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.

On 17 September 2012, Occupy Wall Street celebrated its first anniversary. In spite of the usual problems facing bottom-up political activism in the long term, on which Pamela Brown reported a few months ago, OWS is still alive and kicking. Protest is clearly ‘in’, as the global protests on 14 November 2012 also demonstrated. But social movements and political protest have also made it to the screen, as memories of protest and rebellion reverberated both at the 69^th Venice Film Festival and at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, with Olivier Assayas’ movie about the French 1968 protests (Après mai), Robert Redford’s interpretation of a former Weather Underground member in The company you keep, and Shola Lynch’s documentary about the black civil rights activist Angela Davis, Free Angela & All Political Prisoners.

Characteristic of OWS as well as other recent protests across the world, notably the Arab Spring, is the role of social media and the subsequent global reach of the protests. In Why it’s Kicking off Everywhere. The New Global Revolutions (Verso, 2012), BBC Newsnight economics editor and journalist Paul Mason narrates the course of events in both the Arab world and in a number of European countries since the start of the financial crisis, and analyzes the role and impact of social media in these protests. Starting with the Tahrir Square uprisings, “a revolution planned on Facebook, organized on Twitter and broadcast to the world via YouTube,” Mason takes us back to the 2008 clashes in Greece and Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ in 2009, when the images of a dying Neda Agha-Soltan – discussed recently on this blog by Lisa Lipscomb – made it across the globe in a matter of minutes. Through citizen journalism, Neda became a “global icon” and a martyr, provoking a “thread of solidarity and collective mourning” both online and in the streets (see also Aleida and Corinna Assmann’s chapter in Memory in a Global Age).

In fact, globalization processes and technological developments have changed our experience and sensibility of time and space, giving rise to a “memory boom” where – in the attempt to regain a sense of community belonging – we turn to memory. Both individual and collective memories are, however, increasingly structured within national and global frames and shaped by new media technologies. As Lipscomb demonstrates in her article, these allow people not only to witness and share (global) events in a more direct and personal manner, but also to produce memory themselves, e.g. by shooting home videos. In other words, new media empower people by ‘arming them with advanced means to construct collective identities’ (José van Dijck, Mediated Memory in the Digital Age, Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 172).

These bottom-up, horizontal forms of communication offer an interactive relation to the past, present and future, which emerges at the interface of individual/local and collective/global experience, and in the mutual shaping of media and memory. The ‘mediated memories’ that are thus produced travel across borders and circulate beyond nation-states to be reconfigured – transnationally and digitally – in a global and digital memory field, as with the mobile witnessing of Neda’s death, but we may also think of the 2005 London bombings, where mobile camera phones provided personal, communicative memory of the incidents by survivors and witnesses (see Anna Reading’s article in a special issue of Memory Studies).

The strength of social media lies not only in its capacity to create mediated memories, though: they have also moved what Mason calls ‘the collective mental arena’ (p. 137) out into the real world. Put differently, mass audiences are constituted through connectivity rather than “collectivity,” so that remembering becomes “a matter of navigation in and through emergent and shifting complexities of connections in and through media” (Andrew Hoskins in his introduction to the above mentioned special issue, p. 272). Indeed, the role of Facebook and Twitter in political and social life is ever more important, both in terms of expressing solidarity and forging (online) bonds, and in terms of denouncing violence or injustice, for example by reporting or shooting it with a (video) camera or a mobile phone. I was, for example, stunned to see pictures on Facebook of wounded Palestinian citizens in a hospital in Gaza, after Israeli air raids in early November 2012, including the shocking photograph of a man carrying away a small boy whose leg had just been blown off. Public opinion is also often measured according to what people say on Twitter, a modern ‘vox populi’ where citizens can finally vent their emotions or attack politicians and policy makers.

Has the web then substituted more traditional forms of protest, such as demonstration marches, occupations, sit-ins? If the answer is yes, this may not necessarily be a bad thing, in my opinion. After all, events are ever more ‘media events’ and ‘digital events’, and experiences are no longer exclusively local or global.

Elzbieta Matynia is a historian of ideas and a sociologist of culture, with special interests in performance both in theater and beyond.  She has written incisively about the making of democracy and works actively in the support of free intellectual exchange.

