Читать книгу Nonviolence Ain't What It Used To Be - Shon Meckfessel - Страница 5

It’s about power, because capitalism is about a struggle over agency. To live a life of capitalism, for absolutely anyone, is to be perpetually unstable in your own agency…cause there’s this outside structure of money that governs it beyond you. That sort of power play is at the core of the capitalist psyche. Playing with that power is so key…taking it for yourself is so key, because that is in the end the fundamentally anticapitalist thing, is to do something that expands your own agency.… That’s why [these protests] are a threat, because they’re people being like, oh yeah, there’s way more of us than there are of you. And we can do whatever the fuck we want.

—Occupy San Francisco participant3

Sometime in the last decade, the fear broke. Perhaps it was in the strip malls of little Ferguson, Missouri, or Hong Kong’s intersections, or Istanbul’s Gezi Park, or Brazil’s buses. Perhaps it was in a Tunisian fruit market, or on the rooftops of Tehran, or in Athens’s dusty little Exarchia park. The year 2011 alone witnessed the most disruptive wave of contention to occur on a global scale since at least and perhaps before 1968, with uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Israel/Palestine, Greece, Italy, Spain, Chile, the UK, Canada, and nearly every major city in the United States, to name only some. None of these places had experienced such unrest in decades, at least. Not only the number, but also the very character of these uprisings was something new. Lancing the rancid bitterness of generations stricken by suffocating passivity, isolation, and social depression, the relief and rage finally embodied in these global explosions was notable for a vehemence that could sometimes justifiably be called violent. These protests consistently demonstrated an undeniable intensity and confrontational scrappiness, rising up from the love of strangers drawn together in intimate risk and hope. At the same time, with the eventual exceptions of Syria and Libya, the intensity of these revolts was also almost universally nonlethal, on the demonstrators’ side at least. Little love was felt by the insurgents for police and ruling elites, and though their uprisings often went well beyond what has come to be called “nonviolence,” the millions in the streets were still reluctant to take out their rage on the bodies of their opponents. Why? Why were they so consistently violent, at least in some senses, and yet so consistently nonlethal? And why is it that we lack words for this kind of violence, if that’s what it is?

This eruption came seemingly out of nowhere. But this scrappy intensity was long in the making and can be directly ascribed to decades of increased inequality under the policies of neoliberalism.4 The neoliberal era has overseen the greatest unequal redistribution of wealth in human history, and this inequality has been, and remains, an all-pervasive form of violence. As Harvard psychiatrist James Gilligan argues, relative poverty—that is, poverty in the face of wealth, measured by the gap between rich and poor—is not only itself an endemic form of massive structural violence but also the direct cause of more visible forms of violence. Summarizing his findings from three decades studying violence in American prisons, Gilligan states that “structural violence is not only the main form of violence, in the sense that poverty kills far more people (almost all of them very poor) than all the behavioral [individual] violence put together, it is also the main cause of violent behavior. Eliminating structural violence means eliminating relative poverty.”5 So, rather than wondering why recent protests have been so intensely conflictual, one might initially ask why those most affected by neoliberalism’s inequalities remained quiet for so long instead of responding with a violence analogous to that of previous eras. Where was what E. P. Thompson describes as the “moral economy” of riots, as in the eighteenth-century, when citizens smashed up and expropriated flour stores and bakeries as a means of community control of pricing?6 Where was the response?

The absence of a violent response to intensified relative (as well as absolute) poverty is particularly puzzling when compared to the proliferation of massive urban riots in the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s. As the Kerner Commission appointed in 1967 by President Johnson recognized, these riots were not mute explosions of brute force.7 If anything, they were the most articulate expression of grievance that large swaths of the country had available to them, as Black populations, who had only recently arrived to northern cities in what is called “the Great Migration,” faced massive exploitation and wretched conditions. Historian Michael Katz compares conditions of marginalized populations under neoliberalism to those faced at that earlier time and finds that, “with the notable exception of the Vietnam War, most of the conditions identified in the [Kerner Commission] report as precipitating civil violence did not disappear” but actually worsened to a severe degree.8 Asking in his aptly titled 2008 essay “Why Don’t American Cities Burn Very Often?” Katz observes,

Poverty, inequality, chronic joblessness, segregation, police violence, ethnic transition, a frayed safety net: surely, these composed a combustible ensemble of elements, which a reasonable observer might have expected to ignite. In 1985, two sociologists who studied crime and violence observed: “the ghetto poor were virtually untouched by the progress that has been made in reducing racial and ethnic discrimination.… We thus face a puzzle of continued, even increasing, grievance and declining attempts to redress grievance through collective protest and violence.” Writing in 1988, Tom Wicker pointed to the same puzzle. The “urban ghetto is, if anything, more populous, confining, and poverty-ridden than in 1968.” Yet, the “urban riots that generated so much alarmed attention twenty years ago have long since vanished—rather as if a wave had risen momentarily on the sea of events and then subsided.” Why did no one light the match?9

Katz answers his own question with the idea of incapacitation—the means of making dissent powerless—which includes a set of developments in the country since the last wave of popular insurrection. He proposes a set of six “mechanisms” for “the management of marginalization”: selective incorporation, mimetic reform, indirect rule, consumption, repression, and surveillance.10 “Together,” Katz notes, “they set in motion a process of de-politicization that undercuts the capacity for collective action.”11 Because each of these mechanisms assails the capacity, rather than the righteousness, of dissenters, I argue that movements are pressed to respond in kind by publicly performing power in the face of incapacitation attempts instead of arguing the justice of their cause. The remaining sections of this chapter will look at how marginalization is managed under neoliberalism and what it might mean for social movements.

Katz observes that the inherent violence of inequality never disappears; instead, it is displaced from public to interpersonal expression. While writing the article, Katz was called up for jury duty in his home city of Philadelphia. The trial involved the murder of an elderly African American man by one of his longtime acquaintances, even a friend, in an argument over a loan of five dollars. The crime took place in North Philly, a neighborhood of apocalyptic poverty (where I also lived for three years) only minutes away from Philadelphia’s glitzy Center City. In trying to understand what connection neoliberal developments and the incapacitation of dissent might have to such tragic instances of interpersonal violence, I find it useful to turn to James Gilligan’s research on violence in prisons, mentioned above. Gilligan’s analysis reminds us that neoliberalism’s widespread social incapacitation imposes an essentially humiliating powerlessness and that, by making social action unimaginable, this humiliation is likely to express itself through interpersonal situations closer to home. “The German word for attention—Achtung—also means respect. And that makes sense: the way you truly respect someone is to pay attention to them, and if you are not giving them your full attention, you are disrespecting them…we all need attention. When we get it, we know that we are being respected. That also helps to explain the etiology of violence: assaulting people is a foolproof way to get their attention. Since everyone needs respect/attention, if they cannot get it nonviolently, they will get it violently.”12

Gilligan’s analysis of interpersonal violence as stemming from the systematic disrespect of relative inequality helps us reframe Katz’s question. Instead of only asking why American cities don’t burn very often, we might ask why Americans often shoot each other instead of burning cities. How, in more academic terms, does the endemic violence of neoliberalism’s intensification of inequality become systematically displaced from public to interpersonal spheres?

Before trying to answer this question, we should notice how this same shift, from social control by presumed consensus to control by incapacitation of dissent, essentially redefines the work of social movements at every level. As incapacitation of dissent results in a generalized humiliation among the poor and marginalized, movements must turn their focus away from bemoaning the absence of some anticipated justice, which fewer and fewer people expect in the first place—outrage at exceptional injustices may even sound insultingly obvious to those suffering injustices as routine—and instead focus on resisting the imposed sense of powerlessness. Under these conditions, movements arise simply to prove that it’s still possible to do something, that incapacitation isn’t complete. The focus on the incapacitation of movements, rather than the justice of their cause, can be understood as the most significant shift in social control from the welfare state to the neoliberal era. Consider the foundational 1962 Port Huron Statement that established Students for a Democratic Society. The statement, which in many ways framed New Left concerns, reveals how movement rhetorical strategies of the time were primarily concerned with attacking the justice of the status quo: “Many of us began maturing in complacency.… As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss.… Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era.”13

Reading these words now, their pained sincerity is no less striking than their absolute distance from our own times. Whatever one’s social position or political affiliation, the idea that complacent comfort, virtue, or some sort of Golden Age is in danger of being undermined by a threat of hypocrisy and decline is an idea from some other world. Political radicalization must now happen by other means, since no one—Left or Right—would entertain such naivety in the first place. Even those most likely to bristle at mention of “the hypocrisy of American ideals” would now never argue that the country is in an untroubled, untarnished Golden Age; rhetoric of hypocrisy and the decline of American virtue is now even more typical of the Right than among Left critics—albeit with different alleged causes. Talk of values and righteousness has largely been abandoned by liberals and the Left; such talk persists mostly within the Right, but then only as a thin pretext for the brutal exercise of force by those in a position to do so over those who, until recently, seemed little inclined to fight back. If movements are to do their job and disrupt the daily reproduction of the status quo, they cannot merely point out how unfair things are, which is obvious enough. Instead, they have to figure out, work through, and overcome those social “advances” that have convinced people that they are powerless to do anything about it. In many ways, as later chapters hope to show, they’ve already started.

