The End of Mediation: Radical Democracy and the Reinvention of Strategies for Planetary Liberation

Democratic institutions in the West are increasingly resorting to repression to address social problems. This is particularly evident in protests for climate justice and against the war in Gaza, revealing that democratic institutions are either unwilling or unable to develop solutions to the urgent crises troubling our world. Looking back at the 1970s clarifies this challenge. However, as Michael Hardt argues in his contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, inspiration for implementing alternatives can be found in recent movements that have demanded and practiced radical democracy.

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Protest movements today, such as those focusing on climate change and war, seem to be met with little response from the ruling institutions. It is as if those in power simply are not listening, not matter how loud, numerous, and dedicated are the protesters. These protests are certainly just and have some important effects, but, given the lack of responsiveness from the structures of power, we are forced to question whether we need to invent new practices and a new strategy to combat the power structures and effectively transform social relations.

A shift in the practices of power in the 1970s

Before addressing current dilemma, allow me to take a step back and pose this as part of a long-standing condition, which many activists and theorists in the 1970s conceived as an ‘end of mediation.’ It is useful to return to that moment because I believe the 1970s are the beginning of our era in the sense that, to a significant extent, the political problems faced by progressive and revolutionary movements at that time remain our problems today. Identifying a political problem clearly can be a large step towards formulating a solution.

To understand what activists and theorists in the 1970s meant by the ‘end of mediation,’ I need first to review some of the standard assumptions about the functioning of power and the dominant institutions in liberal democratic society. Mediation is thought to be a primary characteristic whereby ruling institutions meet antagonistic social forces not only with force and violence, but also with concessions, compromise, or reform. At the highest level, the state operates mechanisms of mediation to quell organized social unrest. The passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the U.S., for instance, is seen as an institutional reform in response to powerful waves of Black protest. Labor unions, too, are assumed to operate by mediation in response to worker antagonisms, just as university administrations do with respect to student unrest. The mediation of modern liberal institutions, according to this standard view, creates something like a dialogue, albeit an exchange between dramatically unequal parties.

In the 1970s, activists in a variety of domains believed that these mediatory mechanisms were no longer operative, and thus standard tactics of challenging power, such as organized protest, were no longer sufficiently effective. Antiwar organizers in the U.S., for instance, had previously assumed that if the protests could become large enough and gain sufficiently widespread public support then the government would have to moderate its offensives in Southeast Asia, but, despite the growing size and intensity of the protests, the government offered no mediation and on the contrary escalated war efforts abroad and increased repression at home. Labor actions experienced a similar fate. During the 1973 wave of industrial strikes in West Germany, for instance, Karl-Heinz Roth claimed that the capitalist class, in contrast to its actions in response to a similar wave of the strikes a few years earlier, offered not forms of mediation, such as wage increases, to counteract the worker insurgency. The scene of parliamentary politics underwent a similar transformation in this same period. Sergio Bologna remarked that the political parties no longer sought to represent and mediate the conflicts in civil society, as they had done throughout the postwar period.

Two key propositions result from this hypothesis that these various forms of governmental mediation have ended or declined. First, the ruling structures are less oriented toward generating the consent of the ruled and thus rely more heavily on force and coercion. Second, our traditional protest practices, which seek reform through public appeal, negotiation, and mass mobilization may no longer be effective as they once were.

Climate and pro-Palestine protests

That brings me back to our current situation because it is easy to recognize something like the ‘end of mediation’ regarding protest movements today. Even though for well over a decade climate activism has grown in numbers and intensity in countries throughout the world, as well as achieving an extraordinarily widespread social consciousness, the dominant nation-states and other institutions of power, whether unwilling or unable, have offered no significant reforms in response. Despite the loud and clear voices of activists in the streets and concerned populations throughout society, it is as if those in power simply are not listening or ‘cannot hear.’ Mediation is not on the agenda, and no meaningful program of social transformation is on the horizon. As protests grow larger, the destruction of the planet only continues to accelerate.

