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*** Cede the Collective***
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- The fluidity of their struggle trades off with structural analysis – turns the case
- Collective Key - Extension
- Borderlands Doesn’t Solve - Extension
- Institutions Solve
*** Cede the Collective***1NCTheir focus on the inner struggle for liberation is doomed to fail. Institutional, political and collective struggles are essential to liberatory resistanceOrozco-Mendoza PhD Student Department of Political Science @ UMass-Amherst 2008 Elva Fabiola “Borderlands Theory: Producing Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldúa” Masters Thesis submitted to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008-175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf By making the struggle inner, Anzaldúa puts an excessive responsibility on the individual herself in finding her liberation. Yet, since people experience freedom, or its absence, in the public sphere, in the quest for liberation, the inner self has to realize that the struggle is not only against the inner demons, fears, or traumas, but also against society and its social and political institutions, i.e. the state and the economic sector. In this realm, it is important to remember that identity construction is not an exclusive personal matter, but rather it involves an individual’s perception of herself and her interaction vis-à-vis those against she defines herself. In other words, since Borderlands theory attempts to liberate the self from imposed identities, one needs to be clear that such liberation would not be possible if one does not directly confront the structure of power that participate directly in shaping one’s identity in one way or another. Thus, although Anzaldúa states that the struggle is to be directed against the dominant culture (white males), Anzaldúa misses the opportunity to challenge the institutions that the white culture created to institutionalize domination. In doing so, Anzaldúa also misses the opportunity to challenge one of the most important entities that creates, regulates, and promotes those institutions, namely, the state. The state apparatus widely advanced the ideologies of the Monroe Doctrine, the Manifest Destiny, the Proposition 187, etc. While commenting on Patchen Markell’s Bound by Recognition, Vazquez-Arroyo argues that: The state is frequently a constitutive actor in the politicization of identity, either by its own logics of legitimation or by means of its role in the political economy. It is not innocent to the managing and racialization of identities in capitalist societies either. In fact, the recognition of its legitimacy often relies on the production and management of differences (Vazquez-Arroyo, 2004: 9). Thus, if the state plays a prominent role in politicizing identities, any theory or projects of resistance directed to change or create a new identity needs not only to call accountable the figure state, but also to confront it and seek to influence it in a direct form. It is through the state that domination is legitimized and worked out even in the so-called democratic states. State’s apparatuses through their institutions, policies, rules, laws, etc., have an important participation in determining what is legal and what is not, what is just and what is not and also whose rights get to be protected and whose not. Consequently, in seeking significant freedom, it is important to pay close attention to those political institutions that represent us and critically evaluate their complicity in promoting the privilege or oppression of certain groups. Thus, although I do consider the freedom of the self important, it is hard to argue against Arendt on this point since the freedom of the colonized has been erased in the public sphere, meaning that it is in the public space where freedom must be sought, fought, and recuperated. In this vein, colonized people must not only resist domination, imposition and the like. They must insert themselves in the city, in schools, in hospitals, in congresses, in government offices, in bars, in galleries. In short, the colonized must exist in every single place that claims to be public since it is there where freedom matters. However, in favor of Anzaldúa I will say that she did not fail to see the relevance of having freedom in public spaces for stating that would be untrue. Yet, her concern was first in liberating the self in order for that self to determine what kind of freedom was more important. The fluidity of their struggle trades off with structural analysis – turns the caseVenator-Santiago Assistant Professor Latino Politics, Public Law, and Political Theory @ UConn 2008 Charles R. “Huntington's White Patriotism and Anzaldua's Brown Nationalism” FIU Law Review 33 Hein Online Like Huntington's Anglo-Protestant founding myth, Anzaldua suggests that the core culture of Chicanos can be traced to the Aztec homeland, and, more importantly, all Chicanos should rescue this core culture that has been threatened by artificial physical, cultural, and psychological borders. Anzaldua's representation of the founding racial myth describes the "Aztecas del norte" as a single nation or indigenous tribe, which today would be known as Chicanos.4 ° More importantly, Anzaldua's narrative also calls for the re-conquest of the mythical homeland: "We have a tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks. Today we are witnessing la Migraci6n de los pueblos mexicanos, the return odyssey to the historical/mythological Atzldn. This time, traffic is from south to north."'41 Ironically, despite her recognition of the brutal nature of the Aztec empire, Anzaldfia is willing to use this historical representation of the indigenous subject as the starting point of the founding of Atzlan.42 Rather than taking the contemporary ethos of the Indian, the Mexican, or the Chicana as a starting point for a politics that responds to present needs and concrete forms of oppression, Anzaldua chooses an alien myth.43 This myth, like most myths, neglects to engage the present on its own terms, and ultimately leaves us with a story that depoliticizes the struggle of Chicanas and Latino/as more generally. Stated differently, rather than framing a political position that engages oppressive and exploitative institutions, the reader is left with a therapeutic option-acquire a new consciousness.
Chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for not acculturating. This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity-we don't identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don't totally identify with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness.45 Again, rather than engaging a politics of concrete, material exploitation, the reader is left with ambiguities and fluid metaphors that will somehow empower the oppressed. I would like to see how this new consciousness would empower a migrant who is being treated like an animal by a foreman in a sweatshop and/or a border patrol agent. Anzaldua's argument becomes nothing more than a poetic inspiration that seeks to create a new age consciousness in an ambiguous realm that is not just mythical, but also disengaged from the concrete material experiences of the exploited and oppressed. The institutional status quo is not challenged by this narrative.
Prefigurative strategies fail to address global catastrophes – engaging the state is key to remedy catastrophic impacts external to the affSchwartz Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook & Young PhD candidate in history at SUNY Stony Brook 2012 Michael & Kevin “Can prefigurative politics prevail? The implications for movement strategy in John Holloway's Crack Capitalism” Journal of Classic Sociology 12:220 Sage Publishing Holloway sometimes seems to suggest that the movement should act as though the state does not exist, creating prefigurative and counter-insitutional structures that do not interact with the government. The classical theorists disagree with this view. As Marx suggested in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1963 [1852]), capitalist states are not simply executive committees of the ruling class but sites of contestation whose degree of subservience to ruling-class interests is variable and subject to change based on outside pressures (compare Poulantzas, 1978). Lenin (1965 [1920]) emphasized that the revolutionary must be willing to engage with reactionary institutions as a way of advancing the revolutionary struggle. And Rosa Luxemburg (1925 [1906]) argued that political demands were necessary and appropriate even at peak moments of working-class initiative. We are not sure whether Holloway would disagree with these propositions, since he does not offer a sustained analysis of the relationship of the struggle to the state. But we feel that the classical theorists are correct in arguing that the judicious engagement of the state is an essential part of the movement’s toolkit. Radical activists around the world have often practiced this philosophy with success. In the 1930s the US Communist Party played a vital role in building the labor movement that won major concessions like the right to organize and substantial social welfare provisions, combining on-the-ground actions like sit-down and rent strikes (which fit comfortably into Holloway’s template) with demands for altered state policy such as recognition of unions and rent control (Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin, 2002). The US Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s combined direct liberatory actions with a clever manipulation of state forces, pitting segregationist southern governments against the federal judiciary and executive (Robnett, 1997). Peasant movements in Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and other Latin American countries have compelled the state to enact land reforms by combining a range of legal and extralegal tactics (Becker, 2008: 128–131; Gotkowitz, 2007; Zamosc, 1986). Furthermore, Holloway does not adequately address the incontrovertible reality that many revolutionary regimes have greatly ameliorated human suffering, even if they have deemphasized or suppressed the quest for a ‘self-determining society.’ The Cuban Revolution has made strides against poverty, malnutrition, infant mortality, and other forms of suffering that put wealthier countries to shame. The 1979 revolution in Nicaragua, and elected left regimes in countries like Chile (1970–1973) and Venezuela (1999–present), have also brought impressive social gains, at least for a time. Holloway seems a little too quick to dismiss these reforms, even if he does warn against ‘condemning reformism’ (p. 35) and acknowledges in passing that the Cuban Revolution brought some valuable changes.
