It appears that in our current moment one must be either for change or against it. Those who are not actively fighting are pronounced as already resigned. The silent are not to be trusted. The only ones beyond suspicion are those who unapologetically speak up; those who in daring to hold the megaphone, full of principles and commitments, speak not merely of the present but also paint a picture of the future.
But, are we living in an “age of revolution”? Indeed, is the road to revolution paved by those who possess principles and act them out to their utmost consequences? Are such principled stances untarnished by existence? Don’t demands for justice persist only in an unjust world? That all around us principles turn into their opposite—that calls for equality transubstantiate into inequality—reveals something about the world that demands such principles.
The insidious nature of our society is revealed not merely in the needs and demands it gives rise to—from the need for bread to the demand for various kinds of justice—but also in the manner in which it purports to satisfy those needs and realize those demands. In the place of real fulfillment, existing society offers our demands back to us to be judged on their legitimacy. This it does because it cannot mend the holes that it itself has created. Indeed, only in a society that cannot meet the demands it gives rise to—if it is to persist as it is—do debates about the legitimacy of demands and needs arise. In such a society, the judgment of the legitimacy of needs and demands must function as substitute for their fulfillment. Consequently, people are forced to take up positions and stances for or against racial justice, for or against ending poverty, for or against gender equality, for or against the deservedness to live.
As German philosopher Theodor Adorno puts it, concerns about the legitimacy of demands and needs arise “only when boards and commissions are established and empowered to classify needs, and when, under the rallying cry of ‘man shall not live by bread alone,’ they decide to give us a portion of our bread ration—which is always too small—in the form of Gershwin records” (Theses on Need, 4). Burdened with needs, the ration one gets is never sufficient, or even in its desired form. In our time, our ration is not delivered as high culture; we get our bread transubstantiated into mass culture as “justice.” If we let ourselves be guided by the echoing calls for principled action ubiquitous to our present, the conviction that we are indeed “living in an age of revolution” will acquire affirmation from eco-friendly household products, revolutionary underwear, to newspaper headlines, which rhetorically defend minorities all around us.
But let’s not be too quick. Is anyone really fooled by the pseudo-revolutionary repackaging of the same old capitalist bait and switch? We may be compelled to buy the sexy revolutionary razor as opposed to the aesthetically anemic one, but this does not mean that we cannot or do not see through the plastic. And the last thing we need, one might correctly object, is an outdated 70s anti-consumerist reminder.
One might raise the further objection that years of uprisings, revolutions, struggles, battles won and lost, and even consumer disappointment, have constituted not merely a political subject but a consumer with a sharp eye that can spot truth and falsity from a mile away even when compelled by forces outside her control to opt in.
While these objections may be valid, we should not so quicky dismiss that political stances are commodities. That is, perhaps it is precisely as consumers with sharp eyes and sharp tongues that we can discern not merely the right product for ourselves but the right political position, standpoint, and perspective. That one can assert their power over mystification is not proof of this power. It is not farfetched to say that the development of what appear to be politically revolutionary stances are blended with consumer trends, as much as political decisions are mixed with corporate interests. If one cannot posit the purity of the political in a capitalist society, one surely cannot posit the purity of the activist stance.
If in seeking a role in the division of labor for survival we have become those roles themselves, can we assume that we do not carry this with us when we blast our demands on the megaphone? Can we with certainty say that the political behavior of the individual is different from her commercial and professional one? Perhaps, the moral fitness once demanded of the worker has acquired support in the political fitness required of each individual. Perhaps, it would not be an exaggeration to say that one must not only show by way of their labor that they wholeheartedly identify with the status quo but must simultaneously oppose it by their words.
These matters become further complicated when one shifts from the abstract terrain of “the political” to concrete, large scale social movements such as Black Lives Matter. When our attention is turned to the long struggle for racial justice in the U.S. are we confronted with the same issues of commodification? When even the New York Times reminds us of the power of Black Lives Matter as the largest movement in U.S. history one wonders if emancipatory efforts have culminated in branding or if perhaps the days of the so-called revolutionary 68’ are not behind us. A rich tradition of Black political thought in the U.S. has taken up and continues to develop these questions. Here, I would like to highlight a figure often marginalized in these discussions today: Bayard Rustin.
In the era of “La Beauté est dans la rue,” Rustin writes: “We are living in an age of revolution—or so they tell us” (25). And, despite the constant hum of revolutionary refrain, a real revolution, is nowhere to be found, and “[a]ny appearance that we are in the grip of a black revolution, then, is deceptive” (26). Critical of the dangers of the illusion of change, while struggling to preserve the wish it expresses, Rustin warns against pseudo-revolutionary praxis in his “The Failure of Black Separatism,” which he wrote in the context of the Civil Rights Movement.
Rustin’s position raises an important question: Why would he, a leader in the Civil Rights Movement and a lifetime activist, express such devastating skepticism? Certainly not because he sought to preach passive resignation or to uphold a kind of “revolution or nothing” position. As it is well known, one of Rustin’s many achievements was to organize, alongside Philip Randolph, and the Negro American Labor Council, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Thus, Rustin’s position cannot be reduced to a kind of uncritical embrace of anti-praxis. Rather, it must be understood as one that warns against the dangers of the illusion of change.
The appearance that we are in the grip of a revolution, for Rustin, is not only deceptive but dangerous insofar as it perpetuates the society one purports to critique. His work presents an alternative to the repeated stance that theory always comes too late, judgmentally entering the stage after praxis is complete. Rustin’s critique of pseudo-activity, to use a term employed by Adorno, embodies an understanding of revolutionary praxis not stripped from critique and theory. Praxis that is revolutionary does not turn its back on theory.
I want to suggest that the revolutionary stance in Rustin’s “The Failure of Black Separatism” is twofold: it affirms the possibility of transformation while simultaneously calling out the optimism of a politics proclaiming that revolution is all around us. Such a stance is critical if it shows how optimism is a veiled illusion of autonomy in the face of utter domination. Such optimism promotes the illusion that things are not as bad as they are and that change is not only possible but always already happening.
For the sake of real change, then, Rustin’s piece critiques the provision of psychological and emotional solutions, or symbolic political gestures, to socio-economic and political problems. Rustin writes: “Since real victories are thought to be unattainable, issues become important in so far as they can provide symbolic victories. Dramatic confrontations are staged which serve as outlets for radical energy but which in no way further the achievement of radical social goals” (27). Addressing the question of black separatism in 1970, he argues that while liberals and leftist may romanticize such politics, “it is ordinary Negroes who will be the victims of its powerlessness to work any genuine change in their condition” (26). He sees no value in symbolic victories. Even more, he calls such symbolic achievements, which leave the worst off in the worst conditions, a “politics of escape rooted in hopelessness” (27). Today, the same can be said for liberal activism, which not only leaves the powerless in a powerless condition but has the audacity to demand that they mobilize their powerlessness in the name of resistance.
Rustin’s critique of community control is particularly poignant. Community control “as an idea is provincial and as a program… extremely conservative,” for him, because it “represents an adjustment to inequality rather than a protest against it” (29). I call attention to this dimension of his critique as it both reveals his uncompromised commitment to total transformation and because it presents an alternative to contemporary theories of politics, such as those rooted in precarity that proceed by rendering precariousness not something to be overcome but the grounds for politics itself.
For Rustin, community control and self-determination within a capitalist society is a delusion. Politics that either romanticizes resistance or renders protest an end in itself responds to real social problems with local non-hierarchical community organizing and not the total transformation of the present. In the call for community building one finds the illusion of change which preserves the world as it is. Thus, Rustin writes: “There is indeed profound truth in the observation that people who seek social change will, in the absence of real substantive victories, often seize upon stylistic substitutes as an outlet for their frustrations” (29). Protest, political action, resistance, to the extent that they become ends in themselves, capitulate in mere rhetoric.
Against theorists who glorify present resistances and overestimate the power of people to challenge existing conditions by protestation or community organizing, Rustin offers a different drummer.
What activists refer to as “revolution,” is for Rustin mostly pseudo-achievement or symbolic victory. He accounts for this exaggerated language as an expression of hopelessness, isolation, and impotence. Such actions, he writes, are the “desperate strivings of the impotent” (26). The need for the illusion that revolution is all around us, for Rustin, must be understood in relation to the conditions that give rise to it. To affirm pseudo-activity as revolutionary is a false affirmation of hope that furthers injustice to the most oppressed. The slogan of “revolution,” Rustin writes, merely “serves to take our minds off an unpleasant reality” (25).
In Rustin’s refusal to call moderate improvements in the condition of Black people in the U.S. revolutionary one finds a critical stance. This stance is not characterized by indiscriminate affirmation of all goings on or by a blind call to action, but rather is guided by a fundamental question: “what kind of political action, guided by what kind of political strategy?” (26). We should not, Rustin warns us, turn to his texts or legacy in search of psychological comfort. Never was his aspiration to offer “a new wave of intellectual excitement,” “a new style of life or means to personal salvation,” or to “appeal to fears of threatened whites” (34). The praxis Rustin envisions in “The Failure of Black Separatism” does not seek “refuge in psychological solutions to social questions” (31). For such solutions, he writes, “are reluctant to confront the real causes of racial injustice which is not bad attitudes but bad social conditions” (31). The lack of psychological comfort in this position is, at the risk of an exaggeration, itself revolutionary. It is revolutionary because it refuses refuge in illusion and instead looks, with resolute hardness, only upon the real conditions of suffering.
Jeta Mulaj
Jeta Mulaj is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at Grinnell College. She works on questions related to capitalism, emancipation, revolution, gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, Eastern European thought, and the Balkans. She is currently working on her book manuscript on reclaiming stability as a revolutionary concept.
