Chapter 12: A Pure Theory of Tactics

Our political condition is violent. There is no way around that. Seeking a change in society—or even just maintaining the status quo—is necessarily violent in the sense that it imposes values on others who may not share the same ideals. It necessarily entails redistributions. It will affect ownership rights and possession. It often involves educational, societal, and personal transformations: these are all violent effects if we properly understand violence and are honest with ourselves. Revolutions, of course, are inevitably violent. Uprisings well. But social transformation more generally is violent. Even Gandhian satyagraha is violent, when we realize what it would entail for our children, families, and loved ones. Some practices are not physically violent—like Occupy Wall Street—but they are equally violent in trying to transform distributions of wealth and well-being.

There is, however, no reason or need to valorize the violence. No reason to create justifications that embolden violence. No reason to seek out or accentuate the violence. To the contrary, there is every reason to try to minimize and devalue violence, and to do our best to distribute it equitably so that no one group or individual suffers the brunt of societal change.

In the end, it makes no sense to draw a line at physical violence, first, because the enforcement of any kind of distributional rules will require the threat or application of force (as it does now, through for instance the criminal enforcement of trespass laws), and second, because it is a liberal illusion that masks the structural violence that pervades social relations. Naturally, physicality is a powerful signifier. There is no doubt. The sight of German shepherds attacking the peaceful civil rights protesters galvanized the public. The sight of police officers pepper spraying peaceful Occupiers, or of the militarized SWAT teams aggressing peaceful police protesters—all of those images galvanize political opinion. Peaceful protest, as opposed to violent protest, will have effects of reality. But instead of drawing overly simplistic lines, the path forward should seek to devalorize violence and distribute it equitably.

No one individual or group should bear the burden of violence; the weight of social change should fall on all equitably. It should not be concentrated. Perhaps ultimately this is an ethical question—the most important ethical question. Critical praxis should be conducted carefully and hesitantly—with respect, care, thoughtfulness. Not with glee or delight, but instead always conscious of the harm it distributes, vigilant and watchful of not exceeding what is strictly necessary. Praxis should not be targeted on particular individuals or groups, but equitably distributed across society and classes. As an ethical matter, we should avoid strategies that concentrate rather than distribute the burdens of politics.

It would be nice to imagine that violence would ultimately recede—or that, in a more equitable society, there would be less need for social transformation and redistribution, and thus less need for violence. It would be lovely to imagine a society where there is greater equality and opportunity for all, and therefore less interpersonal struggle. To imagine a society where equality itself limits the extent of violence. In a world where the wealth disparities are not so sharp, where there is good public education and health care, might there be less social competition? If we achieved such a world, wouldn’t there be less violent struggles between individuals?

Yes, it would be nice to imagine. But this is just another illusion, a dangerous one that might justify more violence today to achieve a less violent society in the future. That’s usually how illusions work. We must let it go too. We are left, then, with one promising path forward to resolve the problems of violence: namely, to devalue violence and distribute it as equitably as possible. To recalibrate human experience so that we enhance mutual recognition and labor, and contain and manage violence as much as possible.

What this entails for critical praxis is a contextual, case-by-case analysis of our political struggles that responds to the exact situation and the really-existing political economic regimes. There can be no generalized theory of the vanguard, nor of leaderlessness, nor of non-violence and self-sacrifice—every critical practice has to be perfectly designed for the specific time and space. Here too, we need to resist foundational constraints that may be entirely inapplicable in different geopolitical contexts.

In effect, all praxis must be deeply situated. A fast would not work in 1936 Germany—and Gandhi’s writings were simply off the mark in that regard. The idea of portability makes no sense in this context. The idea of generalizing from one situated political context to another is dangerous. An armed vanguard revolutionary movement in the United States today would get crushed. The disproportionality in weaponry and technology, in the face of American military power, is simply insurmountable. This may not have been the case in Russia in 1917, nor in China in 1948, but in the United States today, the asymmetries and imbalances are far too significant to expect any type of armed uprising to succeed. That is why the alt-right has engaged in a protracted cultural and populist revolution, rather than an armed revolt (for the most part).

It is important to recognize that all social movements and tactics are inevitably situated. Political disobedience of the type manifested in Occupy Wall Street—which many of us, myself included, had perhaps erroneously interpreted as apolitical or outside politics—was deeply ensconced within the political-historical moment of a centrist Democratic administration. Occupy was effectively pushing, or trying to push, President Obama to the left—a model that may be totally inappropriate under a Trump regime. The Occupy movement made sense and was tactically sophisticated under the Obama administration, but would make no sense under a Trump presidency. The model of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons was effective, insofar as it was, under a repressive Gaullist regime. But again, one can hardly imagine it being effective in times of so open and blatant punitiveness and vilification.

What is to be done—in the narrow sense of how to bring about our values and which specific strategies and tactics to deploy—will require specific, situated, contextual assessments. The answer requires a unique political tract for each situation. It should not come as a surprise that Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?” is precisely such a specific and detailed tract. It is not ageless. It is not portable. It is today a historical artifact. That is what our critical praxis should aspire to: winning a struggle and then becoming a historical artifact that may not be replicable. The answer to the question “What is to be done?” must be GPS and time and date stamped.

