The Plebeian Experience is the historical reconstruction of a “hidden” tradition of political struggle for freedom that has developed “discontinuously” underneath mainstream Western politics and political thought. In this sense, the book is deeply related to two previous and very different “classical” researches on the “alternatives” of modernity: Antonio Negri’s Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (2009) and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2012).
Like Negri’s, Martin Breaugh’s study is situated within “the Machiavellian constellation” (p. xvi): The Florentine Secretary is considered the beginner of a conception of politics alternative to mainstream modern theory of state sovereignty and centered on the immanent presence of conflict. More specifically, the plebeian experience described by Breaugh finds its model in Machiavelli’s theory of political “humors”; It is, in fact, the expression of the desire for freedom of the “people” (or “plebs”) against the appetites for domination typical of the “nobles.”
In line with Linebaugh and Rediker’s history from below, the “traces” of this peculiar political experience of struggle for liberation are to be found in the history of marginal groups and common people: The prototype and first historical example is the 494 b.c.e. secession of the Roman plebs to the Aventine Hill to protest their political exclusion, followed by the Ciompi Revolt in Florence (1378) and the Masaniello uprising in Naples (1647), the English Jacobins of the London Corresponding Society at the eve of the nineteenth century, and the Paris Commune of 1871.
The selection of these historical examples is not only a way to circumscribe an otherwise unlimited research field but also and most of all a discursive strategy for underlining the discontinuous character of the plebeian experience: its repetitive but not progressive existence between the wrinkles of Western history. Similarly, the decision to stop this discontinuous history at the Paris Commune does not mean the exhaustion of the plebeian experience and its relegation to a “historical” phenomenon. From the Zapatista uprising and the Seattle and Genoa movements at the eve of the twenty-first century, to the Arab Spring, the indignados, Occupy, and Gezi Park, until the recent resistance of Kurdish women in Kobala and the African American riots in the United States after the “Ferguson case,” a full list of (heterogeneous, but still connected) examples of contemporary “plebeian” struggles for freedom is available. Indeed, it is today that one of the main features of Breaugh’s plebeian experience is gaining a complete self-consciousness in the theory and practice of radical movements: the intrinsic plurality and ambiguity of political subjectivity, resistant to the reductio ad unum that was typical of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century idea of class struggle (here again, careful readers will find more than an echo of Negri’s recent theory of “multitude”). From this perspective, Breaugh’s study can be seen as a historical genealogy of global radical politics or, in his words, of “the politics of the many” (p. xix).
Although Breaugh’s focus is not primarily theoretical, The Plebeian Experience also gives us useful insights for a new and alternative theory of political conflict. In particular, it intersects many elements of what has been recently defined as “destituent power” (see Laudani, Disobedience in Western Political Thought: A Genealogy, 2013, and Giorgio Agamben, L’uso dei corpi, 2014): Modern Western thought has prevalently understood political conflict in terms of constituent power, as the activation of a creative energy that gives rise, ex nihilo, to a new institutional order where human relations are disciplined and organized (constituted power). In all of the different historical examples discussed in The Plebeian Experience, the struggle for freedom takes, on the contrary, the form of a withdrawal (Plebs’ secession being again the paradigmatic example). Conflict for liberation is not conceived, then, within a military imagination, that is to say expressing itself in the form of a direct clash with power for the conquest of power or of something that is missing (rights, freedom, better salaries, etc.), but, on the contrary, as a form of withdrawal of his/her support from the functioning of the power machine. But this is not only a negative force but also a dialectical one: Its negativity brings with it simultaneously an affirmative potency, a different way of conceiving human relations, where conflict is an inner dimension of a new practice of democracy.
Breaugh’s reference om pages 41 and 42 of his book to Etienne de La Boétie’s Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1997) is thus not surprising: “Refuse to serve no more,” the French writer said, “and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hand upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away” (Discourse, pp. 52–53). Here, more than in Machiavelli, we can find theorized for the first time destituent dimension of the plebeian conflict and, more in general, a conception of politics where the conflict between logics of domination and will to freedom is an immanent condition that cannot find a stable and permanent institutional composition.
In this sense, a more direct confrontation with La Boétie’s Discourse would have helped Breaugh to better develop the relationships between the plebeian experience and the idea of democracy as free and conflicting association (which is Breaugh’s implicit normative element). On the contrary, Breaugh’s use of La Boétie is limited to the more classical argument on “voluntary servitude.” to emphasize, against any mythology of the plebeian experience, its ambiguous and ambivalent nature. According to Breaugh, there is, in fact, always the possibility that the plebeian desire for political freedom will relapse into its opposite: the desire for servitude. However, La Boétie’s voluntary servitude is part of a broader conception of politics that, assuming the constitutive fragility of sovereign power because of its potential exposure to the withdrawal of the consent of its subjects, makes of politics a fluid space of conflict between the cooperative instances of the many and the logic of domination of the One. In other words, to make the plebeian experience a real alternative within modernity, it would be better to shift from Machiavelli, who in the last analysis is searching for an institutional composition of the natural conflictuality of society, to La Boétie’s idea of politics as movement.
If a real limit can be found in Breaugh’s book, however, it is its spatial framework, the geographical borders of its historical reconstruction, which remains essentially Eurocentric. In particular, it ignores one of the most significant examples of plebeian conflict: black abolitionism. Better than the example of the Romans’ secession, a confrontation with the experience of abolitionism could have helped Breaugh to highlight the capacity of plebeian withdrawal to produce “affirmative” effects. W. E. B. Du Bois magisterially explained it with the idea of an “abolition democracy”: The African American withdrawal from the plantation system to join the Union Army during the Civil War (Du Bois’s “general strike of the black worker”) not only changed the nature of the conflict, transforming it from a “constitutional” war to a fight against slavery, but also opened the way to a revolutionary, though unfulfilled, process of democratization of American society beyond the limits of its constitutional form. And several other examples of non-European declinations of the plebeian experience could be found in the now-conspicuous historical research coming from Atlantic and postcolonial studies.
In other words, a discontinuous but more complete history of the plebeian experience would call for, to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s famous expression, its “provincialization” or, which is the same thing, its emancipation from the European narrative of sovereignty within which the plebeian experience can remain a “hidden tradition.”