The imminence of catastrophe seems to push us towards a positive conception of totality, some idea that we need a world state. Certainly, some form of global coordination would be desirable in a post-capitalist society, but the forms of global coordination that presently exist are so bound up with capital and the pursuit of profit that they offer little hope of a solution. It is becoming more and more clear that any solution to the problem of climate change can come only from a radical change in the way that we live, and that change cannot come from a state or some sort of world body, but only from the rejection of abstract labour, from our own assumption of responsibility for the way we live. (p. 210, emphasis added) Clearly international governance bodies like the United Nations have generally failed to ensure global peace, justice, and environmental sustainability; the UN, for one, has typically either been captive to the wealthy and powerful in the rich nations or been too weak to enforce regulatory or punitive rulings against those interests. Nowhere has this pattern been more evident than in the record of the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which in seventeen meetings has failed to produce an enforceable global deal on emissions reductions that would stave off devastating climate change.13 But when scientists are giving the world just a few short decades to avert potentially catastrophic climate change, is it really sufficient to exhort individuals to assume ‘responsibility for the way we live’ and hope that alternative institutions will somehow replace corporations before it is too late? The realistic progressive has little choice but to continue targeting states and international institutions given the dire urgency of global warming. We desperately need to reduce net carbon emissions, and right now only states have the power to sign treaties, enforce emissions reductions, and redirect national investment. We must target states, international bodies, and polluters through a variety of means – civil disobedience, boycotts, legislative struggle, the monitoring of carbon-offset trading, and so on — at the same time that we construct alternatives for the future (Hahnel, 2011: 157–242). Modern states are indeed corrupt, and fundamentally so, but until we have adequate alternative institutions in place we can ill afford to forsake all interaction with them. Unqualified antistatism ignores real possibilities for improving people’s lives through engagement with states and other dominant institutions, and at its worst can end up empowering the private corporations and financial institutions that are even less accountable than government. Moreover, states are not monolithic, but rather are constituted from a mélange of mutually contradictory institutions encompassing multiple levels of government. The United States is extreme in the extent to which corporations control politics, but not all levels of government are equally dominated by corporate money. A thousand protesters targeting the president will probably have no effect, but a thousand protesters targeting the local school board or city council might well move the needle at least a little in a liberatory direction. While the US movement for universal healthcare has had little success at the federal level, a grassroots struggle in the state of Vermont has recently won a state-level universal healthcare bill.14 Many movements have succeeded in part by exploiting the conflicts between differing components of government, as the US Civil Rights movement did in the 1960s (Robnett, 1997), and as various anti-colonial and indigenous movements in Latin America have been doing for centuries (Serulnikov, 2003; Stern, 1993 [1982]). At times the state apparatus might even be harnessed to sponsor prefigurative institutions, as seems to be suggested by the Venezuelan communal councils and the adoption of participatory budgeting schemes by city and regional governments in countries like Brazil, India, and Spain (Baiocchi, 2005; Ellner, 2009). Collective Key - ExtensionTheir failure to link individual and collective struggle failureOrozco-Mendoza PhD Student Department of Political Science @ UMass-Amherst 2008 Elva Fabiola “Borderlands Theory: Producing Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldúa” Masters Thesis submitted to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008-175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf Anzaldúa theorized self-liberation by developing a set of cognitive processes oriented to produce a resisting identity in the oppressed. With this process, Anzaldúa appealed to the recognition, transformation, exposition, and exchange of self-epistemologies that work towards a self-metamorphosis that allows the self to resist domination and eventually to bear liberation. Although as a resistance project, the Borderlands theory is not only healing but also empowering, Anzaldúas formulation is restricted by the subject it speaks. Anzaldúa is addressing the colonized and the people whose identity has been bordered by the dominant power. In Borderlands, she is trying to tear those borders down in order to join the loose ends in ones identity to be able to function as a whole being again. However, Anzaldúa is addressing the self as an individual, as a single being that needs to cure him/herself before becoming political. This is precisely the message she gives us when she states: The struggle is inner. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn comes before changes in society (Anzaldúa, 1987: 87). From this explanation, we learn that Anzaldúa does not conceive social change unless the essence of a person changes, unless one has been exposed to the fears of the soul and has learned how to block them. While criticizing Anzaldúas mestiza consciousness, Maria Lugones argues that Anzaldúa fails to link the psychology of oppression and resistance to collective resistance, therefore, weakening the sociality that Anzaldúa herself documents in resistance. For Lugones, Unless resistance is a social activity, the resistor is doomed to failure in the creation of a new universe of meaning, a new identity, a rata mestiza. Meaning that is not in response to and looking for response fails as meaning (Lugones, 2005: 97). While I agree with Lugones critique of Anzaldúa’s failure to see resistance as a collective activity, I do it for different reasons since, in my view, resistance at the individual level is still resistance. As it is well known, both Michel de Certeau and James C. Scott theorized about the practice of everyday life and resistance in everyday life respectively. Michel de Certeau for instance considered that the “weak” employs innumerable practices through which users re-appropriate the space organized by techniques of socio cultural production” (de Certeau, 1984: xiv). de Certeau contends that common people have at hand numerous tactics, which are used to accommodate the oppressor system according to ones convenience. Similarly, Scott states that “weak” individuals do not passively submit themselves to the commands of dominant groups but rather they engage in ordinary, individual practices to mitigate or dissent impositions from those who hold power (Scott, 1985). But contrary to Lugones, both de Certeau and Scott do not consider that individual means practiced by a single individual, but rather, “that the decision to resist is engaged self-motivated, selfinterested, and seeking primarily personal gains. It is manifested through acts of insubordination, evasion, offensive defiance, and defensive disobedience (Scott, 1985; Dunaway, 2003). At the same time, “this is a unique species of collective action because none of this resistance could achieve its purposes unless it is acted as a generalized, unspoken complicity” (Scott, 1985: 447, enphasis added). My own interpretation is that by making the struggle inner, Anzaldúa is trying to force the colonized to believe that the de-colonial shift is possible and change can actually happen since in her view, “nothing happens in the ’real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (Anzaldúa, 1987: 87). The logic that Anzaldúa follows in the above quote, is that in order for people to seek freedom, they need to believe that freedom exists in the first place and have a notion of what that freedom looks like, otherwise, they can lose the point of the struggle not knowing why they are fighting. In this logic, if freedom is first experienced at the inner level, then it is possible to have an idea of what freedom in society is, yet, as Lugones argues: As I understand the liberatory project, the inner and the collective struggles are not separable; they are moments or sides of the liberatory process a dismissal of the inner struggle dismisses liberatory subjectivity. A dismissal of the collective moment robs the struggle of the self-in-between of any liberatory meaning (Lugones, 2005: 97) Lugones considers that the inner and the collectivity are forcibly linked since the lack of one of the two moments would tear apart the whole project of liberation. In this regard, if the inner transformation does not occur, meaningful change would be misleading, and if this inner transformation is not linked to a collectivity, the struggle will also fail because it lacks the support of a bigger entity and, besides that, if liberation does not reach all it is not liberation at all. Here, Lugones still considers that the number makes the difference and that liberation is more likely to occur if liberation is sought, for instance, by a social movement. While I do not follow Lugones on her argument, I do consider that theorizing the Borderlands as an inner struggle is problematic since, as Hannah Arendt states, it is a mistake to take freedom to be primarily an inner, contemplative or private phenomenon, for it is in fact active, worldly and public (Arendt, 1998). In Arendt’s terms, freedom is experienced in our interaction with others, by seeing ourselves being