I.

In Assembly, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri drew a distinction between strategies and tactics: strategies, in other words the broad goals of the movement, they argued, should be decided by the assembled multitude, by the people; by contrast, shorter-term and more localized tactics should be designed by the movement leaders. In this way, Hardt and Negri tried to accommodate the newfound desire for leaderlessness with the reality, or at least their idea of the reality of social movements. They propose an illuminating distinction, even if it may need to be reformulated here.

On a pure theory of illusions and values, the line would be drawn slightly differently: the critical Left should determine the overarching and long-lasting values, but the critical practices need to be contextualized, situated, and designed for the immediate moment and place.

The first imperative, then, is to avoid the tendency to universalize or generalize. Actions have to be analyzed en situation. Desperate times may call for desperate acts, but different times will call for different praxis.

Physical violence might well be called for in a colonial setting, as Fanon did. But it may not be fitting in a liberal democracy, for a number of reasons. First, physical violence tends to backfire in a democratic setting. In the civil rights context, it was the dogs and fire hoses that galvanized opinion against segregation. In the Occupy context, it was the pepper straying of peaceful protesters that outraged so many. Physical violence against peaceful protest in a liberal democracy, against people acting peacefully, mostly boomerangs. The same is true for violent protest. Second, physical violence has long-term traumatic effects. It causes stress disorders in people and later generations, tending to fuel vengeance cycles that last. Third, in a liberal democracy, physical violence rarely gives you the moral high ground.

There is a deep contextual element to praxis: Our critical interventions are situated in time and place. In fact, I am not sure I would be writing or publishing these thoughts in an even more authoritarian state. All of my own interventions—from the illusion of order to the illusion of free markets—were situated; and I could very well imagine a different political situation where I would have called for order or markets. That is the essence of critical thought. It is not universalizing. It is not absolute in this sense. It is non-Kantian. There can be no universalization of our maxims.

The second imperative is to avoid collapsing things, or being too reductionist. Despite the pervasiveness of violence, and the continuity between physical and systemic violence, critical theorists must remain careful about the exercise of power and the distributional effects of their praxis. Just because political action is inherently violent, that does not mean we should turn a blind eye to the harm or rush to cause needless harm, or enjoy it. It means we need to be careful about what we are doing. We need to minimize and devalue the violence—not value it, and certainly not inflate it.

I ended The Counterrevolution hand-in-hand with William of Ockham, in the Inquisition, drawing inspiration from his own struggles against despotic power. That was not an accident. Ockham understood well the imperative to limit things to what was absolutely necessary. That was the essence of Ockham’s razor: not to engage in the unnecessary, not to compound beyond necessity. But at the same time, Ockham recognized acutely the need to resist, to struggle, through the ages. Our political condition is not only dangerous and serious; it is constant, consuming, and unending. There is no equilibrium, recall. There is no end of history. There is just a constant struggle over distributions in society. I ended with Ockham to emphasize that our task will not end, that we are part of a relentless struggle—but that we should be careful not to exceed what is strictly necessary.

The paradigm for critical praxis, then, is not to embrace a particular form or style of action—e.g. an occupation, insurgency, hunger strike, etc.—but rather to discover, in each unique context and en situation, the best method to counter the forces that push us toward servitude and inequality. The key concept is the counter-, once again, but the goal must be to get past its reactivity, so as to produce a constant autonomous countermove as practice. And, equally importantly, to limit critical practice within the bounds of necessity.

II.

The choice of a critical praxis will inevitably have its own effects of reality. Particular critical practices will shape material reality and social relations differently. So, for instance, a boycott and divestment campaign will affect perceptions of injustice, and possibly configure social outcomes, differently than an armed insurgency.

In terms of method, then, it would be important to ask ourselves how different forms of political engagement will reconfigure our social reality and shape our beliefs. There is much to be learned here from prior campaigns and interventions. Let’s look at three examples.

A. Foucault and the GIP

In the early 1970s, Michel Foucault took part in a prison resistance movement and helped organize, along with others, the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (Prisons Information Group, the “GIP”). What is particularly interesting about Foucault’s participation in the GIP is how it drew on his critical theory. The form of his political action was guided by his theoretical work—and as a result, the reality that he sought to shape was informed by his philosophical insights. At the same time, the political practice associated with the GIP would fundamentally reshape his theoretical work. The influence of theory on practice, and of practice on theory, was utterly remarkable—and extremely instructive for our own political practices and theorizing.

Specifically, the form, structure, and practices of the GIP were a deliberate effort to instantiate the turn to discourse analysis that Foucault had inaugurated in the 1960s. The principal intervention of the GIP was to create a space for the voices of prisoners to be heard. This was in direct continuity with Foucault’s philosophical and methodological tenets. Some historical background will help.

