The History of Disruption

Book excerpt: 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 Dsemeci questions the axiomatic association that academics and activists have made between modern social struggles and the category of movement. Dsemeci 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. Dsemeci'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. Dsemeci 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.