Chapter 9: Our Practical Dilemma

The past few years have witnessed productive experiments with modalities of revolt and fruitful attempts at theorizing forms of resistance. The Indignados uprising, the Arab revolutions, the global Occupy movement, Nuit Debout, and the Movement for Black Lives have reimagined political protest, and led to promising theories of the performativity of assembly in Judith Butler’s writings, of the political potential of assemblies in Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s work, and of renewed concepts of civil and political disobedience in the works of W.J.T. Mitchell and Mick Taussig, Brandon Terry, Sandra Laugier and Albert Ogien, Frédéric Gros, and Robin Celikates.¹⁷⁷ The #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements have inspired important reflections on new modes of leadership and representation in the writings of Cathy Cohen, Barbara Ransby, Keeanga-Yamatha Taylor, Deva Woodly, and others.¹⁷⁸

But often, those very practices—of general assemblies, of leaderless and ideologically-agnostic occupations, of spiritually-tinged uprisings, of standing ground and nation-building, of hunger strikes or hashtags—clashed with more traditional conceptions of critical praxis and triggered uneasy reactions among many critical theorists. There was often a sense of frustration at the newer modalities of uprising. Leaderlessness was particularly fraught, and substantial disagreement emerged about the practices at Occupy Wall Street.

At other times, the political crises gave way to low-grade paralysis among critical thinkers, an unexpected quiescence at least by contrast to the more vocal interventions of liberal dissent, such as the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, or the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. The critical responses appeared somewhat muted. The critical Left, as opposed to the liberal Left, appeared disarmed. It often felt that critical praxis was missing in action—as opposed, that is, to liberal forms of protest.

The critical Left has tended to mobilize using mostly traditional liberal devices, and has folded back on liberal legal institutions. In the United States at least, the principal forms of critical resistance to the Trump administration have involved, first, civil rights litigation against the Muslim Ban, the military transgender ban, and other executive orders; second, permitted protest marches, such as the Women’s March, or, even, the March for Science; and third, myriad on-line petitions, letters, and statements of protest by individuals and institutions, including universities. Alongside these peaceful protests and social movements, anti-fascist rallies have spread, sometimes devolving into minor violence. For the most part, though, the resistance has taken the path of liberal democratic protest, even among the more critically oriented. The resistance to the Muslim Ban followed precisely a liberal civil and political rights model: civil rights lawyers and even state attorney generals went to court and sued President Trump, while others offered their expertise as area experts or translators. In effect, the critical resistance predominantly used liberal courts as a bulwark against the intolerable.

Critical praxis, it seems, has not caught up with these critical times. It is precisely for this reason that we now need to rejuvenate a critical praxis for the twenty-first century. The question becomes: What could or should critical praxis look like today when the dialectical imagination is so fractured? What should critical action look like within this new reconstructed paradigm of critical theory, especially at a time when right-wing populist movements have cannibalized segments of the working class, turning old-style class warfare into anti-immigrant and ethno-racist conflict? What is to be done?

Our times call for renewed praxis freed from prior foundational commitments. To move forward, though, we first need to understand clearly where we are and how we got here.

I.

Alongside the structural transformation of critical horizons over the course of the twentieth century, the field experienced as well a structural transformation of critical praxis. The shift from Marx to Mao and to later insurrectional utopias, discussed in Part II, moved critical theory away from the modern concept of revolution to more situated localized events of insurrection, revolt, and disobedience—to new modalities of uprising. This reflected, in part, a movement away from the Eurocentric model of revolution toward practices of insubordination that were historically shaped in the colonial wars. “In the dominated colonial peripheries,” Balibar explains, “there were no ‘revolutions’ but only ‘resistances,’ ‘guerillas,’ ‘uprisings’ and ‘rebellions,’” and by contrast to the latter, the great revolutions of the nineteenth century “were supposed to be political processes typical for the center because they involved the participation of ‘citizens’ who exist only in the nation-states.”¹⁷⁹ In effect, the mid-twentieth century insurrections were to the modern concept of revolution what the periphery was to the center.

From revolution to uprising, from Europe to its colonies: This captures well the shift and the resulting fragmentation of critical praxis during the twentieth century. It produced, by mid-century, four different models. There was, first, an insurgency model of uprising that could be traced directly to Mao’s military strategies pre-1949. This model rested on Mao’s tripartite division of society, and it inspired the growth of small, separatist cells or wider national liberation movements.¹⁸⁰ This was the model of the FLN in Algeria and of other liberation movements throughout the global South. It was the model of insurgency that eventually gave rise to counterinsurgency warfare practices in Indochina, Algeria, Malaya, and Vietnam.

There was, second, a model of the constant upending of revolutionary accomplishments, based on Mao’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1968 (or at least to the time of the disbanding of the Red Guards). This model rested on the idea of the inevitable return of self-dealing and self-interest, of elitism and complacency. It reflected Mao’s idea that the Chinese Communist Party had become the bourgeoisie. This model was one that gave rise to the call for “permanent revolution” that we heard in Latin and South America.

There was, third, a model of more creative insubordination, especially in some of the receptions of Maoism in the West in the 1960s and 70s as an alternative to the Soviet archetype of communism. Militants in France, Italy, and elsewhere drew on Mao’s writings to develop alternative ways of thinking and challenging relations of power, some through new forms of popular justice, others through leaderless inquiries. A good illustration here, again, is the debate between Foucault, Benny Lévy, and Glucksmann in 1971.