Following the student and worker uprisings of May 1968, the French government cracked down on non-parliamentary political organizations. What followed was the massive arrest of several hundred Maoists militants and their detention in French prisons. The Maoist political organization, La Gauche prolétarienne, demanded at first that the prisoners receive political prisoner status. Danièle Rancière and Daniel Defert asked Foucault to conduct a popular tribunal to air these grievances—on the model of the popular tribunal that Jean-Paul Sartre had just conducted in northern France against mining magnates. Foucault threw himself into the movement with full force, but in a slightly different way, preferring a more horizontal model to that of a popular tribunal. After much discussion among a number of intellectuals, the GIP emerged on the model of a discursive intervention: it would be a vehicle to allow certain discourses to be heard, a way to allow prisoners, whose voice was still illegible, to become legible. The GIP was in direct continuity with Foucault’s theoretical work in his Archeology of Knowledge and Order of Discourse. To see this, one need only examine the following three dimensions of the GIP.

First, by contrast to alternative forms of engagement, such as a popular tribunal (originally proposed and extensively debated with other Maoists³⁵⁶) or a formal commission of inquiry, the GIP was organized so as to allow the incarcerated persons to be heard—rather than be spoken for. This principal theme involved a number of sub-elements, including:

(a) The (relative) anonymity of the organizers. Rather than have a named and appointed spokesperson, along the model of Sartre as prosecutor and judge of a popular tribunal, the effort was to diffuse authority and avoid designated speakers. Still today, few of the central figures are known—Danièle Rancière, Christine Martineau, Jacques Donzelot, Jean-Claude Passeron would all be participants, working on the original survey, but their names remained somewhat anonymous.³⁵⁷ Domenach, Foucault, and Vidal-Naquet signed the original manifesto, but practically all of the other communiqués were unnamed, signed generically by the GIP.

(b) The leaderlessness of the organization. Insofar as the objective was to make it possible to hear those incarcerated and their families, rather than to speak on their behalf, there was a concerted effort not to identify or allow leadership positions within the GIP.

(c) The choice not to say what to do, but to allow the voices of the prisoners to be heard. As the GIP manifesto declared, “It is not for us to suggest reform. We merely wish to know the reality. And to make it known almost immediately, almost overnight, because time is short.”³⁵⁸ You hear this throughout the tracts of the GIP, like this one from March 15, 1971:

It is about letting speak those who have an experience of prison. It is not that they need help in “becoming conscious”: the consciousness of the oppression is absolutely clear, and well aware of who the enemy is. But the current system denies them the means of formulating things, of organizing themselves.”³⁵⁹

Second, by contrast to the original impetus of the Gauche prolétarienne, the GIP challenged the distinction between political and common law prisoner. Whereas at first the Maoist militants attempted to obtain political prisoner status for their colleagues,³⁶⁰ the GIP took the position that all prisoners were political prisoners: that the prison and the penal system were political institution. This too was in direct continuity with Foucault’s critical theory of penal law. It followed directly from his 1972 lectures, Théories et institutions pénales, where Foucault had developed a political theory of criminal justice. One can see this translated directly into the GIP, from the initial manifesto onward, where it is clear that the object of the political intervention is the prison tout court, not the detention of militants only or political prisoners.³⁶¹

Finally, the GIP intervention “ended” at the moment of the creation of an autonomous—actually the first—organization of and for prisoners, the CAP (Comité d’action des prisonniers). The central mission of the GIP, namely hearings the voice of the incarcerated, was essentially achieved when the prisoners formed their own association—thereby triggering, with elegance, the dissolution of the GIP.

In this sense, the unique praxis of the GIP emerged seamlessly from the theoretical work on discourse analysis, more specifically from Foucault’s writings from the History of Madness to the Archaeology of Knowledge and the Order of Discourse. As Foucault himself confided to Daniel Defert, his involvement in the GIP was, in his words, “dans le droit fil de l’Histoire de la folie” (“in a straight line emanating from The History of Madness”).³⁶²

Foucault’s investment in prison abolition fit within a line of inquiry that Foucault set for himself in his yearly lectures at the Collège de France. From the outset, Foucault explored at the Collège the ways in which societies used legal forms to produce truth. In his lectures, Foucault explored, reading Homer’s Iliad, how the ancient Greeks used agonistic competition between heroes to reestablish the social order; how early Germanic law used compensation to resolve the blood feud; how medieval jurists employed various ordeals or social status to render justice; and how we had graduated, in the West, to processes of examination and expertise to find and justify the truth in contested legal disputes—to tell justice, to engage in what he called “jurisdiction.” On December 9, 1970, Foucault indicated, at the moment of his very first lesson at the Collège, that his research seminar (distinct from his main lectures) would focus on the production of truth in the context of 19^th century penality.³⁶³ Only a few weeks later, Foucault combined those intellectual interests with the declaration, on February 8, 1971, of the GIP manifesto.

There was, then, an intimate link between Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge and mode of discourse analysis (circa 1970) and his political engagement with the GIP. The conceptual architecture of the GIP related directly to the structure of his analyses, but also, remarkably, his political praxis pushed his theoretical reflections toward both the idea of a “political economy of the body” and also the need to supplement the archaeological approach with a more genealogical analysis of power. In effect, Foucault’s theoretical work in the early 1970s informed his political engagement and, reciprocally, his political praxis reshaped his theoretical writings. This is well documented in Daniel Defert’s oral history of the period, Une Vie politique³⁶⁴, published in 2014, as well as in a range of recently published research on the GIP³⁶⁵ and documentary film work.³⁶⁶

The praxis, in effect, leveraged the theory. This is important: if you believe in discourse theory, then it matters how you say things, who says them, and what is said. You cannot just instrumentally use any device to realize your ambition. Instead, you need to engage in practices that will instantiate and cohere with your understanding of politics.

