The problem with demands
David Harvie, University of Leicester
Keir Milburn, University of Leeds
‘People have been saying for some time that what the movement needs are some real victories. But – it’s a strange but frequent phenomenon – when movements finally win them, they often go unnoticed.’1
With the seemingly irrecoverable collapse of the Doha round of trade talks in July 2006, the World Trade Organization appears to be effectively defunct. The cycle of anti-summit protests of the turn of the century and beyond, and the social movements that formed around them, played a vital role in killing it off. Yet there hasn’t been a general affect of victory. In fact you could even say the opposite: the ‘we are winning’ sentiment of the couple of years following Seattle has disappeared and been replaced by a feeling of impasse.
Inspired by the question, ‘what does – or would – it mean to win?’, we explore this apparent paradox in this paper. We suggest that it makes more sense when we understand social movements, not as concrete blocks of people, but as a moving of social relations. This moving takes place on two levels, one which we call ‘demands’ and the other ‘problematics’. In a nutshell, demands, however radical, must be put to someone or something: they are demands to an existing state or state of affairs. Demands remain within the realm of what is and are, in this sense, static. To explore this we contrast the role that demands play in the formation of a political subject for, on the one hand, Laclau and, on the other, Hardt and Negri.
In contrast to demands, problematics are all about acting and moving. We suggest that social movements produce their own problematics at the same time as they are formed by them. Social movements introduce rupture into what currently makes sense; they produce their own problems, their own sense and hence their own worlds. It is by the movement from one problematic to another that social movements move. By the time the demand to ’Kill the WTO’ had been achieved the movement had new problems to deal with.
We explore how the relationship between concepts and problems presented by Deleuze and Guattari can help us understand the emergence of social movement problematics. Demands and problematics can then be seen through the relationship between extensity and intensity.
An important problem is that it is far easier to analyse demands, since they operate in the extensive realm, the realm of the visible and the measurable. It is to this realm that many of the proposals to solve the movement of movements’ impasse are directed. But we feel that to understand the movements’ problematic as it stands we must turn attention back to the moments of intensity that gave the movement its form.
The G8 holds its 2007 summit in Heiligendamm, on the German Baltic coast, at the beginning of June. Both authors are involved in the counter-summit mobilization and the presentation will be very much informed by our experiences there.
1 Olivier de Marcellus, ‘Biggest victory yet over WTO and “free” trade. Celebrate it!’, Posted to InterActivist Info Exchange, 17 August 2006; http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=06/08/18/0417238&mode=nested&tid=14%3Cbr%20/%3E.