"At this present time in America, people are broken. You can look in people's faces, and see that people are struggling emotionally. When you turn on the nightly news and you see just what makes the headlines these days in the US... We have a people who are decaying from the inside. And the only way to change that… I mean, of course there are temporary reliefs to this, but the real change that can fix that is through revolutionary transformation. That's the only way to truly mend those broken souls that you see in the supermarket, sulking about, or going through their daily drudgery, or unable to get off the couch.
I look at Deaton's book, on deaths of despair. What Deaton notices is that one of the things driving the opioid epidemic is that Americans just tend to complain about pain. It's either stomach problems, or back pain, or this phantom pain, this pain that they can't diagnose. Why someone has this stomach ailment, or why someone is suffering from these pains. But it's there. They're really experiencing these things. And if they can't find the real medical cause to it, I think it's a social/political cause. There's something about the various ways that American society produces these creatures who are suffering. And the only way to end that suffering, is to end what this country has become and is."
-Idris Robinson
Mario Tronti on the death of the modern subject, the defeat of the workers movement, and the new horizons of proletarian civil war.
"With Marxism, and with the workers’ movement, this notion of subjectivity became a collective subjectivity, a social subjectivity, a political one. So, I think that the arc of modernity from the singular subject of the subject-individual to the social subject closes the history of the subject as such. This form of presence in history has entered into crisis. My feeling is that it has opened a different history, the possible developments of which are not yet clear. I have the impression that with the emergence of the working-class, of the proletarian subject, of proletarian subjectivity, the history of modernity and the modern subject, or if we want, of subjectivity, was brought to a close. At this point, as far as I’m concerned, the eruption of the working class seems to be more of an endpoint rather than a starting point for modernity. Of course, this does not diminish the importance of the working class. To the contrary, I think that this exalts the working class: it was the force capable of bringing the long and complex development of modern history to its conclusion. Its defeat brings the idea of the subject into crisis without ushering in another form of subjectivity, but seems rather to point toward the end of subjectivity itself.
The type of world that exists, the dominant social model, has assumed a totalizing form. It has come to occupy all spaces, including all those belonging to the human being, such that purely political responses have become inadequate, as they do not respond to the scope of the problem, which is one of totality. Expanding the anthropological dimensions allows for an expansion of possible responses. It opens new spaces of possibility because this type of world and social form, which has assumed this totality, becomes all the more lamentable and thus refutable. Ethical revolt tells you that you must be against the world in as total a way as the reality in front, above, below, or behind you is… There were strong examples of the internalization of this totality into a single individual, and not only individuals but social subjectivities as well. This process of internalization of the animal spirit of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisification of the individual form, also subsumes what little remains of social subjectivity. In the same social subjectivity there is an interiorization of a hostile world, which explains why even collective organizations (made up of individuals) offer the same answers as do individuals. Just as today’s individual surrenders to being just what they are asked to be, i.e., to be bourgeois — if you want to live, and live well, and everyone wants to live well, then you must be bourgeois — collective organizations (the union, the party) also surrender to this imperative. If you want to perform well in this world, then you need to internalize this characteristic of being as you are asked to be. This is what provokes ethical revolt, because there is a process of internalizing what was earlier an external enemy that has now become a more complicated, more dangerous, and more difficult foe.
Today when I think about the state of exception I think of civil war, which is the point at which there is no longer anyone with the capacity to keep a grip on equilibrium. This is why I find so-called pacifist movements to be a bit pathetic. Because the more there is peace, the more there is order, and thus the more there is the capacity for control by those in charge. The only thing that can unhinge this order and this possibility of control is precisely a form of conflict that is so fierce and uncompromising that no one can control it. It’s true that today there is also a use of conflict to instill control; it’s not a coincidence that wars are occurring in the peripheries. We have to think a bit more about the forms of these wars. The form that politics takes at a given moment dictates the corresponding form that war will take. We have to understand this correspondence. This is interesting, because the war is at the margins of global order and at the same time assures that there is order in the center. I don’t know if this has been strategically planned in this way, but it’s a fact that war doesn’t explode in the center of the system anymore.
