John Berger (1968)
Seventy years ago (on 6
May 1898) there was a massive demonstration of workers, men and women, in the
centre of Milan. The events which led up to it involve too long a history to
treat with here. The demonstration was attacked and broken up by the army under
the command of General Beccaris. At noon the cavalry charged the crowd: the
unarmed workers tried to make barricades: martial law was declared and for
three days the army fought against the unarmed.
The official casualty
figures were 100 workers killed and 450 wounded. One policeman was killed
accidentally by a soldier. There were no army casualties. (Two years later Umberto
I was assassinated because after the massacre he publicly congratulated General
Beccaris, the ‘butcher of Milan.’)
I have been trying to
understand certain aspects of the demonstration in the Corso Venezia on 6 May
because of a story I am writing. In the process I came to a few conclusions
about demonstrations which may perhaps be more widely applicable.
Mass demonstrations
should be distinguished from riots or revolutionary uprisings although, under
certain (now rare) circumstances, they may develop into either of the latter.
The aims of a riot are usually immediate (the immediacy matching the desperation
they express): the seizing of food, the release of prisoners, the destruction
of property. The aims of a revolutionary uprising are long-term and
comprehensive: they culminate in the taking over of State power. The aims of a
demonstration, however, are symbolic: it demonstrates a force that is scarcely
used.
A large number of people
assemble together in an obvious and already announced public place. They are
more or less unarmed. (On 6 May 1898, entirely unarmed.) They present
themselves as a target to the forces of repression serving the State authority
against whose policies they are protesting.
Theoretically
demonstrations are meant to reveal the strength of popular opinion or feeling:
theoretically they are an appeal to the democratic conscience of the State. But
this presupposes a conscience which is very unlikely to exist.
If the State authority is
open to democratic influence, the demonstration will hardly be necessary; if it
is not, it is unlikely to be influenced by an empty show of force containing no
real threat. (A demonstration in support of an already established alternative
State authority – as when Garibaldi entered Naples in 1860 – is a special case
and may be immediately effective.)
Demonstrations took place
before the principle of democracy was even nominally admitted. The massive
early Chartist demonstrations were part of the struggle to obtain such an
admission. The crowds who gathered to present their petition to the Tsar in St
Petersburg in 1905 were appealing – and presenting themselves as a target – to
the ruthless power of an absolute monarchy. In the event – as on so many
hundreds of other occasions all over Europe – they were shot down.
It would seem that the
true function of demonstrations is not to convince the existing State authority
to any significant degree. Such an aim is only a convenient rationalisation.
The truth is that mass
demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical
ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness. The delay between the
rehearsals and the real performance may be very long: their quality – the
intensity of rehearsed awareness – may, on different occasions, vary
considerably: but any demonstration which lacks this element of rehearsal is
better described as an officially encouraged public spectacle.
A demonstration, however
much spontaneity it may contain, is a created event which arbitrarily separates
itself from ordinary life. Its value is the result of its artificiality, for
therein lies its prophetic, rehearsing possibilities.
A mass demonstration
distinguishes itself from other mass crowds because it congregates in public to
create its function, instead of forming in response to one: in this, it differs
from any assembly of workers within their place of work – even when strike
action is involved – or from any crowd of spectators. It is an assembly which
challenges what is given by the mere fact of its coming together.
State authorities usually
lie about the number of demonstrators involved. The lie, however, makes little
difference. (It would only make a significant difference if demonstrations
really were an appeal to the democratic conscience of the State.) The
importance of the numbers involved is to be found in the direct experience of
those taking part in or sympathetically witnessing the demonstration. For them
the numbers cease to be numbers and become the evidence of their senses, the
conclusions of their imagination. The larger the demonstration, the more
powerful and immediate (visible, audible, tangible) a metaphor it becomes for
their total collective strength.