Disruption Disrupted:

Or, Why Have the Poor Been Putting Up with Getting So Screwed?

That Katz measures the incapacitation of the poor in the neoliberal era in terms of the vanishing of urban riots—why he asks “why did no one light the match?” instead of asking why they aren’t, for example, voting in greater numbers—may need some additional explanation. We’d do well here to turn to Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s classic work on the sociology of social movements, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. In the authors’ analysis of a series of hard-won gains of the poor against the powerful in American history, “[I]t was not formal organizations but mass defiance that won what was won in the 1930s and 1960s: industrial workers, for example, forced concessions from industry and government as a result of the disruptive effects of large-scale strikes; defiant blacks forced concessions as a result of the disruptive effects of mass civil disobedience.”14 It is wrong to credit organizations like the AFL-CIO with the gains of labor history, or the Civil Rights Act with the end of Jim Crow. Such institutional measures are in reality more the effect of social change than its cause: “While…symbolic gestures give the appearance of influence to formal organizations composed of lower-class people, elites are not actually responding to the organizations; they are responding to the underlying force of insurgency.”15 The capacity for disruptive intervention is the measure of such “force of insurgency,” and hence of the political power of those without other access to institutional deliberation processes:

It is our judgment that the most useful way to think about the effectiveness of protest is to examine the disruptive effects on institutions of different forms of mass defiance, and then to examine the political reverberations of those disruptions.… By our definition, disruption is simply the application of a negative sanction, the withdrawal of a crucial contribution on which others depend, and it is therefore a natural resource for exerting power over others.… Indeed, some of the poor are sometimes so isolated from significant institutional participation that the only “contribution” they can withhold is that of quiescence in civil life: they can riot.16

For workers at a site of production, the most effectively leveraged disruption—the “withdrawal of a crucial contribution”—might take the form of a slowdown or strike; students might walk out from their school; soldiers might flee into the wilds or attack their superiors. Those with only minimal institutional affiliation—the unemployed or underemployed poor, youth, and indeed the many precarious workers unable to organize in traditional workplace settings—are left with few resources for political intervention besides direct interruption in urban processes of the reproduction of daily life. Such an analysis hardly romanticizes public displays of violence; rather, these are revealed as symptomatic of a final, desperate refusal of powerlessness, an acknowledgment of the severe distance from channels of influence inscribed in the very position of the marginal subject’s daily life:

The poor do not have to be historians of the occasions when protestors have been jailed or shot down to understand this point. The lesson of their vulnerability is engraved in everyday life; it is evident in every police beating, in every eviction, in every lost job, in every relief termination. The very labels used to describe defiance by the lower classes—the pejorative labels of illegality and violence—testify to this vulnerability and serve to justify severe reprisals when they are imposed. By taking such labels for granted, we fail to recognize what these events really represent: a structure of political coercion inherent in the everyday life of the lower classes.17

When the force exerted by the “structure of political coercion inherent in everyday life” effectively blocks marginalized subjects from disruptive activity, the basis of their political power is undermined absolutely. Without a means of staking their claim, the poor (and a significant portion of “the middle class” who find themselves sliding into insecurity and poverty in the neoliberal era) have taken loss after loss in the social gains of previous generations, with little means of response. Recent contentious movements, to their tremendous credit, have finally broken through this impasse after nearly half a century of failures to do so but have not always received adequate appreciation for their particular success.

Seraphim Seferiades and Hank Johnston have described what they term a “disruptive deficit” that has resulted in the neoliberal era, as the poor and underprivileged are denied means of enacting disruption, their only real means of exerting influence. This incapacitation is made worse by a “reform deficit” occurring within institutions themselves, as neoliberal ideology has favored technocratic consensus—“leave it to the experts”—over the sorts of conflicts that drive reforms even within institutions:

[A] key element…is the extent to which “conflict” (as non-violence) is premised on claimant disruptive propensity, that is, the tendency of contentious actors to act transgressively (though not necessarily resorting to violence) in order to further their goals. Even if states are reform-prone (and, nowadays, many seem viciously counter-reformist, both socioeconomically and politico-institutionally), “conflict” is not possible unless protest is sufficiently pungent to disrupt the workings of the system: to exert pressure on opponents, bystanders and authorities.… Prolonged periods of conflictual irrelevance, a state of affairs where either claimant actors fail to adequately express grievances, or the state proves perpetually unable (and/or unwilling) to be responsive—what may be construed as a reform deficit—leads to “conflict’s” eventual collapse (if it had ever emerged). This is where violence begins to set in.… [T]his disruptive deficit may lead to a great paradox: in seeking conciliation through exclusively conventional protest, institutionalized claimants end up inadvert­ently fomenting the kind of political violence they most dread and despise. Indeed, this is all the more so, considering that this disruptive deficit coincides with the reform deficit characterizing contemporary neo­liberal policies.18

As much of the rest of this book will attempt to show, performances of potential disruption—like peaceful protests, pre-­arranged business-union “scheduled strikes,” or even petitions and grievances—ultimately derive their power from the threat of actual, material disruption. And once elites have assured themselves that such threats are unlikely to go anywhere in terms of actual disruption, they have little reason to care. Thus, a deficit in disruption makes such petitionary measures—ironically, the very measures held forth as the only way to actually “change the world”—empty and useless. Consequently, the hollowness of these threats, and their inability to win any substantial gains, ends up resulting in a return of actual, unmediated violence. In political theory terms, this emptiness signals the impossibility of containing conflict within any mediating sphere of deliberation—what Chantal Mouffe terms “agonism,” the clash of interests and perspectives mediated through a functioning deliberative sphere.19 Instead, conflict, when it inevitably appears, escalates and is driven outside mediating processes, appearing as unmediated violence, equivalent in Mouffe’s terminology to “antagonism,” or violence between enemies. By shutting down whatever limited spheres of deliberation that might once have been available for working out conflicts before they exploded, neoliberalism offers the poor and disenfranchised a dismal choice: silence or violence.

Managing Dissent:

Engineering Neoliberalism’s Disruptive Deficit

Political Recuperation and “The Pluralist Prejudice”

Neoliberalism has succeeded spectacularly well, at least until the 2010s, in suppressing dissent; thus, its means of suppression then become the new conditions to which challengers are forced to respond. Clearly, if we are to understand the approaches movements take, we also need to understand how the neoliberal age has witnessed such brilliant achievements in the management of dissent. How has power succeeded so well in repressing dissent? What new factors are social movement actors contending with? I will begin by looking at how dissent is managed through four ways potentially disruptive forces are immobilized: co-optation of dissent leaders, indirect rule of potentially unruly subjects, consumerist deferment of antagonism, and “civil society” recuperation of the symbolic resources of disruption. After that, I will turn to the heavy stick of direct force that complements this managerial carrot.

Since the 1970s, many prominent New Left leaders have entered, or at least visited, the halls of power. SDS president Tom Hayden became a state senator in California, and the Black Panthers succeeded in helping Jerry Brown become governor of the same state with their backing. Across the country, minority and radical activists found homes within municipal governments. This growing political heft led many to claim that yesterday’s radicals had finally won their voice; they were participating in the serious, grown-up world of change-the-system-from-within politics. However, in the same way that demands for more personal freedom made for a new life for capitalist markets, such political “successes” functioned as a new means of social control, employed to great effect against the very claims from which they originated. While self-identified Marxists largely fled behind the safe walls of ivory-tower academic incomprehensibility, “the Left” in the political sphere came more and more to signify social liberals whose economic policies were hardly distinguishable from their conservative counterparts. Indeed, Democrat Bill Clinton, or the British Labour Party of Tony Blair, pushed through neoliberal reforms often surpassing their more conservative opponents in severity. This bipartisan technocratic (“leave it to the experts”) conquest of the political sphere brought together an apolitical consensus, with little room for openly conflictual approaches. Speaking in the European context with its rather more developed institutional Left, Seferiades and Johnston argue that “in contemporary Western democracies, and on a variety of pretexts, official protest organizations, including several [social movement organizations], trade unions, and, above all, the parties of the Left, tend to approach contentious disruption as a relic of the past. Hoping to secure the consensual resolution of pent-up grievances, nominally contentious organizations are increasingly espousing (often in a dogmatic fashion) the modalities of an exclusively conventional protest repertoire.”20

The range of permissible political expression narrowed as previous movement leaders found themselves accepted into the institutions they’d once criticized and disrupted, and thus less apt to disrupt them. A culture developed within the Left favoring what scholar Doug McAdam calls a “pluralist prejudice,” which delegitimized and deprived the marginalized of their most, and perhaps their only, means of expressing their political interest:

[N]on-institutional protest was for a long time considered to be pathological owing to what may be construed as the pluralist prejudice: the axiomatic assumption that political systems (at least in the West) possessed sufficient expressive channels, which protesters, to their detriment, evaded quite simply because they were “irrational”: “Why would any group engaged in rational, self-interested political action ignore the advantages of such an open, responsive, gentlemanly political system?… [Because m]ovement participants are simply not engaged in ‘rational, self-interested political action.’” Incorporating insights from social theory and novel research findings (both historical and contemporary), political process and contentious politics approaches have problematized and eventually shattered the pluralist assumption: actors engaged in contentious, non-institutional collective action are not irrational; instead their departure from the proper channels reflects systematic channel deficiency and is, if anything, eminently rational.21

Such systematic institutionalization of dissent also resulted in what Katz terms “mimetic reform,” defined as “measures that respond to insurgent demands without devolving real power or redistributing significant resources,” most notably through a systematization of conflict which “not only absorbed the energies of insurgents, it also transformed their protests and rendered them harmless.… [It] substituted decentralization for community control, elections for protest, and ‘modest but sufficiently tantalizing distribution’ for redistribution.”22 Institutionalized dissent talks back to insurgent demands without actually answering them, neither serving their constituency’s interests nor allotting them power to do so themselves. The accumulated effects of decades of managed dissent have resulted in a crisis of powerlessness for social movement actors—regardless of the justice of their cause. Material power is replaced with a feeling of “empowerment,” which comes to mean just another kind of despair.