It is revealing and important, as well, that the influence worked in the other direction as well. Foucault’s practical engagements shaped his thinking and significantly influenced the writing of his book on prisons, Discipline and Punish (1975)—which Foucault himself explicitly recognized in the work itself. You will recall the passage in Discipline and Punish where Foucault writes: « Que les punitions en général et que la prison relèvent d’une technologie politique du corps, c’est peut-être moins l’histoire qui me l’a enseigné que le présent. Au cours de ces dernières années, des révoltes de prison se sont produites un peu partout dans le monde³⁶⁷. »

The influence of praxis on theory operated at a number of levels. First, Foucault’s practical engagements helped focus his theoretical analysis on the materiality and the bodies of the prisoners—the bodies that form both the locus of punishment, but also the source of resistance. What Discipline and Punish succeeds in doing is to augment the traditional Marxist political economy with what Foucault referred to expressly as “a political economy of the body.”

Second, the GIP engagement also helped focus his analysis of the relationship between juridical forms and truth—which was the very project he set for himself at the Collège—on the juridical form of imprisonment that is tied inextricably to the form of examination.

Third, it revealed to Foucault that his archeological approach was not entirely sufficient to the task he had set himself, and that a genealogical method was necessary. The first-hand experience of the prison and witnessing of the routinized, homogenous uniformity of isolated confinement, intolerable prison conditions, and the day-in-and-day-out repetitiveness and recurrence of prison life manifested to Foucault the difference from the ideals of the prison reformers of the eighteenth century, thereby revealing to him that an archaeological approach alone was not sufficient, and that a genealogical method was necessary. Archeology would have entailed the derivation of the prison from the theories of the 18^th and 19^th century reformers. Foucault discovered that was impossible, and instead he had to seek its development in a genealogy of morals. You can hear this first in 1973 in his lectures on The punitive society—where you get a clear turn to the penitential; and of course we received the full articulation in 1975.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the GIP engagements turned Foucault’s attention to the productive aspects of penality. Right after he visited Attica prison in New York State in April 1972—his first direct access to a prison, an experience which he describes as “overwhelming”³⁶⁸—Foucault shifted the focus of his analysis. Upset and “undermined” by this visit, Foucault began an analytical transition towards the “positive functions” of the penal system: “the question that I ask myself now is the reverse,” he explained at the time. “The problem is, then, to find out what role capitalist society has its penal system play, what is the aim that is sought, and what effects are produced by all these procedures for punishment and exclusion. What is their place in the economic process, what is their importance in the maintenance and exercise of power? What is their role in the class struggle?”³⁶⁹

Fifth, Foucault’s involvement in the GIP also produced a keen awareness of the seriousness of these struggles—something that would behoove us. Foucault’s turn to the notion of “civil war” as the basic matrix to understand social order was a direct outgrowth of this period. It loomed largest in 1972 and 1973, right during and after the peak of the prison riots in France—the revolt in the Ney prison of Toul in December 1971, the Charles-III jail of Nancy 15 January 1972, and the prisons of Nîmes, Amiens, Loos, Fleury-Mérogis among others.³⁷⁰ After the revolt at Toul, on 5 January 1972, in a joint press conference of the G.I.P. and the Comité Vérité Toul, Foucault declared that “what took place at Toul is the start of a new process: the first phase of a political struggle directed against the entire penitentiary system by the social strata that is its primary victim.”³⁷¹ Civil war comes to fore just at this time in his lectures at the Collège de France.

Foucault’s praxis sharpened his awareness of the stakes of the battle. Foucault’s lectures at the time were peppered with indignation, almost anger, against those who misjudge the seriousness of the political struggle:

We are forever in the habit of speaking of the “stupidity” of the bourgeoisie. I wonder whether the theme of the stupid bourgeois is not a theme for intellectuals: those who imagine that merchants are narrow-minded, people with money are mulish, and those with power are blind. Safe from this belief, moreover, the bourgeoisie is remarkably intelligent. The lucidity and intelligence of this class, which has conquered and kept power under conditions we know, produce many effects of stupidity and blindness, but where, if not precisely in the stratum of intellectuals? We may define intellectuals as those on whom the intelligence of the bourgeoisie produces an effect of blindness and stupidity.³⁷²

And Foucault added, in the margin of his manuscript: “Those who deny this are public entertainers. They fail to recognize the seriousness of the struggle.”³⁷³

It may be possible to summarize all this by saying that the 1973 lectures on The Punitive Society, the book Discipline and Punish, and the militancy of the GIP together formed a philosophical act, what Gilles Deleuze referred to as “a theoretical revolution,”³⁷⁴ that was aimed to deconstruct the distinction between political and common law prisoners, actualize a civil war matrix, and build alliances in society between critical theorists, political militants, and criminal justice practitioners. As he famously said of the book he was writing, Discipline and Punish: “The little volume I would like to write about the disciplinary systems, I would want it to be useful for an educator, a guard, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don’t write for a public, I write for users, not for readers.”³⁷⁵

There were other important elements to the GIP engagement that involved dimensions of frank speech, of a mode of life, and of an aesthetics of existence. These are themes and concepts that flourish in Foucault’s later lectures, and yet they are clearly reflected in the way in which the members of the GIP were proceeding. They relate closely to Foucault’s discussion of the Cynics and of the Cynics’ mode of life and their critique of their surroundings, all of which are developed in great depth in his last set of lectures in 1984 on The Courage of Truth.