She, the director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies of the New School, is currently a Fulbright research  scholar in Johannesburg, South Africa. We at the Center saw her off at our annual beginning of the year party, as I reported in a previous post.  I asked her to periodically send us reports as she researches the tragedy of the assassination of Chris Hani, a former head of the South African Communist Party (aligned with the African National Congress) and a widely admired anti-apartheid leader seen as a potential successor to Nelson Mandela. I have just received her first impressions.

Elzbieta and I first met in her native Poland when I was studying theater, an artistic form that created cultural and social alternatives in a repressive state. It’s strange to receive her note. Now she is in the position I once was, an outsider trying to make sense of a difficult political situation.  Her most recent book, Performative Democracy, is in dialogue with my most recent, The Politics of Small Things.  She starts, appropriately, as Tocqueville or Montesquieu would, by setting the stage with a description of the physical environment, linking it to the hopes and fears of a country undergoing significant political challenges. – Jeff

Do you want to experience the most spectacular spring ever?  Come to Johannesburg in late September: you can smell it, you can see it, and you can almost hear it. The African jasmine is in bloom, the fragrance of its star-like flowers fills every street. You can see the buds of camellias in the parks, and hear people talking about the purple-blue flowers of the big jacaranda trees that are about to provide this vigorous city with a brief but tranquil blue tapestry.

At the same time one senses a nostalgia for the recent winter that brought an even greater joy to this city and to this country, with the remarkable spirit of unity that blossomed during the World Cup, when the city and the country across racial and class divides reveled in being the center of the soccer world, proud of being a world class host for a global media event.

But now the political scene is getting increasingly bitter, and for many, worrisome. It is not easy for a visitor to make sense of it, but last week’s Durban conference of the African National Congress, the 98-year-old liberation movement and ruling party, forced some issues to the surface, brought them into sharper focus, made them for the moment at least, less confusing.

Julius Malema visits Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe

Although the conference allowed the media only limited access to its proceedings, it became clear that over the 16 years since the dismantling of apartheid, its leading actor, the ANC, faces a startling challenge from its own children, the ANC Youth League. Its controversial leader, Julius Malema, who was only twelve when the negotiated settlement with the apartheid regime was reached, is now the most divisive figure in the party. Though he never went to college, his skillful use of both irreverent and vitriolic language (recently directed against the ANC and its allies), and his dubious activities (a trip to Zimbabwe last March to lend support to Robert Mugabe’s policies) made him a popular public figure for some, and a dangerous demagogue for others. There is no doubt that his rebellious, populist performance (demanding legislation for the state to expropriate private property on behalf of the people), though still formally within the ANC framework, contributes greatly to the fragmentation of the party. He himself, flamboyantly arrogant, demands a radical transformation of the ANC, with a greater presence of the younger generation in its leadership.  Observing him one wonders how a high-school dropout could have arrived at such a powerful position. What makes people listen to him? President Jacob Zuma, who is also known for his populist rhetoric, presented himself at the Durban conference as a responsible leader and statesman. In fact many commentators talk about it as a struggle between the “juniors” and the “seniors”.

Though disciplined harshly by Zuma at the conference, Malema and his “young guns” managed to put on the agenda — uninvited and unwelcomed by the ANC elders – a push for the nationalization of mines.  At the moment Zuma seems to be still in charge of the situation, as everybody took note of his “have had enough” remark  and his closing words at the conference on Friday (9/24): Anyone who crosses the line in the ANC will “face the consequences”.

For a sympathetic outsider who is trying to make sense of it all, these are worrisome developments, and not only because they confirm the feeling that there seems to be a good climate in various parts of the world — from Global North to Global South — for effective demagoguery, the appeal to emotions and prejudices. What worries me is that here in South Africa they are combined with fairly advanced demands to establish control over the media, whose freedom has been seen as part of the problem. In fact a large part of the Durban conference was devoted to a discussion on setting up a special statutory body to hold media accountable for their reporting. And a majority of the delegates enthusiastically supported it.

For a sympathetic outsider who has herself lived in a system that presented itself as democratic centralism, the demands for party discipline are worrisome, even if they are meant to rein in political lunatics like Malema.  Today at breakfast a friend told me about the Zulu concept of hlonipha that is deeply ingrained in South African culture.  It denotes respect, especially respect for the elders to ensure dignity and stability at home. Young people should not criticize their elders, no matter how many wives they have or how many lucrative positions they hold. And they should not criticize the Party.

As somebody who cares about the ways in which local cultural paradigms and local knowledge are taken into account and engaged in strengthening and legitimizing political practices in new democracies, I do worry. I worry that the culturally embedded ethos of hlonipha may exclude debate, dialogue, and a free media, while supporting the newer, imported, and deeply anti-democratic  principle of democratic centralism and media censorship announced in Zuma’s introduction of  “revolutionary discipline”.

I am quite ambivalent about the Tea Party.  While I am appalled by some of the slogans and signs that have appeared in Tea Party rallies, I am convinced that this is a genuine social movement, a politically significant instance of the politics of small things, a political movement concerned with fundamental principles, engaged in a great debate about both the pressing issues of the day and the enduring problems of American political life.  As a registered Democrat and as a strong supporter of President Obama and his program, I am pleased that the actions of the movement may have made the Republican landslide in the upcoming elections less momentous, as the talking heads are now speculating, although I am still concerned that the movement may have given wind to the rightward shift of public opinion.  The emotional, irrational and often purposely ignorant political expression in Tea Party demonstrations is of deep concern, but I think the strong expression of fundamental political principles can and should be seriously considered and confronted.  I am unsure about what the Tea Party Movement’s impact on American public life in the very near term, i.e. the midterm elections, and in the long term, i.e. in the reinvention of American political culture will be.  As I have been trying to sort this all out, I am reminded of the insights of an old friend, Alberto Melucci, an Italian sociologist who presciently understood the meaning of social movements in the age of internet and mobile communications, before these new media were common.

The Theoretical Perspective of a Friend

Alberto Melucci

In series of important books, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age, and Playing the Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society, Alberto explored what it means to become involved in a social movement in our times.  He understood that the means of social movements may be even more important than their ends, and that they make possible a new sense of self and self purpose for their participants to emerge.  Further and most significant politically, they can change the basic social codes.  Alberto was mostly thinking about progressive new social movements, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights and the like.  But I think his approach illuminates the new conservatism of the Tea Party quite well.  He died prematurely on September 12, 2001, not observing the strange turn in global politics since that very day.  But he would have understood the Tea Party, as a social movement concerned with primary values, unconcerned with electoral priorities, forging new, in this case, reactionary, identities and values, a movement that is very much a product and a challenge of our times.

Challenging Codes

The Tea Party Movement makes its participants feel good about themselves and gives them a sense of purpose, as the participants frequently report on movement blogs and to reporters.  The Movement seeks to “take our country back,” supporting and attacking politicians of both parties.  They have specific ends against bail outs and the government handouts to the undeserving, from the poor to the mighty banks and corporations of Wall Street and Detroit.  They are for limited government and the constitution, as they understand it.  They imagine together a new future based on an idealized past and in their movement they enact their future.

The movement activists and candidates sometime seem to hurt Republicans more than Democrats, an outcome that seems to be irrational given their own voting records, but this is not as significant to them as one would expect.  They are concerned about a vision of America between its past and its future and their place in this America, and worry that this vision to which they are deeply committed is being lost, taken away politically by politicians they revile, and overlooked by too many of their fellow citizens.  When the fundamental concern with the American code is kept in mind, the Tea Party Activists are not as irrational as most outside commentators, of the left and the right, think.

September versus November

Karl Rove got caught up in this Primary Night last Tuesday.   In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, they agreed on fundamental conservative issues.  Nothing in their discussion suggested a questioning of the principles and practices of the Tea Party.  But Rove dared to frankly criticize the candidate who won her primary in Delaware due to Tea Party activism and support, Christine O’Donnell.  She was the candidate of true conviction against a moderate, but her odd behavior despite her stated purity would lead to electoral defeat.  “It does conservatives little good to support candidates who at the end of the day while they may be conservative in their public statements do not [evince] the characteristics of rectitude, truthfulness and sincerity and character that the voters are looking for.”  Rove maintained, frankly concluding that “This is not a race we’re going to be able to win.” (link)   For this assessment he was severely attacked by Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the full staff of Fox News, forcing him to retreat from his initial assessment. (link)

Rove was caught between the calculation of a political analyst and of a political partisan.  Since he cares most about the politics of the day, he could not be content with pronounced conservative purity.   He, on the right, along with most objective and Democratic partisan observers, noted that the Tea Party victory in the Delaware primary greatly increased the Democrats chances of maintaining their Senate majority.

But those who seek to take their country back, those more interested in the long march of changing the political culture, changing the code of politics as Alberto Melucci would put it, would prefer resolute cultural battle (most prominently Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, link).    Their movement is their message. For them the victory in September is more important than the increased chances of a defeat in November.