A similar scenario is evident regarding protests against the Israeli’s ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, and against the military and political collaboration of other governments. A worldwide movement has grown to condemn the slaughter, but U.S. and European governments – let alone Israel itself – have not responded with mediation of any sort, only repression. The U.S. university student encampments in Spring 2024, often with Jewish students in prominent positions, received extraordinary global media attention, and yet the university administrations and the national government offered no dialogue or mediation, only brutal and ongoing repression. Protests in other countries against the carnage perpetrated by Israel, particularly in Europe, have been met with varying level of repression, but no meaningful political efforts to halt or slow the carnage.

I should note that what I am pointing to here is not an absolute shift in the function of power, a totally ‘end of mediation,’ but something like a point of inflection. Some contemporary protest movements do still result in meaningful reform, such as the feminist movements that led to the 2020 legislation to legalize abortion in Argentina. In addition, mass mobilizations, even when do not achieve political changes, have other important effects, including subjectivation of activists involved, creation of community, and political education for the wider public, as well as unforeseeable outcomes. Nonetheless, the end (or decline) of mediation constitutes a significantly different situation for political action and a problem that the movements need to confront.

During the first months of the second Trump government, the mode of power relations without mediation seems to be becoming more general: no negotiation or compromise with antagonistic political forces, no efforts to gain the consent of opponents, only threats and force. Within the U.S., this shift dovetails with what many recognize as crisis of the constitutional order, and on the international scene, with what Sandro Mezzadra and I call the global war regime, which jettisons mechanisms of soft power, diplomacy, and negotiation, extending military logics to a wide range of economic, social, and political interactions.

This is the question that primarily preoccupies me here: if it is true that we are increasingly confronted by institutions of power that do not offer significant mechanisms of mediation in response to social antagonism, how do we need to shift our political strategy?

The fight for a new democracy

Although I find that looking back at the progressive and revolutionary movements of the 1970s gives us a new vantage point on our political situation, allowing us to recognize current political problems more clearly, those movements do not necessarily provide us with adequate solutions. This is, in part, because many of the strategies pursued in those years were defeated, but also, and more importantly, because the terms of our contemporary political situation are significantly different.

I don’t pretend, either, to have the answer and an adequate strategy to propose. Some general lines, however, seem clear to me. First, despite the fact that what I am here calling the ‘end of mediation,’ with the accompanying forms of authoritarianism and repression, violates the previously accepted norms of liberal democracy, our strategy cannot be simply to ‘return to normal.’ This supposedly realistic and reasonable strategy takes different but corresponding forms in different national contexts. In the U.S. it is frequently today expressed by defending the Constitution, supporting the Democratic Party establishment, and yearning to reestablish U.S. leadership in international affairs. Such a desire for a ‘return to normal,’ however, is increasingly impossible because the political forces that previously sustained it, such as the traditional centrist parties, have lost their effectiveness or no longer exist. Moreover, that version of ‘normal’ was itself a problem – a political system that, although capable of limited reforms and mediation, was fundamentally undemocratic and structured by numerous and persistent social hierarchies.

The only realistic and reasonable option today must be much more radical. I propose it should take its cue from the demands and organizational forms of social movements of the last two decades. At least since the movements of squares from 2011 to 2013, for instance, from Tunisia and Egypt to Spain, the U.S., and Turkey, movements have demanded a ‘real democracy,’ qualitatively different from the version of democracy that the dominant forces celebrate, one based on practices of mass participation in decision-making through assemblies and other organizational mechanisms. Furthermore, movements have directly addressed and attacked the fundamental structures of domination, the way the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, was not satisfied with police or prison reform but aspired ultimately to the abolition of white supremacy itself.

These movements, of course, do not provide a ready-made recipe and, indeed, each of them experienced numerous obstacles and defeats. They do, however, indicate some possible political lines out of which an adequate strategy could be invented. Finally, we must recognize that the time in now. One gets the sense that the blitzkrieg of the first months of Donald Trump’s second mandate left many people temporarily stunned, immobilized, both in the U.S. and outside. And Trump is not alone. The rise of authoritarian and reactionary political forces is accelerating all over. It is true, as I said, that we cannot simply dust off old formulas to repeat; we need take the time necessary to invent a new strategy and new organizational forms adequate to the current conjuncture. And yet, it is also true that urgency is upon us. That paradox is part of the challenge we face.