Refusal of the Refusal

Protesters in Seattle, November 29, 1999. Photo: Carwil Bjork-James. Creative Commons license.

Many commentators describe the present conjuncture as a polycrisis. We are still living in the aftermaths of the financial crisis of 2008, which developed into a longer economic crisis with inflation and slow growth—what economists now refer to as secular stagnation; in fact Marxists have long argued that we are going through a phase of shrinking productivity that has already extended for five decades. We have on our hands the climate crisis, which seemingly matters to politicians only when they attend Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings. We then experienced the Covid-I9 pandemic, which suddenly changed everything for almost everyone. The reaction to all these crises—“the epochal crisis,” as Nancy Fraser summarizes them—has been to accelerate them, much to the astonishment of the last surviving global liberal forces of the 1990s.1 Both Bill Clinton’s and Hardt and Negri’s visions of a post-national or cosmopolitan empire characterized by US hegemony or by the multitude’s never-failing capacity to invent are in ruins. The only game that remains is that of gaining access to state offices in order to advance one’s own particular faction of the local capitalist class, as when Trump favored the arms, energy, and finance sector of American capital after his election victory in 2016 or when he erected a veritable racket with Musk and the authoritarian tech broligarchy after his second election in 2024. In countries such as the United States it is hard to see the state as anything but special groups of armed men, as Friedrich Engels put it.2 Little is left of the idea of the state as a common good or instrument of welfare for the masses. In many places it is difficult to distinguish between politicians and organized crime. Everyone is desperately fighting to amass a giant a pool of money while waiting for the next big economic crisis to hit or for the geopolitical dispute to expand from proxy and trade wars to actual military conflicts.

This “objective dissolution”—the structural violence of racial capitalism, where capitalist development is in equal measure underdevelopment and exclusion—can no doubt continue for a very long time. But it can also be challenged and given a different direction. It can be qualified and turned into a completely different kind of dissolution, which would spell the end of the capitalist destruction that the world suffers—and indeed has suffered for far too long. In three small books, the Invisible Committee has described the scope of the transformation that the many mass protests are tasked with. It is not just a question of small or large changes to society as it has existed since the Second World War. As the Committee explains, what is at stake is an anthropological transformation: an awful lot has to change, both at a societal and at a personal level. For Westerners, this kind of work involves a massive dose of self-criticism. “Inasmuch as ‘being someone’ always comes down finally to the recognition of, the allegiance to, some institution, inasmuch as succeeding involves conforming to the reflection that you’re shown in the hall of mirrors of the social game, the institution has a grip on everyone through the Self.”3 To paraphrase James Boggs, an African American revolutionary and factory worker, inside every Westerner is accumulated all the racial-colonial violence that has made possible the technological advances that have created our current welfare and police state.4 To dismantle this violence that we all harbor, together with all the racist class alliances that have sustained and expanded it throughout history, will be as extensive as the fight against the capitalist economy. Hakim Bey once described this task as the greater and lesser jihad, the greater being the desubjectivization, the radical transformation of one’s self, and the lesser the suppression of money in all its forms and of the economy as a specialized field of human activity—in short, the end of waged labor.5

In his descriptions of the Iranian Revolution published as a series of newspaper articles in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Michel Foucault noted how an uprising can be an inner journey.6 “It is risking no longer being oneself.”7 This is why Foucault chose to label the events in Iran an uprising and not a revolution. If a “revolution” is a socio-material transformation in which the ownership of the means of production changes hands from one class to another, what happened on the streets of Tehran, Qom, and elsewhere was different. For Foucault, what mattered was how the million-strong demonstrators rejected the regime’s way of identifying them:

In rising up, the Iranians said to themselves—and this perhaps is the soul of the uprising: Of course, we have to change this regime and get rid of this man [the Shah] … We have to change the whole country, the political organization, the economic system, the foreign policy. But, above all, we have to change ourselves. Our way of being, our relationship with others, with things, with eternity, with God, etc., must be completely changed, and there will only be a true revolution if this radical change in our experience takes place.8

