by Elliot Liu
Domination always implies not that resistance is overcome, but that resistance (some of it at least) is underground, invisible. Oppression always implies the invisibility of the oppressed.
-John Holloway
It’s impossible to talk about social movement today without also examining radical movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. Across the United States, people are critically reengaging with our history in a search for tactics, analysis and lessons, as a look at recent books on the period shows. The opening salvos of the Iraq War confronted social movement in the U.S. with the clearest evidence of empire in decades, and compelled many activists to set aside language addressing the colonization of daily life and the commodification of the earth in favor of a more classically leftist lexicon. In reincarnating formations like Students for a Democratic Society and dusting off watchwords like anti-imperialism, activists are rummaging through the rhetorical and tactical repertoire of an earlier generation.
Unfortunately, some of the repertoire has outlived its shelf life. The post-2003 antiwar movement has yielded a culture of mass marches, centralized nonprofit organizations and party fronts, complemented by its own economy of peace paraphernalia, books and punditry. These mobilizations often target the consciences of an elder generation of politicians and voters, and employ tactics and aesthetics parroted from the Vietnam era (the first antiwar protest I attended in 2003 featured a permitted march accompanied by aging folk musicians on acoustic guitars.) Critically, these mobilizations tend to mimic not the actual, radical, conflictual politics of the 1960s and 1970s, but the 60s / 70s as it has been rewritten by decades of liberal scholarship, opportunist branding and marketing, and recuperation by political parties.
Our tactics since 2003 have raised the consciousness of thousands across the U.S. and bridged generational divides in the streets, but have done little to halt the machinery of global violence. Today, youth in the U.S. understand that celebrity spokespeople and electoral victories can’t answer a flurry of questions unleashed by the current wave of social mobilization. Debate over the direction of U.S. movement is roiling right now in universities, bookstores, churches and living rooms, and it’s compelling young people to study movements of the past along with their elders. But when people my age look back to the era of the Vietnam War, black liberation and student rebellion, we’re also fascinated with marginal histories, forgotten resistance. In particular, we’re intrigued by the fact that underground groups exploded—sometimes literally—into Global North politics after 1968.
Throughout the 60s/70s in the U.S, upheavals in SDS and the Black Panther Party produced the Weather Underground, which pursed a high-profile campaign of bombing and jailbreaks, and the Black Liberation Army, whose members fought a shooting war with police on two coasts. The underground milieu also included groups like the Puerto Rican FALN, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the George Jackson Brigade, while organizations like the Red Brigades in Italy, the Angry Brigade in the UK, and the Red Army Faction in Germany pursued similar strategies. What sort of political and social climate tilled the soil for these underground groups? How would that fervor emerge differently today, in a time of Homeland Security, consensus process and web 2.0?
Wait, what did you say?
If you talk or type excitedly about the underground phenomenon today, most people raise their eyebrows. For some, the term “underground” is such an anachronism that it’s suspect to use the word. Contemporary leftists generally wrestle with the state through the institutionalized bartering of the nonprofit industrial complex, corporatized unions and political parties, or through diffuse networks of resistance. In this context, highly organized clandestine struggle of the kind seen in the 60s / 70s is largely inconceivable (though some groups still wage armed struggle in an effort to replace the state—Maoist insurgencies in India and the Philippines, notably.) And while the undergrounds of yesteryear capture the imagination of today’s young radicals, they’re also subject to criticism.
Young radicals, many of whom identify with the anarchist tradition, often take issue with the historic authoritarianism of underground formations. They recall communist cadres and urban guerillas, organizations with a politico-military structure and rigid chains of command. Forty years ago, formations like these battled the power structure on its own terms, using arms to spar over physical and social territory with bloody results; internally, many groups looked more like the Politburo than Paris ‘68. This was the climate in which Regis Debray claimed: “the guerilla force is the party in embryo.” (Debray, a French academic fascinated with the Cuban revolution, believed so strongly in guerilla strategy that he joined Che Guevara’s ill-fated Bolivian insurgency and was later captured.)
Many young activists find the underground model of the 60s / 70s too similar to the repressive structures of our own society to be truly liberating. Competing toe-to-toe with the state, armed undergrounds had to limit strategic and tactical decisions to an elite cadre and marginalize internal dissent as effectively as the militaries they faced, thereby mirroring the waste of wars conceived by bureaucrats and executed by technicians. Some millenarian guerillas produced kidnappings, executions and orthodoxies to denounce dissenters inside and outside their ranks, and steadily drifted from the popular movements that birthed them. Instead of consensual movement negotiating effective tactics and ethical imperatives, guerilla groups from the Red Brigades to the Shining Path often perpetuated the hierarchy of vanguard/masses, leader/follower, speaker/silenced that defines state politics.
Nonetheless, at the 2006 National Conference on Organized Resistance at American University, Bernadine Dohrn and Laura Whitehorn were invited as keynote speakers for a panel on their involvement in the Weather Underground. When their introducers noted that Weather had bombed the U.S. Capitol in 1971, the crowd erupted with applause. What can we make of this fascination with the 60s / 70s underground? How can we understand the historical authoritarianism of these formations in a way that creates possibilities for resistance and liberation today? I think a useful examination of “the underground” may hinge not on the spectacle of violence, but on the subtleties of power and domination.
Now They See You, Now They Don’t
In the quote that opens this essay, John Holloway implies that oppression doesn’t consist solely of the violence that’s brought down on the oppressed. Instead Holloway says that there’s a more generalized phenomenon going on, one in which the oppressed are made irrelevant, peripheral, trivial. A bullet is the ultimate dismissive gesture, but many others exist, and we witness them in our daily lives. I experienced them in Reagan-era Michigan, where phrases like “tree hugger,” “feminazi” or simply “liberal” were used to trivialize protest and political criticism—in effect, to make it invisible. The act of making-invisible, of making-silent, is absolutely characteristic of oppression whether it occurs in a guerilla cadre or a congressional hearing.
Practices that make others invisible, which people often call marginalization, are crucial to the forces that quash resistance in U.S. At one extreme, the mainstream media belittles antiwar demonstrators as ineffective whiners, minimizing the impact of protest and creating a sense of impotency where there might otherwise be rebellion. This maneuver helps governments maintain aging facades of legitimacy and democracy, as presidents and pundits let marginalized people speak knowing they won’t be heard, and then praise each other’s tolerance of democratic dissent. Many young people in the U.S. saw this for the first time on February 15th, 2003, when what may have been the largest demonstrations in human history were patently ignored by the powers that be.
At the other extreme, radicals face the terrifying reprisals of non-state groups like the Minutemen or the Klan, alongside those of the state apparatus. In every case marginalization is grease for the gears: it helps the public swallow emergency laws, shock jocks to advocate attacks on dissidents, police to sanction the lynch mob, and courts to whitewash the killing. This rock-and-a-hard-place game works to ensure that dissent leaves the status quo untouched, by force or by farce. The further one gets from the center of the empire, the more overtly violent marginalization becomes, but the goal is the same. Certain voices will make decisions and the rest will be ushered quietly offstage—and into shantytowns, prisons and detainment camps around the world.
Methods of silencing people, much subtler than the gun or the guillotine, pervade every relationship in our society—not only in those institutions we oppose, but also in our own (dis)organizations, communities and families. While from one perspective marginalization comes about through the threat of violence, from another perspective it is the daily maintenance of a powerful, visible center and a powerless, veiled periphery in our relationships with one another that enables violence as a phenomena. Even in spaces where overt violence doesn’t exist, these power relations still can. If I object to something at a collective meeting, for instance, I probably won’t get clubbed, but I may still be marginalized or ignored. Often the spaces in which we plan to overthrow domination are the same ones in which people of color are tokenized or women are sidelined if they criticize an established order.
None of these issues are abstract. As young radicals search for ways to make their own practice egalitarian, the butchery in Iraq and the degradation of our planet continues at breakneck speed. In this climate, people will employ whatever means of resistance seem effective—including tactics drawn from the 60s / 70s that seem militant or academically troubling. The more contentious social movement becomes, the more danger that groups will seize upon a “one right way” and condemn others as reactionary, reproducing the marginalization of broader society. But while marginalization can be reenacted in some forms struggle, it can just as easily be subverted and overcome. One way to talk about this is through the language of infra-politics, a category that has garnered some attention recently in the activist-academic overlap.
Wars Of The Flea
Infra-politics examines the minutiae of resistance, through informal practices that aren’t usually labeled “political” as such. Slaves engaging in sabotage, women subverting gender norms, and queer folks developing their own internal language are all small acts of opposition that occur under the radar of the bosses and patriarchs. These practices usually get placed in non-political categories and labeled things like “crime” or “indecency.” Because infra-politics uses a different language than conventional politics—overturning domination on small scales rather than competing for traditional hallmarks of political power—it’s often as invisible to the powerful as the oppressed people who employ it. In this sense infra-politics is an inherently clandestine practice.
It would be silly to equate infra-politics in the U.S. with an organized underground. There’s a world of difference between the Weather Underground bombing a police station and people catcalling a squad car as it rolls down the block, but the two are related. An example from the 60s / 70s: by continually evading capture, groups like the Weather Underground demonstrated that they had broad sympathy and support. The longer Weather stayed underground, the more legitimate their claim that an underground existed “in every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks and townhouse where kids [were] making love, smoking dope and loading guns,” and the more people were encouraged to collude and act against the power structure in a similar manner. In this way, relatively small guerilla actions encouraged much broader subversion of the system, and were a catalyst for militancy in the youth culture. Weather’s armed propaganda acted as a kind of trickle-down conspiracy against U.S. imperialism.
Infra-politics is precisely the cultivation of this conspiracy (you could call it autonomous action) from the bottom up. Even the most seemingly insignificant clandestine act plants the seeds of pervasive movement. When a cashier catches her co-worker pocketing snacks on the job, and nods to affirm her understanding and solidarity, an underground is born. Soon these workers could be appropriating company equipment for their own means, or networking with their peers. Acts like these overturn our sense of marginality, our sense that the decisions governing daily life occur elsewhere, by defining the terms on which we will live. In refusing to fight the power structure by its own logic, infra-politics also avoids detection and spreads laterally, flaring up in unexpected mass rebellions. Insurrections like these kept NCOs awake in Vietnam, and surprised slave masters as they sipped their sweet tea.
Infra-political resistance abounded in 60s / 70s, but it rarely held the spotlight. Notably, pervasive rebellion within the ranks of the U.S. military, often cited as a deciding factor in ending the Vietnam War, developed on a largely informal level. On military bases and in the war zone, soldiers developed common understandings that led to combat refusals, sabotage and clandestine attacks on their superiors. G.I.s accomplished most of this without an umbrella organization directing the insurrection; in fact, many groups had only peripheral knowledge of how widespread the rebellion really was. In a 1971 issue of Scanlan’s Monthly, a short-lived radical publication from the early 70s, veterans described their comrades assassinating superior officers, sabotaging military equipment, going on patrol without ammunition, colluding with the Vietcong to survive ambushes, and eventually staging outright rebellions at forward bases, all without the avenues of a formalized underground organization.
This kind of rebellion operates today in different arenas and on different scales. Oppressed communities regularly engage in invisible, small-scale resistance as a matter of physical and emotional survival, and groups privileged or exoticized by the power structure do the same whenever they exploit their ability to “pass” for radical ends. Ethel, an elder anarchist in New York, often volunteers to block streets or drop banners because, as a senior citizen, she’s subject to very little scrutiny from the police. Ethel uses the image projected onto her by the power structure as a cover from which to hit it back. Clandestine action allows her to aikido the marginalization she experiences in broader society, turning “we can speak but we won’t be listened to” into “let’s speak and conspire while the powerful aren’t listening.”