I’m very interested in what’s happening in Paris. Of course, when I see the explosions of the banlieues I feel happy, because every instance of disruption and disorder is a positive thing. There are many people that aren’t fans of movements because they see only a practice of excessive violence. I instead see them as weak practices: movements don’t have power. And perhaps it’s for this reason that they resort to violence, to gratuitous violence, since violence is always gratuitous. Power is a serious thing, it impacts the great contradictions, it makes itself felt. Power is always organized, thought through, quasi-planned. Struggle only makes an impact when it is organized. Movements need to find their strength. Not a strength based in external politics, but precisely their strength. Movements should become the primary powers of the moment, seeing that political powers have become powerless. Movements should be self-organizing so as to become powerful, not just strong, but powerful. But at the same time, they also need to develop the capacities for longevity and management; I know that this contradicts the very idea of movements, given that once you begin to manage something you also create a form of organization that is no longer a movement. This is an impasse that I myself have not figured out how to resolve.
I really like the idea of destituent power. I think it is a really nice idea. But we have to reason, elaborate, and articulate the discourse a bit, because I think destituent power emerges from the crisis of subjectivity. Subjectivity — especially when it became social subjectivity, whose organization was indeed a possibility and a reality and a practice — was naturally constituent, and a bearer of a positive project. In fact, it linked struggle more to solutions rather than to the reasons for struggle itself. In some sense, this was the logic in which the worker’s movement was trapped, since it often became more about preaching socialism than critiquing capitalism. Put another way, the idea of socialism became more central than the critique of capitalism. If the idea of socialism seem less important to me today, this is because it is possible to make a pure and simple critique of really existing conditions that is strong enough to muster the same capacity for development and mobilization as historical socialism once did. Also because it is not necessary to discern what to do about subaltern classes. The same type of work that we were talking about earlier — fragmented, dispersed, one that is at a completely different level of awareness as compared with traditional work, since we are talking about knowledge work — allows for a more realistic and less ideological discussion. The critique of really existing conditions becomes less messianic and closer to the practice of effective struggle against working conditions rather than about fighting the manager. It is here that the idea of destituent power takes shape. The primacy lies not in building something, but rather in destituting what is already there, to place the existent into crisis. This is an idea that I would insist on.
I’m not sure that democracy is a reproduction organ that is enlarged by the imagination. I see it as a means of reducing the capabilities for human beings’ imagination insofar as the available modes of escaping democracy are relatively few in number, trapping people inside a perpetually unattainable horizon. Then, imagination has other ways of expressing itself, because the world of the market, of consumption, of free time, are all inscribed inside democratic time. Instead, I think that we need to consider the force of imagination in a positive sense, and find a way to recharge — not in the sense of the old idea of ideology, but rather through the deconstruction of ideology — and enlarge life’s horizon of possibilities.
It has been many years now that I have been attempting to reacquaint myself with these territories that had been taken from us by an excess of rationalism (which Marxism also has at its base), in order to reconsider human complexity as something much more difficult to enclose within materialist frameworks. There are various human resources that can be used, and that have been destroyed by, the form of organization proper to modern capitalist society. It is the same type of thought that I’ve been practicing for the last few years, which is an imaginative style of thinking and writing, which is more transversal, allusive, and always seeks to make people think in new ways: not in the style of political economy, whose method replicates the cold calculus of the capitalist market, but in a manner that emphasizes that which is profound in human being. This should be a refrain for social movements: to accuse the world of having reduced the human being to much less than it could be.
