Why NON?
Bulletin No.2 in english (pdf)
The non-movements
It may have started in Iran in 2009 with the „Green Movement“, which was followed by the so- called Arab Spring, the uprisings in the banlieues, the yellow vests … insurrectionary movements that were perhaps spontaneous, certainly eruptive and not led by the classic political actors, parties, trade unions or alliances, in order to achieve this or that political goal, to push through this or that percentage increase in wages, reduction in working hours, even if bread or petrol prices were their causes. It was the beginning of what Asef Bayet1 called „non-movements“.
Endnotes2 have taken up this term and understood it as an expression of our times for the Western hemisphere as well: They see them as a „collective action of dispersed and unorganized actors“. Their struggles are about „demanding practices“, i.e. direct actions that are, in their radicalism, without corresponding real political demands. They are not about exerting pressure on authorities and not about forcing concessions. They are not revolutionary, but initially subjective expressions of objective disorder. Revolutionaries emerge from them without revolution.