Rights Act with the end of Jim Crow. Such institutional measures are in reality more the effect of social change than its cause: “While…symbolic gestures give the appearance of influence to formal organizations composed of lower-class people, elites are not actually responding to the organizations; they are responding to the underlying force of insurgency.”15 The capacity for disruptive intervention is the measure of such “force of insurgency,” and hence of the political power of those without other access to institutional deliberation processes:
It is our judgment that the most useful way to think about the effectiveness of protest is to examine the disruptive effects on institutions of different forms of mass defiance, and then to examine the political reverberations of those disruptions.… By our definition, disruption is simply the application of a negative sanction, the withdrawal of a crucial contribution on which others depend, and it is therefore a natural resource for exerting power over others.… Indeed, some of the poor are sometimes so isolated from significant institutional participation that the only “contribution” they can withhold is that of quiescence in civil life: they can riot.16
For workers at a site of production, the most effectively leveraged disruption—the “withdrawal of a crucial contribution”—might take the form of a slowdown or strike; students might walk out from their school; soldiers might flee into the wilds or attack their superiors. Those with only minimal institutional affiliation—the unemployed or underemployed poor, youth, and indeed the many precarious workers unable to organize in traditional workplace settings—are left with few resources for political intervention besides direct interruption in urban processes of the reproduction of daily life. Such an analysis hardly romanticizes public displays of violence; rather, these are revealed as symptomatic of a final, desperate refusal of powerlessness, an acknowledgment of the severe distance from channels of influence inscribed in the very position of the marginal subject’s daily life:
The poor do not have to be historians of the occasions when protestors have been jailed or shot down to understand this point. The lesson of their vulnerability is engraved in everyday life; it is evident in every police beating, in every eviction, in every lost job, in every relief termination. The very labels used to describe defiance by the lower classes—the pejorative labels of illegality and violence—testify to this vulnerability and serve to justify severe reprisals when they are imposed. By taking such labels for granted, we fail to recognize what these events really represent: a structure of political coercion inherent in the everyday life of the lower classes.17
When the force exerted by the “structure of political coercion inherent in everyday life” effectively blocks marginalized subjects from disruptive activity, the basis of their political power is undermined absolutely. Without a means of staking their claim, the poor (and a significant portion of “the middle class” who find themselves sliding into insecurity and poverty in the neoliberal era) have taken loss after loss in the social gains of previous generations, with little means of response. Recent contentious movements, to their tremendous credit, have finally broken through this impasse after nearly half a century of failures to do so but have not always received adequate appreciation for their particular success.
Seraphim Seferiades and Hank Johnston have described what they term a “disruptive deficit” that has resulted in the neoliberal era, as the poor and underprivileged are denied means of enacting disruption, their only real means of exerting influence. This incapacitation is made worse by a “reform deficit” occurring within institutions themselves, as neoliberal ideology has favored technocratic consensus—“leave it to the experts”—over the sorts of conflicts that drive reforms even within institutions:
[A] key element…is the extent to which “conflict” (as non-violence) is premised on claimant disruptive propensity, that is, the tendency of contentious actors to act transgressively (though not necessarily resorting to violence) in order to further their goals. Even if states are reform-prone (and, nowadays, many seem viciously counter-reformist, both socioeconomically and politico-institutionally), “conflict” is not possible unless protest is sufficiently pungent to disrupt the workings of the system: to exert pressure on opponents, bystanders and authorities.… Prolonged periods of conflictual irrelevance, a state of affairs where either claimant actors fail to adequately express grievances, or the state proves perpetually unable (and/or unwilling) to be responsive—what may be construed as a reform deficit—leads to “conflict’s” eventual collapse (if it had ever emerged). This is where violence begins to set in.… [T]his disruptive deficit may lead to a great paradox: in seeking conciliation through exclusively conventional protest, institutionalized claimants end up inadvertently fomenting the kind of political violence they most dread and despise. Indeed, this is all the more so, considering that this disruptive deficit coincides with the reform deficit characterizing contemporary neoliberal policies.18
As much of the rest of this book will attempt to show, performances of potential disruption—like peaceful protests, pre-arranged business-union “scheduled strikes,” or even petitions and grievances—ultimately derive their power from the threat of actual, material disruption. And once elites have assured themselves that such threats are unlikely to go anywhere in terms of actual disruption, they have little reason to care. Thus, a deficit in disruption makes such petitionary measures—ironically, the very measures held forth as the only way to actually “change the world”—empty and useless. Consequently, the hollowness of these threats, and their inability to win any substantial gains, ends up resulting in a return of actual, unmediated violence. In political theory terms, this emptiness signals the impossibility of containing conflict within any mediating sphere of deliberation—what Chantal Mouffe terms “agonism,” the clash of interests and perspectives mediated through a functioning deliberative sphere.19 Instead, conflict, when it inevitably appears, escalates and is driven outside mediating processes, appearing as unmediated violence, equivalent in Mouffe’s terminology to “antagonism,” or violence between enemies. By shutting down whatever limited spheres of deliberation that might once have been available for working out conflicts before they exploded, neoliberalism offers the poor and disenfranchised a dismal choice: silence or violence.
Managing Dissent:
Engineering Neoliberalism’s Disruptive Deficit
Political Recuperation and “The Pluralist Prejudice”
Neoliberalism has succeeded spectacularly well, at least until the 2010s, in suppressing dissent; thus, its means of suppression then become the new conditions to which challengers are forced to respond. Clearly, if we are to understand the approaches movements take, we also need to understand how the neoliberal age has witnessed such brilliant achievements in the management of dissent. How has power succeeded so well in repressing dissent? What new factors are social movement actors contending with? I will begin by looking at how dissent is managed through four ways potentially disruptive forces are immobilized: co-optation of dissent leaders, indirect rule of potentially unruly subjects, consumerist deferment of antagonism, and “civil society” recuperation of the symbolic resources of disruption. After that, I will turn to the heavy stick of direct force that complements this managerial carrot.
Since the 1970s, many prominent New Left leaders have entered, or at least visited, the halls of power. SDS president Tom Hayden became a state senator in California, and the Black Panthers succeeded in helping Jerry Brown become governor of the same state with their backing. Across the country, minority and radical activists found homes within municipal governments. This growing political heft led many to claim that yesterday’s radicals had finally won their voice; they were participating in the serious, grown-up world of change-the-system-from-within politics. However, in the same way that demands for more personal freedom made for a new life for capitalist markets, such political “successes” functioned as a new means of social control, employed to great effect against the very claims from which they originated. While self-identified Marxists largely fled behind the safe walls of ivory-tower academic incomprehensibility, “the Left” in the political sphere came more and more to signify social liberals whose economic policies were hardly distinguishable from their conservative