Infra-politics is more decentralized, and perhaps more prevalent, than the “underground” commonly associated with the late 1960s and 1970s. Three decades ago, clandestine organizations formed after years of vocal protest, following unprecedented police violence and state attacks. These groups surely crystallized the rebellion that permeated U.S. society at the time, but in naming only the most formal organizations of the 60s and 70s “the underground,” historians can obscure the general insurgency that produced them. The expansive networks of autonomous spaces and countercultures that gave birth to underground activity in the 60s / 70s are hard to present in a coherent historical narrative. It’s easier to describe discrete organizations being driven underground after 1968, as if underground movement were a product of State violence, and not an extension of an insurrectionary culture.
The underground I’m interested in—the underground already fomenting in the U.S.—is both pervasive and persistent. Like water simmering on a stove, it exists at any moment as a churning substratum of resistance, and at any moment it may start to boil and overflow its bounds. A recruitment center is attacked in Ohio; a police van is defaced in Queens; a hole is cut in the border fence. By degree, clandestine acts start to occur in concert, creating networks of mutual support and inspiration. Participants avoid acting through public organizations, as doing so would provide a formulaic adversary for State repression. Without explicit targets, the powerful interpret these acts as part of the minstrel show and overlook the insurrection brewing under their noses. In this way infra-political networks hollow out the power structure from below, even as resistance is deemed isolated and non-political by the voices above.
Is Subversion Enough?
If guerilla warfare entails the risk of dogmatic violence and domination, decentralized underground movement entails the risk shortsightedness. In 2005, seething anger in the impoverished suburbs of Paris blossomed into full-scale riots (the largest since 1968) but there was little sense that the youth engaged in open insurrection against the French government would connect critiques of racism to those of, say, gender and patriarchy. For small resistances (small in terms of the time and social engagement they require) to develop into a sustained attack on power in all its forms, infra-political insurgents will have to experiment with new forms and methods, linking the subversion of repressive power with the subversion of oppressive norms and social relations.
The swarm tactics that emerged from the Petri dish of counter-globalization already provide examples of functioning underground structures that approach these goals. At the 2004 Republican National Convention protests, spokescouncils, clearing houses and open meetings typified the planning for public demonstrations, while closed affinity groups and informal networks planned banner drops, lockdowns and property damage with greater security. Young people participated in both environments, and tried in both to embody the participatory methods of a free society. Anti-authoritarian groups consensed on creative tactics in a challenging environment, and developed complex roles and arrest plans according to the comfort levels of their participants. In this way, actions targeting specific apparatuses of power simultaneously dismantled the coercion and privilege of its participants.
This model fought the World Trade Organization to a standstill in 1999, but it’s still adapting to the post-9/11 climate. Occasional, ritualized mass mobilizations now provide fat targets for security forces with bloated budgets and a taste for blood; today the State can mobilize resources against popular protest on a scale that would’ve seemed outlandish a decade ago (in 2004, there were more police in New York City than there were troops in Afghanistan.) Actions focused around a single event and limited to a particular timeframe can also produce sectarian divisions as centralized organizations vie for limited resources. And if militant action occurs, it can expose even legal demonstrations to the brutal reaction of an increasingly militarized police force.
These are reasons not to retire our protest culture, but to radically expand it. Ratcheting up our resistance to war and ecocide will entail carrying resistance outside the socially legislated boundaries into which it has been corralled—and one way to do this is through underground movement. If marches can be organized without recourse to a central committee or charismatic leader, underground networks can be organized without a chain of command using the anti-authoritarian tools we already possess. If oppression implies the invisibility of the oppressed, it also implies the ubiquity of infra-political struggle outside the formalities of party, union and peace march.
Clandestine networks like these are already a reality, and unlike the undergrounds of the 60s / 70s, young radicals have the working knowledge to make them participatory, pervasive and sustainable. Underground movement exists today not as a particular organizational or tactical commitment, but as a common understanding and ongoing conversation among everyone fighting against domination. One doesn’t have to choose between underground and aboveground organizations, but can instead participate in two tendencies, traveling back and forth, between the world and the infra-world, experiencing how each supports the other.
