Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri: Assembly (2017)

“In recent years ‘leaderless’ social movements have proliferated around the globe, from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, the Americas, and East Asia. Some of these movements have led to impressive gains: the toppling of authoritarian leaders, the furthering of progressive policy, and checks on repressive state forces. They have also been, at times, derided by journalists and political analysts as disorganized and ineffectual, or suppressed by disoriented and perplexed police forces and governments who fail to effectively engage them. Activists, too, struggle to harness the potential of these horizontal movements. Why have the movements, which address the needs and desires of so many, not been able to achieve lasting change and create a new, more democratic and just society? Some people assume that if only social movements could find new leaders they would return to their earlier glory. Where, they ask, are the new Martin Luther Kings, Rudi Dutschkes, and Stephen Bikos?

With the rise of right-wing political parties in many countries, the question of how to organize democratically and effectively has become increasingly urgent. Although today’s leaderless political organizations are not sufficient, a return to traditional, centralized forms of political leadership is neither desirable nor possible. Instead, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, familiar roles must be reversed: leaders should be responsible for short-term, tactical action, but it is the multitude that must drive strategy. In other words, if these new social movements are to achieve meaningful revolution, they must invent effective modes of assembly and decision-making structures that rely on the broadest democratic base. Drawing on ideas developed through their well-known Empire trilogy, Hardt and Negri have produced, in Assembly, a timely proposal for how current large-scale horizontal movements can develop the capacities for political strategy and decision-making to effect lasting and democratic change. We have not yet seen what is possible when the multitude assembles.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2017
Heretical Thought series
ISBN 9780190677961, 0190677961
xxii+346 pages

Reviews: Publishers Weekly (2017), Christian Fuchs (triple-C, 2017).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML

Stefano Harney, Fred Moten: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013–) [EN, DE, ES, FR]

“In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.”

Introduction by Jack Halberstam
Publisher Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe, 2013
Open access
ISBN 9781570272677, 1570272670
165 pages

Reviews: onderwijs filosofie (2015, NL), Kris Cohen (open set, 2016), Lisa M. Corrigan (Philosophy & Rhetoric, 2019).
Commentary: David Wallace (New Yorker, 2018).
Interviews with authors: Transversal (2016, EN/DE), Cristina Rivera Garza, Marta Malo, and Juan Pablo Anaya (New Inquiry, 2018), Millenials Are Killing Capitalism (2020, podcast, part 2).

Publisher (EN)
Publisher (DE)
Publisher (ES)
WorldCat (EN)

The Undercommons (English, 2013, PDF)
Die Undercommons (German, trans. Birgit Mennel und Gerald Raunig, 2016, EPUB)
Los Abajocomunes: planear fugitivo y estudio negro (Spanish, trans. Cristina Rivera Garza, Marta Malo and Juan Pablo Anaya, Cooperativa Cráter Invertido and La Campechana Mental, 2017, EPUB) (added on 2019-6-5)
Les sous-communs (French, 2022, added on 2022-1-11)

Radical Education Collective (eds.): New Public Spaces: Dissensual Political and Artistic Practices in the Post-Yugoslav Context (2009)

“This reader draws its inspiration from encounters and conversations with activists, artists, critical thinkers, curators, militant researchers and writers from Belgrade, Helsinki, Istanbul, Ljubljana, London, Pristina and Prizren in April and May 2008 at the social centre ROG and the AKC Metelkova mesto in Ljubljana. Those encounters challenged not only the distinction between ‘serious’ discussions and ‘informal’ debates – that instantly reproduce linear time and hierarchical space – but also our mutual ability to listen, talk and share experiences (instead of consume information). Contributions were subsequently elaborated into the reader, which consists of two parts. In the first part, engaged collectives reflect on the organisation of different political issues: from anti-capitalist and student struggles, to immigrant workers and the re-appropriation of public spaces in the region. The second part focuses on specific art collectives from Kosovo and Ljubljana, which are occupied with the question of space: why was space so important when rethinking the relation between art and politics, and also what can one do with the space? Here, a set of political practices enabled art collective to undermine the presupposed liberal border between public and private. The reader concludes with a presentation of some art projects that intervened and articulated spatial and visual transformations in the post-Yugoslav context.”

Edited and compiled by Gal Kirn, Gašper Kralj, and Bojana Piškur
Publisher Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, and Modern Galerija, Ljubljana, 2009
ISBN 9789072076878, 9072076877
194 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (4 MB)
PDFs