Social Justice Movements as Border Thinking IV Special/SteveMartinot-FM.pdf · tion. For Piven and...

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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press). All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

In their book on

Poor People’s Move-ments

, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Clo-ward theorize a strategic difference in so-cial justice movements that for them deter-mines the successes and failures (neverwholly separable) of such movements.

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The dichotomy they develop is between or-ganizing mass mobilizations and buildingpermanent organizations. They look at thehistories of civil rights, industrial unions,and the welfare rights movement of themid-60s to 70s (in which they were person-ally involved), and they suggest that, ineach case, the potential mass power of themovement was derailed or dissipated byfocusing on organizational forms whosepurpose was ironically to give that power

permanence (PPM,307). For instance, when the welfare rights

movement won concessions from state andfederal governments in terms of benefitsfor economically displaced persons andchanges in how welfare was dispensed(which often involved the humiliation ofthe recipient), it was through mass mobili-zations at the welfare centers (PPM,275ff).It was these mass mobilizations that pro-duced a social recognition that recipientswere real people living in real oppressiveconditions, while providing them with ave-nues for social and political participation intheir lives. When the movement leadershipdecided to consolidate this militancy in theform of political organizations that could

Steve Martinot is a lecturer in Interdisciplinary Programs, human rights activist, and former union organizer. His mostrecent book is The Rule of Racialization, a critique of the structures of racialization in the US. He translated Albert Memmi’slast book, Racism, from French.

Social Justice Movements as Border Thinking An Anzaldúan Meditation

Steve Martinot

San Francisco University––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

[email protected]

Abstract: The theme of this article is the implicit and inherent sovereignty that existentiallyaccrues to social justice movements. I argue that movements naturally point to where society orsocial institutions are undemocratic, and that the resistance to this fact by institutions, theirexclusion of movements and the political demands made on them, produce an integrity in move-ments that they don’t always recognize. As excluded yet interior to the functioning of institu-tions, and included in the social domain of institutions yet external to them, movements appearas border regions, or border thinking, with respect to social institutionality. Using a homologicalapproach to the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, I investigate what this sovereignty that underlies theexistence of movements entails, and signifies. Through that homology as a lens, I look at the var-ious inherent dimensions of social justice movements, their ability to ground alternate politicalstructures, their natural ability to produce pro-democratic operations, and their possibility ofbringing together varying strategies that are often held to be incommensurable ideologically.

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influence political parties and negotiatefrom strength with legislators, its abandon-ment of mass mobilizations eroded the par-ticipation that was needed to provide cohe-sion and strength for just such organiza-tion. For Piven and Cloward, the differencein focus between mobilization and organi-zation marked the axis along which amovement succeeded or failed (PPM,278).

This paradox, wherein a movement canput an end to itself by the very means withwhich it seeks to guarantee its survival, hasbeen noticed by others. In his book,

DoingDemocracy

, Bill Moyer attempts to give it apositive spin.

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He provides a map of move-ment stages by which activists and organiz-ers can judge where they are in the move-ment-building process, so that set-backsand erosions can be seen as natural phasesand transcended. For him, as for Piven andCloward, a movement’s purpose is to influ-ence political structures, and win conces-sions from the institutions they confront. InMoyer’s schema, movements begin outsideinstitutions in order to eventually “use in-stitutional channels to bring about change”(DD,112). Where he differs from Piven andCloward is in focusing on the conscious-ness of activist organizers as central tobuilding a movement, while the latter seesocial conditions as determining the in-volvement of poor or dispossessed people.

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For both, however, the movement is an

instrumentality, something to be moldedby activists or leaders for the purpose ofcorrecting the abrogations of social institu-tions in the interests of the material needsof people. They do not ask what it reallymeans that a social justice movement exists.Their concern is with the dynamics of howa movement counterposes itself to institu-tionality and wins influence. This impliesassuming that society is democratic, andthat the political expression of people’sneeds will have a place at the table, even ifpeople have to fight their way in.

Yet something lurks in the backgroundthat disturbs this assumption. In describing

the birth of movements, Piven and Clo-ward say, “Masses of people become defi-ant; they violate the traditions and laws towhich they ordinarily acquiesce, and theyflaunt the authorities to whom they ordi-narily defer” (PPM,4). It is a collective defi-ance, by which people wrench themselvesfree from tradition, and transform their en-tire being, their very sense of themselves,both emotionally and rationally (my thanksto Mohammad Tamdgidi for emphasizingthis in his presentations and communica-tions). In other words, more is at stake thancan be subsumed by demands for benefitsor recognitions. And the multiplicity offorms of organization that arise, the fluidsegmentation of activities and perspec-tives, bespeaks a heterogeneity that couldhardly find a “place” for itself at so limiteda venue as the political “table.”

One thing that implicitly resides in amovement’s existence is a concept of justice,a call for ethics that precedes issues and de-mands. An anti-war movement is a call forjustice in demanding the cessation of themass murder that a war of aggression (suchas the US invasion of Vietnam or Iraq) consti-tutes. Environmental movements call for jus-tice for future generations, and for all life, indemanding that the planet we all call homenot be bulldozed by corporate resource ex-traction. The demands for affirmative actionand reparations by black and Native move-ments are calls to rectify past and present in-justices that have wrought segregation andcultural destruction. A call for justice is not ademand to sit at someone else’s table, to begrudgingly accommodated as a former non-participant, and included under the formerrules. It is a vision of inclusion and socialparticipation that does not depend on anoth-er’s invitation, but rather goes without say-ing. In particular, it is a vision of human well-being that precedes the exclusionary inter-ests of property or profitability, in which hu-man rights precede property rights or gov-ernmental power. To put people first is to putin question the ethics of the “table” itself.

