The Ruling Class & the Radical Resistance
Every imperialism is an endeavor to construct a stable and enduring power formation.
Stable and enduring power formations stratify societies. Not only do they filter and channel differing social elements apart from one another — the masculine from the feminine, the Black from the white, the developed from the underdeveloped, the human from the non-human, the living from the dead — they also make it increasingly burdensome and unappealing for differing social elements to commune fluently with one another, and more practical and appealing for some social elements to dominate, exploit, and eliminate others.
Every counterpower is an anti-imperialist movement that destabilizes and dissipates a power formation and destratifies a society. Counterpowers create confluences of differing social elements, making it increasingly more practical and more appealing for differing social elements to commune fluently with one another — for the masculine to commune fluently with the feminine, the Black with the white, the developed with the underdeveloped, the human with the non-human, the living with the dead. The more confluences that are enabled by counterpowers, the less determinate the differing social elements involved in so many confluences will become. This does not mean that confluent social elements will become more alike and differ less from one another — counterpowers do not diminish the differences between the Black and the white by making everything and everyone gray. Rather to the contrary, it means that confluent social elements will defer to one another more and more despite differing from one another — counterpowers confound attempts to filter and channel Blackness apart from whiteness by entangling the one with the other and creating confusion whenever and wherever attempts are made to disentangle them.
Imperialisms stratify societies by restricting the fundamental freedoms extended to differing social elements according to determinate logics that assign more freedoms to some elements and less to others. Counterpowers, in turn, destratify societies by extending fundamental freedoms further and further to increasingly more and increasingly different social elements according to an indeterminate logic. Thinking with and through the work of David Graeber and David Wengrow, there are three fundamental freedoms that are of greatest concern in this regard: (i) the freedom to flee, to migrate, move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (ii) the freedom to rebel, to ignore or disobey directives issued by others; and (iii) the freedom to (de-/re-)construct worlds, to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.
Today’s prevailing imperialism is a white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal power formation that enables white men profitably engaged in capitalist relations of production to enjoy the fewest restrictions on their fundamental freedoms, while Black and indigenous women engaged in providing for social subsistence suffer the greatest restrictions on their fundamental freedoms. For social elements betwixt and between these extremes, the logic of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy runs as follows: less restrictions are placed on the freedoms of all those who effectively serve as proxies and redeemers for rich white men, while more restrictions are placed on the fundamental freedoms of those who are either unwilling or unable to effectively serve rich white men. Those who provide the highest quality of service as proxies and redeemers, the “talented tenth,” effectively become honorary rich white men and face the fewest restrictions by far, while those others who are the least willing and least able to serve as proxies and redeemers face restrictions similar to those faced by poor Black and indigenous women.
Concatenations of ruling powers, disciplinary powers, normalizing powers, and optimizing powers effect the logic of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Ruling powers today enact ritualized spectacles that exaggerate the “achievements” of rich white men, their proxies, and their redeemers, enabling them to feel “superior” to others. The ritualized spectacles involved in maintaining and mobilizing police and military forces to restrict the freedoms of non-whites are amongst the most important in this regard.
Disciplinary powers today enact routine examinations that enable rich white men, their proxies, and their redeemers to transform their feelings regarding the “inferiority” of others into prevailing standards and stereotypes. The routine examinations used by teachers evaluating pupils in schools, by bosses evaluating employees in workplaces, and social workers evaluating people in line for social services are amongst the most important in this regard.
Normalizing powers today enact biased surveys that transform prevailing standards and stereotypes that presume the “inferiority” of others into technical/statistical facts. The biased surveys conducted by the social scientists and technocrats who shape public policy are amongst the most important in this regard.
Optimizing powers today enact variable controls that employ technical/statistical facts regarding the “inferiority” of others to compel others to adopt “best practices” and “measure up” to the “superior” standards of achievement set by rich white men, their proxies, and their redeemers. The variable controls deployed by social engineers, management consultants, public relations professionals and other social cyberneticians are amongst the most enabling in this regard.
The concatenations of ruling powers, disciplinary powers, normalizing powers, and optimizing powers that constitute today’s imperial order are overseen and managed by a ruling class formed of those individuals who hold the most important decision-making positions in the most heavily-armed police and military units (“we shoot at you”), the best endowed academic institutions and philanthropic organizations (“we fool you”), and the wealthiest national governments and transnational corporations (“we rule you”). The individuals who form this ruling class ostensibly face the fewest restrictions on their fundamental freedoms but, here is the rub, they are also those who have proven themselves the best risks for the prevailing imperial order, having been filtered and channeled into their positions of authority by the workings of the very same ruling, disciplinary, normalizing, and optimizing powers described above. This is to say, in other words, that those who are able to exercise the greatest degree of freedom under the prevailing imperial order also tend to be those who are least likely to exercise their freedom in a manner that threatens the prevailing imperial order.
