The Lessons of 2011: Three Theses on Organisation | Mute 20/01/16 14:05

ARTICLES

THE LESSONS OF 2011: THREE THESES ON

ORGANISATION
By Rodrigo Nunes , 7 June 2012

Activism / AntiCapitalist / Occupations / Social Movements

Image: Campsite on Rotshchild Boulevard, Tel Aviv, July 2011

Moving beyond the conceptual polarisation of tight-knit vanguardist parties and loose-tie virtual networks,
Rodrigo Nunes sifts the residue of last year’s wave of revolts to produce a more nuanced picture of
organisational dynamics in the age of Web 2.0

2011 was an exceptional year, one which could – hopefully – come to be remembered in the same breath as 1968
and 1848. That being so will depend on whether the coming years will fulfil its promise, making it appear
retrospectively as the start of something. Understanding the nature of that promise, and the means by which it can
be fulfilled, therefore, are part and parcel of making that happen. A key challenge in this regard is to strip what
happened in 2011, as much as possible, from false representations, both negative and positive, created by media
coverage and the sometimes misleading reflections of protesters. To try, in other words, to stay as close as possible
to what people were and are doing, rather than what they say or are said to be doing.

Negri’s dictum on Lenin – ‘organisation is spontaneity reflecting on itself’ – suggests spontaneity is never simply
formless but always already belying some kind of organisation.[i] It is a long standing mistake of the ‘organisation’
debate that it takes place as if one should choose between absolute formlessness (‘spontaneous’ movement) or
form (the Party). As much as a party, however tightly controlled, will always have some degree of porosity and
anomalous deviation, what seems formless always contains its own form, even if mutable and open. The three
theses that follow aim to both draw out some of the lessons already implicit in the last year and a half’s struggles
and to get closer to what is characteristic of their underlying forms.

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1. It is Possible to Have a Mass Movement Without Mass Organisations

This lesson is not particularly new; it has been known since at least 1968, or since the late 1990s if we are to
eschew the classical references. It is nonetheless both worth repeating and phrasing in this way, since attempting to
translate the questions thrown up by the present into the language of older debates can offer more of a grip on them
than merely insisting on their absolute novelty.

What matters here is not only the extent to which mass organisations (parties, unions – notable exceptions being
the strikes in Egypt, and local support by unions in Tunisia) were seen as ‘part of the problem’, or simply not invited,
but also the extent to which they were questioned as mass organisations. In the face of a large, heterogeneous,
developing, living movement, their mobilising capacity seemed limited by comparison – and the quality of their
representation too stale, too ossified, too much of a representation to matter. When masses of people rose up
against the representative system and the dearth of real options it offered, unions and parties were widely regarded
as representing that system itself, rather than those they notionally represent.

To say this, of course, does not tell us anything about the staying power of the movements that appeared in 2011;
whether a choice not to form mass organisations will entail a progressive loss of momentum, or whether forming
them will simply be divisive without bringing any gains; nor does it say anything about whether mass organisations
as such are an outdated proposition.[ii] But it does say something about the state of existing mass organisations,
and the potentials that reside in the encounter between widespread discontent and access to technological tools
that allow for mass, multi-polar communication. It is, thus, evidently good news: mass organisations are in crisis
everywhere (and this includes Latin America, from where I presently write); it is good to know that it is possible to
bypass them in order to produce political effects.

It also says something about the crisis of representation, and how it will be a long time until it is solved. Some were
quick to point out the ‘failure’ of movements in Tunisia, Egypt and Spain, in the sense that the forces that eventually
came to power were not much better than those that were removed. There is a truly bizarre logic in this: if these
movements started out by decrying how all essential decisions were outside the scope of representative democracy
and all the available options were different shades of the same, to expect to prove them wrong by pointing out that
what they got was ultimately a different shade of the same is essentially to corroborate their assertion. This
argument can only make sense if one has already accepted the premise these movements reject – that there is no
alternative to the ‘there is no alternative’ that they oppose. It fails to acknowledge how they have, from the start, set
their sights on a much longer game than can be measured by electoral cycles (and which will demand a lot more
from them to be achieved).[iii]

In regard to the political system as a whole, these movements are exercising – and that is perhaps all they can do
at present – what Colectivo Situaciones have called poder destituyente, de-instituent power.[iv] They undoubtedly
also possess a constituent power whose future and direction is as yet impossible to predict. It may result in new
political forms, new mechanisms of representation, new institutions or, at the very least, new organisations. It may
result in all of those at once, as was the case in Bolivia in the aftermath of neoliberal crisis. But right now, their main
achievable goal is probably that of flushing the system; and not only can this not be done overnight, the sharpening
of contradictions in the short term – Spain now has a right wing government elected by 30 percent of the population,
while polls indicate that around 70 percent agree with the indignados, who the new government are on a declared
collision course with – may lead to just that in the longer run.