Indirect Rule

For many, increased minority inclusion in political representation—the election of a Black president, selection of a Black secretary of state and Supreme Court judges, and particularly the Black entry into municipal politics—has been the most palpable victory won by the civil rights movement. Notably, people-of-color representation among business leadership has continued to be considerably more constrained, which in any case hardly “trickles down” to racialized populations at large. In view of the worsening conditions for large numbers of minorities and the poor, such “selective incorporation” of token elites, by “constructing limited ladders of social mobility,” may well be viewed as an ultimately counterproductive strategy, working to confuse without essentially improving the reality of material inequalities and unequal access. Michelle Alexander, former Racial Justice director of the ACLU, for example, criticizes affirmative action programs for this reason, pointing out that their effect in creating small, visible elites may work to mask the widespread degradation in conditions, thus actually perpetuating it.23 In terms of the more public challenges confronted by social movements, the selective incorporation of holders of municipal public office bears particular significance.

This selective incorporation of marginalized populations did not occur in a vacuum. Housing policies first robbed these populations of assets and networks of influence by first driving them into deteriorating city centers during an explosion in suburban land values, which was policed by real estate covenants often with explicitly racist language. Then, gentrification went on to rob them of the considerable assets and networks they’d built up in these neighborhoods. In the midst of these massive schemes of dispossession through displacement, civil rights era struggles did away with some of the mechanisms that kept members of these communities out of office—primarily, however, only at the municipal level. Invoking a term from the colonialism’s vocabulary, Katz points out that this limited representation results in a form of “indirect rule,” as the faces of political and bureaucratic rule appear much darker than the faces actually setting policies and determining budgets at the state and national levels. “Like colonial British imperialists who kept order through the exercise of authority by indigenous leaders, powerful white Americans retained authority over cities through their influence on minorities elected to political office, appointed to public and social service bureaucracies, and hired in larger numbers by police forces.”24

State legislatures have retained effective control over finances, schooling, and housing, but more diverse representation at the city level “meant that civil violence or other claims on city government increasingly would be directed toward African American elected officials, African American public bureaucrats, and African American police.”25 This results in a perverse hesitancy for communities of color to manifest antagonism in the places they live, lest they lose the ambiguous gains won through long struggle; political elites, whatever good or bad intentions they may have, are thus able to demobilize dissent, as urban populations identify more closely with the faces, if not the actual forces, of rule. The contradictions in the practice of such management strategies can be seen in the example of Occupy Oakland, when Chinese American (and former neighborhood organizer and self-described communist) Mayor Jean Quan at first attempted to express sympathy with the movement by visiting the camp, only to order the deployment of near-lethal force by hundreds of riot police less than two weeks later. Quan justified her move by claiming that “white anarchists” were marauding through “our Oakland,” which, though misrepresenting the diverse composition of Occupy, seemed true if “our” referred to the racial makeup of the city’s political elites. The appeal of this claim must have been noticed by other politicians: on November 24, 2014, when Black Lives Matter protests erupted in Seattle and shut down the country’s largest interstate for a full hour, white mayor Ed Murray did not blush to claim that the freeway had been shut down by “a bunch of white anarchists,” even though, according to several eyewitnesses I spoke with, every one of those who actually made it on the freeway were Black youth (with the ironic exception of local white hip hop celebrity Macklemore). In both instances, a bizarre rhetorical situation was revealed: minoritized communities were apparently shut off from the sort of public disruption that had historically been a central means of influence, so that their “representatives” could actually claim public disruption to be evidence of privilege.

After decades of being assured that racial uplift can work by ­trickle-down, disprivileged communities are hesitant to stand up to and take on political leaders who, though ultimately lacking power, resemble the face of progress. The political quiescence resulting from such accumulated hesitation is central to disruptive deficits and has become a central challenge that movements are forced to confront.

Consumerism and Credit as “Hope”

Much of the recuperation and displacement of potentially disruptive drives in the neoliberal era has occurred outside the sphere of what is usually understood as political, as for example in the composition of the consumer economy. As the Free Association has brilliantly analyzed, the neoliberal era managed to defer the antagonism that might have resulted from declining real wages by substituting easy consumer credit; so long as one didn’t actually have to pay off all these little plastic cards, what was the difference between wages and credit anyway?26 Suspiciously easy home mortgages became so simple to attain that the entire global economy somehow came to rest on them. The availability of consumer and home credit was coupled with a drastic drop in the price of many commodities due to the slave-like working conditions of globalized labor. This increase in purchasing power gave more and more people a means to feel powerful in their consumer choices just as they had less and less power in their political lives. As New Deal welfare-state labor protections were dismembered and ­factory-line industrial jobs were replaced with service and information work, increasing insecurity was marketed back to workers as an exciting new world of flexibility and mobility. Credit cards and easy mortgages that could be paid off just after dreams come true, cheap goods made by happy distant workers grateful to work for slave wages, a long procession of short-term jobs that one hopes will end in untold wealth—what all these changes had in common was a deferral of the essential antagonism of capitalism, between labor and capital, into the future. It is precisely this anxious faith that things would work themselves out that Barack Obama mobilized in his reliance on a message of “hope and change” during his successful 2008 campaign. The Free Association points out that the 2008 economic collapse, when investors very literally lost faith in the future as they sold off debt everyone suddenly realized would never be paid off, was the end of this deferral and “hope.” Antagonism could no longer be postponed into the distant future, and it returned to the present in full force, as a wave of protests, riots, and uprisings swept across the globe in 2011.

Although easy credit and other consumer enticements may be losing their magic in the face of economic decline, the ideological function of consumerism as the sole respectable means of exercising one’s agency remains. Nowhere is this so obvious as when social movements attempt to call it into question in protests and riots. Those who participate in consumer society, the logic goes, have no right to protest or riot against it; those who do are instantly labeled hypocrites. When, for example, rhetorical scholar Ellen Gorsevski makes a passing mention of protest “violence” in her book on nonviolent rhetoric, she quickly and confidently (and without feeling the need to cite a single source) alleges that the true motive of 1999 WTO protesters in Seattle, who broke the windows of Starbucks, was that they were shopping for coffee:

[T]he newest stereotype that is an equally challenging obstacle to be overcome by the various peace movement diaspora is that of the spoiled suburban teenager, the proverbial purple-haired punk, dressed in all black clothes, who, out of sheer boredom, takes to the street to smash things. A friend of mine who attended the “Battle of Seattle” protests in 1999–2000 observed with ironic dismay, for example, when a small band of black-garbed, face-masked protesters, self-proclaimed “anarchists,” used crow bars to smash into a Starbucks coffee chain store, then proceeded to help one another to bags of coffee, saying: “Hey! Pass me some of that Mocha Java,” or “I’ll trade you this Kenya for that Morning blend.”27

One participant in these actions assured me, on hearing this quote, “There was free coffee in the convergence center. No one needed to shop for coffee. We were good for coffee.” In Gorsevski’s view, rioters could be understood merely as coffee shoppers who were doing it all wrong. Similarly, within hours of the 2012 May Day riot in Seattle, in which hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage were inflicted on downtown banks and corporate businesses, one masked rioter who sported the characteristic Nike swoosh on his shoes while swinging a wooden stick at the windows of Niketown came to summarize the entire event in much media coverage. Twelve years before at the same Niketown building, another masked protester had climbed its awning and was kicking down its metal letters, with shoes apparently marked by a similar swoosh. Then, too, this one pair of shoes among thousands somehow was supposed to explain everything. How, we might ask, is this supposed to be an explanation? Why would one rioter’s choice of footwear somehow explain away the presence of tens of thousands of protesters? The “hypocrisy” is not simple wrongdoing, but rather the revealed individual contradiction between legitimate choice (shopping) and illegitimate choice (anything besides shopping). It is as if the rioter wearing Nikes (probably dumpstered or bought used in a thrift store, in any case) stupidly missed his one legitimate chance to voice his disapproval of the company by not buying their shoes, which is why he ended up so confused as to be smashing windows, which in turn explains why everyone else was probably rioting as well. Besides being a rather simple reading of riots, such an explanation seeks to reassert the idea of society as nothing more than the simple aggregation of individual preferences; an ascription that leaves no room for collective political action against an institution, which a riot would rather obviously seems to be. If anything, such bewildered “explanations” indicate that riots still possess a great deal of power, exactly because they are so inexplicable within these dominant frameworks and may actually work to call them into question.

Civil Society as Institutionalized Dissent

Of the various developments in the incapacitation of dissent that have undercut the power of social movements to challenge the status quo, none are quite as insidious as those developments that claim to represent and speak for the same concerns that movements do or even to speak for the movements themselves. The neoliberal era has witnessed an astronomical growth in the nonprofit sector: from 50,000 organizations designated by the IRS with charity status in 1953 to over one million tax-exempt organizations in 2012.28 According to one nonprofit advocacy group, “If the nonprofit sector were a country, it would have the seventh largest economy in the world…the nonprofit arts and culture industry generates $166.2 billion in economic activity every year.”29 Structurally, the more “progressive” among these organizations often operate by grafting the revolutionary symbolic branches of the 1960s and 1970s struggles to a consistent trunk of pluralist-prejudice approaches. The words and slogans of the nonprofit sector—not to mention the participants themselves—are often deceptive carryovers of the radical aspirations of past disruptive social movements, but they are ultimately and unavoidably beholden to the organization’s funding cycle, and hence to the political agendas of the funders themselves. What recent scholars have termed the “Nonprofit Industrial Complex” (NPIC) has been a central cause of the disruptive deficit, a fact that today’s social movements must (and do) consciously confront.

An instant classic on the topic, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, by the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence collective, has brought together a watershed and widely referenced collection of essays bearing out this analysis.30 The history of the collective illustrates the same tensions they came to write about. INCITE! began in 2000 in an attempt to bring together efforts to end endemic domestic violence within communities of color and state violence targeting these same communities. Simultaneously taking on both institutionalized feminist groups that collaborate and legitimize racist institutions like the criminal justice system and organizations that claim to fight racism while ignoring endemic violence directed against women of color, the collective has continued to courageously put themselves squarely in the midst of the deepest contradictions of our time. In their first several years, INCITE! put on a series of well-funded national seminars and authored a widely acclaimed book that gathered the experiences of women of color organizing against the intersection of domestic and structural violence. However, when one of their key sponsors, the Ford Foundation, learned of their outspoken support for Palestinian liberation, their endowment was withdrawn, and they were forced to replace their funding through grassroots efforts. This dynamic revealed to the collective’s members the stifling effect of foundation dependency and motivated them to publish The Revolution Will Not Be Funded anthology. The book is

not particularly concerned with particular types of non-profits or foundations, but the non-profit industrial complex…as a whole and the way in which capitalist interests and the state use non-profits to [1] monitor and control social justice movements; [2] divert public monies into private hands through foundations; [3] manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism; [4] redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society; [5] allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through “philanthropic” work; [and 6] encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them.31

At their most innocuous, nonprofits frequently interfere with less institutional approaches to mutual aid and social change, which inadvertently threaten to compete for the legitimacy necessary in successful grant applications. Additionally, the demands of institutional survival are often quite different than those of forcing social change, or even of just helping people. Many of the demonstrators I interviewed for this book said that disillusion with the ineffectualness of nonprofit work was a central motivation for their conversion to more directly disruptive approaches. One spoke of her brief tenure in one organization as a sort of training in defeatism:

I was a canvasser for a day and a half for Working Families Party in Connecticut. The second day they dropped me off in a neighborhood, there were three evictions on the street, and so I was like, alright, I’m obviously not going to be canvassing in this neighborhood, instead I am going to help this person move their couch. So I came back to the person who was running the canvas and I was like, yeah, I didn’t make any money, I was helping this person move out of their house. And she was like, “What? How…that’s not what you’re supposed to be doing.” And I was like, “So you wanted me to go through this working-class neighborhood and badger people for money [to lobby against evictions] instead of helping this person out who actually legitimately needed my help? I quit. I can’t deal with this anymore.” It’s like, way to take a bunch of energetic radical kids and turn them into zombies.32

Worse, by claiming to be the legitimate voice of wider movement concerns and cooperating with state agencies, nonprofits often end up exposing less institutional approaches to direct repression. Scholar Aziz Choudry terms this phenomenon the “co-opt and clampdown” strategy: nonprofits provide a way for state agencies to claim to be helping the cause, often in the same moment that they are cracking the skulls of those fighting for it in the streets.33 As authorities often rely on “good protester/bad protester” talk to divide movements and isolate their more radical elements for repression, such characterizations can be devastating. Just as nongovernmental organizations paved the way for military intervention in Afghanistan by advocating from afar for Afghani women’s rights, domestic nonprofits conveniently make those who fall beyond the NPIC pale vulnerable to repression. In their book Paved with Good Intentions, Nikolas Barry-Shaw and Dru Oja Jay examine how this strategy has played out among Canadian development NGOs, including NGO-funded counterconferences, Oxfam’s close collaboration with the World Bank, and how the Canadian “federal government consciously funded the participation of the NGOs in the [alter-globalization] protest movement as an effort to contain its militancy and limit its demands.”34 By their account, among the greatest foes to movements seeking to force social change in the current era are those philanthropic institutions who claim to be working for the same ends.

Policing As A Real Problem

Another shift in the conditions of neoliberalism that has centrally transformed the character of social movements is activists’ core antagonism with police, both because of their social role in general and in protest situations in particular. Members of previous generations of movements are often too quick to ascribe such anticop antagonism to the madness of youth and its dangerous predilection for senseless violence. But this antagonism is anything but senseless. If co-optation, indirect rule, consumerism, and “civil society” domestication form the enticing carrot of dissent management, we should not be surprised when we find a big, heavy stick in the other hand of neoliberal social control—surveillance, police, and prisons. Even those types of enforcement inherited from previous eras have undergone an incredible expansion and intensification over the last several decades. While many excellent studies have focused on surveillance and prisons, the role of police in these “­advances” in social control have only—finally—come to light through the Ferguson/Black Lives Matter movement. Yet, even with these struggles, the centrality of policing—both in daily life and in the protests challenging the structures of daily life—is still seriously underrecognized, except by those who do not have the option to ignore it. And even those who know how bad it is still have trouble theorizing how we got here.

Policing has always been a problematic and contradictory institution, despised and spiteful, marbled through with both servitude and sadism. In the words of former slave Harriet Jacobs, writing in 1861, “Any white man, who could raise money enough to buy a slave, would have considered himself degraded by being a constable; but the office enabled its possessor to exercise authority. If he found any slave out after nine o’clock, he could whip him as much as he liked; and that was a privilege to be coveted.”35 In the neoliberal era, policing is not simply one means among others to maintain control—it is absolutely central to the existence of the state itself. In Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Loïc Wacquant presents a thoroughgoing analysis of the discursive and material constitution of the neoliberal state.36 The neoliberal state finds itself challenged not only by the material insecurities generated by a drastic increase in income inequality and the abolition of the social safety net but also by a crisis of appearances. As the state in its roles of distributing social goods (“provisional”) and regulating business (“regulatory”) gradually vanishes under neoliberalism, it risks the appearance of not being a state at all, of disappearing behind private interests, unless it compensates in impressiveness through the mighty “grandeur” of its functions of policing, military intervention, and imprisonment:37

Thus is resolved what could appear to be a doctrinal contradiction, or at least a practical antinomy, of neoliberalism, between the downsizing of public authority on the economic flank and its upsizing on that of the enforcement of social and moral order. If the same people who champion a minimal state in order to “free” the “creative forces” of the market and submit the dispossessed to the sting of competition do not hesitate to erect a maximal state to ensure everyday “security,” it is because the poverty of the social state against the backdrop of deregulation elicits and necessitates the grandeur of the penal state.38

Part of the point, then, is to make sure that state violence is seen and makes an impression on potential rebels. The neoliberal state has a day-to-day need to assert omnipotence through widespread surveillance and forceful repression to make up for the disappearance of its friendlier functions, and to incapacitate expressions of dissent even before they appear.

The penal force of the neoliberal state appears in different guises. In trying to understand the management of dissent and the conditions faced by social movements, the most relevant of these are policing and incarceration. The Black Lives Matter movement has finally begun to bring to attention the way that policing and the entire state apparatus around crime and punishment function to produce inequality directly, not coincidentally. Until this movement, policing and prisons were widely misunderstood as a mere effect of social inequality, a “superstructural” result of racism in the “base.” Police and prisons are not mere symptoms of the dearth of opportunity and severity of need in communities of color resulting from “deeper” issues of housing discrimination, access to quality education, and redlining and other banking policies. They do not simply arise from personal prejudicial attitudes endemic among whites. Rather, policing and prisons have arguably become central to the production of racialized power inequalities in the US, as Alexander lays out in her now-famous book The New Jim Crow. The successes of the civil rights and Black Power movements made legal practices like the Jim Crow laws, which explicitly inscribed inequality by race, discursively unworkable by the late 1960s. Nevertheless, the material investments of white supremacy did not disappear but instead sought a new manner of social inscription: while the civil rights era succeeded in enormously decreasing white vigilante violence which, since Reconstruction, had helped maintain a Black underclass, police and prisons would soon come to assume the same function. Nixon’s successful “law and order” campaign of 1968, which in the 1970s and 1980s evolved into an unprecedented assault on communities of color, became the new home for white supremacy. Rather than explicitly encoding race, these policies proliferated law enforcement powers under the guise of a supposedly race-neutral War on Drugs, empowering a discretionary policing that allowed but never acknowledged highly racialized logics of application. In turn, political leaders and pundits, conservative and liberal alike, deflected criticism of the obviously racialized consequences of these policies with an incessant hammering of “colorblindness”—a discursive trick that claims pointing out these consequences to actually be the central cause of racism itself. While Naomi Murakawa demonstrates in her book The First Civil Right that liberal administrations after WWII actually deserve much of the blame for the resulting mass incarceration crisis, Alexander’s analysis shows how policing and crime have come to assume their central place in maintaining inequality in our day.39

As policing has become central to the production of general social inequality, it has also had to adjust the way it contains attempts to fight back against this inequality. In the 1960s and 1970s, heavy-handed “escalation of force” responses had entailed a serious loss of political legitimacy from Birmingham to Berkeley and played a key role in mobilizing widespread support for anyone on the wrong end of the police baton. Cops urgently sought a new, less politically costly means of containing demonstrator transgression. With most dissident formations relatively cowed by recent repression and therefore backing off of confrontational methods, police and protesters settled on a modus operandi known as negotiated management, in which protest organizers would consult with police beforehand, notify them of the general outline of the action (including even likely number, names, and method of arrests), and sometimes themselves take on policing functions, acting as “peace marshals.” As the next chapter will discuss, contemporary “nonviolent” approaches often have not come to terms with this shift in policing strategy. Classic nonviolent approaches brilliantly played up and played off the contradictions of escalation-of-force policing, but using those same approaches within a negotiated management model risks having the opposite effect: aiding, rather than contradicting, the mechanisms police use to contain public disruption and dissent.

In the Seattle protests of 1999 and within wider waves of ­alter-globalization contention, the model of negotiated management collapsed—protesters not only refused to notify police beforehand of their plans but also actively (and successfully) strategized to outmaneuver police on the ground. Illegal activity was suddenly no longer limited to predetermined, agreed-upon acts of nonviolent civil disobedience; it included politically embarrassing employments of disruptive tactics—most importantly in Seattle, with the successful blockading of delegates from entering the WTO ministerial and massive disruption of downtown business flow during Christmas shopping season, in addition to Black Bloc property destruction. Employing new electronic communications media, protest organization became utterly decentralized and autonomous, removing the traditional core of coordinators with whom to negotiate or, alternately, target for elimination. Consequently, police had to come up with a new plan. They arrived at a new approach that Patrick Gillham and John Noakes call “strategic incapacitation.”40 By employing fierce but focused violence, scrambling communications, conducting preemptive arrests and detention until protests are over, targeting support networks such as medical and legal assistance, seizing food, interrupting protesters’ sleep, and disrupting coordination of actions, police tactics aim primarily to impose limits on the ability of protesters to carry out their plans by miring them in the muck of logistical dilemmas. Publicly, police try to limit sites of political action to “free speech zones” far from the target of the protests, while demeaning protesters through intensified media coordination that limits their larger webs of support. In extreme but increasingly common cases, police encourage right-wing vigilantes to preoccupy demonstrators and organizers with the logistics of their own safety and survival. Attempts to control demonstrators end up mimicking the tactics of the demonstrators themselves, as police, too, become more diffuse and multimodal. In turn, protests tend to be increasingly focused on countering the actions of the police. Responses to strategic incapacitation thus become an unavoidable core “message” in the politics of contemporary protest.

In this back-and-forth negotiation of power in contemporary protest, the attempt to even define what protest means becomes a key point of struggle. David Graeber presents a compelling analysis in his “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets,” when he wonders why, during a number of alter-globalization protests, the police often reacted with such outrage to the puppets seized from protesters, gleefully backing their patrol vehicles over or absurdly bludgeoning with batons the heads of these papier-mâché mock-ups.41 The antiauthoritarian orientation of many contemporary social movement participants hinges on an assertion of the potency of imagination and a refusal to negotiate the right to define a social situation. This insistence on the realization of a collective imaginary is precisely the confrontational trigger for police, who, far more than worrying about infractions of the law or disorderly social conduct, seek to impose and maintain a “reasonable,” agreed-upon definition of the situation. However civil or “nonviolent” the conduct of protesters, this interaction will result in (police) violence the moment protesters refuse to surrender the right to define what, exactly, it is that they’re up to. The consequences for protest strategy are significant: while “nonviolent” analyses of protest interactions generally posit protester aggression as the cause of violent police response—a theory inconsistent with most protest experiences in which aggression and violence are most often initiated by police—attention to the right to define the moment shows that conflict arises in the political moment when protesters claim their autonomy to understand a situation in their own terms. This issue is completely tangential to their “violent” or “nonviolent” conduct.

The Black Lives Matter movement has been perhaps unique in bringing such widespread concern to policing as a social issue. Such concern, however, is hardly novel. The Boston Knowles Riot of 1747, described by historian Paul Gilje, reveals the centrality of policing to issues to which it might at first seem tangential. The crowd, gathered against new policies of forced naval conscription, threatened to hold several navy officers hostage, but peacefully surrendered them before the home of the governor. Yet “[t]hey did take an under sheriff, physically abused him, and, in a nice bit of role reversal, locked him in the town stocks.”42 As an embodiment of the legal violence forcing them into conscription, which Gilje describes as “practical imprisonment, horrid conditions, and an earlier death,” the crowd found the undersheriff—as the functionary finally tasked with driving them into a deplorable situation—a more apt target than the navy officers or governor who might be more obviously held responsible for the policy. While conventional wisdom might hold this decision to be ill considered, the crowd certainly seemed to weigh their decision. Is it so clear that they were wrong?

The refusal to acknowledge policing as a persistent concern in its own right is especially noticeable in the public amnesia around Martin Luther King Jr.’s address to the March on Washington. While the final, “I have a dream” portion of the speech may well be the most frequently cited act of public oratory of the twentieth century, the speech in its entirety is seldom cited, particularly the middle portion, where King extols “[t]he marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community.”43 Rather than mentioning policing in passing as a local impediment to his campaigns, King presents it as core to the movement’s goals, as a sort of summary of actually existing racism in the United States. “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’ We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”44 Addressing those who have traveled to the nation’s capital from the struggles in the South, King again presents the violence of policing as the epitome of racist hatred faced by movement participants: “Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.”45 Bizarre metaphors aside, police brutality is of such pervasive importance to King that he evokes it repeatedly, throughout multiple sections of the speech, unlike the incessantly quoted dream of the day when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,”46 which appears only in the closing passage, when “all of God’s children…will be able to join hands.”47 While the horrors of police brutality warranted more space in King’s speech (already heavily edited by state censors) than the dream of children of different races joining hands, the latter image came to stand in for the entire message of his speech, and indeed his entire life; his critique of endemic, racist police violence, however, has been utterly erased from public memory.

The prevalence of antipolice slogans under neoliberalism is reason enough to suspect that policing has been an issue of central concern to movements long before Black Lives Matter brought it to wide attention. In the mid-1980s, the once mighty British Left struggled in vain to hold off Margaret Thatcher’s brutal neoliberal reforms. The conflict came to a head during the protracted coal miners’ strike, which brought the battle to the public eye as starkly as Reagan’s firing of 11,000 air-traffic controllers did in the US. Though Thatcher was hardly beloved among miner ranks, it was the helmeted face of police which, for many, served as the face of the violent conflict. Images of police waving generous overtime checks in the face of literally starving miners on picket lines were not soon forgotten. Consequently, in the narrative of some participants, the long-standing motto “ACAB” or “All Coppers Are Bastards,” a watchword within British prisons since at least the 1920s, became a favorite slogan in the miners’ struggles. The slogan has since entered widespread global usage, helped along by its ubiquitous presence in the youth uprising of 2008 across Greece, and has been widely manifest in contentious protests since.

Similarly, the phrase “Fuck the Police,” often abbreviated “FTP,” has more recently come to hold a central place in struggles against racism and economic inequality. The words gained popularity through 1990s hip-hop, which was itself largely inspired by the street rhetoric of the 1992 Rodney King riots, for which the phrase served as the most recognizable slogan. For all of their force and magnitude, the 1992 riots are still only occasionally remembered in the annals of Black liberation or social justice history, and they are generally dismissed as somehow more of a race riot than anything political. Only if critique of policing (and the racialized practices of policing) is somehow construed as a personal or collective psychological abnormality, divorced from history, can such a claim make sense. The Rodney King riots came at the end of nearly a decade of policing and incarceration policies that had resulted in an exponential growth in incarcerated youth of color and a level of surveillance unrivaled in human history.48 While falling outside the pale of “Black Power” or other recognized political movements, that uprising dwarfed all previous riots in American history by an order of magnitude: it greatly exceeded each of the famous riots of 1965 in Watts and 1967–68 in Newark, Detroit, and Washington, DC, in terms of arrests, injuries, deaths, and fires set. The monetary damage of the 1992 riots totaled three times the combined damage of the previous three.49 The Rodney King riots were not, however, unusual in their cause. Other than the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, every major riot in the United States since WWII has been set off by police brutality or murder of a youth of color: in Miami and Tampa alone, police violence triggered large-scale riots in 1980, 1982, 1987, and 1989. Dismissing these as “race riots” elides the importance of their obvious concern with policing but also belies their evidently multiracial constituency. In the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, 52 percent of arrests were Latinos, 10 percent whites, and only 38 percent African Americans.50 Similarly, although the Tunisian revolution was triggered by Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in response to humiliation by police, and Egypt’s Tahrir revolution by Khaled Said’s death by torture in police custody, the issue of policing as constitutive of Arab Spring revolutions is generally ignored. Michael Brown’s murder had been certainly not the first, but merely the latest, of a long and even global history of police murder of the marginalized; it was precisely this lineage that was invisible to so many confused white Americans, who struggled to understand what could have been so special about the youth. His murder was not special but absolutely mundane, which is precisely what drove the residents of Ferguson, and soon every major American city, to strike out with such brilliant rage.

Even within communities of color, the recognition of policing as a central social movement concern has often been starkly generational. Research concerning perceived causes of the massive 2005 riots in the Paris banlieues is borne out by analysis summarized in Figure 1, looking at 366 statements culled from Le Monde.51 Older neighborhood residents, spokespeople for the government and opposition parties, and Sarkozy himself favored explanations blaming either personal discriminatory attitudes, structural exclusion from access, Sarkozy and the parties in power, or, predictably, excessive immigration and youth delinquency. Of the seventeen statements by neighborhood youth, not one of them mentioned any of these as a related issue; fully 100 percent of their statements attributed the riots either to police (40 percent) or to other causes (60 percent) not understood as “political.” Not one of the 145 statements by older inhabitants or political figures mentioned police. Experts and volunteer associations, presumably comprising and having contact with both of these constituencies, offered even more mixed statements. Older inhabitants’ responses more closely resembled those of political parties than their own youth; this would indicate more of a generational divide rather than solely an ethnic, class, or geographical one.

Figure 1

Source: Donatella della Porta and Bernard Gbikpi, “The Riots: A Dynamic View,” in Seferiades and Johnston, eds, Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 95.

So why haven’t police been understood as a core concern by older and more establishment respondents? This is a question for future research, but for the purpose of understanding the particular situation faced by contemporary social movements, one brief hypothesis will suffice: the centrality of policing, particularly in the neoliberal era of hypertrophied penality, is not taken up as a legitimate social concern because of its very centrality. Seeped in the ideology of the age, even policing’s strongest critics find it next to impossible to imagine life without policing—although the Ferguson and Black Lives Matter movements have begun to change this.52 The purpose of the vast networked apparatus of dissent management might well be understood as an elaborate means of talking around this difficulty. While I will return in the next chapter to the slippage of “nonviolence” from a means of conflict with power to an excuse to avoid it, the propensity of such “talking around” the issue at the center of contemporary conditions of repression suggests a tragic, self-defeating hope for risk-free social change—one often expressed in our time through appeals to nonviolence.

From Masses to Publics

Why Elizabeth Is Alive but Erin Is Dead

On the morning of September 4, 1957, taking the recent Brown vs. Board of Education at its word, Elizabeth Eckford and eight other black students attempted to attend classes at Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas, but were prevented from doing so by the National Guard, in coordination with a virulent mob of whites. After three-quarters of a century of the rule of white terrorism that undid the gains of Reconstruction, themselves won by force of armed freed slaves,53 Eckford and her colleagues’ dignity and courage could very well have been met with immediate and lethal response. Only two years before, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till had been murdered and horrifically mutilated in Money, Mississippi, for allegedly flirting with a white woman. After Till’s gruesome murder, Till’s mother had courageously insisted on circulating a photograph of his disfigured face to recently established Black newspapers and magazines around the country, and the image played a key role in galvanizing national support for the civil rights movement. Just as that photograph worked to bring the systemic violence of southern white-supremacist rule into the national arena, so the mass media coverage of the Little Rock Nine helped ensure Eckford’s survival in the midst of a venomous white mob and the quick success of the immediate aims of the integration campaign:

The drama…was played out before a national, even a world, audience. The affair at Little Rock was not an isolated event in a provincial backwater. News cameras and reporters captured every move of both Elizabeth and the segregationists. In the contest for this larger audience, although greatly outnumbered, Elizabeth won.… When Elizabeth, joined by eight other black students, reenrolled at Central later that month the reporters were again there. This time the crowd beat four reporters—a sign that racist whites understood the implications of the presence of the media—and officials withdrew the students for their own safety. Again, however, isolation was not possible. On the next day President Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and sent paratroopers to guarantee that the nine African-American youths could proceed with their education.54

Strategists of the civil rights movement were well aware of their dependency on mass media; their articulation of nonviolent tactics was an explicit response to the novel occasions presented by television and the still novel technologies of newsreel, radio, and print. Such tools opened unprecedented opportunities for a heavily disenfranchised minority population to turn the local balance of power. This dynamic corrects a frequent misconception among the critics of nonviolence (and many of its less-informed proponents as well): classic nonviolence never, in truth, sought to convert its opponents; rather, it played to the cameras of mass media by embarrassing its opponents before a wider audience—and very effectively so. As one civil rights movement participant said, “We were not simply addressing our immediate opponents. What we were doing was addressing the larger audience, the nation, the world, because the strategy in nonviolence is that you educate a large number of constituents and win them on your side. In fact, even though we as African Americans were the minority, no change could happen unless you have the sympathy of the majority, if not the active participation.”55

Classic nonviolence, in the hands of figures such as Gandhi and King, was anything but a naive faith in the innate goodness of the imperial British officers with their bludgeons or the Bull Connors with their dogs. However, just as past means of successful dissent have been skillfully preempted in the neoliberal age through indirect rule, consumerism, nonprofit recuperation, and policing patterns replacing explicitly racial laws, so the mass publics that classic nonviolence relied on have been reconstituted by shifts in the nature of mass media. Once again, hegemonic forces have done quite well in foreclosing the opportunities successfully exploited by previous generations. Modern images analogous to those of My Lai are scant when journalists must choose between “embedded” reporting and being shot. The only exceptions are occasional internal leaks carried out with great courage in the certainty of terrible reprisal: Chelsea Manning, rather than receiving the Gandhi Peace Prize, as Daniel Ellsberg did for his leak of the Pentagon Papers, instead gets solitary confinement, pain-compliance holds, and a thirty-five-year prison sentence; Edward Snowden, as of this writing, waits in uneasy exile, likely facing worse than Manning if he is extradited. These are precisely the acts which, a generation ago, won accolades for Ellsberg and for the courageous exercise of free press powers by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Coverage of domestic dissent has followed suit; nearly all media outlets are owned by the same few parent companies that set their editorial policy, with disastrous consequences for breadth of permissible dialogue on domestic issues. Mass media in the neoliberal era works to hide rather than publicize the present-day Little Rocks and other forms of state and racist violence. The highest rate of incarceration in world history, with a total of seven million citizens under correctional supervision; daily killings of African Americans by police (one African American death at the hands of police and vigilantes every 28 hours);56 daily deaths by enforced exposure along the United States–Mexico border—all have been rendered invisible to the public eye by near-absolute exclusion from mass media coverage, at least until the limited successes of Black Lives Matter and more local movements.

In a tragic synecdoche of this shift, Elizabeth Eckford’s only child, her son Erin, a student at University of Little Rock, was gunned down by police on New Year’s morning in 2003, after reportedly firing an assault rifle into the air. Police did not allege that Erin was directly threatening anyone, merely that he fired it into the air, just as many thousands of others do across the country on New Year’s morning. The killing barely merited a paragraph of local coverage for Erin’s relation to his mother’s past role in Black freedom struggles, but nothing was said of Erin’s own freedom struggles in his time; his voice silenced by six bullets before he could give his own account to a mass media unlikely to listen in the first place. A grand jury declined to indict the officers who gunned him down, and media outlets showed no interest in following through with the story. No one seemed to remark that the very tool that had saved his mother’s life was actively complicit in Erin’s murder.

When older movement participants fail to appreciate these shifts in media, it is not that they naively trust mainstream media or expect it to transparently convey their messages. As one veteran nonviolence trainer who I interviewed suggested, in an attitude she attested as “old guard,” mainstream media can be seen as a reliable way to get a message across, even while the representation of this coverage is likely to be unsympathetic. This might be termed the “message-in-a-bottle” approach:

I would never assume that mainstream media were going to cover things accurately, but I think maybe I’m old guard in thinking that they still influence a lot of people.… I would never do stuff trying to make it look good for the media so that they would put out the right message—because they don’t.… I like actions that in themselves embody what we’re trying to change, or show without words, without needing words, what we’re trying to do. So I think it’s definitely worth keeping media in mind, mainstream media in mind, to some extent at least, but not designing everything around it.57

In this view, even if media representations of activist events are likely to be unfair, decisions should still be made with the expectation that mass media use a modicum of referential, factual representation in their coverage. Even approaches as radical as ACT UP’s ultimately relied on this analysis of the available means of persuasion: corporate media cannot be trusted to be sympathetic or accurate, but the media can certainly be trusted to be the media.58 Sensational actions, like the public scattering of the ashes of AIDS casualties on the White House lawn by their militantly mourning beloveds, will not be ignored, the logic goes, and can reliably be used as a vehicle of counterhegemonic communication, whatever the institutional bias of the vehicle’s drivers.

