by Mehmet Dösemeci
Verso Books
12/31/2024, paperback
SKU: 9781804293904
Challenging our understanding of social struggles as movements, Mehmet Dösemeci traces a 300-year counter-history of struggle predicated on disruption
Why do we think of social struggles as movements? Have struggles been practiced otherwise, not as motion but as interruption, occupation, disturbance, arrest? Looking at three hundred years of Atlantic social struggle kinetically, Mehmet Dösemeci questions the axiomatic association that academics and activists have made between modern social struggles and the category of movement. Dösemeci argues that this movement politics has privileged some forms of historical struggle while obscuring others and, perhaps more damningly, reveals the complicity of social movements in the very forces they oppose.
Dösemeci's story begins with the eighteenth-century establishment of a transatlantic regime of movement that coerced goods and bodies into violent and ceaseless motion. He then details the long history of resistance to this regime, interweaving disparate social struggles such as food riots, Caribbean maroon communities, Atlantic pirates, secret societies and syndicalism, the student New Left, Black Power, radical feminism, Operaismo, and the Zapatistas into a history of politics as disruption. Dösemeci convincingly argues that this history is key to understanding the resurgence of disruptive politics in the twenty-first century and offers valuable guidance for future struggles seeking to overturn an ever-intensifying regime of movement.
Reviews:
"At a time when movements are spent forces, The History of Disruption offers a reprise of the history of social struggles against capitalism and the left by spontaneous disruptions. [This] account of the immutable direct resistance reflects an unassailable reality of the 21st century-the oppressed will continue to resist and disrupt injustice and oppression with or without movement and organization-a salient contribution." --Immanuel Ness, author of Southern Insurgency
"Anyone who has endured academia will be familiar with the way that concrete struggles become purely figurative, and know as well that such dematerializations mark historical defeats in the world of practical social contest. This has been one fate of "disruption"; its corporate capture is even more dire. We should take heart then from this clear and clarifying book, whose urgent goal is to rematerialize disruption, to render it practical and pressing-or perhaps simply to engage in canny witness to the work of the world as it restores disruption to the realm of the "kinetic," where it belongs if we are to have any hope at all." --Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. Riot.
About the Author:
Mehmet Dösemeci is an anarchist, activist, and associate professor of history at Bucknell University. The author of two books and numerous academic articles, his writings on the meaning and significance of radical democracy and the uprisings, occupations, and riots of the 21st century have appeared in Al Jazeera, RoarMag, Open Democracy, and Common Dreams. In his spare time, he runs a website on the past and present of social disruption www.disruptnow.org