And then, finally, there emerged a model of Maoist-inspired insurrection that had elements of early insurgency theory, but was far more isolationist and separatist from the general population. Mao here is less an explicit point of reference, than a central but silent identifier. This model is what I would call separatist insurrectional, and it was reflected in the more extreme violent movements of the 1970s and 80s in Western Europe and the United States, such as the Baader-Meinhof Group, the Red Brigades in Italy, or the Weather Underground Organization. The model differs sharply from the modern concept of revolution. It has a sharply different episteme: a small-bore, tactical episteme of the guerilla fighter, associated with rebellion and insurrection, as opposed to the modern revolution.

These structural transformations greatly influenced practices of critical resistance at the turn of century. There were, naturally, a range of practices, but two major styles, or poles, emerged in the West in the first decade of the twenty-first: at one end, a set of more radical insurrectional movements in continuity with the historical transformations already discussed; and at the other end, a set of more open, prefigurative social movements that have evolved in part in opposition to the previous models—including, for instance, Occupy Wall Street, #BlackLivesMatter, and Standing Rock in the United States. Each of these styles and movements have been fruitfully theorized by contemporary collectives and thinkers such as the Invisible Committee for the first, or Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Judith Butler, and others for the second.

A. Insurrectional Cells

The first style of separatist insurrectional movements manifested around the world, from El Salvador and Peru in the 1980s to Nepal and Kashmir in the 1990s. These insurrectional practices took different forms and inspired separatist cells in Europe and elsewhere. The Invisible Committee, an anonymous group of anarchist activists in France, gave theoretical expression to this approach in a series of books, beginning with their first, The Coming Insurrection, published in 2007.

The Coming Insurrection views the world through the prism of civil war. What lies ahead is the “emergence of a brute conflict,” the Committee writes.¹⁸¹ It is a civil war between different visions of society—between “irreducible and irreconcilable ideas of happiness and their worlds.”¹⁸² It is useless, the Committee tells us, to get indignant, to get involved in citizens’ groups, to react to the news, or to wait for change or the revolution. “To no longer wait is, in one way or another, to enter into the logic of insurrection. It is to once again hear the slight but always present trembling of terror in the voices of our leaders. Because governing has never been anything other than postponing by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will string you up, and every act of government is nothing but a way of not losing control of the population.”¹⁸³

Rather than join citizens’ groups or assemblies, the Committee advocates a form of separatism, secession, and isolation. France, the Invisible Committee tells us, is “the land of anxiety pills,” “the Mecca of neurosis”¹⁸⁴; rather than embrace the people, the insurrectional project is to withdraw to communes, to isolate oneself, to remove oneself from the people. “Far more dreadful are social milieus, with their supple texture, their gossip, and their informal hierarchies,” the Invisible Committee writes. “Flee all milieus. Each and every milieu is orientated towards the neutralization of some truth.”¹⁸⁵ Even anarchist milieus must be forsaken because what they do is “blunt the directness of direct action.”¹⁸⁶ Activists today must form communes instead of blending into the population. They must remove themselves from the toxicity of the general population. The masses are to be viewed with caution and suspicion, not the least of which because “we expect a surge in police work being done by the population itself.”¹⁸⁷

The Committee sets forth strategies for insurrection: demonstrations need to be wild and unexpected, not disclosed in advance to the police; they must lead the police, rather than be herded by them; they must take the initiative; harass and distract the police, in order to attack elsewhere; chose the terrain; take up arms and maintain an armed presence, even if this does not mean an armed struggle, using arms sparingly and infrequently.¹⁸⁸ The central idea is of an uprising that represents “a vital impulse of youth as much as a popular wisdom.”¹⁸⁹ This was one important model at the turn of century, inspired clearly by Mao’s trajectory of insurrectional practices over the course of the twentieth century.

B. Leaderless Assemblies and Prefigurative Movements

At the other extreme, another broad style embraced a very different ethic. Reacting in part against the patriarchal, “great man,” and top-down character of most traditional critical praxis, these movements aspired to leaderless—or inversely, what could be called “leaderful”—and more egalitarian, ideologically open, democratic procedures. They attempted to prefigure the political processes that they aspired to, rather than view their militancy as a temporary necessary means to achieve the society they wanted to live in.

Naturally, these movements took different forms. Some of the organizations within the Movement for Black Lives, for instance, were more centralized and hierarchical, such as the Black Youth Project 100 (“BYP100”), but most of the others aspired to be leaderless, such as Occupy Wall Street, Nuit Debout, or other organizations within #BlackLivesMatter. Many of the movements were ideologically open, in the sense that there was often no policing of views, censorship of political ideologies, or establishment of a party line. There was rarely, in these new movements, a vanguard party. To the contrary, many of the militant movements had a unique ethical and political stance of equality and respect that went against the very idea of hierarchical power, the latter being mostly viewed as patriarchal. They deployed new technologies and had a strong digital presence on social media—using FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and every other digital medium as a way to horizontalize authority.¹⁹⁰ They honed their political ethos and strategies around notions of equality, and skillfully deployed digital disobedience toward that end.