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Whose table is it? In raising this question, a movement in-

herently opens pro-democratic possibilities,political options outside the institutionsupon which it makes its demands. It is apro-democratic ethos produced by the veryinstitutional exclusion (of justice, rights, orparticipation) that brought the movementinto existence in the first place. That exclu-sion implicitly renders the demand for in-fluence a structural demand for democracy,that is, for an inclusive political processwhose source is external to the given insti-tutionality, yet internal to its domain as anexcluded possibility of institutionality. Inother words, a social justice movement, byits very existence, constitutes a borderlandat the edge of institutionality in the sensethat Gloria Anzaldúa writes of it in her bookof that name.

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Perhaps a dialogue with An-zaldúa on this question can offer some in-sight into an alternate terrain on which theparadox that Piven and Cloward identifiedwithin social movements can find a differ-ent ethical existence.

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Let us begin with the most fundamen-tal assumption made about a social justicemovement, whatever its demands or the in-stitution it confronts. That assumption isthat a movement, by its existence, provesthat society is democratic; it demonstratesthat society is open to all popular expres-sions of protest and political influence, andthat the right to assemble and demand theredress of grievances is real and extant. Butin fact, the existence of social justice move-ments indicates just the opposite, that soci-ety or its institutions are not democratic.

If democracy means that people struc-turally participate in the making of theirown political destiny as well as exercisecontrol over that destiny, then the channelsand avenues of expression and participa-

tion in the functions of governance must beavailable and operative (PPM,xi). The factthat people have to organize social move-ments to gain the ability to speak, to ad-dress or oppose policy that had been madewithout them, to proclaim the injustice ofpolicy in which they were not consulted,and to demand to be consulted in the mak-ing of policy, means that those channels ofexpression and participation had not exist-ed, had been closed or withheld. Whenmovements form to call for an end to policebrutality, the death penalty,

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discrimina-tion, segregation, white supremacy, sweat-shop conditions, slum housing, the prison-industrial complex (which I list to map outthe kind of political terrain I am looking at),all of which violate the basic tenets of de-mocracy, it means there are no establishedchannels in the structures of governancethrough which to curtail these violations,or to rectify these injustices. In other words,the issue of justice cannot be adequately ad-dressed through the mere ability to assem-ble and demand redress of grievances.

In addition, the necessity to organizesuch a means of expression for a group, aclass, or a community implies a further in-justice; it points to where people had beensilenced institutionally, insofar as their so-cial needs were excluded from policy-mak-ing. For instance, the granges and industri-al union movements arose to stop capitalfrom running rough shod financially overpeople who had only their labor to live by;these movements had no extant structuralmeans for confronting and stopping theprerogatives of property that such financialpower represented. Civil rights movementsformed because there were no structuralmeans of curtailing the cultural assump-tions of white supremacy or the assumedentitlements of patriarchy. The disenfran-chisement of black people under Jim Crowmeant that no access was permitted for can-celling the segregationist legal structurethat regulated debt servitude, inherent im-poverishments, and social controls en-

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forced by arbitrary imprisonment in chaingangs. Capitalist operations (production,marketing, etc.) are all undemocratic;though unions can address wages andhours, no union movement has ever beenpermitted (without repression) to questionthe prerogatives of property, nor the autoc-racy of production management, let alonebring such prerogatives to a vote. For capi-talism, to do so would destroy the com-modity character of labor that it relies on byrehumanizing the worker.

In other words, the existence of socialjustice movements points to where societyis undemocratic in essence, where it silencespeople so that the prerogatives of power re-main unquestionable. Institutional silenc-ing does not signify that speech has beenprohibited; it means that though peoplespeak, it is in the context of already havingbeen spoken for, so that what they say isheard as something else. To speak for peo-ple transforms what they say into what isthereby given for them to have said, what isassumed or provided for them to say. It thustransforms their thought into what they donot think, but rather into what others thinkfor them.

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Segregation was legitimized byproclaiming black people not ready for par-ticipation, though that assumed a prior par-ticipation that segregation itself was de-signed to curtail or prevent. An anti-warmovement gets denigrated as unpatriotic,so that objections to the criminality of warare rendered treason rather than calls forjustice. To be spoken for is a form of oppres-sion because one is not free to be oneself. Allrelations of domination depend on the abil-ity of the dominant to speak for the domi-nated; that is, to tell them who they are, whytheir subjugation is rational or just, and whyit is actually a form of equality. One speaksfor others in order that one’s domination ofthem not appear as domination.

When the means of expression againstinjustice are withheld, it means that the po-litical space in which people can expressthemselves has been close down. Unions

form against capital shutting down the po-litical space concerning property rights;third parties form against the two partysystem shutting down electoral spacethrough monopolized control over candi-dates and issues. Civil rights movementsform against the segregation and disen-franchisement that racialize political space.

Ironically, the most subtle form of“speaking for” others is perhaps the mostrevelatory. In the US, the current mode ofrepresentational democracy operatesthrough single delegate districts. But thisimplies that elected representatives cannotrepresent. Because each district of a mod-ern, industrial, urbanized society like theUS contains many contradictory class, cul-tural, ideological, and community interests,no single individual can represent them all.Single delegates can offer representationonly to districts of relatively homogeneousinterests, in which political differences havea common socio-economic foundation. Inthe absence of the ability of representativesto represent, a separation occurs betweenlegislature and electorate. The legislaturelapses into horsetrading projects and mak-ing internal political deals, and each repre-sentative essentially goes to the highest bid-der. The representative “speaks for” his/herdistrict in a way that silences all political in-terests except the most powerful.

When a social justice movement arises,it means that people have ceased to acceptbeing spoken for. Against all modes of si-lencing and injustice, the movement opensa political space of expression. In doing so,it not only points to where social institu-tionality is undemocratic and unjust; in de-manding that silencing and oppressioncease, it establishes a space for voice, forpeople to speak for themselves, a space inwhich to refuse being spoken for. For exam-ple, an anti-death penalty movement ariseswhen people refuse complicity in the judi-cial attribution of revenge that the deathpenalty signifies; in abjuring revenge as it-self unjust, they demand that state-spon-

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sored murder cease. A civil rights move-ment arises when the people racialized bywhite supremacism refuse being represent-ed as inferior or unready for participationby a culture that superiorizes itself byspeaking for them and segregating themunder those auspices.

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Third party move-ments continually arise because peoplerefuse to be silenced politically by whatthey perceive should represent them. Buteven when third party or community basedcandidates are elected, they get absorbedinto the insularity and autonomy of the leg-islative culture. The movements that electthem find that the real difficulty involvesholding those they elect to speak for themaccountable to the movement that put theminto office. In other words, their real strug-gle is not to be silenced by their very at-tempt to establish a voice in government.

In sum, the existence of social justicemovements implies two things: a withhold-ing or disabling of democratic participationby social or political institutions, and a si-lencing of the people thus institutionally ex-cluded by being spoken for. Beyond the di-chotomy between mass mobilizations andorganizational forms designed to speak indifferent ways to institutional policies—adichotomy that Piven and Cloward see ascontradictory and Moyer sees as symbiot-ic—a social justice movement opens a spaceof democracy in which people can speak forthemselves. (The movement may not empir-ically comport itself in a democratic fashion,but it provides that potential by standingoutside anti-democratic institutionality.)

On the other hand, the autonomy as-sumed by people speaking for themselvesthrough a movement can only appear to theinstitutionality that had spoken for them asan act of resistance. In response, institu-tions develop forms of counter-resistancein order to preserve their legitimacy. Insti-tutional resistance to movements does notnecessarily take the form of suppression(such as the firing of all air traffic control-lers in 1981 by Pres. Reagan). There are sub-

tler forms—such as the two party systemfielding two pro-war candidates in 2004 inthe face of a growing anti-war movementagainst the war in Iraq. Mary Louise Prattgives an example of institutional resistancein a story of Native American graduate stu-dents in California who asked local highschools to stop using Indian symbols asmascots. “The resistance they encountercomes less from peoples’ attachment to thesymbols than from the pain and guiltwhites must experience if they acknowl-edge the racism of the symbols”—whichwould be an admission of non-legitimacy.

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Institutionality is always a complex

structuring of advantage, a privileging ofthose inside (who obtain social integrity assubjects through it) over those outside itwho become the (dehumanized) objects ofits operations. To contest that boundary ona pro-democracy basis puts the institution-al subject-object relation in question, de-privileging the status of those included as“subjects,” as well as their assumed right tospeak for its “objects.” When people speakfor themselves, they escape institutionaldomination as objects. No war could befought if people had subject status thatgave them the power to just walk off thefield, and countermand orders. To allowpeople to speak for themselves with respectto war would break the necessary equationbetween nation and obedience, killing andnational security. It would reveal that noth-ing is more undemocratic, more destructiveof democracy and the sovereignty that is itsnecessary condition, than war.

Thus, institutions must both pretend tobe democratic and disparage movementdemands for democracy, precisely to pre-serve their legitimacy as institutions, andtheir ability to speak for people.

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Ironically,what institutional resistance to movementspoints to is an implicit existential sover-eignty that precedes both the movement’smobilizations and its organizations. It isthat sovereignty that forms the basis forconfronting institutionality from a poten-

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tially democratic space, and grounds its po-litical stance. Sovereignty constitutes thepossibility of an alternate political structureoutside institutionality. Indeed, sovereign-ty is the fundamental condition for democ-racy. If a people or group is to determinetheir own destiny, they have to be sover-eign in that destiny in order to participatein determining it. (In that sense, interven-tion in another nation, of whatever kind,because it destroys sovereignty, makes de-mocracy impossible for it.)

If an institution is to relegitimize itselfin the face of a confrontation with a socialjustice movement, it is the movement’s sov-ereignty that it must disrupt, in order tosubvert its pro-democratic posture or es-sence. The level of violence it will allow it-self is the measure of its desperation in rel-egitimizing itself.

Though political violence or derogatorymisrepresentation signifies that power hasno other response to a movement’s de-mands for justice, it will often get popularsupport for those activities. In assaulting amovement, institutions preserve themselvesas a pole of social identification for civil so-ciety at large; they thus implicitly preservethe mainstream cultural identities constitut-ed by such identification (this is, essentially,a definition of “mainstream”). Popular hos-tility to social movements always representssuch an identification seeking to conservethat cultural identity. Institutional violence(even in arbitrary form), like the revengeethic of the death penalty, or the dehuman-izations performed in prisons, is then seenas re-legitimizing that cultural identity. Inrestoring the sense of subject status grantedpeople by institutional identification, it tran-scends issues of democracy or justice. Whitesupremacy, for instance, is always violenttoward those it racializes because any senseof dignity in a person of color signifies asense of autonomy that instantly disrupts awhite person’s ability to speak for the other,as well as his identification with his cultur-ally concocted supremacy.

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In sum, while social justice movementsarise out of specific institutional injustices,they are given an existentially sovereigncharacter by institutional exclusion, whichengenders a pro-democratic alternate polit-ical space that transcends their specific de-mands. It is a place where alternate politicalstructures become possible.

The primary dialectic in which move-ments find themselves is between theirown inclusiveness as sovereign and pro-democratic, and the institutional exclusionthat engenders that in them. Standing out-side social institutionality because exclud-ed as pro-democratic, they nevertheless re-main internal to the socius controlled bythat institutionality. Including themselvesin social institutionality by making de-mands on it, they find themselves excludedbecause of those very demands. They areexcluded from institutionality while inter-nal to it, and included in the socius of insti-tutionality while external to it. Thus theyreside at the margins of institutionality,turning one face (of critique and social de-mand) toward institutional unjustice, andanother face (of program and promise) to-ward the people of civil society—a borderregion for institutionality in a sense that in-vokes the thinking of Gloria Anzaldúa. Ifwe now turn to her work, it will be to askwhat a homology between her experienceof autonomy and resistance and the exis-tentiality of movement sovereignty andpro-democracy might imply.

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A border is an artificial line dividingtwo zones that would have no distinct ex-istence except for that given by the linedrawn between them. It always constitutesa coloniality, a form of domination by thosewho draw that line over those who did not,and did not want to draw it. It invades un-der the pretense of repulsing an invader. It

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creates invaders by closing what had oncebeen open.

Anzaldúa came from a complex of bor-der regions, a Chicano community at theedge of Anglo US, a woman under the eyesof Chicano and Anglo masculinism, a femi-nist in contestation to Chicano and Anglopatriarchy, a dark woman thrust away byMexican and US rejection of indigeneity, awoman of color segregated by white su-premacism, and a lesbian expelled fromheterosexist gender binaries. She livedthese borders within a society to which shebelonged, yet which excluded her; a societypromising to include her if only she woulddeny herself for it (BLF,20ff). “Each sepa-rate reality and its belief system vies withothers to convert you to its worldview”(Home,548). Against this, she included her-self through activist resistance—throughthe autonomy of feminist resistance to pa-triarchal domination; through anti-racismas resistance to white supremacy; throughthe gay/lesbian community as itself a formof resistance to sexist gender definition andits nuclear family; and through Chicano/acommunity resistance to Anglo domination(BLF,38).

To see oneself at those borders, internalto the society guarded by them, yet exclud-ed by that society as other, external to itsself-definition while residing in its terrain,is to inhabit what Anzaldúa calls “nepant-la,” a place between perspectives, a placewhere identity assumptions cannot not bein question (Home,548). Nepantla is the in-terstice between given categories and astate of rebellion, neither a mobilization ofpatterns of activity nor a reorganization ofpatterns of power; it is an “overlappingspace between different perceptions andbelief systems” (Home,541). To inhabitnepantla is to construct an autonomy with-in and among these “separate realities,” adecision to be authentic to oneself and whoone finds oneself to be. For Anzaldúa, itconstitutes a bridge between who she wasmade to be by those border regions, and

who she makes herself be out of what shehad been made to be.

From this in-between place, “you seethrough the fiction of monoculture, themyth of superiority of the white races”(Home,549). Resistance produces theawareness that race, femininity, gender andnation are social categories, not “fixed fea-tures of personality or identity” (see note 7).Thus, one can see their inherent coloniality,the creation of inside/outside binaries bythose given social categories. One’s space ofautonomy becomes an alternate space ofconsciousness, a new consciousness that al-lows an “us” not bound by monocultures togerminate. While it disrupts the flow of thegiven, it permits those including them-selves in its fluidity to slow down and trans-form identity (BLF,46), to transform autono-my itself from a relation to the given to anautonomy that is one’s own. As Anzaldúasays, “I find that autonomy is a boulder onmy path that I keep crashing into. I can’tseem to stay out of my own way. I’ve alwaysbeen aware that there is a greater powerthan the conscious I. That power is my innerself…[in] all my incarnations. …someone inme [who] takes matters into our ownhands” (BLF,50-51). The “heat” of this trans-formation, this entry into a border betweenthe self as first person and the self as third,she calls a Coatlicue state. It is a name takenfrom the Nahuatl tradition of Mexico signi-fying the keeper of the sacred, the motherwho preceded the birth of patriarchy(BLF,46). It embraces all the categories inwhich she “does not fit,” all her incarna-tions, as an autonomy for which her experi-ential rebellion is only a means.11

Residence in nepantla, as awareness of“overlapping perspectives,” opens ave-nues of thinking beyond it. To bridge thegap requires dialogue with others in orderto disseminate the change one brings aboutin oneself by stepping onto the bridge. Dia-logue that understands the inseparabilityof all these given border regions is centralto transcending the binary separation of in-

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side and outside that defines each border.“To transform yourself, you need thehelp…of those who have crossed beforeyou” (Home,557). And those who come af-ter are in the same position. In other words,autonomy and dialogue are the necessaryconditions for each other.

If her lesbianism rendered her autono-mous as a woman, that autonomy becamethe power of her feminism, and her autono-my as a feminist woman of color became aforce for Chicano/a autonomy and commu-nity cohesion. Autonomy as dialogue be-comes the methodology of inclusion. “Mostpeople self-define by what they exclude; wedefine who we are by what we include”(Home,3). Indeed, to speak of inclusiongoes beyond mere calls for unity or solidar-ity; solidarity too often implies an imposedhomogeneity, an acceptance of a given “self-definition.” Resistance against exclusion isresistance against just such “self-defini-tion,” evading the power that pre-defineswhile simultaneously avoiding demandsfor assimilation in terms not one’s own.

Thus, she includes herself in her ownterms against a social inclusion that wouldhave excluded her from herself by makingher other than who she was. Resisting theterms of social inclusion that would ex-clude her from herself, she includes herselfin a transformed relation. To include herselfas a feminist in a patriarchal Chicano com-munity, she includes herself in Chicano/aresistance against Anglo social exclusionand colonialism, not in solidarity with pa-triarchy, but as an autonomous woman. It isa sense of expanding autonomy that beginswith her embrace of her most intimate be-ing, her sexuality (BLF,20).

To help bridge this sense of inclusiveautonomy to the concept of democraticsovereignty already discerned in social jus-tice movements, let us focus a moment onits territorial aspect, the coloniality of theTexas border region from which Anzaldúacomes. Texas was originally part of Mexico,incorporated into the US when the US colo-

nized it (BLF,6ff). The (Chicano) communi-ties descendant from the original Mexicans,now US citizens, found themselves inhabit-ing the same terrain as a dominant Anglosociety that related to them as aliens. Theneed for psychic and cultural defenseagainst social derogation necessitated themaintenance of much of their Mexican her-itage, while facing the demand that theyadopt allegiance to the US as citizens. AsMexicans, they were absorbed into an ex-cluding Anglo society, and as US citizens,they are expelled from its socius through itsenveloping colonialist overlordship. Theyare silenced by being spoken for as citizensby a nation that excludes them, and theyare silenced as excluded (Mexican/Chi-cano) people by an Anglo demand that theyassimilate into a society that disparagesMexicans and Chicanos. It is a double bind.In such a situation, one cannot move eitherway without doing violence to oneself.

For Anzaldúa, nepantla transcends thisdouble bind as an autonomy within a socialframework that doubly refuses autonomy.It constitutes an alternate foundation, syn-thesizing incommensurabilities. Andagain, “Coatlicue” signifies a polydimen-sional connection to an autonomous tradi-tion that provides a foundation upon whichto transcend the paradoxical boundary ofinclusive exclusion (BLF,47). It remaps theworld, bringing its many dimensions intoconjunction rather than contiguity as an in-tersection of identities. It produces a socialdomain that itself becomes an inside, aplace of inclusion, for which excluding in-stitutionality remains the outside. As out-side, a Coatlicue domain becomes an insidefor which the given (institutionality) re-mains outside, not across an us-themboundary because coloniality is not a possi-bility for it, but as a withdrawal of the ac-quiescence upon which institutionality re-lies for its existence (BLF,51).

Thus, Anzaldúa shines a light on thehidden structures of alternate sovereigntythat already exist within each social justice

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movement, and on the potential (anti-colo-nialist and de-colonizing) power of thatsovereignty as the place of an alternate de-mocracy, a place to speak in a voice no long-er spoken for. It embraces its differencefrom the institutionality to which it oppos-es itself, and re-presents inclusion in a tra-dition of democracy that had itself been si-lenced by institutionality.

THE ECOLOGY OF POLITICAL RESISTANCE

Movements begin from a position ofunacknowledged sovereignty, of separate-ness and an “inner self” that “takes mattersinto its own hands” (BLF,50). They do notdraw the borderline between people and in-stitution, between hegemony and those si-lenced by it; that line is drawn for them. Buteach movement inherently opens that polit-ical borderline into a socio-political space, aplace of nepantla, a sovereignty bestowedby exclusion in which it opens a spacewhere voices previous silenced (spoken for)can speak. It becomes a place of participa-tion and possible democracy. Facing in twodirections, toward the institutionality thatexcludes and toward other people subjectedto that institutionality, a movement be-comes a place of alternate subjectivity. Itdoes this existentially, simply because peo-ple get together to change their destiny insome way. The movement provides a con-sciousness of being able to choose.

This is not the strategic choice Pivenand Cloward had elucidated between orga-nization and mobilization. It is a choice ofwhere acquiescence is to stop. Yet this is notirrelevant to the choice of strategy; it medi-ates that choice through its awareness of le-gitimacy. To build organization in order toconcretely negotiate or influence institu-tional policy is to accede to the legitimacy ofthe institution, a recognition the movementoften offers in exchange for the institution’streating people with respect and dignity

and not as objects. To focus on mass mobili-zations recognizes instead that injustice isinstitutional, and that human respect anddignity lie within a self-awareness of sover-eignty. It marks an erosion of the institu-tion’s claims to legitimacy. Though this sec-ond strategy still makes concrete demandson institutions, they are disillusioned de-mands, behind which to constitute alterna-tive structures. Where the first strategyseeks to equalize the power difference be-tween institution and people by strengthen-ing the people to the point of breakingthrough exclusion (DD,18), the secondseeks to equalize by withdrawing supportfrom the institution, causing the excludingwall that relies on that support to crumble.

Empirically, the first path makes sensebecause institutional exclusion and injus-tice appear as policy that should ostensiblybe changeable politically. Thus, people be-lieve institutional protestations of democ-racy, and override their experience of theirown sovereignty (revealed through institu-tional exclusion) in the belief that immedi-ate concessions are attainable. When theanti-war movement supported Kerry in2004, attempting to wield the electoral pro-cess for anti-war ends, it was in the beliefthat the institutions of war were democrat-ic, and that war could actually be institu-tionally undeclared by people who had norole in declaring it.12 Against the vaguehopes that surround such beliefs, the sec-ond path appears hopeless; it requires alevel of opposition to acquiescence, a refus-al of being defined by institutions, and alevel of critical thinking that can maintain acollective recognition that injustice is struc-tural and not simply policy. One must con-front what one has had to betray in oneselfin one’s former acquiescence. It meansabove all to value the alternate political cul-ture made possible by sovereignty, a valuethat breaks with institutional identification.

