Overcoming Internal Pacification by Emily Brisette and Mike King : An Essay Review
The essay is written against the backdrop of Occupy Oakland, a movement, aside from anti-capitalist agenda that has been a thread in every Occupy movement, also largely centered on complaints about alleged police misconduct. Relationships between protesters and police were especially frayed at Occupy Oakland. Emily Brisette and Mike King criticized how the larger movement cope with this circumstances, citing internal pacification as a cause of decentering the objective of the movement. Both Emily Brisette and Mike King are sociologist and activist based in Bridgewater State University, Massachusetts.
They opened the essay with a strong claim that struggles for social change are struggles not just against contemporary configurations of power or modes of distribution and exploitation, but also against their internalization: against the internalized belief in the naturalness and permanence of the existing order, and the way it shapes the categories through which we apprehend the world and understand ourselves as subjects. It is in confronting and shaking loose these shackles of internalizations that transformations could happened. I found this passage interesting, cause in this class we have talked about the media framing of the Occupy quite often, pointing out guns to late night TV shows hosts that sees the movement as barbaric anarchists, when internalized belief also makes activist within the movement to play with rules of the game of the establishment, instead of dismantling it.
The supposed objectives of Occupy movement is quite radical, which is challenging the political and economic inequalities caused by late capitalism/neoliberalism, but the degree of the transformation wanted by the people in Occupy movement is varied, some want to transform the status quo altogether, and some want to check its more egregious excesses only. Then, with these two spectrums, where should Occupy Oakland based its movement better, realistically? Should the Occupy activists talk to and work with the City Councils and Police Officers in order to make the demands answered? Brisette and King argued otherwise.
They claim that all of us have work to do to confront the way our thinking, because the existing order dictates how we define the terrain of struggle. This is internal pacification, various conscious and unconscious ways we internalize systems of power that seek to dominate us, and so we become the desiring agents of our own subjugation. This process, validation-seeking, self-restraining, value-checking to the existing order essentially constraints and limits our ability to be radical and imagine radical social change. Pre-figurative politics is less about making a world where ideals are imagined, but rather about how do we make tweaks and compromise with powerful actors and systems. We often have a hard time believing that alternative world is possible. Internal pacification is far more suffocating in a way that it entrenched in the way we produce idea. It’s in the realm of abstract, not physical. Brisette and King equated this phenomenon with the plot of The Matrix. The people who remain plugged into the dream world cannot think beyond the terms imposed by the existing order and are invested in its preservations, despite glaring exploitation and dehumanization. If the existing order is threatened, thus disturb expectations, any one of them can morph into an agent, an enforcer of the status quo. We see this all the time, with the so called radicals joining the establishment, because alternative politics is simply out of the question. Elected officials like AOC or NY Times journalists are essentially agents, enforcer of the status quo.
Then, Brisette and King ground their deliberation in the context of Occupy Oakland. The state has the monopoly of violence, including the definition of violence, and they define it as whatever acts that is disruptive and threatening of entrenched power. This would means, equating property destruction with violence partakes in the state and capital’s definition of violence, privileging property over human life. Brisette and King then argued that the definition of violence should be restricted to that which causes harm to people and living things. It would include home foreclosures that create precariousness around the basic human need for shelter. During Occupy Oakland, anti-capitalist march targeted bank windows, and yet some within the march has morped into agents, vigorously defending the sanctity of corporate property by tackling and photographing those thought to be involved in property destruction. They are doing the police’s works and dividing the movement, solely because the sanctimonious value of corporate property has been internalized. Peaceful protesters then has morphed into agents of order, a people’s militia for the police state.
It reminds me of our readings on violence within social movements and how “nonviolence” protects the state. The essay frames this mode of thinking with protection racketeering argument from a Sociologist, Charles Tilly, “A state is essentially an organized crime that runs a protection racket by offering to protect people from a threat that it create.” This protection offering from real or imagined threats becomes a key justification for the state’s prerogative power, its monopoly on violence. Those seen to be outside the protection of state authority become vulnerable to attack, not primarily because threat from which they need protection is credible, but because it might delegitimate the protector through the example of their refusal. The logic then get reproduced within the movements whenever someone seek to protect others from “violent elements”. It is, claimed Bassett and King, utterly paternalistic.
Brisette and King essentially call for a movement that is able to not let public opinion and existing structured disciplined our capacity for action. Seeking to avoid offense is an inherently conservative position, hence creating revolutionary pole in opposition to the status quo and embraced a polarizing approach is needed. Our goal is to harness that reality, painting a portrait of the existing order in terms that make its destruction not only desirable, but necessary, justified, and imperative.
Questions
1. Do you all think that radical/revolutionary politics would be a better fit to contemporary social movement when neoliberalism has coopted every corner of life? If it is better, then why? What would you think be the cost if social movements will swing to the radical side of things?
2. Bassett and King claims that revolutionaries need to reflect peoples capacity to act politically, outside of the bounds of what has been deemed acceptable. Do you have any ideas to strengthen the faith in mass politics? What should activists do, say in the situation of Occupy Oakland, to build trust on and to each others?