Some of these new movements were more attentive to membership and representation. BYP100, for instance, restricted membership to persons who are between 18 and 35, and it was by definition black and young. Beyond that, to become a member of BYP100, the person had to attend an orientation meeting, had to participate in two chapter meetings, and had to attend a public event. The organization was wedded to democratic principles: “Leaders are nominated, elected, and constantly rotated; the bulk of decisions must be ratified by a majority vote.”¹⁹¹ Other large-scale protests like Occupy Wall Street or Nuit Debout, were more leaderless and equally egalitarian. What these movements all shared, though, was that they did not endorse political parties or political actors. For the most part, they maintained themselves outside of mainstream politics.

In their very organization, many of these movements inserted their principles of equality into the way they functioned and operated. The aspirations and values were included in the movement structures themselves. In this sense, they were acting out what Barbara Ransby called “group-centered leadership practices.” This did not mean that there were never recognized individuals, even some celebrities in these movements. What it meant, according to Ransby, was that everyone in the group responded to the will of its members. “The Movement for Black Lives is distinctive because it defers to the local wisdom of its members and affiliates, rather than trying to dictate from above,” Ransby explained. This was, in Ransby’s words, a “better model for social movements,” and it represented “a choice, not a deficiency.” The reason that it represented a better model, Ransby argued, was that it turned over the decision making to those people on the ground who had the best understanding of the problems they faced and who were in the best position to carry out their own solutions. “People are better prepared to carry out solutions they themselves created, instead of ones handed down by national leaders unfamiliar with realities in local communities,” Ransby wrote.¹⁹²

In Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Judith Butler explored the performative dimensions of these assembly-based movements, in order to expose how the physical gathering of bodies and the material element of assemblies precede, constitute, and make possible political expression. For Butler, the performative nature of assembly is a precondition for expression, and the materiality of assembly fashions the discursive realm. As Butler writes: “The assembly is already speaking before it utters any words, […] [B]y coming together it is already an enactment of a popular will. […] The “we” voiced in language is already enacted by the gathering of bodies, their gestures and movements, their vocalizations, and their ways of acting in concert.”¹⁹³This enactment of a “we” by means of physical assembly—both being present and being absent for those who are in prison or have been disappeared—is, for Butler, an essential precondition to expression and speech. It forms—or it performs—the medium within which claims for inclusion are expressed. It is the way to initiate claims to be “we the people” or, even more, “we are still the people.”

Butler argues that “acting in concert can be an embodied form of calling into question the inchoate and powerful dimensions of reigning notions of the political” and this works in two ways, first, by enacting contestation and, second, by exposing precarity.¹⁹⁴ In other words, assemblies serve as incipient forms of popular sovereignty. They give rise to forms of popular will, and help shape our conception of the will of the people.¹⁹⁵ The bodily nature of assemblies exposes the precarity of these lives. They reveal the lived existence in the shadows, but also the resounding claim that this condition of precarity is intolerable. “[T]he bodies assembled ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently.”¹⁹⁶

Butler’s central point is that the materiality of assembly, the corporeal presence of people assembled in the square, has a force of its own, independent of what is said, and serves as the precondition for what gets said. Assembly, in and of itself, matters. It says and does a lot. Or, as Butler writes: “the basic requirements of the body are at the center of political mobilizations—those requirements are, in fact, publicly enacted prior to any set of political demands.”¹⁹⁷ This is, for Butler, the power and importance of these types of assemblies.

II.

The historical context, though, changed once again in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The liberal veil was lifted off the true face of the right across the globe. More openly conservative and xenophobic parties surfaced around the world—with the rise of alt-right parties in Europe, of the Tea Party and the Trump presidency in the United States, authoritarian leaders in Turkey, Russia, the Philippines, India, and elsewhere. Across a spectrum of political issues, from immigration to sexual orientation, the gloves came off and we faced a far more vocal and expressive authoritarianism and extreme right—with even the more traditional conservative parties revealing their ugliest underbellies. The lines of political demarcation became more polarized, violent, and confrontational.

This presented a real challenge to critical praxis. The truth is, critique was always sharper when it confronted liberal ideology. The reason is simple: critique operates most often and most powerfully as an immanent form of criticism, using the aspirations and ideals of its object of critique to motivate a reassessment. Critique was always more cutting when it could show up liberal ideals—e.g., the promise of equality in the face of an unequal world, or the potential of freedom in an unjust society. It was always stronger when it could leverage the rhetoric of its interlocutor. But when the opposition is openly racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, nationalistic, and supremacist, there is little to be gained from immanent critique. In the struggle over values, there is hardly any need for sophisticated critical theory.

In the early twentieth, critique faced precisely that: political leaders who were openly and proudly—and vociferously—Islamophobic and mysogenist; or who campaigned on their willingness to kill their own citizens accused of drug dealing; who openly imprisoned political opponents in the name of democracy. While critique may function well in the face of liberalism, it is disarmed against these forms of authoritarianism. It is powerful at mapping a civil war matrix onto relations of power when the dominant regime is liberal; but when the opponent is more extreme, and there is effectively an open civil war, the subtleties of critique become less useful.

