“The social revolution… cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past.” – Marx
A specter is haunting the pro-revolutionary milieu. The specter of Public Relations.
As the uprising against anti-black state violence continues to develop, its supporters have taken it upon themselves to re-frame the events of the revolt in the language of spectacle. As the weight of public discourse bears down upon the insurrection, threatening to suffocate it with the verbiage of “dialogue” and “debate”, the supposed friends of freedom willingly immerse themselves in this muck. When a riot breaks out and is met with an armed response, people are quick to transform the riot into a peaceful protest. A collective attack on the state is supplanted by a mass of defenseless innocents, brutalized without provocation. A mall is looted, and we are told that this isn’t real looting, because it is insignificant relative to the violence of the system. Property damage is justified, not because the institution of property itself poses an obstacle to freedom, but because the anger it expresses is rooted in “legitimate” causes.
The goal of these narratives is to make rebellion palatable to those still conditioned by ideology. As such, they make use of the same categories deployed by the media and state. This concession is rationalized by reference to “coalition-building” and “consciousness raising”. The people aren’t ready for the truth, so we must nudge them gently towards it. Every step we take must be explained in terms that they can understand and accept. One must not charge forward on their own; instead they must shuffle along, always looking over their shoulder to ensure that everyone else is behind them.
As long as proponents of this view continue their quixotic efforts to build a bridge to the truth out of lies, they will function as agents of counterrevolution. The latter gains strength when pro-revolutionaries begin to doubt themselves and succumb to the loneliness of the struggle. They see “the masses” remain hesitant as the world burns, and, fearful of acting on their own, chalk this up to a language barrier. Thus, would-be insurrectionaries turn themselves into PR consultants.
Narrative and Spectacle
The strategic focus on “reaching people where they’re at” results from an inability to break with the methodology of the spectacle. What passes for politics in modern society is characterized by the subsumption of individuals into voting blocs, distinguished by a few demographic identifiers. These blocs, going by names like “the black vote” and “the youth” are targeted by politicians and the media with rhetoric that panders to the lowest common denominator, as our supposed leaders attempt to position themselves as representatives of the broadest possible section of the population. Democracy thus sacrifices Quality at the altar of Quantity. As Edward Bernays, father of public relations, put it, “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society”.
It is hardly surprising that liberals, the foremost defenders of democracy, subscribe to such methods. The danger lies in the acceptance of this approach by those who claim to oppose the present social order. While it is certainly true that one cannot step outside of society, revolutionary critique aims to de-naturalize the assumptions that underpin prevailing ideologies. To blindly accept the politics of quantity as the only viable of mode of action is to abandon this project. This being the case, it is clear that the constellation often referred to as the left has largely abandoned the critical project, opting to mirror the methodology of its supposed opponents.
It is not necessary to ascribe this to a conscious rejection of radical social change. Most leftists are probably genuinely committed to revolution, yet remain mired in counterrevolutionary ideology. We’ve all been taught that actions could only be legitimized if they are made to fit certain criteria, and so naturally many continue to appeal to these criteria even as they struggle to destroy the world that produced them. This necessitates the rhetorical taming and whitewashing of the struggle, for its unadulterated form cannot be reconciled with the logic of ideology.
Disrupting this logic will free us of the perceived responsibility of debating the defenders of unfreedom. When they bring up Jacob Blake’s criminal record, instead of getting bogged down in arguments about his moral character, we must make clear that we do not accept the state-imposed category of “criminality” as justification for murder. When they say that one of Kyle Rittenhouse’s victims was armed, we only state our regret that he didn’t shoot first. There is no need to convince the enemy that we are in the right. The only “narrative” to be pushed is the necessity of social revolution, by any means necessary.
With respect to strategy, it may be objected that a refusal to play the legitimacy game will result in the isolation of the pro-revolutionary minority. Such a criticism, however, assumes that any interactions between this group and everyone else are restricted to former’s participation in the “battle of ideas”. The truth of the matter is that insurrections are rarely initiated by pro-revolutionaries. The pressures of the social system are driving people to take action every day, and no amount of proselytizing will accelerate this process to the point where insurrection magically becomes revolution. Pro-revolutionaries should engage with the process as participants, not lawyers in the court of public opinion or all-knowing leaders seeking to make an “intervention”.
Rebellion isn’t some inert mass of information waiting to be framed through newspaper headlines and tweets. Knowledge of it only comes through practice, as those involved work through the problems posed by the attempt at social transformation, developing a self-understanding through their responses to these problems. A “peaceful protester” arrives at a demonstration to march around with a sign for a couple hours, but, faced with the inevitably violent police response, find themself working with others to build a defensive barricade. Another person berates looters as opportunists, but after hearing them explain their actions, realizes that these so-called opportunists are actually more politically informed than the average protester. In the space opened up by insurrectionary acts, practice becomes praxis, self-conscious, creative activity that breaks with quotidian automatisms to remake the world.