In retrospect, it is clear that what happened in Iran in 1979 was also a revolution that ended with Khomeini’s taking power and establishing a repressive theocracy alongside the reactionary Islamist movement he led. But before Khomeini’s counteroffensive destroyed the workers’ councils, Foucault saw something else, which he described as a subjective uprising. It was not class struggle and political emancipation in the tradition of the French and Russian revolutions that the philosopher glimpsed during his visits to Iran. He described the revolutionary events as a displacement of the identity of the protesters, a transformation, a disruption that affected people “to the point of renouncing their own individuality, their own subject position.”9

We see something similar taking place in the new protests. These are protests, occupations, demonstrations and encampments that do not take place according to a preestablished political program, but instead reject the political order in its totality. All political self-evidence is abandoned. Away with the old regime, as the Tunisian protesters shouted. Away with all the oppressive institutions, big and small. Even when the mass protests take place around an identity, as in the rejection of anti-Black violence in the George Floyd revolt, there is a displacement wherein all the different identities dissolve and become what we can call, with Agamben, the “whatever singularity.”10 The incineration of the third police precinct in Minneapolis and of the city hall in Reno, Nevada, and all the looting that took place in countless cities—none of these expressed demands for a less racist police or for body cams on officers. What happened in the streets was a radical refusal of state institutions and identities of late-capitalist society—a transgression of the representations and self-representations that are used to separate us from one another and from ourselves. The exaggerated attempt to conflate protests like the George Floyd revolt with demands and make them a matter of identities, make them someone’s, testifies to the fundamental insecurity of the state. The images of Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic members of Congress kneeling with kente scarves in the Capitol building, and the images of plainclothes officers removing protesters from Lafayette Square so Trump could pose with a Bible in hand in front of St John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, speak volumes. The state is also subject to spectacular conditions and must constantly facilitate capital’s increasingly exaggerated destruction and production of identity. When suddenly there is a rupture and many refuse to participate in this process, the state begins to stagger, sends more police into the streets, and stages mind-numbing photo ops to contain the refusal within the already established structure.

Adrian Wohlleben has described what happens when a protest transcends itself.11 A protest crosses a threshold and achieves what Wohlleben describes as “strategic autonomy.” In other words the protest gains its own agency, lets go of its starting point, and becomes about much more than what the initial mobilization was about. Examples of such processes are legion in the new protest cycle: Macron quickly abandoned his petrol tax, but that in no way made the Yellow Vests go home. And in Hong Kong protesters continued their actions after Carrie Lam postponed the extradition bill they were protesting against. In both cases, the protests metamorphosized and became much larger. It therefore made no difference when the state rolled back its taxes or its laws. The protests continued unabated. It was as if the protesters realized that they could get away with doing things they were otherwise prevented from doing. It became possible to share the world in a completely different way, beyond any idea of crime and property rights. As Wohlleben writes: “Wherever the virtual coordinates of the antagonism shift, no backtracking is possible.”12 The French sociologist Romain Huët describes this as “the vertigo of riots,” in which there is an “ontological opening” and the fixed structures of the world become unstable or begin to crack.13

As in the case of the Arab Spring, the Yellow Vests, or Argentina 2001, only after the protests have taken place is it possible to reconstruct a causality, even if the latter will always be slightly skewed or reductive. Labor market reforms, fuel taxes, or austerity policies are never the real causes; or they might be, once enough people take to the streets and refuse, allowing for a condensation to occur that then explodes. “None of these dissimilar memories can be understood as a cause, for they only act as such once they have entered under the dynamic that actualizes them.”14 There is a shift, causal connections dissolve, and another space opens up in the protest. This is what Foucault sensed in Tehran in 1979 and what Walter Benjamin and Furio Jesi both noted in their analyses of the German Revolution of 1919.15 Homogeneous, chronological, and abstract time is suspended in mass protests when people refuse.