I say metaphor because
the strength thus grasped transcends the potential strength of those present,
and certainly their actual strength as deployed in a demonstration. The more
people there are there, the more forcibly they represent to each other and to
themselves those who are absent. In this way a mass demonstration
simultaneously extends and gives body to an abstraction. Those who take part
become more positively aware of how they belong to a class. Belonging to that
class ceases to imply a common fate, and implies a common opportunity. They
begin to recognise that the function of their class need no longer be limited:
that it, too, like the demonstrations itself, can create its own function.
Revolutionary awareness
is rehearsed in another way by the choice and effect of location.
Demonstrations are essentially urban in character, and they are usually planned
to take place as near as possible to some symbolic centre, either civic or
national. Their ‘targets’ are seldom the strategic ones – railway stations,
barracks, radio stations, airports. A mass demonstration can be interpreted as
the symbolic capturing of a city or capital. Again, the symbolism or metaphor
is for the benefit of the participants.
The demonstration, an
irregular event created by the demonstrators, nevertheless takes place near the
city centre, intended for very different uses. The demonstrators interrupt the
regular life of the streets they march through or of the open spaces they fill.
They ‘cut off these areas, and, not yet having the power to occupy them
permanently, they transform them into a temporary stage on which they dramatise
the power they still lack.
The demonstrators’ view
of the city surrounding their stage also changes. By demonstrating, they
manifest a greater freedom and independence – a greater creativity, even
although the product is only symbolic – than they can ever achieve individually
or collectively when pursuing their regular lives. In their regular pursuits
they only modify circumstances; by demonstrating they symbolically oppose their
very existence to circumstances.
This creativity may be
desperate in origin, and the price to be paid for it high, but it temporarily
changes their outlook. They become corporately aware that it is they or those
whom they represent who have built the city and who maintain it. They see it through
different eyes. They see it as their product, confirming their potential
instead of reducing it.
Finally, there is another
way in which revolutionary awareness is rehearsed. The demonstrators present
themselves as a target to the so-called forces of law and order. Yet the larger
the target they present, the stronger they feel. This cannot be explained by
the banal principle of ‘strength in numbers,’ any more than by vulgar theories
of crowd psychology. The contradiction between their actual vulnerability and
their sense of invincibility corresponds to the dilemma which they force upon
the State authority.
Either authority must
abdicate and allow the crowd to do as it wishes: in which case the symbolic
suddenly becomes real, and, even if the crowd’s lack of organisation and
preparedness prevents it from consolidating its victory, the event demonstrates
the weakness of authority. Or else authority must constrain and disperse the
crowd with violence: in which case the undemocratic character of such authority
is publicly displayed. The imposed dilemma is between displayed weakness and
displayed authoritarianism. (The officially approved and controlled
demonstration does not impose the same dilemma: its symbolism is censored:
which is why I term it a mere public spectacle.) Almost invariably, authority
chooses to use force. The extent of its violence depends upon many factors, but
scarcely ever upon the scale of the physical threat offered by the
demonstrators. This threat is essentially symbolic. But by attacking the
demonstration authority ensures that the symbolic event becomes an historical
one: an event to be remembered, to be learnt from, to be avenged.
It is in the nature of a
demonstration to provoke violence upon itself. Its provocation may also be
violent. But in the end it is bound to suffer more than it inflicts. This is a
tactical truth and an historical one. The historical role of demonstrations is
to show the injustice, cruelty, irrationality of the existing State authority.
Demonstrations are protests of innocence.
But the innocence is of
two kinds, which can only be treated as though they were one at a symbolic
level. For the purposes of political analysis and the planning of revolutionary
action, they must be separated. There is an innocence to be defended and an
innocence which must finally be lost: an innocence which derives from justice,
and an innocence which is the consequence of a lack of experience.
Demonstrations express
political ambitions before the political means necessary to realise them have
been created. Demonstrations predict the realisation of their own ambitions and
thus may contribute to that realisation, but they cannot themselves achieve
them.