We too often attribute more agency to the members of the ruling class than is deserved. The reality is that decisions made at the helms of the organs of Empire that shoot us, fool us, and rule us are, to quote the authors of the journal Chuang (눴), “always decisions made in response to material limits confronted by complex political and economic systems.” Indeed, it is worth quoting the authors of Chuang at length on this matter:
The ruling class is a designator for a non-homogeneous array of individuals who hold decision-making positions within the citadels of political-economic power, for whom the continuation of the status quo is of the utmost priority. But these individuals sit in highly structured positions, beholden to the built-in demands of shareholders (for higher profit) and political constituencies (for minimal levels of stability and prosperity, not so much the requirement that things get better but simply that they don’t get too bad too fast). There is thus no real malicious intent behind [their] decisions, nor is there the ability for such holders of power to truly transform or break free from the system itself. They are chained to it just as we all are, though they find themselves chained to its top. The entire process [of maintaining and advancing the prevailing imperial order] is […] one of contingent adaptations, rather than ruling class conspiracy. [The maintenance and advancement of the prevailing imperial order] is therefore not a fully conscious, casually malicious political program, as some authors would have it, but simply a term attributed to a loose consensus formed around numerous local solutions to [crises] that seemed to overcome short-term limits at the time [of their formulation].
The authors of Chuang, otherwise on point, neglect to mention something important: the chains that bind those at the top of the system tend to be far more subjective and psychological and far less objective and physical. Simply put, those at the top are, above all else, “trauma bound” to their positions of privilege. By contrast, those at the bottom, in addition to being trauma bound to their positions of servitude, are also bound by the reality that they and their loved ones would be deprived of food, shelter, and other basic necessities if they were to desert their positions of servitude.
The ruling class is, in sum, a fractious group of individuals who are trauma bound to threatened positions of privilege, and they are always desperately grasping for motives, means, and opportunities to overcome threats to their positions of privilege. What we call imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy is not the result of a well thought out elite conspiracy. Rather to the contrary, it is the accretion of five-centuries of desperate and hasty marriages of convenience that have enabled Euro-Atlantic elites to maintain and advance the privileges to which they are trauma bound.
Euro-Atlantic elites deny this. They rationalize their desperate and hasty marriages of convenience by wrapping them up in ideological and mythical narratives. They claim that some combination of natural superiority, divine dispensation, and/or historical necessity brought them to power, and they argue that their opponents and subordinates have been on the wrong side of Nature, God, and/or History. The truth is that elite decision-makers are always and forever (i) reacting to their fear of losing privileges to which they are trauma bound and then, subsequently, (ii) covering up the fact that they are reacting out of fear. In an essay titled “Let Us Think About Fear”, John Berger forcefully asserted this reality:
Any of us can become terrified at any moment if fear waylays us. The leaders of [Empire], however, would seem to be married to Fear, and their subordinate Commanders and Sergeants to be indoctrinated from above with something of the same fear.
What are the practices of this marriage? Day and night the partners of Fear are anxiously preoccupied with telling themselves and their subordinates the right half-truths, half-truths which hope to change the world from what it is into something which it is not! It takes about six half-truths to make a lie. As a result, they become unfamiliar with reality, whilst continuing to dream about, and of course to exercise, power. They continually have to absorb shocks whilst accelerating. Decisiveness becomes their invariable device for preventing the asking of questions.
The ruling class is desperately afraid of being questioned. It is not just that they fear being questioned by those over whom they rule but, more profoundly still, they also fear that they might start questioning themselves. Thus the ruling class is always claiming that their bold and decisive decision-making is urgently needed.
Radical resistance to imperialism begins with the realization that bold and decisive decision-making is not urgently needed, rather, what is urgently needed is time for convivial forms of questioning and experimentation. Those who argue that the forces of resistance must yield (to) bold and decisive decision-makers are those who are only interested in resistance as a means to reform and restructure the existing ruling class. By contrast, a radical resistance seeks to abolish the need for a ruling class, as opposed to reforming and restructuring an existing ruling class.
¡Que se vayan todos! All of them must go!
The crucial privilege to which the ruling class desperately clings is that of knowing that more freedoms are extended to them than to those beneath them. What the ruling class wants above all else is to restrict the extension of freedoms to those beneath them so as to maintain their relative advantages. The ruling class is fine with having fewer and fewer freedoms extended to them in absolute terms as long as they have more and more freedoms extended to them relative to those beneath them.
A radical resistance to imperialism is all about extending the freedoms to flee, rebel, and (de-/re-)construct worlds to the maximum extent possible. Contra the ruling class, a radical resistance assumes that fundamental freedoms do not need to be earned. Instead, what has to be “earned” is the power to restrict the fundamental freedoms of others. Furthermore, a radical resistance holds that the power to restrict others’ fundamental freedoms cannot be “earned” without the continuous and freely given consent of those whose fundamental freedoms are being restricted. This is to say, in other words, that fundamental freedoms ought only to be restricted by and through the workings of a continuous consensus process — which is neither a discrete consent form nor a discrete polling forum but, rather, a continuous conversation that (re-)negotiates the dissensus within an overall consensus and the consensus within an overall dissensus. From the perspective of a radical resistance, all authorities who exercise powers that limit others’ freedoms to flee, rebel, and remake social realities are exercising unearned privileges to the degree that they do so without facilitating a continuous consensus process.
A radical anti-imperialist resistance can form itself whenever and wherever it is possible to challenge the unearned privileges of prevailing authorities by and through initiating a continuous consensus process. Continuous consensus processes are endeavors to make it increasingly more practical and more appealing for differing social elements to commune fluently with one another and, as such, all effective continuous consensus processes form counterpowers.
The prevailing imperial order is overseen and managed by a ruling class of decision-makers who exercise unearned privileges to restrict peoples’ fundamental freedoms at many different points in time and space. A radical resistance must think strategically and conduct experiments in order to discover which places and times are most vulnerable to acts of radical resistance that effect continuous consensus processes, and, further, which of these vulnerable points are confluent with other such points nearby in space and time such that contagion is possible amongst them. Michel Foucault recognized something like this when he wrote:
The points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments of life, certain types of behavior. Are there no great radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds. Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible.
Wherever and whenever a radical resistance decides to initiate a continuous consensus process, one will find the ruling class complaining (i) that continuous consensus processes are an ineffective and inefficient way to make decisions and (ii) that we are facing crises that demand swift and effective decision making and expert decision makers. What the ruling class fails to acknowledge, of course, is that it is their decisions that have caused those crises, and that they have made them in order to ensure that there is an ever increasing demand for swift and effective decision making by expert decision makers. Privileged decision-makers will make a spectacle of wanting to avoid crises but, in actuality, they invariably get off on producing and managing crises; they scrupulously precipitate crises that create a demand for their decision-making powers. What a radical resistance aims to do, above all else, is to break the cycle.
We all know, for instance, that climate change did not have to become the crisis that it is now. Indeed, the fact of the matter is this: the ruling class, consciously or unconsciously, sought to make climate change into a crisis because they sensed that a climate crisis would empower them further. Indeed, when climate change was first recognized, there were many ways to respond to climate change that did not involve placing further restrictions on oppressed peoples’ freedoms to flee, to rebel and to (de-/re-)construct worlds. Climate change had to be made into an urgent crisis if the ruling class was to use it as an excuse to further restrict oppressed peoples’ freedoms relative to the freedoms enjoyed by the ruling class. Knowing this, consciously or unconsciously, the ruling class made decisions that resulted in climate change becoming the crisis that it is at present. Now that the climate crisis is upon us, many in the ruling class feel that the time is ripe to declare a climate emergency so that they may enjoy the privilege of exercising emergency powers.
The great irony here is that there is no halting the climate crisis without depriving the most privileged decision-makers, those who rule over the most people and places, of their decision making powers. Climate change is a global phenomenon, of course, but its character is such that any and all effective responses to it will be hyperlocal. This is because the global phenomenon that is climate change is only the aggregate statistical result of so many hyperlocal changes. Our societies are presently failing to respond to climate change effectively because decisions about how to respond are being made by regional and global authorities who are incapable of responding to so many ongoing hyperlocal changes as they occur, and who must react to aggregate statistical results and catastrophic events that are indexes of hyperlocal changes that have already run their course.
Ay, the climate crisis is but a part of the most wicked problem ever created by privileged decision makers, a problem that privileged decision makers simply cannot solve from their positions of privilege: the problem of countering the twin scourges of global apartheid and planetary ecocide before it is too late.