2. Organisation Has Not Disappeared, But Changed

Many have observed how the obvious similarities between 2011 and the alterglobalisation moment went oddly
unnoticed among the commentariat. [v] In what concerns organisation, there is a double irony in this invisibilisation.
On the one hand, the alterglobalisation moment marked the first attempt to elaborate the transformations to
organisational practice brought about by new communication technologies, the internet above all. On the other, it
already manifested the same tabula rasa, new dawn attitude that some adopt today: new technological conditions
have changed the way we organise forever, it is all about connected individuals now, the time of hierarchical
organisational forms is over. Therein lies, of course, a third irony: that, as is often the case with the modern attitude
of announcing the present as a total break with the past, it appears retrospectively as an anticipation of something

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then still to come. The ‘new technological conditions’ of ten years ago – mailing lists, camera-less phones and
Indymedia! – pale in comparison to the access to the means of production of information that we see today;
conversely, today’s ‘total break’ has already been around, in some form, for ten years.

Image: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The problem is that different things tend to get mixed up in the discussion, and activist practices associated with
older organisational forms – such as ‘factory floor’ or ‘door-to-door’ community organising – are lumped in with the
organisational form itself. As a consequence, the argument flits from claiming that some organisational forms are no
longer necessary to some forms of activism have become superfluous, and ends up producing a falsified picture of
how social media have actually been put to political use.

In a well received article from late 2010 that went on to seem thoroughly debunked by ensuing events, Malcolm
Gladwell drew on Mark Granovetter’s groundbreaking work in social network theory to suggest that social media are
fabulous tools when it comes to spreading information and fostering low involvement forms of action (‘share’, ‘like’,
‘retweet’, ‘donate’), but are not as good when it comes to developing dependable relations, commitment and what it
sometimes takes to really get an action or campaign off the ground. One of that text’s strongest conclusions was
that ‘Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice, but by motivating them to do
the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice’.[vi] In other words, social
media are an excellent medium for weak tie activism, but the development of strong ties requires greater
organisational consistency than ‘clicktivism’.[vii] As anyone who’s ever organised anything will know, it is sadly not
as simple as ‘tweet it and they will come’.[viii]

My hypothesis is that, rather than contradicting this conclusion, the political use of social media in 2011 highlights a
possibility underestimated by Gladwell: that, under certain special conditions, the quantity of connections enabled
by social media can indeed produce the quality of stronger ones – a marginal effect that weak ties always possess
that is intensified by favourable circumstances, and which we could describe as a general lowering of each
individual’s participation threshold.

If one pays attention to how events unfolded, the myth of isolated individuals coming together on the randomly
picked date of a Facebook event becomes shaky. Even the instance seemingly closest to the ‘spontaneous
uprising’ narrative, Tunisia, is arguably best described as starting with strong ties. Mohamed Bouazizi’s shocking act
of self-immolation first galvanised a small circle of friends and family who tried to make sure the information about
his death, and the protests that followed, got out of the town of Sidi Bouzid. From then on the story was picked up
by Al Jazeera, there was support from the local trade union branch and student groups, and longer-term activists
and media critics of the government began to speak (and act) out.[ix]

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The movement, in other words, was not simply from weak ties to strong ties, isolated individuals to strong
commitments, the internet to the streets; but (small scale) strong ties to weak ties (more people hearing about what
had happened) to strong ties (activist groups and individuals becoming involved on a larger scale) to a broader
fringe of weak ties becoming strong ties as things gathered momentum. This is illustrated in the geographical
spread; from the countryside to Al Jazeera, then from social media and YouTube to the capital and abroad, where
each relay produced not only a greater number of informed people, but also people who became active; and it is not
too much to imagine that communication among individuals was taking place not only through media, social or
otherwise, but also through meetings and nascent or pre-existing organisations of different kinds.