It should not come as a surprise that the leading critical theorists in wartime have so often joined the ranks of the state apparatuses that they previously or ordinarily would have critiqued. After all, where was the Frankfurt School in wartime? At the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the “OSS”), which was the forerunner to the C.I.A. Franz Neumann, who had just published his book on Nazi Germany Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism in 1942, as well as Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer, author of Punishment and Social Structure with Georg Rusche in 1939, all worked for the OSS under its head, the Republican Wall Street lawyer, William Donovan. Neumann in fact took charge of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS for Donovan. As John Herz, who worked in Neumann’s unit, quipped, “It was as though the left-Hegelian World Spirit had briefly descended on the Central European Department of the OSS.”¹⁹⁸ Max Horkheimer was also reportedly part of the OSS. Meanwhile, Theodor Adorno, Herta Herzog, and Paul Lazarsfeld became involved in the Princeton Radio Project, which became later the Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Research, and which served intelligence functions.¹⁹⁹ And, to be honest, what else would one do, faced with a regime like the Third Reich and Nazi Germany—especially as a Jew in exile in the United States?

Similarly, today, we face a new constellation. The rise of the alt-right and extreme right parties has shifted the landscape of critical praxis. Critical theory no longer faces the spineless liberalism that merely fed mass incarceration and workfare to America. It no longer faces a Democratic administration that ratchets up drone strikes and legally justifies the first targeted assassination of an American citizen abroad. Rather, it faces political leaders who are openly Islamophobic, homophobic, xenophobic, mysogenist, and racist.

In response, a lot of critical theorists fold back today on the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, or Human Rights Watch. They fall back on liberal bastions—as critical theorists did at mid-century. And it may well be that one effective strategy today is to lock arms with liberals, tone down the critique, and work together until better times. But few critical theorists openly take that position. Instead, contemporary critics advocate for an array of new or reconstructed practices. It is possible to map out these different avenues. There are at least eight broad categories that critics advocate, plus a polyvalent approach that draws on them all. Let’s review them one at a time.

#1. Return to a Vanguard Party

Some critical theorists urge a return to vanguard revolutionary practices. In the context of the Arab Uprisings of 2011, for instance, thinkers such as Tariq Ali and Perry Anderson advocated for a more concerted anti-imperialist strategy and vanguard revolutionary practice. The only way for the Arab uprisings “to become a revolution,” Anderson wrote in 2011, was for the region as a whole to undo the 1979 Camp David Accords: “The litmus test of the recovery of a democratic Arab dignity lies there.”²⁰⁰ Tariq Ali, for his part, pointed us back to Lenin as the proper guide to rethink the Arab uprisings—and uprisings more generally.

In his 2017 book, The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution, Ali draws our attention back to Lenin’s April Theses, discussed earlier. Lenin pronounced his theses at meetings of soviets in Saint Petersburg in early April 1917 (in between the first revolution of February 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917). The April Theses were, as Ali reminds us, a clarion call to vanguard action at a time when the revolutionary leadership was adrift—a provocative, in Ali’s words “explosive,” and extremely controversial call for a second, truly socialist revolution to overcome the first, bourgeois political revolution.²⁰¹ At that time, Lenin called on his party members to unleash in effect a second revolution—in terms that would have had a special resonance in Egypt in 2011:

The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.²⁰²

These words, Ali notes, “paved the way for the revolution in October 1917.”²⁰³ They laid the groundwork for a leaderful vanguard revolution—precisely the type of practice that was consciously avoided by many in Tahrir Square, and latter in Zuccotti Park and at the Place de la République. Ali’s message is clear: what is needed at our assemblies today is a second uprising, a truly vanguard revolution. That alone will produce lasting change, according to Ali.

Revolutionary class struggle has and can always serve as a model for critical praxis. It is worth recalling, though, the dark side of vanguard communism: how Leninism led to Stalinism, to the Terror-Famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression in 1939, and the Soviet Gulag; or how Maoism led to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-61 and to unconscionable violence during the Cultural Revolution. In armed warfare, naturally, there have been successful models of vanguard insurgencies based on the military strategies of Mao, Che, and others; but those were armed insurrections led by armed insurgents attempting to gain independence or violently overthrow a government. That might still be a model for critical praxis today, but it is important to emphasize that it would likely be violently repressed and lead to wide scale incarceration and death. It should not lightly be advocated by theorists who are not willing to put themselves at the forefront and risk their own lives. It also should remind us of the courage of those women and men who engage in uprisings. It reminds me of the words of Mina Daniel (1991-2011) who was killed in October 2011 by the Egyptian military in Maspero, near Tahrir Square, during a peaceful Coptic protest: “You are not going out to make a revolution and live; you are going out to make a revolution and die… for your siblings, for your children, for anyone, so that others can enjoy this beautiful thing.”²⁰⁴

#2. Continue with Insurrectional Practices

Other critical thinkers strenuously advocate for insurrectional practices. Critical theorists, such as Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière for instance, are often associated with the anonymous collective, the Invisible Committee, discussed earlier, which explicitly militates for insurrection in its series of books, from The Coming Insurrection (2007), To Our Friends (2014), and Now (2017). Some commentators have suggested that the writings of the Invisible Committee, in certain passages, bear striking resemblance to those of Agamben and Rancière.

