The History of Disruption

Praise

“At a time when movements are spent forces, The History of Disruption offers a reprise of the history of social struggles against capitalism and the left by spontaneous disruptions. [This] account of the immutable direct resistance reflects an unassailable reality of the 21st century-the oppressed will continue to resist and disrupt injustice and oppression with or without movement and organization-a salient contribution.”
—Immanuel Ness, author of Migration and Economic Imperialism

“Anyone who has endured academia will be familiar with the way that concrete struggles become purely figurative, and know as well that such dematerializations mark historical defeats in the world of practical social contest. This has been one fate of “disruption”; its corporate capture is even more dire. We should take heart then from this clear and clarifying book, whose urgent goal is to rematerialize disruption, to render it practical and pressing-or perhaps simply to engage in canny witness to the work of the world as it restores disruption to the realm of the “kinetic,” where it belongs if we are to have any hope at all.”
—Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. Riot.

“At the very moment that the belief in disruptive behavior is identified with corporate management gurus, activist and intellectual Mehmet Döşemeci boldly demonstrates that it has been practically central for two hundred years for those confronting capitalism on its own kinetic terms. Nor is this absorbing and inspiring book just a history: it is also a defense of a much-debated political strategy that has gone far already to define our times.”
—Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself