The Constellation of Opposition
by Jason Adams
Introduction: The Constellation of N30
The protests that occurred around the world on November 30, 1999 (N30) were
truly without precedent. They mark an important turning point in what had
become increasingly fragmented struggles of new social movements
constructed around various forms of antiauthoritarian politics, identity
politics and ecological politics as well as traditional class struggle
politics. In the cultural rebound against universalism after the 1960s, new
social movements continuously sought to create autonomous space for the
particularity of youth, queers, women and people of color as well as for
the general ecology of the planet. While there have been enormous strides
made since that time, the downside has been that in general, they have not
succesfully articulated the intersectionalities of these various
oppressions and resistances. This failure has resulted in fragmented,
single-issue politics with no visible option other than reformist - rather
than transformational - political activity. At the same time, traditional
class-oriented movements have been in continual decline due to the rise of
a global neoliberal economy since the 1980s. Faced with such circumstances,
labor unions have often opted to merely "protect their own" leaving most
low-income women, people of color, immigrants and students to fend for
themselves. Throughout the three decades following the 1960s and lasting
well into the final years of the 20th century, it seemed therefore that a
constellation of opposition would not likely emerge, meaning of course that
reformism was destined to become the new reality of social movements.
N30 was a turning point because it articulated for the first time the
irreducible interconnectedness experienced but not recognized within the
praxis of contemporary social movements. Never before had so many divergent
groups and perspectives converged, successfully swarming and disrupting a
"common enemy," as did the tens of thousands who filled the streets of
Seattle and dozens of other cities around the world. Many people who had
been never really understood the intersectionalities between oppressions
experienced dramatic revelations about them for the first time in their
lives. In the midst of the third day of protests, one elderly woman
reflected, "isnt this extraordinary, I've been around since the sixties and
my dad in the thirties with UAW and this is really happening for the first
time. Its great." A rank-and-file Teamster agreed heartily; "there was a
banner, and it said 'Teamsters and Turtles Together at Last' - that was so
wonderful. Of course we belong together. The same people who exploit
natural resources exploit human resources. We belong together." Perhaps
from a less traditional perspective, a bare-chested member of the Lesbian
Avengers explained her perspective; "the WTO went against too many people
at once; you know, labor, environmental movement, women's rights, animals
rights - every different type of group of people was affected by this. That
was their worst mistake ever, they pissed off too many people and now we're
going to fight back unified and that's what's going to help us." Yet this
was no simple return to the homogenous politics of the past; in fact it was
precisely the immense diversity of individuals and groups present that
allowed a type of untamed, spontaneous, critical, tentative "unity" to
emerge in the form of a movement of movements. As Hop Hopkins of the Brown
Collective argued afterward, "solidarity doesn't mean that we don't talk
about the issues that separate us. That's the biggest change that I see
happening…race, class, gender, sexism, heterosexism - if that's not in your
analysis then you're only half-stepping and you're not really working for
the revolution." As a result of the shifts in the self-consciousness of
these movements the need to find common nodes of communication amongst and
between the many divergent movements, while also maintaining the
self-determination of all involved, could finally be actualized.
These developments in late 1999 raised hopes that "another world is
possible" and that there might in fact be a movement that would at least
potentially be capable of bringing it about. Interestingly, the most active
elements of the various movements involved were said by many commentators
to have exhibited an "anarchist sensibility," if not a clearly articulated
affiliation with anarchism itself. But in the years after, the
constellation of opposition that allowed for this intersubjectivist sense
of autonomy-within-solidarity began to unravel back into its previous state
of fragmentation and incommensurability. The healthy balance of tension
that had united the previously fragmented movements had degenerated into
something of a war between the various elements centered on the
particularities of age, race, class, gender, and sexuality amongst other
things. Even if the particulars could not be agreed upon, nearly everyone
involved seemed to agree that the quest for forms of life as free as
possible of domination and hierarchy was the primary glue keeping these
movements "together." However it is undeniable that there were multiple
lines of division that could be seen before, during and after N30; this is
an unavoidable feature of any constellation of oppostion and is not
necessarily negative. One line of division that emerged rather clearly was
that between the "organizationalist" level of officiality such as the
Direct Action Network on the one hand and the "postorganizationalist" level
of unorganized affinities such as the Black Bloc on the other. Another
important divisions was that between the traditional class-based movements
and the new social movements; those organized around the so-called
"identity politics" that emerged after 1968 on the one hand versus those
organized around class politics such as the labor unions and socialist
parties that emerged in the nineteenth century, on the other.