In The Coming Insurrection, the Committee explicitly calls for a cellular, separatist insurgency. It offers very precise prescriptions for action, including the following:

Expect nothing from organizations. Beware of all existing social milieus, and above all, don’t become one (100)

Form communes (100)

Get organized in order to no longer have to work (104)

Plunder, cultivate, fabricate (106)

Flee visibility. Turn anonymity into an offensive position (115)

Organize Self-Defense (117)

Abolish general assemblies (125)

Liberate territory from police occupation. If possible, avoid direct confrontation (130)

Take up arms. Do everything possible to make their use unnecessary. Against the army, the only victory is political. (133)

Depose authorities at a local level (136)

“Abolish general assemblies”: the Committee signals, in no uncertain terms, that it is writing against the recent tradition of occupations and general assemblies, and advocating a far more radical posture. The Committee goes so far as to propose a weaponized insurgency, although it is careful to emphasize that it does not fetishize armed resistance. It embraces weapons in order not to use them. The idea is that an a priori refusal to arm oneself or to handle weapons is equivalent to powerlessness. Power is achieved by having weapons but not using them. The idea is to get us to the point where it is no longer necessary to use arms through all the other strategies of unseating local authorities. “When power is in the gutter,” the Committee writes, “it’s enough to walk over it.”²⁰⁵

Many of these tactics that have been deployed recently in anti-fascist and anti-government protests that draw on these insurrectional writings. In protests in 2018 in Berkeley, Oakland, and Paris, for instance, the “black bloc” tactics were inscribed within an insurrectional frame. These tactics generally involve breaking windows, burning garbage, tires, or cars, and throwing projectiles at the police, and are generally carried out by black-clad protesters equipped with helmets, goggles, and face coverings. The tactics trace back to the squatter and other autonomist movements in Europe in the 1980s and to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. In certain locations, such as in Western Europe, they have become routine at protest marches.

In France, protests were traditionally headed, in what was called the “cortège,” by union representatives, and were strictly policed by union security forces. In more recent times, though, the protest marches have been preceded, in what is called the “tête de cortège,” by individual protesters, including black bloc protesters, who defy the march permits and take on law enforcement agents (national police, CRS, military gendarmes) that are policing the march. Individual protesters now also regroup in smaller clusters outside the perimeter of the permitted protest route in order to expand the space of protest and inject the protest more into the public space. These tactics violate the protest permit and are often severely repressed by the police, resulting in large-scale confrontations and arrests.

These insurrectional practices are fraught with potential violence and are physically dangerous. At the 2018 May Day protests in Paris, for instance, a tête de cortège with hundreds of black bloc protesters violently encountered a police force, resulting in over 200 arrests and a handful of injuries. In some cases, the practices have lead to accusations of sabotage, conspiracy, and terrorism. This was the case of the Tarnac Nine—a group of nine or ten alleged anarchists living collectively in the French rural commune of Tarnac in the Corrèze department of France and purportedly associated with the Invisible Committee— who were accused in 2008 of obstructing power cables of the high-speed railroad in France. Those charges were ultimately dismissed; but the accusations weighed on the activists and continue to circulate.

Like vanguard revolutionary practices, these insurrectional strategies involve radically militant, dangerous, potentially treasonous practices that expose individuals to incarceration, physical injury, and possibly death. In this sense, they should not lightly be advocated, especially not by armchair critical theorists. Nothing is off the table, but it is important to emphasize the risks of any strategy—and the trade offs.

#3. Defend Autonomous Zones

There have also emerged non-violent, non-insurrectional separatist movements that seek to create communities, often through a squatting model that does not involve violence, but instead community, new forms of property, and various forms of collaboration. The ambition of these temporary spaces is generally to avoid formal state structures of control. They are often referred to as Temporary Autonomous Zones (“TAZs”), in part in homage to the poetic anarchist writings of Hakim Bey by that name. They can also aspire to be permanent autonomous zones, or as Bey suggested “Permanent TAZs” in article in 1994 of that title.

A well-known example of a TAZ, which has attempted to become a permanent autonomous zone, is the autonomous zone of Notre-Dame-des-Landes outside of Nantes, France. This zone and others in France—in Rouen, Lyon, and elsewhere—are referred to as “Zones à defender” or “ZADs,” and have generally involved peaceful occupations of lands often with a significant environmental aspect. In the case of the Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the zone began as a protest movement against the building of a large new airport outside Nantes to service all of Western France. The physical presence of the protesters, through a form of squatting of agricultural lands where the airport was going to be built, started a long-term alliance between leftist activists, anarchists, environmentalists, and local farmers. The ZAD eventually brought down the airport construction project after 10 years of occupation and protest. In the process, the activists invented new forms of non-property, which the French state has tried to violently repress and demolish.

#4. Engage in Civil and Political Disobedience

Civil and political disobedience have also recently received increased attention in critical circles.²⁰⁶ These practices build on the traditional notion of civil disobedience made famous in David Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Mahatma Gandhi’s writings on Satyagraha or non-violent resistance, Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, and Hannah Arendt’s writings on civil disobedience as a form of lobbying in the Crises of the Republic. It is conventionally defined as the act of disobeying a positive law in order to suffer legal punishment and thereby convince others of the injustice of the law.