I believe we need this venue for our energies, and that, collectively, we need underground networks in this hemisphere to compliment and reverberate with aboveground formations. We need networks to help soldiers escape the military or spread the good news of peace and resistance; networks to protect and assist so-called “illegal” human beings as they cross arbitrary political borders; networks to support the health of women, queer people and communities of color outside the ledgers of medical profiteers and drug cartels; networks to subvert, confuse, attack and destroy the machinery of global violence that tries, and will try, to obliterate all of us—for one dollar more.
Elliott Liu is a writer from East Lansing, Ann Arbor, and Flint, Michigan. He currently lives in the Bronx, where he works with the Anarchist People of Color network and the Regeneracion childcare collective. His poetry and prose have been published in Post Road and Fifth Estate. You can find more of his writings at linesblog.com.
i Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy. Cleaver, Kathleen and Katsiaficas, George. Routledge (2001); Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years 1960-1975. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. City Lights (2002); The Power Of The People Is The Force Of Life: Political Statement Of The George Jackson Brigade. Abraham Guillen Press/Arm the Spirit (2002); We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords. Melendez, Miguel and Torres, Jose. St. Martin’s (2003); Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. Varon, Jeremy. University of California (2004); Street-Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. Ali, Tariq. Verso (2005); Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. Berger, Dan. AK Press (2005); Bring the War Home: The Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground. Anarchist Action Collective (2005);
ii PACE flags, UFPJ, ANSWER, MoveOn.org, Air America, Robert Greenwald, Michael Moore and so on.
iii Pg. 106. Debray, Regis. Revolution in the Revolution?: Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America, Grove Press, 1967.
iv Even against those of relative privilege, the state can get away with a lot. Consider the 2001 police riot in Genoa that left trails of blood on the walls, or the razor-wire pens in Pier 57, where hundreds were held without charge for days during the 2004 Republican National Convention.
v Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Scott, James C. Yale (1986); Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Scott, James C. Yale (1992); Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. Kelley, Robin D.G. Free Press (1994); Everyday Resistance as Strategy. Kevin Van Meter. Recorded at the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition Conference, 2005. [http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=4713]
vi Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground 1970 – 1974. Dorn, Ayers, Jones, ed (2006).
vii Consider the veterans featured in David Zeiger’s 2006 film Sir! No Sir!, who remarked that they had no idea other soldiers were resisting as they were. For more on rebellion within the U.S. military during Vietnam, see Cortright, David. Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance in the Vietnam War. Haymarket Books. 2005.
viii For excerpts from this issue of Scanlan’s Monthly, blacklisted in the U.S, visit [http://www.historyisaweapon.com].
ix Clandestine groups made the same mistake at the time. Only after their “New Morning, Changing Weather” communiqué could the early Weather Underground Organization see itself, not as the lone vanguard in a sad milieu of bought-off reformists, but as one purposeful expression in a broad web of clandestine struggle that was already taking place—a fact proven by the extensive networks that supported Weather in their transition to clandestinity.
x The Earth and Animal Liberation Fronts provide an interesting example here. While engaging in underground actions in a radically decentralized manner, the ELF and ALF still identify their actions by name and try to define a cohesive political mission. Infra-political resistance is just as decentralized—but it generally includes little to no messaging beyond the actions themselves. Sabotage is made comprehensible through a multiplicity of small social interactions rather than through manifestoes, and no press release is required because militancy is already comprehensible to a broad swath of the public.
xi Consider just a few of the underground-type actions that took place in the past month: RAAN Firebombs Police Cruiser in Lexington, Kentucky (USA). [http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/4746]. Surveillance Camera Dismantled in Bloomington. [http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/4736]. US Bank Window Broken in Santa Cruz. [http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/08/01/18521843.php]. Spanaway: Military Recruitment center attacked. [http://seattle.indymedia.org/en/2008/08/268183.shtml].