Critical theory as a way of living, as a mode of life: this is, as Foucault explored in The Courage of Truth, the characteristic life of the Cynics—of those philosophers in the tradition of Antisthenes and Diogenes of Sinope who, from the fifth century BCE to the fifth century CE, espoused a simple mode of life that challenged most of the conventions of society. There are certain key concepts associated with the Cynics, at least on Foucault’s reading: An aesthetics of existence, frank talk, and life as a work of art.³⁷⁶ Cynic practice is all about a particular mode of life. And on Foucault’s reading, this mode of life is inextricably linked to a certain form of truth-telling, a particular ethical form of parrhesia. Truth-telling is, as we know, by no means limited to the Cynics, but the Cynics are in part defined by their truth-telling. “The Cynic is constantly characterized as the man of parrhesia, the man of truth-telling,” Foucault tells us.³⁷⁷ If anything, it is the kind of parrhesiastic truth-telling that is characterized by “insolence”: this is a term that Foucault began to deploy in relation to the frank speech of the Cynics.

In helping the prisoners to be heard, and in paving the way for them to create their own prisoners’ action organization, the CAP, Foucault’s praxis had at its center a mode of life geared toward independence, simplicity, and autarky. This resonates distinctly with the Cynics, who Foucault would study and approximate in his final years. Praxis and theory came together perfectly.

B. Political Disobedience: Occupy

I have written extensively about the praxis of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and placed it under the rubric of what I call “political disobedience.”³⁷⁸ Political, rather than civil disobedience, because, in my view, the Occupiers did not accept in any way the legitimacy of the existing legal regime. By contrast to Rev. Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, the Occupiers were not breaking the law in order to be punished and to expose the injustice of the law. They were not accepting the constitutional structure or the very notion of the rule of law, but instead challenging the existing political system. Their disobedience was political in nature, not civil.

It would be useful here to return to those discussions to explore how the theoretical world vision of the Occupiers shaped their praxis. There too, praxis and theory came together perfectly. The Occupiers instantiated a form of political disobedience that prefigured participatory, egalitarian democracy, that tried to be leaderless, non-hierarchical, and not means-ends driven or merely instrumental, and that tried to avoid being coopted by the dominant hegemonic system of party politics.

Their praxis implemented their world view, their values, and their ambitions—their critical utopias. The leaderlessness reflected their embrace of equality and respect. The general assemblies represented an open mode of discourse and prefigured the kind of democratic processes they envisioned. The resistance to formulating policies translated into praxis their skepticism with easy answers and technocratic solutions. The experience, overall, had a transformative element for many of the Occupiers that was connected to their emphasis on self-care, self-government, and the creation of new subjectivities.

Others might return to this experiment to explore how the praxis and theoretical outlook of the Occupiers overlapped and cohered—I personally have written too much about it already. What is clear is that the interaction was mobilizing for many people.

C. #BlackLivesMatter and BYP100

The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was born of a Facebook post by Alicia Garza that went viral in July 2013, right after George Zimmerman’s acquittal at his trial in Florida for the homicide of Trayvon Martin.³⁷⁹ Garza’s partner, Patrisse Cullors, took a snippet from that post, added the hashtag, and thereby created one of the most important political memes of the twety-first century: #BlackLivesMatter. Another acquaintance, Opal Tometi in Brooklyn, developed a social media platform to deploy the term and connect the emerging networks of activists.

It was at about that time that the United States exploded with incident after incident of video-taped police shootings or killings of unarmed black men and women. Eric Garner died of asphyxiation from a chokehold under the weight of several NYPD officers on the streets of Staten Island, New York, on July 17, 2014. A month later, August 9, 2014, an unarmed eighteen-year-old young man, Michael Brown, was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri, by police officer Darren Wilson. Two months later, on October 20, 2014, on the Southwest Side of Chicago, police officer Jason Van Dyke unloaded sixteen rounds of his 9mm semiautomatic service weapon into seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald. The wave of police killings continued on and off camera, around the country, with the police shooting deaths of twenty-eight-year-old Akai Gurley in a Brooklyn stairwell on November 20, 2014; of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park on November 22, 2014; of fifty-year-old Walter Scott, shot in the back five times on April 4, 2015 in North Charleston, South Carolina; of thirty-two-year-old Philando Castile, pulled over in a suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and shot seven times on July 6, 2016 while peacefully trying to explain his situation; of thirty-year-old Charleena Lyles, shot in front of her four children in Seattle, Washington, after calling the police on an attempted burglary on June 18, 2017; and of the deaths in police custody of thirty-seven-year-old Tanisha Anderson in Cleveland, slammed on the pavement while being arrested, and of twenty-eight-year-old Sandra Bland found hanging in her jail cell in Waller County, Texas, on July 13, 2015—all African American men and women.