A number of contemporary critical theorists advocate a renewed attention to civil disobedience in democracies as a powerful tool to achieve social reform. Sandra Laugier and Albert Ogien in their work Pourquoi désobéir en démocratie ? address head-on the counter-majoritarian difficulties typically associated with civil disobedience and resolve in its favour. Frédéric Gros, in a book titled Désobéir (2017), explores and maps out the various forms of disobedience that mirror the different types of expected obedience to authority in political theory. Others as well have enriched the conversations including especially Robin Celikates, Candice Delmas, Alexander Livingston, Todd May, and Brandon Terry.

By contrast to civil disobedience, political disobedience can be defined as a form of insubordination that contests not only unjust positive law, but also the very political system that gives rise to those laws. It thus challenges the docility of civil disobedience, refusing to respect the punishment associated with breaking the law. It involves flouting rules, not to challenge their legality, but because they are simply intolerable. W.J.T. Mitchell, Mick Taussig, and I theorized these new forms of political disobedience in the Occupy context in Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (2013). This type of practice has become increasingly common along state borders, where local farmers are giving aid and assistance to undocumented immigrants in defiance of the law, as well as in sanctuary cities that openly resist the legal enforcement of immigration laws. The ambition here is not to suffer punishment, as a way to reveal the immorality of the law, but to defy laws that are considered immoral. It takes a different ethical position toward praxis. It is much closer to what Foucault described in his 1978 lecture, “What is Critique?”, where he suggested that critique is not being governed “like this.” Not, as he had originally formulated, in being governed less or not at all, but in not being governed in this way.²⁰⁷

#5. Gather in Assemblies, Occupations, and Movements

A number of critical theorists, including Judith Butler, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, Barbara Ransby, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Deva Woodly, among others, rally around new practices of assembly, occupation, and non-violent social movements. These practices build on the many occupations and assemblies that proliferated in the early twentieth century—such as Occupy, Standing Rock, Nuit Debout—as well as on many ongoing social movements, such as #BlackLivesMatter, or more broadly the Movement for Black Lives, and #MeToo. These assemblies and movements offer new models of political disobedience.

Deva Woodly emphasizes how the organizations within the Movement for Black Lives repoliticize the public sphere and demonstrate the potential of democratic experimentation. These movements revive the public sphere by countering the growing “politics of despair,” Woodly writes.²⁰⁸ The different manifestations of #BlackLivesMatter protest, she explains, are not just “pre-political” or prefigurative, they are inherently political practices that allow democracy to correct itself.

Judith Butler explicitly embraces these new political forms. A frequent speaker at the global Occupy movement, Butler sees promise in such non-violent strategies. In her 2017 book discussed earlier, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler elaborates on the productive ways in which already-existing assemblies shape our politics. Butler praises the productive performative dimensions that emanate from the materiality and physicality of people assembling either in public or virtually on digital platforms.

Michael Hardt and Toni Negri in their book Assembly (2017) provide a handbook intended not just to analyze, as does Butler, but to stimulate, encourage, and foster assembly-style social movements. Hardt and Negri offer guidance on how to organize, how to assemble, how to revolt, how to seize power, and how to transform society. “Smash the state,” they write.²⁰⁹ “Blow the dam!”²¹⁰ “Take power.”²¹¹

Their book is a manual, a how-to guide, with both concrete instructions on how to seize power and also rich theorization of our current political condition—both in terms of our subjective existence in our social milieu and in terms of our political economic condition that affects as well our subjectivities. Hardt and Negri locate the productivity of assembly as a new mode of politics within the power of the “multitude”—a notion that grounded their last book. Their strategies, such as inverted leadership and claimed entrepreneurship, are each individually to be viewed “as a simple operator of assembly within a multitude that is self-organized and cooperates in freedom and equality to produce wealth.”²¹²

At the most concrete level and faced with leaderless social movements like Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Uprisings, Hardt and Negri offer a list of concrete organizational advice, almost commands, for leftist revolt: Do not give up on leadership. Do not go leaderless. Instead, “transform the role of leadership by inverting strategy and tactics”: let the multitude decide on strategy, but the leaders decide on tactics.²¹³ Do not give up on institutions and organizations, but instead build new institutions—specifically non-sovereign institutions.²¹⁴ “Smashing the state means […] creating political and administrative institutions that immanently organize the collective, democratic decision-making of the entire population.”²¹⁵

Most importantly, Hardt and Negri argue, seize power. Many of the current social movements focus all their attention on the movement itself, its general assemblies, and the insulated world of the resistance movement, rather than on taking power from the state. Many now create a hermetically sealed space of protest and militance—en vase clos—separate and independent from ordinary politics and political power. At Occupy, for instance, there was a palpable and deliberate resistance to power, legislative politics, or party politics—to any engagement with conventional political representation and practices. Hardt and Negri push in a very different direction: Leftist movements must take power. They must seize the conventional instruments, institutions, and pathways of politics. “[W]e have little sympathy with those who want to maintain their purity and keep their hands clean by refusing power,” they proclaim. “[I]n order to change the world we need to take power.”²¹⁶

Many of these sentiments are echoed in other non-violent movements, such as #MeToo or #BLM. Many activists in these social movements seek to leverage the momentum of gatherings and non-violent protest to push assemblies into a more direct political process. As Jelani Cobb documents in the New Yorker, the Movement for Black Lives is pushing in new directions, getting more involved in public policy platforms, and some activists are even jumping into the electoral fray, such as DeRay McKesson who ran a mayoral campaign in Baltimore in 2016.

