And herein lies the irony of the course being given in Poland. It is the fruit of the alternative public of a major social movement past. The Democracy and Diversity Institute is an outgrowth of the Solidarność underground. Members of The New School, led by Democracy and Diversity founder and director, Elzbieta Matynia, and I worked with Adam Michnik, the great Polish “dissident” intellectual and later editor of Poland’s major newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, on a clandestine “Democracy Seminar” in Budapest, Warsaw and New York in the 1980s. The seminar was a small activity of the underground Solidarność cultural world. The Democracy and Diversity Institute built upon its legacy. I have always thought of my class as being explicitly a continuation of this activity, starting my classes where the discussions of the Democracy Seminar left off. This history continues in July, taking on very new concerns and experiences.