All social justice movements containboth approaches. After all, if injustice werenot structural, then why would it require the

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formation of a movement outside institu-tionality? And if it were not policy-driven,why would there be a social movement rath-er than insurgency? The movement lives inthe space between these possibilities, as itlives in the space between institutional he-gemony and the people subjected to it.13

Each approach may think in the same terms(for instance, anti-racist movements, wheth-er integrationist or for black and brownpower, both call for a cessation of white dep-recation and depreciation of people of col-or). That is not where the difference lies. Itlies in the value given autonomy.

Let us consider the question of de-mands, for instance. There are two types ofdemands a movement can make. WhenFrederick Douglass said, “power concedesnothing without a demand,” he did not dif-ferentiate. There are demands to whichpower can concede, whose terms remainwithin the scope of its institutional opera-tions (civil liberties reside within the termsof governance, wage rates are within theterms of corporate accounting). And thereare demands that require a concession ofpower itself. A union can demand wagesand hours, to which an enterprise can ac-cede within its fiduciary operations; but theunion demand for a hiring hall would en-tail a concession of power over governanceof the enterprise. A rent strike to force re-pairs on tenement buildings simply re-quires landlords to obey building codes. Aneighborhood movement to stop evictionsof people who can’t pay their rent is amovement demanding the power to trans-form housing from a commodity to a right.

These two types of demand are notstrictly separable. It depends on the sur-rounding political situation. For instance,the voter registration drives of the mid-1960s that followed the initial lunchcountersit-ins were carried out by diverse civilrights organizations that united in a move-ment-wide decision to focus on voting. Tac-tics varied widely, from ad hoc mobiliza-tions to alternate structures such as the

Lowndes County party and the MississippiFreedom Democratic Party, and from lob-bying and court cases to tight forms of col-lective security against white supremacistviolence.14 In the segregationist south, thedemand to register and vote expressedboth kinds of demand rolled into one. Itwas a demand that white supremacist insti-tutions change their policies toward blackpeople registering and voting, and it was ademand that governmental institutionscede the power to participate to black peo-ple through the vote itself.

What differentiated the various sectorsof the movement was their awareness andevaluation of the sovereignty of the move-ment itself, which constituted the way eachperson synthesized the in-between, thenepantla of living the movement as a bor-der region between demands for negotia-tions and alternate political structures.

The consciousness of that state of beingin-between legitimacies could be called“movement consciousness.” It is the waypeople see their relation to institutionalityin the context of an awareness of sovereign-ty. That is, the institutions cease to be thecontext for one’s demands, and movementsovereignty becomes the context for howthe institutions are in turn objectified. Sov-ereignty remains the existential foundationfor both, and “movement consciousness”then reflects a sense of inclusion parallel towhat Anzaldúa has called a “Coatlicuestate.” That is, a movement is not just anopposition group led by organized activistsseeking to restore “social values,” as Moyerposits. A “movement consciousness” signi-fies how a movement represents the con-sciousness of those who, having lived insti-tutional injustice, understand it in criticalconsensus as unlivable, and construct an al-ternate open space, a place to speak forthemselves. Within the vast variety ofgroups that sprang up in the civil rightsmovements or the anti-war movements,each with their own critical consensus, allhad an awareness of being part of some-



thing big. Their common consensus wastheir awareness of the necessity for demo-cratic space that provided what institution-ality withheld, the place where an An-zaldúan sense of inclusion could occur.

A critical consensus is an internal bor-der between the first person “us” seeing “it-self” in the third person as other to whatthey confront, and confront together, a“nos/otras,” as Anzaldúa puts it (a “we”composed of “us” and “others”) (Home,570). Each critical consensus is a collectivestand on the justice of one’s demands andthe direness of people’s needs. In otherwords, “movement consciousness” consti-tutes a critical environment for people, a so-cial context they have chosen for them-selves in which to act politically and givethemselves historical meaning.

Because each critical consensus germi-nates directly from the existential nature ofa movement, filling its pro-democraticspace, it cannot be put to a vote. To do sowould be to impose one on others, breakingthe commonality of their foundation thesame sovereignty. A vote on strategy wouldbe unintelligible because it would assume ahomogeneity proper only to organizationalform, and not to movement consciousness.However much each consensus mightthink others wrong or misguided, theircommon foundation in sovereignty cannotbelong to any one. Indeed, while peoplechoose consensus according to personaltemperament and experience, as well asideology, or organizational form, the exis-tential fact of that choice is not negotiable.The relative strength of integrationist orblack power ideas shifted within the civilrights movement according to how peopleperceived the surrounding political land-scape. Such shifts reflect a fluidity whosepossibility germinates from the same sov-ereignty as ground. Anzaldúa would callthat fluidity the place of Coatlicue, takingthe form of endless dialogue, a slowingdown of social motion to allow people totake stock of each other.

This fluidity, this recognition of thepossibilities that emerge from movementsovereignty, implies a responsibility. Eachmovement has a responsibility to under-stand how the voices it contains demand tospeak through it, as well as a responsibilityto become a voice against being spoken for.It bears within it what un-silenced voiceshave to say when they speak through it, onall sides of the issues of strategy. It has a re-sponsibility to express what those voicessay, from the places it has itself providedwhere they are not spoken for.