It is well known that, for years, activist groups in Egypt had had their attempts to channel mass opposition to the
Mubarak regime frustrated and repressed. Then the events in Tunisia and the viral spread of information and
availability of online mobilising tools provided them with an opportunity that they seized. It is true, someone did
create a Facebook event calling for the January 25 ‘Day of Anger’; this someone, however, was no random
‘concerned citizen’, but the admin of a Facebook page (‘We are all Khaled Said’) with over 400,000 followers that
had existed for half a year. That admin, the now famous Wael Ghonim, attributes the idea to his collaborator
AbdelRahman Mansour and the final decision to a brainstorming session over a month earlier with Ahmed Maher of
the April 6 Youth Movement, in which they agreed that the Facebook page would spearhead the call, while the
activist group would take care of logistics.[x] (April 6 had already mobilised for that date – Police Day – in the past.)
And as the idea of a protest on that and subsequent dates caught on, it was worked out and made operational by
several other already existing and then sprouting organisations and affinity groups.

The communication that enabled the Arab Spring (or 15M and Occupy) did not simply spread from one individual to
the next via social media; in each case, what happened was always a much more complex relay between already
established hubs – either ‘strong tie’ groups or communication nodes with a large following and credibility – and a
long tail of ties with decreasing intensity, in a sort of ripple effect with many epicentres. If there can be mass
movements without mass organisations, it is because social media amplify exponentially the effects of relatively
isolated initiatives. But that they do so is not a miraculous phenomenon that can magically bypass quality by
producing quantity out of nothing; it requires the relay through hubs and strong tie groups and clusters that can
begin to operationally translate ‘chatter’ into action. As that happens, under propitious conditions, the spread of
information also aids the development of strong ties down the long tail: once a friend or family member goes to a
demo, or you see stirring images of one, you are more likely to go, and so on. So we can only speak of ‘spontaneity’
if we understand the new flows of information and decision making as also being necessarily routed by previously
existing networks and organisations and more tightly knit affinities, and thus along the lines of previously given
structures that no doubt were transformed in the process; certainly not in the sense of an ideal ‘association of
individuals’ who previously existed as individuals only. This is even more explicit in those cases, such as 15M and
Occupy, where there was an open, overground organising process prior to things ‘kicking off’.[xi]

Finally, it is interesting to speculate on how the beginnings of both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions are tied to
death and sacrifice, of Mohammed Bouzizi and Khaled Said above all. There is no greater test of commitment, or of
the strength of ties, than being ready to die. The relation between years of police abuse and violence, and then the
irrepressible resolve demonstrated by protesters in those countries – the way in which the risk of taking action being
the highest was turned into the most fundamental ‘strengthener’ of ties: the disposition to die together if necessary,
and the solidarity that it creates – seems clear.

3. The Primary Organisational Form of 2011 was Not the Assembly

At the most evident level, the primary organisational form employed by movements in 2011 was the camp. From the
extraordinary example set by Tahrir Square, the model spread to Wisconsin, Israel, Spain (where, however, it was
an unplanned outcome of the 15 May demonstration); and then, after Occupy Wall Street (initially devised as a
camp) and the 15 October day of global action, to the rest of the world. It was the most powerful meme, which is
unsurprising seeing as it provided the most stirring images and, with Egypt, the most captivating victory.

Yet it is important to bear in mind the precise connection between form and goal that made Tahrir into a victorious
symbol. For more than simply a meme, it was a tactic that consisted in concentrating the movement in one place
with a very concrete, if negative, demand: that Mubarak step down. Even then, it is clear that it would not have
managed to achieve its goal had the regime not realised they were losing control of several other parts of the
country.

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As the camp became a meme, this connection was lost. It is remarkable that the first tweet from @acampadasol –
the first Twitter account of the first ‘spontaneous’ (i.e. moving from strong ties to developing strong ties along the
weaker intensity long tail) camp in Spain, at Puerta del Sol, Madrid – stated that ‘we shall stay here until we reach
an agreement’. Who ‘we’ was, and with whom agreement was to be reached, were things left unstated in the micro-
blogging website’s peculiar syntax. By the time it got to the various worldwide ‘Occupy’ that sprung after October 15,
this tie was lost. The same can be said about other related memes, such as the ‘human mic’, which started out as a
practical solution to a ban on amplification at Zucotti Park in New York, and went on to become a marker of a
certain ‘Occupy’ way of doing politics, even where the original impediment that had elicited it did not exist.