Those who revolt don’t need representatives or translators, they need accomplices. If racism and capitalism were mere ideas that existed solely within the minds of individuals, then perhaps all that would be needed was the correct narrative. Tell people a convincing story, and they’ll abandon previously held beliefs. Of course, this isn’t the case at all. Racism and capitalism are material realities that can’t be talked away. They exist as institutions, policies, and behavioral patterns. As such, social reality can only be transformed when we target and disrupt these things. Thus taking direct action against oppression means materializing critique as a weapon in the streets.
Against Self-Defense
We have been told that violence is almost always bad. With the exceptions of law enforcement and self-preservation, society condemns the use of force. While being bombarded with images of violence, we are told that refraining from such acts is a sign of self-control and moral superiority. When people of color respond to their oppression by tearing shit up, the pacifist avoids open condemnation, claiming to “understand” people’s anger. Yet we can all see that inner smile, that smug self-satisfaction at not stooping to their level. When people recite that MLK quote about riots as the “language of the unheard”, they sound like zookeepers explaining that animals can’t be blamed for their lack of self-control. When the oppressed “lash out”, their self-appointed spokespeople defend them by dehumanizing them, by degrading their acts of rebellion.
Revolution isn’t a matter of survival, it is an attempt at life. When people forcibly re-organize their conditions of existence, rather than speaking of this as a blind reaction, devoid of political content, we must seek to understand the struggle in its own terms. Rebels aren’t just automatons spitting out some pre-programmed output in response to environmental input, they’re human beings with mouths and voices. Let us hear how they understand their actions. We can disagree with them, but to do so requires that we recognize their agency.
It is true that society deprives people of power, shaping their lives with forces beyond their control. This doesn’t mean, however, that burning down a liquor store indicates a lack of power. The story often told is that the fires come when people are unable to access “more constructive” channels in their pursuit of social change. What this narrative ignores is the possibility that the burning liquor store is the product of a conscious decision, the outcome of a choice made by people who long ago realized the futility of “legitimate” channels and have taken matters into their own hands.
Let’s stop talking about individual or community “self-defense”. The state kills people every day, but we don’t just want to arrest its activity, bringing the killings to a halt in order to return to some state of “normalcy”. In this society, murder and incarceration are normal. The default of mode of being is hardly something worth preserving. The self as it currently exists is the atomized, castrated individual of capital, trapped in a barren world that reduces each person to an “identity”. The supposed freedom of capital is the freedom to be defined entirely by where you work, what you buy, and who you fuck. “Communities” are prisons into which people are forced by social forces that impose arbitrary divisions in order to maintain economic hierarchies. These false collectives function to prevent the establishment of genuine relationships between subjects. Why should limit ourselves to the preservation of the existent, when it promises nothing but continued misery?
The far-right has made a fetish out of the concept of civil war, a day of reckoning when they will rise up to restore the nation to its former glory. The recent escalation of political violence has, for many, placed this event on the near horizon. Visions of armed clashes between anti-fascists and rightist militias are seeping into the popular imagination. This is a trap. A civil war is a conflict between factions within a single polity, vying for control of the state apparatus. To allow the struggle to be demarcated along such lines is to accept the notion that the existing political system is a neutral space that can be contested by any group. The fact of the matter is that the state has already aligned itself with fascist paramilitaries in order to suppress the ongoing uprising. It too is the enemy. Unlike the right, we don’t want to take back “our” country, we want to destroy it.
The relationship between the oppressed and the state is more properly understood in terms of social war, a continuous process of subjugation and forcible integration. The perpetual expansion of repressive institutions such as the police and the carceral system facilitates state domination over the exploited. This process can only be interrupted through the establishment of new forms of life, through the total re-organization of society. As such, proper strategy can only be derived from an ethics of attack, an orientation towards the existent that seeks to actively challenge all that obstructs the realization of freedom. “Arming the people” cannot be reduced to the accumulation of physical weaponry; what is more important is that any collective action rejects the mediation of existing political or moral categories. Rather than assuming a defensive posture, constantly justifying itself by reference to these categories, an insurrectionary formation must embrace its own disruptive nature.
While the events of this summer have opened new opportunities for the development of pro-revolutionary forces, a number of countervailing factors threaten to foreclose these possibilities. Chief among them are tendencies arising from the oppositional camp itself, defanging this nascent rebellion. Another world is possible, but it will not come about if its partisans allow themselves to be trapped by the ideology of the old world.
In one of Aesop’s fables, a boastful man goes about telling everyone of his supposed exploits. He claims that while in Rhodes, he won a competition by making a leap so great that no living man could match it. A skeptical bystander challenges him to replicate the feat: “Here’s your Rhodes, jump here!”
For those of us who seek to destroy this world built on oppression and exploitation, our Rhodes is here. It’s time to jump.