It was during the protests in Ferguson and throughout the country in response to these events that the #BlackLivesMatter movement was born.³⁸⁰ The movement consisted of a range of activism, extending from individual acts of resistance to local collectives to national organizations all self-identifying as part of a broader movement for Black lives, anti-racism, and racial justice. The key element was self identification. There was no authoritative policing, no institutional judge of who could legitimately claim to be part of the movement, and perhaps as a result, the edges and boundaries of the movement were fluid.

There was, on the one hand, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter itself that still is a unique phenomenon and does an enormous amount of work on its own. It might be worth stopping here for a moment—on the hashtag itself—to explore how this phenomenon represents a new form of uprising and how it challenges the very notion of a movement. The hashtag is a radical new form of politics, in large part because anyone can deploy it. The hashtag resists appropriation. It can spread on its own, and has a certain malleability, so that it can be redeployed in different and new contexts of anti-racist protest. As a result, it can be seen pervasively and has resilience. It does not allow for the identification of leaders. And it resists the organizational form, since the hashtag, almost in its identity, resists appropriation. In this, the hashtag is brilliantly responsive to the problems that have plagued social movements to date.

There were, on the other hand, a number of local organizations (in Chicago, for instance, Assata’s Daughters, We Charge Genocide, Black Lives Matter–Chicago, and Peoples Response Team) and national organizations like the Black Lives Matter Global Network (that traces back to Garza, Cullors, and Tometi) or BYP100, as well as over 30 chapters of #BlackLivesMatter across the country, that coalesced into a larger national Movement for Black Lives with specific policy platforms.

These groups varied somewhat in their organization and leadership. But one thing that still seems to united them all is a commitment to avoiding the model of the single heroic male leader that is so common to prior movements and revolutions—from Robespierre and Danton, to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, to Marx and Lenin, to Mao, Gandhi, and Che Guevara, to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. There is hardly a modern revolution or revolutionary project that is not associated with a great man. (Not surprisingly, all of the major counterrevolutions today as well are headed by charismatic male figures).

The thread that ties together all of the different facets of the movement for Black lives is the direct challenge to that history. And in this, as Barbara Ransby underscores, we can see the strong influence that black feminist and LGBTQ theorists and practitioners have had on many of the leaders of the Movement for Black Lives.³⁸¹ As the website of the Black Lives Matter Global Network recounts, in its herstory:

Black liberation movements in this country have created room, space, and leadership mostly for Black heterosexual, cisgender men—leaving women, queer and transgender people, and others either out of the movement or in the background to move the work forward with little or no recognition. As a network, we have always recognized the need to center the leadership of women and queer and trans people. To maximize our movement muscle, and to be intentional about not replicating harmful practices that excluded so many in past movements for liberation, we made a commitment to placing those at the margins closer to the center.³⁸²

As noted earlier, these movements are also developing, on these bases, now forms of “group-centered leadership practices,” in Ransby’s words. These authorize decision making by those on the ground who have better understandings of the community’s problems and how to carry out solutions.

The movement for Black lives is now “a movement of movements.” The term captures perfectly the diversity of groups, projects, alliances, and organizations that make up the larger movement for Black lives and that is represented by the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. The expression has been used, recently, in other contexts, including for instance with regard to the movements challenging neoliberal globalization,³⁸³ or with regard to the New Left more generally.³⁸⁴ And the term has been deployed more recently in various debates, pro and con—suggesting that it may indeed have negative potential if it is associated with a desire to control or rein in other movements, or to privilege one organization or set of actors of another.³⁸⁵ But if we think of the singular in “a movement of movements” not as an identifiable organization or set of actors or even single actor, but rather as the larger whole that is greater than the parts of all the different organizations for Black lives—from BYP100 to the Black Lives Matter Global Network, to the chapters of #BlackLivesMatter, to all the different groups that militate side-by-side, like Assata’s Daughters, We Charge Genocide, or the Peoples Response Team—then the term seems to capture perfectly what is going on today.

If we speak of the larger phenomenon that is associated with the hashtag and made up of all the organizations and groups, then we have what could be called a “movement of movements,” one that does indeed seem to resist appropriation or cooptation. That is perhaps, ultimately, the theoretical genius of the hashtag and the larger movement: it cannot be coopted because it cannot be pinned down or associated with any one particular group or person. It makes the movement ultimately larger than any of its constituent parts, broader than any of the specific organizations, and longer-lasting than the present constellation.

One of its strengths, theoretically, is that it rejects a politics of respectability. But it has many others. The fact that is contains organizations that are so well organized, using these new and innovative table structures (i.e. tables for communications, policy, law, healing justice, electoral justice, etc.) to reach policy proposals, as Shanelle Matthews demonstrated.³⁸⁶ The fact that there is a deep engagement with the state and with policy, but no ambition to be the state. The resonance with the Foucaultian idea of critique as the desire not to be governed thusly. The way in which the organizations repoliticize the public sphere, as Deva Woodly emphasizes—and the potential for democratic experimentation that these movements express.³⁸⁷

As Deva Woodly suggests, the movement for Black lives revives and repoliticizes the public sphere by countering a growing “politics of despair.” The different manifestations of #BlackLivesMatter protest, then, should not be understood as “pre-political.” They themselves are inherently political and they may be what allows a democracy to correct itself—since, as Woodly correctly noted, the institutions alone certainly do not seem capable of correcting themselves.