Image: Occupy hand gestures

This is not to say that subsequent iterations of the camp meme were in no way tactical; they were, except the tactic
was different. In the absence of the clear cut negative demands that existed in Egypt and Wisconsin, what they
were doing was not trying to enforce a collectively shared will, but attempting to create the political space in which a
collectively shared will could be constructed, so that a social force capable of effecting change through
‘contamination’ and/or enforcement of its will, could appear. In this sense, if their ‘diminishing tactical returns’
resembles what happened to the counter-summit cycle of the alterglobalisation movement, to criticise them without
recognising the other, crucial function they exercise – like Badiou, for example, did back in 2003 in regard to
counter-summits – amounts to missing what people actually do by virtue of focusing on what they (or the media)
say they do.[xii]

The strength of camps such as the ones seen in Spain, Israel and several Occupy sites lay in their provision of a
focal point for widespread dissent. They were moments when already existing virtual and non-virtual social
networks collided with one another, were reshuffled and given greater consistency by direct contact and co-
presence. More than that, they provided a space in principle accessible to all, regardless of any previous
experience of activism or insertion into the social networks in which the process had initiated. Finally, they did so

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while also exposing people to the challenge of sharing a space and its running, which, if it can be rather testing, can
lead to the development of stronger ties. In other words, what these later camps did was to act on the conditions of
possibility of politics: in the context of profound disempowerment and a severe crisis impacting on highly atomised
societies, they functioned as a space where the fabric of relations that one calls ‘the political’ could, at least for
those who were there, be partially (re)constituted.

The whole difficulty was that, while they did this, both outsiders and insiders also expected from them concerted
political action and clear position taking. They had to grow up in public. All this in a situation whose tactical
coordinates were not time bound, with no obvious idea of what that holding on indefinitely entailed, and facing the
Herculean (maybe Sisyphean) task of deciding it on the spot with very large numbers of very diverse people.

Much was made of the general assemblies, which is no surprise considering how at once impressive and quaint
they looked (cue the de rigueur journalistic remark on hand gestures), but also how they seemed to address the
widespread experience of a democratic deficit. One of the most typical comments made by participants speaks of
everyone’s ostensible gladness to be given a voice in front of others. And if virtual networks were the original
medium for affective spread and contagion, the ‘reshuffling’ enabled by open mic spaces where people could
exchange points of view, begin new relationships and get into other networks – let alone the sheer power of
discovering commonalities with people one would otherwise never meet – cannot be underestimated.

Yet the very difference in intensity in moving ‘from the internet to the streets’ can produce an overvaluation of the
assembly in the face of everything else. During the Arab Spring, Christian Marazzi compared the logics of contagion
proper to financial markets and to the events taking place in the Mahgreb.[xiii] In the former, it is the deficit of
information that leads to mimetic behaviour which, in the frantic heights of a speculative bubble, becomes entirely
self-referential and incapable of observing any dynamics outside of itself; instead it assumes some (market Big)
Other knows something ‘we do not know’. In the latter, an excess of information produces an ‘imitation of oneself’
whose material referent is the very social body. In these terms, the risk that assemblies carry with them could be
described as a fetish of presence – of restricting the imitable ‘oneself’ to the assembly itself, losing sight of non-
presential affects as well as the ‘others’ of that experience, which in turn is made into a less inclusive, less
connected ‘you just had to be there’. This mistakes the immediate, visible body of the mo(ve)ment for the whole of
its real one – which is mediate as well as immediate, virtual as well as actual, diffuse as well as concentrated,
variable as well as given, and dependent at all times on a complex assemblage of bodies, technological interfaces,
words, affects and ideas.

This dynamic can be intensified by the very tendency of the media to represent assemblies as the movement’s
core. If, however, we take a step back from the most visible to apprehend the entire process that enabled it and
kept it alive, what becomes apparent is that this movement’s key organisational form, while in its own way also open
and horizontal, is not the assembly.

