~ THREAD ~

As militant revolts are now being waged seemingly without end in #Chile, #HongKong, #Iraq, #Lebanon, & elsewhere, it's worthwhile clarifying what is at stake in such collective gestures. [1/11]

Historically, most of what we call politics has in fact been contained to the contest/combat between constituted power on the one hand and constitutive power on the other, between those is power and those who fight to seize it. [2/11]

What all of the present revolts against constituted power have in common, however, is actually something they lack: none of them are constitutive. They each have a formally asymmetric relation to power, whether it is expressed as presidents, parliaments, or police.  [3/11]

This new wave of revolts should be understood as *destituent* in nature. Through various practices of disruption, endurance, and solidarity, they all aim to undo the constituted power of the state *and* ward off any possible reconstitution of state power. [4/11]

In this way, these revolts aim to be useless for the operations of power and in turn aim to make power useless. This uselessness is central to escaping the capturing logic of the constituted/constitutive power cycle/structure. [5/11]

Many analysts who wrote about the waves of struggle following the 2008 financial crisis (Occupy, the Arab Spring, the Indignados, etc.) wrote them off as failures because they could only see them as constituent movements that failed to de/reconstitute power [6/11].

What they failed to understand is that those too were destituent revolts that, although they were ultimately defeated in the streets, were laboratories for developing destituent practices and repertoires that we now see being elaborated upon and developed further today. [7/11]

These destituent gestures have become popular precisely at the historical moment that it's also become impossible to imagine any form of power ever being divorced from precaritization, debt, and poverty, from climate catastrophe, and thus from escalating state violence. [8/11]

The wager of these revolts, then, is that destituent practices may eventually render power inoperative, to unravel power's constitution (as the military, as a corporation, as the police, as a politician, etc.) in order to avoid losing what is at stake, which is everything. [9/11]

To fail is to be condemned to be born, to live, and to die under forms of power that, no matter how they are constituted or reconstituted, aim to perpetuate themselves at any cost, even as that cost approaches the loss of most life on Earth. [10/11]

To win is to entirely destitute power, to cancel out all of the ways power presently ab/uses life, and in so doing to create breathing room for diverse and novel forms of living to emerge beyond the capture of domination. [11/11]