When this does not happen, a move-ment reverts to old hegemonies and acqui-escences. For instance, the Vietnam anti-war movement eventually became a whitemovement because the hegemonic thinkingof white people involved in it did not knowhow to step aside and allow those from theracialized internal colonies of the US (black,Latino, Native, Asian) to speak along withthemselves. Having already an under-standing of coloniality (and that the Viet-nam war was a colonialist war), these inter-nal colonies had related strongly to themovement in its early days. But most whitepeople in the movement at that time couldnot see the existential anti-colonialism ofthe movement itself, as an alternate sover-eignty to the war machine. Thus, it lost itsinclusive character.

The environmental movement pro-vides another example. In opposing corpo-rate despoliation of national forest land, itrefuses to accept the hegemony of corpo-rate property rights over the world and itspeople. In extending its reach to environ-mental racism (a more urban dimension ofcorporate impunity), however, it does notyet know how to make that an assault onthe injustice of housing and neighborhoodsegregation, which conjoins racializationwith property rights. To do so, the environ-mental movement would have to extend itsrefusal of corporate property rights notonly to a demand that the real estate indus-try be deracialized, but that housing itself

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be seen as a right rather than a commodity. A movement’s responsibility to the

many voices within it is an ethical question,an ethical dimension of “movement con-sciousness.” The ethics of responsibility re-sides within its sovereignty. To refuse to bespoken for means also to refuse to speak forothers. This ethical dimension of refusal goesbeyond the choices leadership makes withrespect to mobilizations and organizations,or which way people choose to turn their au-tonomous thinking. Whether a movementprioritizes policy demands on institutions orits own alternate structures, this ethical ques-tion accompanies its political thinking, as thecontent of its sovereignty.

Empirically, it would seem that theground of sovereignty would naturallymove people’s activity toward building al-ternate political structures, especially since,in contesting institutional injustice, a move-ment already constitutes an awareness thatinjustice is structural, against which it pro-vides a place where justice can envision it-self. Yet the question of alternate structuresis often waved aside by movement activistswho focus on immediate demands, in orderto show that the movement can accomplishsomething real.

Those who follow an electoral strategy,for example, think that electing people tooffice is proof that the institutions can beused, though holding the elected represen-tative accountable remains a thankless task,requiring direct action. On the other hand,those who engage in direct action see theirown repression as proof that injustice isstructural, and not simply policy; but then,the necessity to raise money for legal de-fense absorbs them back into that structure.Thus, a place of encounter between strate-gies is unavoidable; it is a nepantla wherethe necessity of dialogue becomes the realmeaning of the sovereignty, despite and be-cause it produces strategic incommensura-bilities. An awareness of the power of sov-ereignty leads naturally to the building ofalternate structures, while an awareness of

the democracy sovereignty makes possibleleads naturally to an attempt to realign theinstitutionalities from which the movementemerged. It is its Coatlicue state that wouldwelcome the incommensurability as a mu-tual necessity for both those who seek insti-tutional policy change and those who seekto build alternate political structures.

But that is hard to come by. An identifi-cation with strategy, comparable to theidentification with institutionality fromwhich mainstream people obtain their cul-tural identity, is very strong. For instance,in the wake of voter registration drives, thecivil rights movements divided between in-tegrationists focused on policy demandsand running candidates, and a black powermovement that sought to counterpose asense of alternative community sovereign-ty and self-determination, building neigh-borhood organizations, unions, and self-help groups against the culture of white su-premacy.15 Both demanded that white soci-ety cease its segregation of people of color,and that white people cease speaking forpeople of color. Integrationism demandedthat the social and political spaces fromwhich people of color had been excludedbe opened to democratic participation.Black power refused this if it meant adopt-ing the anti-black attitudes of white society,and argued that people of color could notintegrate themselves into society until thatsociety ceased constructing its whiteness(or ceased being white altogether) throughits exploitation of people of color.

Integrationism countered by sayingthat to prioritize independence would ab-jure the claim on society to which the laborof centuries entitled black people. For blackpower advocates, if integration meantadopting the anti-black attitudes of whitesociety, it would thus affirm social injustice.For integrationists, if black power meantseparatism, it would similarly maintain so-cial injustice by abandoning the mass ofblack people to white supremacy. For theformer, integrationism represented an irre-



sponsibility toward black communal con-sciousness; for the latter, the former repre-sented an irresponsibility to a legitimateclaim on the present from the past. Neitherby itself was ethically adequate to the legit-imacy of the black voices constituting thepolitical space of the movement. Yet boththought of themselves as the only road torealism. And neither would realisticallyhave had the social weight they did with-out the other.

A similar process unfolded in the Viet-nam anti-war movement between thosewho focused on direct action—anti-draftorganizing, stopping troop trains, buildingresistance inside the military—and otherswho considered themselves a “peace move-ment,” focusing on electoral campaigns,lobbying Congresspeople, getting citycouncil resolutions passed, etc. Consider-able acrimony developed. The pro-lobby-ists accused the direct actionists of antago-nizing those undecided (middle-of-the-road) persons that they were trying toreach; the direct actionists accused the pro-lobbyists of abandoning them, isolatingthem, and thus aiding government repres-sion of the movement as a whole.

Ultimately, it is the meandering itself ofmovement consciousness among strategiesthat constitutes an alternate subjectivity be-yond that of institutional or strategy identi-fication. That meandering occurs in threedimensions at once: toward the institutionthat excludes it, toward the people to whomit offers sovereignty and the ability to speakfor themselves, and toward the fluidity ofdialogue between these critical consensus.It is an ethical relation toward the internalspace of the movement, its slowing downand taking stock of its confrontations andnegotiations. The sovereignty of a move-ment is not the resolution or synthesis ofthese different meanderings among strate-gies; it is their common foundation, the nec-essary condition for their possibility.