But even while one could argue that the organizationalist and class-based
sections were perhaps stuck in an industrial-capitalist era when a primary
center of power made such movements potentially powerful, it is clear in
hindsight that the postorganizationalist and new social movements often
made the equally fatal mistake of avoiding economic factors altogether. In
their rush to emphasize the emergence of the new, they lost sight of what
has remained of the old; this is nothing less than the mirror image of what
the organizationalist and class-based movements have done in denying the
emergence of the new and overemphasizing the continuity of the old. An
important challenge then, would be to develop a more practically applicable
hybrid analysis of the workings of contemporary power, which as Derrida
would say, will always contains some specters from the past as well as some
from the future. Such an analysis would emphasize the way that power
operates in the practices of everyday life just as it would the way that it
operates in "larger" institutions such as capitalism and the state. To put
it clearly, what is needed today is an eclectic, pragmatic critique of the
transformation of power and resistance since 1968 that avoids unwarranted
overzealousness in order to develop a theoretical basis that would be more
relevant to emerging situations marked largely by a sense of transitionality.
This was precisely the goal of the Total Liberation Project (TLP). Two and
a half years after, dozens of activists and intellectuals involved in the
antiglobalization movement converged at the Evergreen State College in
Olympia, Washington. They came with the stated goal of expanding on and
attempting to articulate more clearly what had become known as "the spirit
of Seattle" as an alternative to the two-sided coin of the particularist
single-issue new social movements on the one side and the universalist
class-struggle movements on the other. The convergence intended to consider
instead the potential viability of "visions that do not privilege any
particular type of oppression over any other, yet which still successfully
respect and further the autonomy of all movements within a greater context
of solidarity." As it was during N30, all of this was deeply imbibed in a
wide variety of anti-authoritarian analyses, all of which were dedicated to
challenging the hybrid combinations of new and old forms of power;
centralized, decentralized, repressive and creative. The reaction to this
attempt to move beyond these polarities tended toward the extremes; while
there were many letters of support, the TLP also endured countless
denunciations from those fragments of the "movement of movements"
apparently dedicated to the absolute preservation of their particularity
and the prevention of the emergence of a hybrid analysis of power and
resistance in transition. Most of these denunciations sought to valorize
the purity of ideology over the eclecticism of theory on the one hand, or
to valorize the primacy of action over the "intellectualism" of theory on
the other. But what is most ironic is that many of these exorcists refer to
the events of May 1968 as proof to back up such points; because while
action was indeed paramount at that time, there was also a very strong
correlation between theory and practice in Paris, while the doctrinarity of
ideology was eschewed. Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle for instance,
was a self-described attempt to flesh out the beginnings of a theoretical
basis for the revolts he hoped would follow in France and around the world;
as he remarked in the preface to the Italian edition "those who really want
to shake an established society must formulate a theory which fundamentally
explains this society." In short, all too often, those who fetishize
"action" while completely dismissing clear and deep theorization about that
action often end upon entangled in a unanticipated dimension of the web of
power or even worse, get tricked into serving as a pawn in someone else's
game.
It is true that the TLP was primarily about theory; as has been stated,
what it tried to do was to help articulate the experience in contemporary
social movements that the shape of both power and resistance has become
both decentralized and interconnected, with the intention of further
developing the constellation of opposition that emerged during N30. This
article then, can be considered a continuation of the TLP in that it seeks
to theorize a "common story" - with the intention that it be put to
practical use - about how oppressions are both decentered and interwoven in
contemporary society and about how our resistances might be as well. It
also marks a discontinuity with the TLP in that it confronts the idea that
any "liberation movement" can ever really be total in a society marked by
the continuing fragmentation of totalities. Ironically, this is precisely
for the reason that the term "liberation" is defined by a view of power as
ultimately repressive rather than also creative, a point that was mentioned
by one of the most interesting intellectuals who took part, Todd May. In
fact, upon reflecting on the event, it has become clear that while the TLP
talked about "totality" and "liberation" throughout, perhaps what it was
really working with was an unacknoweldged synthesis of early Frankfurt
School critical theory, recent poststructuralism and the "new anarchism" of
contemporary social movements. This realization came about after realizing
the strength of May's presentation in which he outlined his theories of
poststructuralist anarchism and contingent holism, which in fact reflect
very closely the emerging character of the antiglobalization movement. The
most important lesson from this reflection - which will be developed and
considered throughout this article - is that the constellation of
opposition which emerged in Seattle would not have been possible during
either the epoch of universality and class struggle nor the epoch of
particularity and identity politics, but only became possible in the
current transition to the epoch of singularity and limitless
multidimensionality of identity.
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Link: http://www.geocities.com/ringfingers/constellation.html
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