In a series of texts drawing upon Frantz Fanon, Cecil Taylor, and Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten describes a paradoxical process of self-abolition in which the slave rejects the denial of freedom.16 The Black slave is the paradigmatic example of an individual denied subjectivity. With a reference to anti-colonialism and Black feminism, Moten conceives of the struggle against the enslavement of people from Africa as a refusal of this refusal. When the Black slave escapes—Moten often mentions Harriet Jacobs—that is not an act of liberation through which she aspires to become a subject and a citizen and thereby achieve political recognition and legal status. It is a refusal of the entire political, economic, legal, and scientific order that produces her as an object—the order that produces Blackness as radical exclusion, the impossibility of being a subject with self-awareness and agency. Black fugitivity is an act of resistance that avoids recognizing the structure, an act in which the Black person is always already flesh, a body without legal status that cannot enter into the struggle for political recognition.

Moten’s analysis is a contribution to the understanding of refusal as a radical shift in which the need to be a subject is loosened and problematized—as when Fannie Lou Hamer radically questions what it means to be a US citizen and attempts to run for the Democratic nomination in Mississippi in 1964, but the following year participates in demonstrations against the Vietnam War.17 Hamer challenges anti-Black racism, according to which she cannot participate in political discussions, but she also rejects the entire structure on which it rests, and thus the United States as a racial-capitalist war state. In so doing, she questions the notion of freedom itself and asks: What if this freedom is actually a mechanical part of the very structure that constantly destroys all the worlds that could exist but never see the light of day? What if the notion of freedom and the idea of humanity it defines are actually a prison? In doing so, according to Moten, she rejects the freedom she has been denied. She refuses to exist as a subject. She escapes the bounded singular subject and becomes something else.

This radical refusal of misery and oppression is reflected in the many demonstrations, riots, revolts, and occupations of the new protest cycle. Everywhere people take to the streets and refuse. They do so from different vantage points, of course—there is a difference between a white cis-gender male body in the United Kingdom and a Black trans body in the United States or a brown lesbian body in Mexico; but on the streets they are united in refusing this world and its models of sovereignty.

It is difficult to avoid being caught in a deadly dialectic with the state, where it remains the horizon of all your gestures, whether these take the form of compromises or militant actions. With Jacobs and Hamer, we can say that refusal must be a refusal of refusal. The state always “offers” something other than what is being fought for, and it is not the state that the new disobedient subjects are interested in. It is wrong that we cannot exist without it and its subject forms. It is no longer a question of becoming a revolutionary, even less a leftist or an activist. The new protests are no longer about getting recognized by institutions or securing a share in running the whole thing. Power is something to be avoided, not something to aspire to or fight for. The refusal of refusal extends the struggle beyond reformist or terrorist dead ends and suspends the heated struggle for identity. We take to the streets for Palestine and for Black lives, but something other than the oppressed and oppressive representations emerges when we find one another there, together: new forms of life that cannot be recognized by late capitalism’s diverse modes of control and necropolitics.

What is really new in the mass protests that continue to take place is that no one believes they have discovered, in this new bubbling-over of forces and ideas, the birth of a new party, as has always been the case throughout the twentieth century—not even in events like May 1968 or 1977 in Bologna, where the old parties were being violently refused. This is precisely what we must affirm today: the absence of a party, with all that this implies. True, many people still try to recall, and thus revive, old organizational and party theories.18 But the movement of refusal is the negation of this attempt. It is what we hear in the constant cry that all the leaders must go. The refusal is so massive that it points towards a radical transformation, the end of the world as we know it. There should be nothing left when the protests are over—not even a small annex or some extension from which a new power can emerge and impose its laws. As Marcello Tarì puts it, “There is no necessity of power, only a decadent tradition that continues to postulate it.”19 This is the perspective of the movement of refusal: the concrete dismantling of all laws and all the forms of power that maintain them. A refusal of refusal, or an annihilation of nothing. This is the task of the Refusalist International.

Excerpted from Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, The Refusalist International: A Theory of the New Protest Cycle, out now from Polity.