Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today

The ’Arab spring’, the Spanish ’Indignados’, the Greek ’Aganaktismenoi’ and the ’Occupy Wall Street’ movement all share a number of distinctive traits. Similar features have marked collective resistances from the Zapatistas and the Seattle protests onwards, giving rise to theoretical and practical debates over the importance of these ideological and political forms. By engaging with the controversy between the autonomous, biopolitical ’multitude’ and the arguments in favour of the hegemony of ’the people’ the central aim of this book is to probe the innovative practices and ideas that have developed and to debate their potential to reinvigorate democracy whilst seeking something better than ’disaster capitalism’.