A rich debate has emerged between the strands of Black joy and dandyism in the movement—in effect, over the desire not be reduced to victimhood and death—versus the elements of Afro-pessimism and the dark truth that the movement itself was born from fatal encounters of young black women and men with the police. Kendall Thomas ultimately argues for recognition of the foundational element of mourning and Black death in the movement to fight against injustice itself and as a motivating force. “I am pessimistic. I am pessimistic,” Thomas declares in a powerful intervention. “We fought for and won this new legal order… and yet have prisons which are filled with black and brown citizens in complete compliance with the law…. I think there is something to the claim by the Afro-pessimist Frank Wilderson. The notion of black citizenship in the US is an oxymoron…. At the same time, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has given us joy and it gives me hope. But the challenge is to hold on to both ends of the chain at once: the pessimism, which provokes the passion to rage against injustice, and at the same time that joy that gives us a vision of the future that allows us to imagine that another world is possible.”

To imagine how this other world is possible, it may be useful to investigate, specifically, how black youth movements crystalized in response to the shooting death of Laquan McDonald in Chicago and to the fact that the state’s attorney, Anita Alvarez, waited almost 400 days to indict police officer Jason Van Dyke in the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald.

A Case Study: #BLM Activism in Chicago

“Two down, one to go!” The chant started quietly, and then caught on, resonating across the victory ballroom at the Downtown Holiday Inn in Chicago. The Democratic state’s attorney candidate, Kim Foxx, had just unseated Anita Alvarez in the March 2016 primaries. Alvarez, the sitting county prosecutor, had infamously waited almost 400 days to indict police officer Jason Van Dyke in the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald. At the time of the indictment four months earlier in November 2015, Alvarez and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel were hounded by another chant—“16 shots and a cover-up!”—but now, the movement had a new slogan, “Two down, one to Go!” along with its new hashtag “#Bye Anita,” two catchy memes that it was chanting and posting all over social media.³⁸⁸

The first down, of course, was former Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy, who was quickly sacrificed by mayor Emanuel as soon as the cover-up began to get exposed and the political heat turned on—fired on December 1, 2015. Anita Alvarez was the second, with Foxx taking 58 percent of the primary vote, against Alvarez’s 29 percent, and now headed to a likely election in the generals in the fall of 2016.³⁸⁹

This group of young activists, mobilized by the Laquan McDonald cover-up, rallied against the sitting state’s attorney, Alvarez. With T-shirts bearing “Adios Anita” and a flurry of social media carrying the hashtag #ByeAnita, these young activists are probably responsible for taking down the prosecutor. Alvarez had been leading her challengers in the polls well into February 2016;³⁹⁰ but the concerted efforts of these activists, on the streets and on the Internet, seem to have shifted the tide.

According to newspaper reports, the young activists who buoyed Foxx’s campaign were predominantly young African-American organizers in movements such as the Black Youth Project 100, Assata’s Daughters, and We Charge Genocide.³⁹¹ These are a new set of popular, bottom-up, militant organizations, often interlinked, with an interesting new political character and a strong digital presence on social media. The presentation of the People’s Response Team on their Facebook page is characteristic:

The People’s Response Team is a team of concerned community members committed to supporting efforts to end police violence in Chicago. We do not collaborate with law enforcement. We aim to respond to, document, and investigate fatal police shootings in Chicago and connect family members and loved ones with emotional, social, and legal support. Many of us are members of We Charge Genocide, Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR), Black Lives Matter – Chicago, and other grassroots organizations challenging police violence.³⁹²

What is interesting is that these movements did not explicitly endorse the other candidate, Foxx. They mobilized against Alvarez, and succeeded in getting her out of office; but they did not actively campaign for Foxx. As Kampf-Lassin reports, “While none of these groups explicitly endorsed Foxx, they did work diligently to make sure Chicagoans did not vote for Alvarez. Brenna Champion, an organizer with BYP100, said that the group canvassed, knocked on doors throughout the city with their anti-Alvarez message and reached out to 2,500 voters who planned to vote for Foxx, focusing on African-American voters, largely on college campuses.”³⁹³

In fact, not only did they not endorse Foxx, some of the groups made it clear that they too had their eye on her. @AssataDuaghters stated this explicitly in their “collective victory” statement they posted on-line:

Chicago Black youth kicked Anita Alvarez out of office. Just a month ago, Anita Alvarez was winning in the polls. Communities who refuse to be killed and jailed and abused without any chance at justice refused to allow that to happen. We did this for Rekia. We did this for Laquan. We won’t stop until we’re free and Kim Foxx should know that well.³⁹⁴

“Kim Foxx should know that well”: An ominous statement to the candidate who unseated Alvarez—reflecting the particular strategy of these young activists.