It’s so terrific. “The revolution made progress, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements.” I think this is wonderful. To define its immediate achievements as “tragicomic” is the greatest possible critique of reformism. Because everything is reformist: pragmatism, the workers’ movement, and even the Italian communist movement chased after immediate achievements. Defining them as “tragicomic” is extraordinary because that’s exactly what they are. Immediate achievements are ridiculous. The more they are immediate conquests, the more they are tied to the present condition. Immediate conquests will improve the present conditions of work, of life, but they won’t allow you to pass on to other alternative conditions. Rather they lock you inside what you have already achieved. This is the tragedy at the heart of comedy. But Marx continues: “…but by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party.” So, the revolutionary process (or what we could call destituent power) thus consists in creating an adversary, in creating a “united counter-revolution.” It’s not about fighting for the revolution, but rather doing it in such a way as to produce a powerful counter-revolution, that, as you struggle against it, it allows you to go beyond the immediate situation. I find this illuminating. The insurrectionary party will only mature when it has a powerful enemy to combat. The movements needed this; instead of a power that immediately represses them, then tolerates them, then learns to control them, they needed to find a great adversary that would have allowed them to grow.
When the open conflict recedes, there will be nothing for everyone to do but go home, and even if it seems like the most advanced solution, we will all fall asleep again and nothing will happen."
In Fall 2023 and again in Spring 2025, I taught Texas State University’s graduate-level Social and Political Philosophy course. My aim was t
"As Christoph Schuringa has recently argued, the ongoing impact of McCarthyism is largely to blame for professional philosophy, political or otherwise, often operating as little more than “an extended apologia for American liberalism,” exchanging barren concepts like prepackaged commodities in the “marketplace of ideas.” On this account, the current assault on the university did not appear out of thin air, but is rather the culmination of a continuous historical process of repression and censorship that can be detected in even the most unassuming of college lecture halls. Therefore, if a philosophical education is to retrieve its original Socratic mission, then it must be remembered that the gadfly was martyred for engaging in a critical and subversive mode of thought that attacked the most sacrosanct and fiercely guarded conventions of his age."
"American cities have almost unanimously suffered from a very acute concentration of capital, specifically in finance, insurance, and real estate. As a consequence, they have been transformed into complete cultural wastelands. This has a profound anthropological dimension, whereby the city-dwelling animal has internalized the very worst aspects of bourgeoisie society; and its thoughts, feelings, tastes, and behaviors have become homogenous expressions of this emptiness."
-Idris Robinson
Idris Robinson, “How It Might Should Be Done: On Strategic Potentialities Unleashed by the George Floyd Rebellion,” Red May, July 2020
10 theses on the strategic potentialities of riot, insurrection, and revolution unleashed through the George Floyd Rebellion
1. A militant nationwide uprising did, in fact, occur. The progressive wing of the counter-insurgency seeks the denial and the disarticulation of the event.
2. While spearheaded by a black avant-garde, this largely multi-ethnic rebellion managed to spontaneously overcome codified racial divisions. The containment of the revolt aims at reinstating these rigid lines of separation and policing their boundaries.
3. Avoiding the morbid libidinal core of white supremacy, identity politics, intersectionality, and social-privilege discourse comprise the most sophisticated sector of this police apparatus.
4. The insurgency cannot be confined within any well-circumscribed sociological category. By necessarily exceeding all classification, it is an excluded remnant detaching itself from whatever binds together the American wasteland. Consequently, this combatant formation can only be defined in terms of its movement and its development, as that which emerged during the first weeks of the revolt and will dissolve itself upon the full completion of the revolutionary project.
5. The so-called the black leadership, therefore, cannot and does not exist. It is a chimera to be found exclusively in the white liberal imagination.
6. The current crisis derives from a contradiction that proceeds from the two Janus-faced sides of post-Cold War American governance: an inconsistency between the demands of the sovereign imperial State and globalized biopolitical security. As a result, the metropolitan center has begun to experience the chaos and the instability that it has classically sewn within the colonial periphery.
7. As the rebel-slaves did with the periodic outbreaks of yellow fever in Haiti, there is a hidden partisan knowledge to be uncovered surrounding the novel coronavirus pandemic that also can be exploited and weaponized against established power.
8. The insurrection will involve precise coordination from within the constellation of riots: the paradoxical organization of disorder beyond any measure of control. Accordingly, the problem of insurrection has equal parts social and technical dimensions.
9. Materialize the ever-present specter of a second, more balkanized, civil war by fragmenting the fragments of a crumbling empire.
10. The fulfillment of the revolutionary project is ultimately an inescapable ethical obligation that each of us have to the dead and the exploited.