Yet, by the time of the alter-globalization movements, feelings toward mass media hardened among many younger activists, who increasingly suggested that the media might not be worth addressing at all. The skepticism of previous generations hardened into a distinct cynicism. According to the statement released by the Barricada Collective during the 2001 WTO protests in Quebec City: “[W]e have nothing to hope for from the corporate media, we should expect nothing from them, and we should absolutely not change any of our tactics or messages in order to pander to them. We should instead treat them as the servants of capital, and thus our enemies, that they are.”59

Although perhaps overstated here, media cynicism has only become more endemic in the years since. In an era of embedded journalism, institutional press releases, and image management, social movement participants are also no longer grappling with the question of which federal power can be invoked against a regional injustice. They face issues involving the nature of federal and transnational dominance, and they justifiably wonder if the media are worth attempting to address at all, however difficult it might be to find alternative means of reaching and constituting a public. The predominance of insurrectionary anarchism in some regions is related to this shift: it involves constituting new publics through direct means rather than mobilizing already existing publics. The insurrectionary anarchist movement has fractured into local sectarian schisms over ambiguities of definition, or even whether to constitute a new public at all, or, rather constitute an illegible antipublic with no attempt at appeal to outsiders at all. While the latter approaches might be excessive for their absolute hopelessness in any appeal to those outside the fold, the concerns expressed through these tendencies are certainly reasonable (however much most insurrectionist anarchists might bristle at being called reasonable).

While the Black Lives Matter movement has been widely covered in mass media (as in both discussed and obscured), excoriated and extolled by commentators of every stripe, the movement itself has consistently prioritized constituting new publics over performing for the cameras. In the words of Seattle’s Black Lives Matter organizing group Outside Agitators 206,

Often, when news reports come out about our movement, our experiences get reduced to feelings, as if there’s no factual basis for why we’re in the streets. Let’s set the record straight. First off, it is a fact that in 2012 there was a Black person executed by law enforcement every 28 hours in the United States, but the mainstream media are completely silent about true injustice committed by law enforcement. Why is that?

We know that the cycle of police terror that we have experienced will never stop until the people who give police their orders are no longer allowed to make a profit from anti-Black racism. Specifically, the owners of 6 media giants who also make money from legalized slavery in the private prison industry. We know that 90 percent of all media are owned by these 6 corporations. We know that these same corporations hire lobbyists that affect the laws that oppress us. Honest depictions of Black experience are seen few and far between because anti-Black racism is profitable for them. We don’t expect the mainstream media to tell the truth about our movement. We will win, and we expect that they will lie about it until they can’t breathe…

We don’t directly speak to corporate media, nor do we need them. We are our own voice.60

Such words show little hope for fairness from mouthpieces deeply embedded in the same systemic racism that the movement fights to expose, but immense hope and determination for other means of constituting a voice. What kind of means could they have in mind?

Constituting Immediate Publics (Despite It All)

Taking the above concerns seriously, movement participants are left with the question: if the mass media are, at least in some circumstances, no longer worth addressing, how should movements go about constituting a public?61 If we look closely, some of those other means may already be well underway.

On February 11, 2012, the paper edition of the Oakland Tribune printed the results of an online poll, to which 10,829 readers had responded; the online edition of that day neglected to post the results. The poll posed a simple question: “Do you support the Occupy Oakland movement?” The paper had spent the previous five months being consistently critical of Occupy Oakland, ranging from an initial bewilderment to later indignation and even outrage. Just two weeks before the poll, it headlined an article with a quote from Mayor Quan addressed to protesters, “Stop Using Oakland as Your Playground!” The paper tended to highlight the voices of local political, business, and nonprofit leaders dismissing Occupy Oakland as beyond the boundaries of legitimate dissent. One might have expected, then, for Tribune readers to harbor few warm feelings for the movement. The results of the poll, quietly published in a sidebar, were surprising: 94 percent voted “yes” to supporting the movement, and only 6 percent voted “no.”62 Evidently, the 10,829 respondents bore little relation to the audience constituted through the paper’s daily discursive prac­tices—a puzzling outcome indeed.

The passivity or activity of mass-mediated publics has been a heated debate within cultural and media studies since the field’s inception. On the one hand, theorists of the Frankfurt School spoke of the “culture industry,” a depressing, fatalistic, and seamless model of social control, in which masses are passively molded by capitalist culture. On the other hand, there is John Fiske’s “semiotic democracy,” in which audiences, with joyful irreverence, freely go about creating their own meanings to sabotage unequal access to the means of representation. Arguably, however, neither of these models can account for the sort of public that appears in the Tribune’s poll—materially real, yet somehow invisible in all but this one sidebar. The more this material public begins to appear, the more the “average reader” addressed by the paper is revealed as an empty public; ghost-like, disappearing into the realm of the supernatural. How is it possible, one must wonder, that some previously invisible public believes precisely the opposite of the audience that the paper’s consistent editorial policy seeks to discursively constitute, and that they believe so to such an extreme degree? An independent survey cited by “Occupy Research” claims equally surprising results from the businesses surrounding the encampment as well:

Similarly, there was a charge that Occupy Oakland was hurting local businesses, until a survey of local businesses found 80% of 106 shops within two blocks of Oscar Grant Plaza reported a positive or neutral impact from the encampment. In another instance, Police Chief Howard Jordan worried in email to Mayor Quan about how to share the good news of a 19% crime reduction in downtown Oakland during the Occupy encampment. This fact directly contradicted Quan, the City Council, and Oakland Chamber of Commerce’s claim that Occupy Oakland was causing an increase in crime.63

What these figures show is that Occupy Oakland’s claims and rhetorical appeals, which were negatively received (if at all) by mainstream media and leading figures among indirect-rule political institutions and nonprofits, do indeed reach certain immediate publics. Those publics seem to be created by some resonance of actions, invisible to the channels of mass mediation that usually serve as the exclusive measure of contemporary publics. The choices that virtually ensure antipathy from news editors and political representatives may simultaneously work to constitute publics through other channels—a fact that organizers seem well aware of and consider worth the risk.

The approach of constitution publics immediately does not lay claim to any pretensions of a universal audience, without race, class, gender, or any positionality. Responding to the slogan “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter,” or insisting that the movement has to moderate its acts to appeal to “normal people,” ignores the fact that the “All Lives” and “normal people” are themselves instances of the status quo. Organizing a collectivity or public—mainstream or marginal—is already and inherently political; it implies and determines the possibilities of consciousness and action available to that public. “All Lives” are not equally murdered by police, but people of various “races” gathered together on the basis of resisting police violence against Black lives might find themselves acting as a powerful body against racism. The same group of people thinks and acts very differently depending on how and under what logic they gather. Marginality isn’t incidental—the very means of coming together, of constituting a new public, is an attack on how the center is constituted. All are welcome, but not necessarily as they are: if everyone showed up as they are, then the new group would be indistinguishable from the status quo. Challenger publics must transform participants in the very act of coming together. This transformation is central to what contemporary disruptive social movements work to achieve.

Hannah Arendt and the Direct Demos

The notion that mass publics, brought together by mass media, are resources better left untapped is not entirely new. Emma Goldman, who in 1893 was arrested on inciting-to-riot charges for exhorting a large crowd of unemployed workers to take bread if they were not given work, could hardly be called an elitist; yet the hazards “the masses” present to real democracy is an ongoing theme in her work. Near the end of her essay “Minorities Versus Majorities,” she addresses this apparent contradiction in her concerns:

Not because I do not feel with the oppressed, the disinherited of the earth; not because I do not know the shame, the horror, the indignity of the lives the people lead, do I repudiate the majority as a creative force for good. Oh, no, no! But because I know so well that as a compact mass it has never stood for justice or equality. It has suppressed the human voice, subdued the human spirit, chained the human body. As a mass its aim has always been to make life uniform, gray, and monotonous as the desert.… I therefore believe with Emerson that “the masses are crude, lame, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. Masses! The calamity are the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only.”64

Scholars of Goldman have often stumbled over her position, finding her affection for Nietzsche and his idealization of the solitary genius of the Übermensch in contradiction with her anticapitalist populism. But as she makes clear, she is not making an elitist assertion against the differentiated Many (what Paolo Virno calls the “Multitude”), but is warning against their unitary constitution—through representative media of politics, information, or sociological instruments—into an undifferentiated whole. Rather than being an embittered, secret aristocrat, Goldman reveals herself to have a very contemporary concern with how people are drawn into a collectivity, without assuming that their mode of collective being is given by their demographic. For many years, Goldman herself served as the English spokesperson of the Spanish CNT-FAI, consisting at times of some millions of members—certainly a “mass” of participants in some sense—but which was organized along decentralized, ­direct-democratic, rather than mass, lines.

No modern political thinker has been so misunderstood for her opposition to mass constitutions of publics as has Hannah Arendt. Arendt is, indeed, consistently terrified by mass entrance into politics, viewing mass politics as characterized by an unavoidable tendency toward totalitarianism. She typifies “the masses” as possessed with the irrationality of inarticulate desire. Appropriate to neither the public nor private spheres, these masses dwell in the cursed realm of “the Social,” with the overreaching of this sphere responsible for the disappearance both of public and private in the modern world. At the same time, in apparent contradiction, she embraces the direct democratic model of workers’ councils of Hungary in 1956, in which representative governance was replaced by direct collective self-governance. Why are not these the very “masses” Arendt fears will exert undue—or perhaps any—influence? Arendt directly answers such concerns from critics who assume that a critique of “the masses” is evidence of an equal distaste for popular self-governance. “[T]he assumptions [of such criticisms] are not difficult to point out. Theoretically, the most relevant and the most pernicious among them is the equation of ‘people’ and masses, which sounds only too plausible to everyone who lives in a mass society and is constantly exposed to its numerous irritations.”65

Arendt’s thought in her earlier The Human Condition focuses on the way that different types of political or personal activity determine the values and meaning of human life; thinking in terms of such meaning-producing activity can clarify the difference between “people” and “masses.” What we do determines who we are, not only individually but also collectively; and as any sociologist could attest, collectivities come in many different forms. For Arendt, groups are not even necessarily determined by those in them, as with the “working class” of orthodox Marxism wholly determined by its given position in production; Arendt was consistently critical of orthodox Marxism for this very reason. Instead, she argues that the manner of political activity itself constitutes the agent; in this way, the passive “masses”—with all their political party representation, television watching, and mass-produced commodities—are the precise opposite of ancient Athens’s direct demos. Seen in this way, the public constituted through Gallup polls, Nielsen ratings, and mass representative voting is an extraordinarily thin public: existing only in statistical average but with little resemblance to or resonance with the thoughts and passions of those mysterious persons surveyed in its construction. This thinness, at its extreme, is precisely what I’m calling an “empty public.” More akin to the democracy of ancient Athens, in Arendt’s view, are the sorts of assemblies present in workers’ councils and revolutionary streets. She does not oppose the masses to a professional political elite, as she is often unfortunately read, but distinguishes between groups of people as a mass, and any collectivity of the same bodies constituted by political self-activity. For her, the ancient Athenian plenum offers a participatory ideal:

[T]he two-party system…has by no means enabled the citizen to become a “participator” in public affairs. The most the citizen can hope for is to be “represented,” whereby it is obvious that the only thing which can be represented and delegated is interest, or the welfare of the constituents, but neither their actions nor their opinions. In this system the opinions of the people are indeed unascertainable for the simple reason that they are non-existent. Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods…but no opinion.66

Arendt considers that politics and deliberation are inseparable from and unthinkable outside participation, since “[w]henever knowing and doing have parted company, the space of freedom is lost.”67 Political deliberation, the working-out of dissensus, which can only emerge from collective activity, is the arena in which meaning is produced; outside of its commotion, only “moods,” but not actual “opinions,” are possible. That Arendt has been drastically misread by her followers on the right is nowhere as evident as in her passages on councilism, when she openly calls “for a new form of government that would permit every member of the modern egalitarian society to become a ‘participator’ in public affairs.”68

Arendt’s vision is strikingly mirrored in the “Solidarity Statement from Cairo,” written by participants in the Tahrir revolution in Egypt to advise their American counterparts. In the Egyptian revolutionaries’ formation, Arendt’s egalitarian “participation in public affairs,” and the very physical spaces that make such participation possible, are clearly more than a precondition of politics; they become the core political content of the struggle itself:

In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces for gathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting—these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst.69

As the next chapters will attempt to bear out, the Tahrir statement indicates a profound shift shared by contemporary movements around the world. After decades of disastrously effective demobilization strategies, contemporary social movement actors have finally found new ways to mobilize, or rather constitute, publics founded on a fundamental revulsion to those very demobilizing strategies. These publics are necessarily immediate, unmediated, by mass media or political representation. The goal of these immediate publics is less communication (of the justice of their cause or anything else) than constitution: they are forming new collective subjects through the intimacies of shared risk and power, persisting in spite of state attempts at repression, and articulating their power through this very persistence.

3 Personal interview (A).

4 Although neoliberal policies have driven social shifts and movement responses in powerfully similar ways across the globe—even in states purportedly outside the global-capitalist sphere like Syria and Iran—this study will focus, with some exceptions, on examples in the recent US context.

5 James Gilligan, Preventing Violence (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 102.

This definition of violence alone is adequate to refute the thesis of Steven Pinker’s awful The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Viking, 2011), based as it is on a laughably narrow view of violence, massively downplaying, for example, civilian war casualties in modernity. Nassir Taleb’s criticism of Pinker’s statistical abuses, or Stephen Corry’s bearing out of the dishonest cherry-picking justification of the “brutal savage” trope, among many others, should already have been adequate.

6 E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136.

7 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).

8 Michael Katz, “Why Don’t American Cities Burn Very Often?” Journal of Urban History 34, no. 2 (2008): 188.

9 Ibid., 189.

10 Ibid., 193.

11 Ibid., 192. My emphasis.

12 Gilligan, Preventing Violence, 122.

13 Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (New York: SDS, 1964).

14 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), xv.

15 Ibid., xxi.

16 Ibid., 24–25.

17 Ibid., 26.

18 Seraphim Seferiades and Hank Johnston, “The Dynamics of Violent Protest: Emotions, Repression, and Disruptive Deficit,” in Seferiades and Johnston, eds., Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 5–6.

19 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000).

20 Seferiades and Johnston, “Dynamics of Violent Protest,” 6.

21 Ibid., 4.

22 Katz, “Why Don’t American Cities Burn?,” 193.

23 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).

24 Katz, “Why Don’t American Cities Burn?,” 194.

25 Ibid.

26 Free Association, “Antagonism, neoliberalism and movements: Six impossible things before breakfast,” Antipode 42, no. 4 (2010): 1019–1033.

27 Ellen W. Gorsevski, Peaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent Rhetoric (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 21.

28 See Councilofnonprofits.org.

29 Ibid.

30 Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007).

31 Ibid., 3.

32 Personal interview (B).

33 Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor, eds., NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects (London: Zed Books, 2013).

34 Nikolas Barry-Shaw and Dru Oja Jay, Paved with Good Intentions: Canada’s Development NGOs from Idealism to Imperialism (Halifax, NS: Fernwood, 2012).

35 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: Dover Publications, 2001), 100.

36 Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

37 The inverse developments of provisional/regulatory vs. penal functions of the state are helpful in understanding what the Right really means when it argues to “stop big government,” and how anarchists, for example, might mean something very different when we call to “smash the state,” even if the claims are apparently similar.

38 Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, 19. Emphasis in original.

39 Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

40 Patrick F. Gillham and John A. Noakes, “‘More Than a March in a Circle’: Transgressive Protests and the Limits of Negotiated Management,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 12, no. 4 (2007): 341–57.

41 David Graeber, “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets,” in Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (Oakland: AK Press, 2007).

42 Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 31.

43 Clayborne Carson, ed. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 225.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., 226.

47 Ibid.

48 In some communities in South Central Los Angeles at the time, every young Black male had been entered into a gang database.

49 Oliver et al., “Anatomy of a Rebellion: A Political-Economic Analysis,” in Robert Gooding-Williams, Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993), 119.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 For a great suggested reading list, see “Thinking Through the End of Police,” Prison Culture website, accessed May 23, 2016, http://www.usprisonculture .com/blog/2014/12/29/thinking-through-the-end-of-police.

53 William E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).

54 Gilje, Rioting in America, 151.

55 Bernard Lafayette Jr., videotaped interview by Steve York for the documentary television series A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 2002), DVD, Part 1, 20:22. My emphasis.

56 “We Charge Genocide Again!,” Malcolm X Grassroots Project website, accessed May 23, 2016, https://mxgm.org/we-charge-genocide-again-new-curriculum-on -every-28-hours-report.

57 Personal interview (C).

58 How to Survive a Plague, directed by David France (New York: Sundance Selects/MPI Media Group, 2013), DVD.

59 In David Van Deusen and Xavier Massot, The Black Bloc Papers: An Anthology of Primary Texts From The North American Anarchist Black Bloc 1999–2001, The Battle of Seattle Through Quebec City (Shawnee Mission, KS: Breaking Glass Press, 2007), 136. Available online at http://www.infoshop.org/amp/bgp /BlackBlockPapers2.pdf (accessed May 23, 2016).

60 “To the Media,” Outside Agitators 206 website, accessed May 23, 2016, https://outsideagitators206.org/statements/to-the-media.

61 The role of social media has been so exhaustively discussed, to the point of fetishization, without convincing conclusions, that I have chosen to leave it aside in this study. People hear about events because of social media, but dependency on platforms like Facebook make them profoundly vulnerable to authorities in new ways. Tools of communication facilitate new connections, but also introduce new pervasive isolations. This study will focus not on the role of digital platforms but on those using them, and particularly those moments when people come together, physically, and leave their phones in their pockets or at home for the day. For readers interested in social media’s role in contemporary movements, I recommend Todd Wolfson, Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).

62 “Bay Area News Group Poll Finds 94% Support Occupy Oakland,” Occupy Oakland website, accessed May 23, 2016, https://occupyoakland.org/2012/02 /bay-area-news-group-poll-finds-94-support-occupy.

63 Ibid.

64 Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 84. My emphasis.

65 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 274. For a recent critical look at some of Arendt’s serious shortcomings, see Kathryn T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).

66 Ibid., 272. My emphasis.

67 Ibid., 268.

68 Ibid.

69 Comrades from Cairo, “Solidarity Statement from Cairo,” Occupy Wall Street website, accessed May 23, 2016, http://occupywallst.org/article/solidarity-statement-cairo.