Chapter 1: Subjective Figures of the Crisis ... - Negri in English

These movements do, of course, share a series of
characteristics, the most obvious of which is the strategy of
encampment or occupation. A decade ago the alterglobalization
movements were nomadic. They migrated from one summit
meeting to the next, illuminating the injustices and
antidemocratic nature of a series of key institutions of the global
power system: the World Trade Organization, the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the G8 national leaders,
among others. The cycle of struggles that began in 2011, in
contrast, is sedentary. Instead of roaming according to the
calendar of the summit meetings, these movements stay put and,
in fact, refuse to move. Their immobility is partly due to the fact
that they are so deeply rooted in local and national social issues.
The movements also share their internal organization as a
multitude. The foreign press corps searched desperately in
Tunisia and Egypt for a leader of the movements. During the
most intense period of the Tahrir Square occupation, for
example, they would each day presume a different figure was the
real leader: one day it was Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize
winner, the next day Google executive Wael Ghonim, and so
forth. What the media couldn't understand or accept was that
there was no leader in Tahrir Square. The movements' refusal to
have a leader was recognizable throughout the year but perhaps
was most pronounced in Wall Street. A series of intellectuals and
celebrities made appearances at Zuccotti Park, but no one could
consider any of them leaders; they were guests of the multitude.
From Cairo and Madrid to Athens and New York, the movements
instead developed horizontal mechanisms for organization. They
didn't build headquarters or form central committees but spread
out like swarms, and most important, they created democratic
practices of decision making so that all participants could lead
together.
A third characteristic that the movements exhibit, albeit in
different ways, is what we conceive as a struggle for the common.
In some cases this has been expressed in flames. When
Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, his protest was
understood to be against not only the abuse he suffered at the
hands of the local police but also the widely shared social and
economic plight of workers in the country, many of whom are