We could call it distributed leadership: the possibility, even for previously ‘uncharted’ individuals and groups, to
temporarily take on the role of moving things forward by virtue of coming up with courses of action that provide
provisional focal points for activity. (I have previously referred to this as ‘diffuse vanguardism’, defining it as the
power ‘to ignite large scale effects without any sort of [previously existing or at a proportionally large scale] decision
making procedure’.[xiv]) It applies both to the first outliers, groups or individuals, who started networking towards
the mass actions that then developed into camps and assemblies. But equally to all those whose initiatives, by
example more than persuasion, by contagion more than argument, managed to cut through deadlocks in decision
making processes progressively reduced to the assembly form.

What makes this form of leadership different is the fact that it does not require a previously established ‘leader’ or
‘vanguard’ status (membership numbers, political trajectory, reputation). In fact, one of the key things that, in the
present environment, appears to work in favour of an initiative is precisely its being ‘anonymous’ or (to put it in
sports language) ‘unseeded’. It is only natural that, the present crisis being to a great extent one of representation,
there should be suspicion towards ‘representative’ names.

At the same time, producing an initiative that resonates and gains traction with others usually demands more than
just ‘throwing an idea out there’. It implies setting an example to be followed, and thus depends on it being
embodied in a group of people who ‘make it happen’. Such seems to be the case with arguably the most important
development to take place after the camps – the focus on anti-eviction actions and occupations with a view to
providing housing for foreclosure victims. Again, a mediation takes place between strong and weak ties, producing
strong ties in the process. But, even at times when the participation threshold is lower, successful new initiatives are

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likely to be those that offer relatively low entry levels, perhaps increasing in commitment and militancy with time.[xv]

The logic of distributed leadership characteristic of 2011 struggles is that of the ‘leader of the pack’ as described by
Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus; and yet, if we read Hegel minus the teleology (the only way to do it
today), we will find it is not too distinct from those Werkzeuge of world history, ‘world-historical individuals’. In
Catherine Malabou’s felicitous phrase, what we have here is the movement of a changing body/border precipitated
by the occurrence of singular initiatives ‘as the cutting edge of excess/overrunning (comme bord de débordement)’.
[xvi] Interestingly, it could be noticed that more optimistic readings of today’s movements, while ostensibly
predicated on something like ‘collective intelligence’ rather than history (or Spirit), appear to rely on a surreptitious
teleology according to which this intelligence, rather than responding to conjunctural problems with the resources at
its disposal at any given time, is in the long run ‘working out’ the solutions for all crises faced today.[xvii] In a
somewhat extreme case of presence fetishism, assemblies and working groups figure as stand-ins for humankind
as a whole.

But it would be naïve to think that such leadership, while distributed, is done so evenly. What visualisations of the
social media networks behind the likes of Occupy and 15M[xviii] illustrate is that these networks, like the social ones
behind them, possess what is called a scale-free structure.[xix] That is, their characteristic distribution consists of a
large number (or ‘long tail’) of less connected nodes and a small number of hubs with more, more connected and
farther nodes. As such, any simplistic ‘levelling’ conceptualisation of horizontality as absolute equality is
contradicted by all the available knowledge, mathematical and intuitive, on the structure of this kind of network.
(Was this not a variation on the liberal theme of a naturally righteous, free association of individuals, at any rate?)

Image: Mourners hold a picture of 'The martyr: Fadhel Salman al-Matrook' during his funeral procession in
Manama, Bahrain, 16 February 2011

Yet this does not make these movements ‘undemocratic’ either. Firstly, it must be noted that the majority of the most
important Twitter accounts in these visual representations did not exist just over a year ago. If they acquired their
present relevance it was through their being relevant at the time when new connections and a particular kind of
traffic among them boomed. This argument can no doubt be extended beyond social media. Secondly, while it is
obvious that there is something self-confirming about being a hub – those who have more connections will
automatically be heard more – this very self-confirming loop entails dependence on a process of constant
legitimation. That is, while distributed leadership is not an ideal ‘free market’ of information, analysis and initiative,
but subject to preferential attachment, a hub’s ‘stock’ also fluctuates according to the quality of traffic that it routes
and initiatives that it proposes or backs.[xx] Furthermore, that something is routed by a ‘strong’ source does not

