Rhizomatic Resistance: Social Movement Politics from Porto Alegre to Tunis and Frankfurt

The last three decades have seen massive protests and mobilizations. From the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in the 1990s to mass demonstrations against war and protests at virtually all gatherings of world leaders to struggles in North Africa and most recently Occupy Wall Street and anti-austerity type mobilizations, protests and social movement organizing have taken place across the globe against rising inequality, war, the dispossession of rights and entitlements, democratic deficits and austerity politics.

This paper examines this arch of movement-based politics. Situating it within former modes of social movement organizing and relating it to shifting dynamics of capitalism, I argue that contemporary movement-based politics is relying on and enacting a distinct and novel movement logic. Different from the so-called  “Old Left” of mass unions and parties and the more identitarian politics of the “New Left”, contemporary movement formations are based on what I suggest to call a “Rhizomatic Logic”, forging linkages and synergies across the fractured landscape of “old” and “new” left. Thriving on multiplicity and thus lacking a dominant core or main axis, the rhizomatic logic emphasizes multi-connectivity and heterogeneity of political struggles, which has no central actor, issue, strategy, or ideology beyond opposition to neoliberalism and thus a subsequent need for thicker communicative processes. While this logic allows for unprecedented connections as well as tempering of inherent antinomies of diverse movements and groups, it simultaneously limits the degree of congealed and resilient movement building. Most recently this Rhizomatic Resistance model has found variegated expressions in pro-democracy as well as occupy-type and anti-austerity protests from Tunis to New York and Athens to Frankfurt.