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The History of Disruption:Social Struggle in the Atlantic World
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Challenging our understanding of social struggles as movements, Mehmet Dösemeci traces a 300-year counter-history of struggle predicated on disruption.
Why do we think of social struggles as movements? Have struggles been practiced otherwise? Not as motion but as, interruption, occupation, disturbance, arrest? If so, what are struggles trying to stop? Looking at 300 years of Atlantic social struggle kinetically, Mehmet Dösemeci questions the axiomatic association that academics and activists have made between modern social struggles and the category of movement. Dösemeci argues how 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 have struggled against.
Challenging this association, Dösemeci begins the story with the 18th century establishment of a transatlantic regime of movement that coerced goods and bodies into a violent and ceaseless motion. He then details the resistance to this regime over the next three centuries, 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. Dösemeci convincingly argues that their stories are both key to understanding the resurgence of disruptive politics in the 21st century and offer valuable guidance for future struggles seeking to overturn an ever-intensifying regime of movement.
Reviews
At the very moment that the belief in disruptive behavior is identified with corporate management gurus, activist and intellectual Mehmet Dosemeci boldly demonstrates that it has been practically central for two hundred years for those confronting capitalism on its own kinetic terms. Nor is this absorbing and inspiring book just a history: it is also a defense of a much-debated political strategy that has gone far already to define our times.
Anyone who has endured academia will be familiar with the way that concrete struggles become purely figurative, and know as well that such dematerializations mark historical defeats in the world of practical social contest. This has been one fate of "disruption"; its corporate capture is even more dire. We should take heart then from this clear and clarifying book, whose urgent goal is to rematerialize disruption, to render it practical and pressing-or perhaps simply to engage in canny witness to the work of the world as it restores disruption to the realm of the "kinetic," where it belongs if we are to have any hope at all.
At a time when movements are spent forces, The History of Disruption offers a reprise of the history of social struggles against capitalism and the left by spontaneous disruptions. Mehmet Döscemi's account of the immutable direct resistance reflects an unassailable reality of the 21st century-the oppressed will continue to resist and disrupt injustice and oppression with or without movement and organization-a salient contribution.