Some critical thinkers criticize these new political formations as disorganized, episodic, and doomed to failure. Critics argue that they will gradually transform into more ordinary party politics (like Podemos in Spain) or worse, play into the hands of completely different actors (like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt). Disavowing the more radical approaches, some argue, may appear safer, but may disarm critical theory. The practices may become more ad hoc and small bore. In certain contexts, though, this may be for the better. In any event, these new formations have been increasingly deployed.

#6. Jam the System

Another direction is to disrupt, to cause chaos, to jam the system—perhaps in a less constructive way than assemblies or social movements. It can take many forms, but is captured well today, for instance, by denial of service attacks and other forms of hacking.²¹⁷ This approach is traditionally associated with marginalized and disempowered populations. It has been theorized by James C. Scott (1990) under the umbrella of infrapolitics and ordinary acts of resistance.

Infrapolitics is, according to Scott, the space of struggle of the non-elites and involves “surreptitious resistance.”²¹⁸ It is, for instance, “poaching and squatting on a large scale that restructures the control of property, or peasant tax evasion, or massive desertion by serfs or peasant-conscripts bringing down a regime.”²¹⁹ These are down-to-earth, low-profile stratagems designed to minimize appropriation. In the case of slaves, these stratagems have typically included “theft; pilfering; feigning ignorance; shirking or careless labor; foot-dragging; secret trade and production of – for sale; sabotage of crops, livestock, and machinery; arson; flight; etcetera.”²²⁰ We are talking about the mob and the riot, the moral economy of the English crowd, in E. P. Thompson’s terms. Scott argues that these stratagems of infrapolitics are a foundational form of politics. They are “the building block for the more elaborate institutionalized political action that could not exist without it.”²²¹ They reflect the situation of being cornered, dominated, powerless in the face of an all-powerful state with all the tools—and lashing back in whatever way you can.

On a personal note, this is the place where I have found myself for the past three decades as counsel for death row inmates in Alabama. It is a space where the opponent—the state’s chief law enforcement officer, the attorney general—has all the power. Where opposing counsel can even, and often does, write the judicial opinions for the judges. Where your opponent effectively controls the judiciary, the executive, and the legislature, and exercises practically unfettered punitive authority over condemned inmates who, by contrast, are despised by all and viewed as pariah. What can one do, cornered in this way? Often, all you can do is jam the system. Yes, of course, you can try to get the legislature to enact reform—that will not get you far, or more likely backfire. You can file well-written and thoroughly researched briefs in state and federal courts—but that too will not get you very far. You can try to organize and seize power—but you are so disempowered, it is highly unlikely you will succeed. So, you have little alternative but to find ways to poke a stick in the wheel. There are few other option. Sometimes, all you can do is jam the system.

And that—throwing sand in the gears—can take many form, including the traditional liberal legal strategies of mounting legal challenges, making media appearances, trying to influence public opinion, marching in the streets, writing editorials, and so on. It may mean teaming up with liberals. Working with the ACLU on challenges to the Muslim Ban or on finding ways to protect DACA. Or swaying a moderate republican not to vote down universal healthcare. It has many uncomfortable dimensions—uncomfortable because you feel like you’ve sold out or that you have become reformist, or worse, are legitimating the system. But the fact is, in a time like ours, conventional legal challenges have been successful at jamming the works.

The resulting forms of praxis can take many shapes, from radical forms of political disobedience to strategic deployments of critical legal practice. The approach calls for an openness to different forms of resistance, particularly in different political contexts—at times engaging in disobedience or insubordination, in disruptive occupations, or breaking silence, at other times critically deploying legal rights, or disrupting the normalcy of life.²²²

For the longest time, I was troubled by the fact that many of my own political interventions drew on conventional liberal legal methods. In the death penalty context, for instance, or more recently, in challenging President Trump’s Muslim ban, I have often been concerned that my own practices, relying mostly on civil and political rights, have been merely palliative efforts, mere reformism in effect, or worse, served to bolster or uphold or legitimize the legal structures that were in question—concerned that I was merely protecting rights and not doing substantive justice, in the sense that Marx argued so powerfully in On the Jewish Question. I have often struggled to understand how my practical engagements differed from purely liberal reformism and approximated critical praxis.

But from the perspective of counter-critical theory, I now see that deploying liberal legal weapons, even traditional civil rights, among other strategies, does not simply promote or protect the existing framework, but more fundamentally challenges the punitive state. I’ve spent decades using the state’s weapons to prevent the state from executing my clients—from exercising its full power in a situation where the state is at its most powerful: where the state faces down, most often, an impoverished and despised man or woman, who has confessed to murder, has no resources whatsoever, and no one to turn to. It is the ultimate confrontation of a Goliath state at its most mighty—in the realm of crime and punishment, in the unquestioned space of security and policing—with an entirely subjugated individual, isolated in solitary confinement, on a desperate path since the moment he or she was born. This should be quick work for the state. A swift display of power. And yet, the litigation takes place as a power struggle, as an ordeal, with the condemned prisoner using every weapon they can get their hands on—including those from the register of liberalism. In the end, the critical deployment of civil rights is another form of critical praxis.