No organizational structure could con-cretize their unification, nor mobilization

express all of a movement’s voices. In-be-tween, there is the place and the ethics ofsovereignty itself. Within this space, the de-mand for justice becomes both a culturalidentity and its opposite, a participation inpro-democratic process.

NOTES

1. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Clo-ward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Suc-ceed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books,1979). Hereafter PPM.

2. Bill Moyer, Doing Democracy (New Soci-ety Publishers, 2001), p. 5. Hereafter DD. Moyersets out 8 stages of movement developmentthat oscillate between peaks and depressions,and how activists can transcend moments thatlook like failures. His focus is on buildingmovement activity that will induce policychanges in given institutions of power. Hisvision of movements remains limited to a lead-ership ethic. Piven and Cloward set out basi-cally three stages (PPM,3), and would criticizeMoyer for seeing the force of popular mobiliza-tion as tactical, for the purpose of restructuringgiven social institutions to which it gives access,rather than demanding institutional accommo-dation to itself.

3. It is one of those cases were both areright, but touching different parts of the ele-phant. The economic position of the US rightafter World War II, and the emerging Cold Warwere directly relevant to the flourishing of socialjustice movements. On the one hand, a hege-monic world position undermined the desire bythe US elite to continue withholding rights fromits citizens. And on the other hand, a significantnumber of early civil rights organizers wereblack Korean War veterans, who thought theyhad fought for democracy only to return hometo continued segregation and disenfranchise-ment. They initiated the critique that called inquestion US white messianic pretensions. Cf.Clayborne Carson, In Struggle, SNCC and theBlack Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Har-vard Univ. Press, 1981); Sara Evans, Personal Pol-itics (New York: Vintage Books, 1980); HalDraper, Berkeley: the New Student Revolt (NewYork: Grove Press, 1965); Louis Lomax, The

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Negro Revolt (New York: Harper, 1962). 4. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera:

the New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/AuntLute Press, 1987). Hereafter BLF.

5. The death penalty represents a culturallysanctioned revenge ethic that abandons throughself-contradiction all pretense of justice. It con-tradicts the sanctity of life that it pretends torestore through killing. To place a revenge ethicat the core of a judicial structure is to abandonjustice to dehumanized spectacle, and to the rawpower that is generated by reserving the right tokill. Cf. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish:the Birth of the Prison; trans. Alan Sheridan (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1979).

6. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the SubalternSpeak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cul-ture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg(Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988).

7. Recent scholarship has argued that “race”is not a noun, but a verb; the verb is “to racial-ize,” and it is something that one group of peo-ple does to another. In particular, the modernconcept of race was invented by European colo-nialism to hierarchize its relation to those it colo-nized on a basis that could be “naturalized.” Ininventing itself as “white” by these means, Euro-peans became the only group having an interestin “race,” or in racializing others, as essential totheir own white racialized identity. Cf. TheodoreAllen, The Invention of the White Race (New York:Verso, 1996); Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racial-ization (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 2003).As Anzaldúa says, seeing oneself within a limi-nal border region, “a demythologization of raceoccurs. You begin to see race as an experience ofreality…not as a fixed feature of personality oridentity.” Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keat-ing, eds. This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visionsof Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2002), p.549. Hereafter Home.

In the US, the death penalty has ineluctableties to white supremacy, stemming from thearbitrary and vindictive power over life anddeath inherent in the slave system. The revengeethic embedded in the death penalty is an echoof slavery’s barbaric responses to the slightestdisobedience. Cf. Saidiya Hartmann, Scenes ofSubjection (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997).

8. Mary Louise Pratt, “Apocalypse in theAndes,” in Encuentros (IDB Cultural Center),no. 15, March 1996, p. 15.

9. The most common form of disparage-ment is to label a movement “protest.” Toreduce it to “protest” pretends that the move-ment is only expressing belated dissatisfactionwith a decision-process, rather than an opposi-tion to injustice. It refuses to hear the substanceof the movement’s political position, exceptthrough additional denigrations, such as “trea-son” or “anti-Americanism” as levied againstanti-war movements.

10. It is against this identification withinstitutionality that Moyer projects the notionof “basic social values,” by which he theorizesthe ability of movement activists to build demo-cratic resistance to arbitrary institutional power.His thesis is that return to those basic valueswill supersede the social status that accompa-nies the cultural identity produced by identifi-cation with those institutions (DD,16-17). Thegeneral acceptance of US interventionism, theconstancy of residential segregation, and theanti-immigrant movement, would call in ques-tion his assumption of what those “basic socialvalues” really were.

11. Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Prieta,” in ThisBridge Called My Back, eds. Cherie Moraga andGloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen TablePress, 1981), p. 205.

12. Steve Martinot, “Pro-Democracy andthe Ethics of Refusal,” Socialism and Democracy,vol. 19, no. 2, July 2005.

13. Piven and Cloward elucidate the con-flict and separation of these strategies. Moyeradvocates opportunistically prioritizing one inorder to put it in the service of the other. Othersociological approaches begin by interpretingmovements as searches for identity, ignoring theprotestations of injustice the rejection of whichplaces people outside institutions and thus out-side the identities given by them; or they seetheir (sociologist) role as discovering the trueinterests and ideologies of a movement, as ifthey can’t take the movement’s word for what itis doing. Cf. New Social Movements, eds. EnriqueLarana, Hank Johnson, and Joseph Gusfield(Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1994).

14. Hanes Walton, Black Political Parties,(New York: Free Press, 1972).

15. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V.Hamilton, Black Power: the Politics of Liberation inAmerica (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).

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