Download Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle by Asef Bayat PDF

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What form of politics, if any, do the urban marginalized groups espouse? Critically navigating through the prevailing models, including culture of poverty, survival strategy, urban social movements, and everyday resistance, I would suggest that the new global restructuring is reproducing subjectivities (marginalized and deinstitutionalized groups such as the impoverished middle classes, the unemployed, casual labor, street-subsistence workers, and street children), social space, and thus terrain of political struggles that current theoretical perspectives cannot on their own account for.

And why do they act in common if they are not deliberately mobilized by organizations or leaders? Collective identities are built not simply in open and legal institutions or solidarity networks, of which they are in general deprived due to surveillance. ” The passive networks represent a key feature in the formation of nonmovements.  Thus, the poor street vendors would recognize their common predicaments by noticing one another on street corners on a daily basis, even though they may never know or speak to one another.

The story of nonmovements is the story of agency in the times of constraints. The concept is both descriptive and prescriptive. On the one hand, by bypassing the rigid dichotomies of “active”/“passive,” “individual”/“collective,” or “civil”/“political” resistance which have limited our conceptual horizons, it opens up wholly new possibilities to explore unnoticed social practices that may in fact be harbinger of significant social changes. It helps uncover the logic of practice among dispersed and distant collectives mostly under the conditions of authoritarian rule when free association and active communication are suppressed.