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necessarily make it ‘catch on’; for every successful initiative there are hundreds that do not ‘take off’. At the same
time, one of the things that makes a source strong is the fact that it can draw attention to smaller, less connected
nodes, and thus contribute to increasing their visibility and connectivity. Finally, the more connected and excitable
the ‘machine-body’of a networked movement – that is, at peak moments in the mobilisation of bodies, affects and
virtual connections – the likelier it is for traffic from less connected nodes to be picked up, the quicker and easier the
movement from weak to strong ties that an initiative requires to be made effective, and the faster can traffic be
rerouted in general.[xxi]

Thus, however counter-intuitive, we could speak of a ‘vanguard’ of these movements, if we understand it as an

immanent vanguard, endowed with a power of immanent command. Its capacity to ‘lead’ has to be proven each
time, or rather, its status fluctuates much more rapidly. It is only a vanguard to the extent that it ‘works’ – and when it
does not, it does not, maybe even in ways that will damage its power to ‘work’ in the future.[xxii] It is a cause that
inheres in its effects. Now, it could be argued that this was the only sense in which vanguards ever actually existed
historically. But to make this point is tantamount to suggesting that there is no objective ballast to vanguard status –
the identification of one having long been the chimera of different strains of Marxism – beyond the effectiveness of
its (temporary, localisable, though potentially much wider than its initial context) ‘leadership’.

Rodrigo Nunes < rgnunes AT kein.org > is a PNPD/CAPES post-doctoral researcher in philosophy at
PUCRS, Brazil, where he leads the research group Materialismos (http://materialismos.wordpress.com).
Ontological day job notwithstanding, he remains involved in different political initiatives, and a member of
the Turbulence collective (www.turbulence.org.uk). He occasionally blogs at
http://orangoquango.wordpress.com.

Footnotes

[i] Antonio Negri, Trentratre lezioni su Lenin. Roma: Manifestolibri, 2004, p.42. He continues: ‘Otherwise, it is
impotence and defeat trying to justify themselves.’

[ii] Just recently, in fact, a group founding members of Democracia Real Ya! decided to start a non-profit association
of the same name, allegedly to bypass decision-making paralysis in order to exercise ‘ coordinated pressure’ on
institutions. See, Democracia Real Ya se constituye como asociación. El País, 22 April 2012,
http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2012/04/22/act.... The move was denounced in an official statement that insisted
on the original conception of a ‘leaderless coordinated network of individuals that neither can nor should conform to
a legal framework’ . See, La ‘Asociación Democracia Real Ya’ no es Democracia Real Ya,
http://www.democraciarealya.es/blog/2012/04/22/la-...

[iii] The same argument can be made about the tiresome discussion on lack of demands: to make demands that
can be met means, precisely, that one remains within the scope of the present system; so any ‘real’ demands, i.e.,
dealing with the real choices foreclosed by the system, will inevitably seem impossible or nonsensical. This does
evidently not mean that there cannot be concrete local demands, defensive or offensive, which will be useful focal
points, precipitating fights which work as stepping stones for movements – e.g., anti-foreclosure legislation. One
should always be careful not to mistake the ‘subjective “rejection”’ of institutions for their ‘actual destruction’. See,
V.I. Lenin, ‘Left wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder, London: Bookmarks 1993, p.73. On demands, see J.
Butler, ‘So, What Are the Demands?’, Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy 2, 2012, pp.8-11.

[iv] See Colectivo Situaciones ‘Disquiet In the Impasse’ Turbulence 5, 2009, http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-
5/disquiet-in-... 19 & 20, Notes for a New Social Protagonism, N. Holdren and S. Touza (trans.), New
York/Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2011.

[v] On the choice of referring to it as ‘moment’ rather than ‘movement’, see my ‘The Global Moment: Seattle, Ten
Years On’, in Radical Philosophy 159, 2010, http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/the-gl...

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[vi] M. Gladwell, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, New Yorker, October 4, 2010,
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/1010...

[vii] Granovetter defines the strength of a tie as ‘a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional
intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie’. M. Granovetter,
‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, American Journal of Sociology, 78 (6), 1973, p.1361.

[viii] Not that such widely available intuitive knowledge prevented Kurt Andersen from claiming just that. See K.
Andersen, ‘The Protester’, Time, 14 December, 2011 http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printou...

