The Organized Crowd: Organizing, Mobilizing, and Democratic Agency

• In Event: Organizing Struggles from Below

Abstract

Crowds are risky as the subject and source of democratic agency, or so the bulk of mainstream liberal-democratic political theory would seem to suggest. The problem, according to this line of thinking, with reclaiming crowds for democracy is that when the many – in all their messy difference – call up the fiction of the people as a singular and unified collective actor, the realization of an impossible fantasy of being (or becoming) self-identical seems to require the identification and expulsion of others. In a democracy, Claude Lefort famously argued, democracy entails “two apparently contradictory principles: on the one hand, power emanates from the people; on the other, it is the power of nobody. And democracy thrives on this contradiction. Whenever the latter risks being resolved or is resolved, democracy is either close to destruction or already destroyed” (Lefort 1986, 279). The “People-as-One,” Lefort claimed, is a dangerous fantasy, collapsing the distinction between state and society, and asserting a unity-without-remainders. Thus the ephemeral moments when crowds come together – when separateness becomes solidarity and the mass presents itself as a collective – are alluring, but fraught.

The risks are real, but I argue they are often overdrawn. The idea of the spontaneous crowd looms large in the imaginary of democratic agency and popular sovereignty: mobilization is routinely centered as the sort of essence of what it means to act in concert and in protest. Yet a focus only on those brief moments as the essence of popular power risks obscuring all of the dispersed, ongoing, and largely invisible work that goes on in the form of “organizing” – the work that not only makes “mobilizing” possible (Payne 1995), but also enables collective agency to be something other than an elusive and fugitive moment. Indeed, one of the reasons that the Schmittian alter ego of mobilization – the people identical with itself – appears to lurk so close is that we tend to focus so intently on the arresting moments of human gathering en masse, in public space. The result, I am suggesting, is that such a focus facilitates the neglect of all the connected and related forms of acting together that matter for the particular formations of solidarity, emancipation, and temporality that political actors devise, offer, and articulate in an attempt to reconceive their political worlds.

This paper argues that attending to the work of organizing behind, between, and beyond moments of mobilization helps deflate two key dangers associated with the crowd as a form of democratic agency: the problem of substantive unity, and the problem of ephemerality. Organizing – the activity of building new relations amongst individuals, cultivating the capacity for collective agency, and constructing alternative understandings of the political present and its possibilities – requires forms of intersubjectivity, collaboration, and negotiation that can forge solidarity without eliminating difference, and that root democratic agency in ongoing, horizontal, and local activities rather than just exceptional moments of mobilization or resistance – emerging out of particular pasts and projecting individuals and groups into the future.

While attempting to make present the organization that often enables the spectacular appearance of the crowd, therefore, this paper also pushes back against too neat and firm of a distinction between organizing, on the one hand, and activism or mobilizing, on the other. There are indeed tensions between the “office” of the moral activist and that of the organizer (Sabl 2002), and between the activities of “outrageous resistance” and those of “everyday populism” (Grattan 2016). Yet theorists of organizing tend to make too much of the distinction, and therefore present activists as relatively disconnected from the ongoing work of solidarity- and capacity-building, and as solely focused on the public presentation of mobilized grievance. In reality, I suggest, long-term organizing and successful mobilizing are far more closely tied.

Author

• Erin Pineda, Smith College