#7. Organize Political Parties

Another direction for critical praxis is to organize politically in a more conventional fashion in order to pursue critical theoretic goals. Along these lines, political organizing operates through political parties and trade unions, and it resembles the basic strategies of leftist political parties. This approach has become increasingly visible in the United States in the wake of the campaign of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. The surprise victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the Democratic primary for the Fourteenth Congressional District in the Bronx, New York, for the 2018 midterms, gave momentum to the Democratic Socialists of America party. In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon rallied leftists behind a new populist and social democratic party he founded in 2016, La France insoumise, which advocates a constitutional convention and the creation of a new republic that would transform the private ownership of capital. In Spain, Pablo Iglesias founded in 2014 a leftist populist party, Podemos, that has challenged European austerity measures and become one of the country’s largest political parties.

Some critical theorists rally behind even more centrist leftist parties, such as the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Democratic Party in the United States, or the French Socialist Party. In effect, the idea here is that the political ambitions are set by critical theory, but that the practical implementation follows more conventional political strategies of electoral politics. This approach may feel conventional, even non-critical, but if it is deployed in furtherance of critical objectives, there is no reason that it could not be considered an instrumental critical practice.

#8. Secede

Another course involves secession. We have seen this strategy deployed in the Catalan recently, but also in the United States, with Calexit and other movements to seceded from the union. The thrust here is not to create a secessionist isolated cell along more insurrectional lines, but rather to redefine borders in order to create a community more compatible with one’s own values.

Often, the secessionist approach is insular: one region, or one state, or one people call for secession. However, it need not be. One could imagine, for instance, an effort in the United States to break up the country into more politically homogenous and coherent units—in the same way in which the former Czechoslovakian Republic was broken up into different countries. The idea would be for different regions of the country to all agree to govern themselves separately—in effect to agree to disagree about the major political issues and policies of the day.

The fact is, some Americans believe deeply and earnestly in private health care, gun ownership rights, pro-life values, the death penalty, and closed borders. Other Americans believe sincerely and profoundly in universal health care, public education, gun control, unions, refuge, and family choice. The cleavages between these different values and views of society may simply become too deep at some point, and citizens may decide to effectively sort themselves into two or more sovereign states based on popular referenda. One could imagine, for example, separate sovereign states in the U.S.—and this would be a matter of popular decision-making—such as New England, the Republic of Texas, the Republic of California, the Southern States, the American Heartland, Native Lands, among other sovereignties.

The underlying practice would involve creating more homogenous units, in terms of values and ideals, in order to approximate more rapidly the new critical horizon.

#9. Take A Polyvalent Approach

Other critical theorists embrace polyvalent forms of resistance—finding allies, embracing different strategies, but not dictating one approach on others. In the face of newly empowered alt-right movements and the constant attack on minorities—from Muslims, to #BlackLivesMatter activists, to immigrants, to trans* persons—multiple forms of resistance may be necessary and none, perhaps, should be off the table. Form assemblies and jam the system. Or be insurrectional and secessionist. Try to enjoin the Muslim ban, occupy and assemble, organize, protest, and poke a stick in the wheel. These may all be important weapons, and there may be no reason to exclude any.

Talal Asad argues for more polyvalent forms of political engagement that contest authority at different levels or, in his words, that would “address numerous overlapping bodies and territories.”²²³ This would mean not always seeing conflict and aiming resistance at the same target—at times focusing on matters of national citizenship, at others of religious faith, and still at others of local governance. Asad reminds us of the remark Foucault made in the context of the Iranian Revolution: “Concerning the expression ‘Islamic government,’ why cast immediate suspicion on the adjective ‘Islamic’? The word ‘government’ suffices, in itself, to awaken vigilance.”²²⁴ It is vigilance across the board that would be called for—without any specific privilege to tradition, to the national, or to the local: multiple different strategies of resistance at various different levels. Here then are Tala Asad’s words:

The idea of numerous nonhierarchical domains of normativity opens up the possibility of a very different kind of politics—and policies—that would always have to address numerous overlapping bodies and territories. Procedures to deal with differences and disagreements would include civil pressure directed against authorities, such as civil disobedience, to make officeholders accountable. But the differences would not take the form of a legal distinction between citizen and alien, or between Muslim and non-Muslim. The tradition of amr bi-l-ma’ruf could form an orientation of mutual care of the self, based on the principle of friendship (and therefore of responsibility to and between friends) not on the legal principle of citizenship. This sharing would be the outcome of continuous work between friends or lovers, not an expression of accomplished cultural fact. The same tradition might find its way to collective acts of protest against excessive power (and so there have to be notions of power’s temporalities and bounds). There would be neither the power nor the technical ability of state apparatuses to impose a single legal authority or to deploy an institutionalized force. The risk of a military force being formed to create an exclusive territorial body would have to be met not merely by constitutional barriers but also by the work of tradition in the formation, maintenance, and repair of selves who are bonded to one another.²²⁵

As critical theorists today, then, we face a wide array of avenues for critical praxis. The question becomes, how do we move forward?