[ix] See, for example, the narratives of how the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ unfolded in: Y. Ryan, ‘How Tunisia’s Revolution
Began’, Al Jazeera, 2011 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/01/... P.N. Howard et al, Opening closed
regimes: what was the role of social media in the Arab Spring? Working paper of the Project on Information
Technology and Political Islam, 2011 http://pitpi.org/index.php/2011/09/11/opening-closed-regimes-what-was-the-
role-of-social-media-during-the-arab-spring/.

[x] W. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0. A Memoir, London: Fourth Estate, 2012, p.225.

[xi] A step-by-step explanation of the 15M’s organising process between February and May 2011 was provided by P.
Buentes, ‘Como se gestó el 15M?, 2011 http://storify.com/pablobuentes/que-es-y-como-se-g.... Good accounts of
Occupy Wall Street’s lead-up to Zuccotti Park include: M. Sledge, ‘Reawakening the Radical Imagination: the
Origins of Occupy Wall Street’, Huffington Post, 11 October 2011 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/10/occupy-
wa... A. Kroll ‘How Occupy Wall Street Really Got Started’, Mother Jones, 17 October, 2011
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/occupy.... As the former summarises it, ‘[t]he movement didn't get that
big simply because AdBusters […] sent out a flashy email promoting it, or because the hacker collective
Anonymous flicked out a few tweets. Instead, it took a group of about 200 committed activists 47 days to outline the
ground rules that have allowed the protest to flourish’.

[xii] A. Badiou, ‘Beyond Formalisation. An Interview’, B. Bosteels, and A. Toscano in Angelaki: Journal of the
Theoretical Humanities, 8 (2) 2003, p. 120.

[xiii] C. Marazzi, ‘Mahgreb e mercati finanziari: la logica del contagio’, in UniNomade 2011
http://uninomade.org/maghreb-e-mercati-finanziari-...

[xiv] See my ‘Dictionary of Received Ideas (In the Interest of Passing Them On)’, ZNet
http://www.zcommunications.org/dictionary-of-recei...

[xv] In this regard, see The Free Association, ‘On Fairy Dust and Rupture’, The Free Association 2011,
http://freelyassociating.org/on-fairy-dust-and-rup...

[xvi] C. Malabou, ‘Who’s Afraid of Deleuzian Wolves?’, in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, P. Patton, (ed.), London,
Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, p. 221. As Malabou and Juliette Simont have argued, the distance between Deleuze (and
Guattari) and Hegel can often be smaller than the former would like to see transpire. See J. Simont, Essai sur la
quantité, la qualité, la relation chez Kant, Hegel, Deleuze. Paris: L’Harmattan.

[xvii] G. Pór, ‘How Revolution Carries Itself Forward By the Working Groups of Occupy’, The Future of Occupy,
2012 http://thefutureofoccupy.org/2012/02/04/how-revolu...

[xviii] M. Lucas, ‘A quién seguir esta primavera? Un estudio en Twitter sobre la Spanish Revolution’, 2012,
http://www.manuelalucas.com/?p=53; O. Marin Miro et al., ‘15 Octubre 2011: mapas de la revolución global en
Twitter’, ParadigmaLabs 2011, http://labs.paradigmatecnologico.com/2011/12/19/15...

[xix] The scale-free model was introduced by physicist Lázlo-Albert Barabási, among others, to refer to the power-
law distribution of nodes (and consequent hub/long tail structure) characteristic of most complex networks known to
us. See A.L. Barabási; A. Réka, ‘Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks’, Science 286 1999, pp.509-12.

[xx] Growth (the addition of new nodes over time) and preferential attachment (the tendency of more connected
nodes to attract more nodes) are the two basic laws governing the formation of scale-free networks in the model
advanced by Barabási and his team.

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The Lessons of 2011: Three Theses on Organisation | Mute 20/01/16 14:05

[xxi] R. Sanchéz Cedillo, ‘El 15M como insurreción del cuerpo-máquina’, Universidad Nómada, 2012,
http://www.universidadnomada.net/spip.php?article377

[xxii] G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Mille plateaux, Paris: Minuit 1980, p.46-7: ‘No doubt there is no more equality, no
less hierarchy in packs than in masses, but they are not of the same kind. The leader of a pack or band plays move
by move, must risk everything in each move, whereas the leader of a group or mass consolidates and capitalises on
past gains.’

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