And of course, both in Chicago and at the national level, they have confronted and challenged—and intensified—relations to older, more established civil rights figures, such as Jesse Jackson, Sr., and the Democratic establishment, both Hillary and Bill Clinton. Some of this is not unusual and can be chalked to generational shifts and more radical politics. The organization BYP100, for instance—an outgrowth of Cathy Cohen’s Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago—advocates in the long term for the “outright abolition of the police department and the prison system,” as well as “reparations, universal childcare, a higher minimum wage, the decriminalization of marijuana,” and more.³⁹⁵ But there is also a different political sensibility at play, especially in relation to the political establishment.

There is a rapport, though, to Occupy. So, for instance, BYP100 flips the famous Occupy slogan about the bottom 99% and the top 1%: in their self-presentation, they associate themselves more closely with the bottom 1%, which can only be understood in relation to Occupy. As they write on their webpage: “We envision a more economically just society that values the lives and well-being of ALL Black people, including women, queer, and transgender folks, the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated as well as those who languish in the bottom 1% of the economic hierarchy.”³⁹⁶

BYP100 specifically positions itself against a politics of respectability, claiming to speak on behalf of “ALL black people” including the most marginalized LGBTQ folks.³⁹⁷ Their agenda, they writes, is “not meant to advance politics of respectability—we want ALL Black people to be able to live in their dignity.”³⁹⁸ With a strong national coordinator, Charlene A. Carruthers, they do not present as leaderless or starry-eyed. They set out their positions and their demands clearly, backed up with research and community sentiment, in a 24-page “Agenda To Keep Us Safe,” that includes lengthy “References and Additional Resources.”³⁹⁹

Here too, then, we can identify numerous ways in which the praxis and critical theory come together and leverage each other. This is undoubtedly the greatest strength of the movement for Black lives.

III.

In terms of method, then, theory and praxis need to work together—as Foucault did in harmonizing discourse theory and the GIP, as Occupy did in prefiguring new forms of democracy, as the Movement for Black Lives has done in rejecting a politics of respectability. That is, after all, the point of infinitely testing and revaluing our beliefs and material conditions: to ensure that we are not deluding ourselves again, to test our praxis against our theoria, with the blows of a hammer.

In the end, our praxis should be guided by the following core principles:

1. There are no universals. Action has to be judged in context, en situation. Nothing is off the table: in a colonial setting, in a brutal authoritarian setting, violent armed resistance seems entirely appropriate. In a liberal democracy, physical violence may be counterproductive, and other forms of praxis may be necessary instead.

2. As between different tactics—e.g. occupation, hunger strike, mobilization, litigation, etc.—there are, again, no universals. Different forms will function in different contexts. Occupy Wall Street may have functioned in the setting of the Obama administration, but would not under the Trump presidency. There is a need for situated interventions.

3. That being said, what is called for is constant insubordination: the struggle is unending, and has to be considered as a permanent pushback against the forces of tyranny and inequity. The paradigm should be “constant countering,” where the counter-move ends up achieving autonomy so that it is no longer merely reacting to the opponent. It must become an autonomous political form: A constant countering that overcomes its own reactivity to become a force of its own.

In all this, we need to resist foundational thinking and adamantly overcome the hegemonic ideas we oppose.

The deceit of hegemonic ideas is that we begin to believe them and internalize them. That’s true of the neoliberal ideas of market efficiency. It is equally true of counterinsurgency governmentality. We begin to think that the masses are passive, and can be swayed one way or the other. Or that there is only a small minority that is prepared to actively resist—and a small guardian class that is maintaining an oppressive system. Part of what makes these ideas so powerful is that we begin to absorb them, to internalize them in our own thinking about how to resist, we begin to believe them or stop asking questions.

But the truth is, they are just illusions: The myth of natural orderliness in economics that has come down to us from the divine order of the first economists. The delusion of an economic sphere that is somehow self-regulated. The illusion of an insurrection, of a small active minority ready to sway the passive masses. The “passive masses”: Nothing could be further from the truth. That counterrevolutionary vision of society—of a tripartite division of society, with the passive masses in the middle—is pure fiction. It is far too simplistic and misleading. The masses have never been passive. And they are not passive today. They know what they want, and they know what they are doing. Today, the vast majority of Americans are content: with their digital pleasures and their on-line shopping, they are enjoying life. And that’s what many want, to simply enjoy life. For many of us, as long as we have a modicum of pleasure, we are content. It is what allows us to go on with our lives even when someone like Donald Trump is elected president and makes a mockery of our democracy. It’s only when there is a direct affront to our way of life, when for instance our retirements were threatened by the Great Recession of 2008, that people—at least a number of people—take to the streets. The election of Trump did not cause a constitutional crisis or a political revolt because most people did not believe he would fundamentally destabilize their way of life. That is not passivity, it is deliberate. It is intentional.

The masses are not passive. When they are quiet, they tolerate. They might tolerate because they are scared, or because they think the alternative would be worse, or because they have been taught to tolerate. But it is not because they are inherently passive. Whether in an authoritarian or democratic regime, the political system always depends on the authorization and legitimacy of the people. What Gandhi made clear through his inspiring acts of non-violent resistance (satyagraha) is that a regime, even an oppressive regime that wields all the military force, cannot survive if it does not have the backing or support of the citizens. That was the lesson of Gandhi’s resistance.