directed towards a specific end or by being able to make up choices free from any constraint or imposition. In consequence, while we may feel free or liberated when dealing with the self, in our social interactions this freedom may not be there at all since many human actions are guided by any type of necessity. Interestingly both Anzaldúa and Arendt consider action as one of the most empowering tools at the hands of humans since both consider that the moment of empowerment comes with action. For Anzaldúa, action means taking the initiative, to propose, which is also the opposite of to react, while for Arendt action means to begin or not being constrained and bounded by others. But despite differences, the authors resemblance in the relevance of action for human freedom, in what is of concern in the treatment of the public and private spheres, Arendt has no tolerance for the private realm (the inner) when it comes to political aims, since for Arendt, action is a public category, a worldly practice that is experienced in our daily interaction with one another and as such it is a practice exercised in public spaces or the city (Arendt, 1998). The key point here is that people do not live isolated from one another, but rather we live in society. We live our experiences and give them meaning in society; in relation to those with whom we share plans and that is the reason why freedom does not work so well at the inner level. In addition, as Henri Lefebvre argues, an critical assessment the social life “ought ‘by a process of rational integration… to pass from the individual to the social’ –and, ultimately materialize itself in collective action toward social justice” (Lefebvre 1992: 148, as quoted in Bartolovich and Lazarus, 2002: 6). While we would like to think of our souls as being free from any influence, we cannot escape the fact that we live in society and it is there where freedom is relevant.
Engaging institutional debate is necessary to solve the material impacts of the aff – with immigration reform being coopted by the far right it is essential to inject policy debate with institutional solutionsVenator-Santiago Assistant Professor Latino Politics, Public Law, and Political Theory @ UConn 2008 Charles R. “Huntington's White Patriotism and Anzaldua's Brown Nationalism” FIU Law Review 33 Hein Online Over the years, LatCrit has been encouraging a conversation across disciplines. Unfortunately, the work of academics and poets like Huntington and Anzaldfia provide normative arguments that contribute to various legal and public policy debates. At this particular time when immigration reform is on the legislative agenda and when right-wing rhetoric has been shaping the contours of the limits for legal reform, it is imperative that scholars engage these debates. A LatCrit approach could use as a starting point the relationship between these debates and the law, race, and nationalism. Neither Huntington nor Anzaldua's arguments offer much in the form of a conceptual critique of law. Huntington's argument is reminiscent of a right-wing, original intent approach to the interpretation of law. Huntington's argument would encourage us to look at the "original" principles and interpretations embraced by the founding "fathers" as a guide to interpreting the constitution. His argument would ignore the important and radical transformations of both the constitutional text and the interpretation of the law that have resulted from long and protracted struggles. Huntington's argument neglects to consider how these socio-legal changes have been part of a mutually constitutive story of nation-state building that has abandoned the founding principles of his white Anglo-Saxon protestant patriotic identity. Simply put, the history of changes in law and society are descriptive of a new and constantly changing United States-American identity. In contrast, Anzaldua's argument seems to suggest a focus on the penumbras of the law. Anzaldua's argument suggests that there is a need to break with the fixed dualities present in law in order to open up a more fluid space to re-think the law. Law can become something else that is more malleable and open to multiple sources beyond black letter law and the positivist influences of a formalist approach. This conception, however, leaves us with a quandary, namely, to what extent will this fluidity lend itself to take measure position on questions of justice. Stated differently, to what extent can the law be used to prohibit injustices? Yet, Anzaldua also suggests that law, here understood as a concrete institution, may become irrelevant when the new mestiza consciousness takes hold of the borderland subject. Perhaps Anzaldua's critique may lead to an anarchic conception of society where law no longer matters. The ambiguities in Anzaldfla's narrative leave open either of these possibilities. Borderlands Doesn’t Solve - ExtensionBorderland doesn’t solve – most likely to replicate status quo hierarchiesOrozco-Mendoza PhD Student Department of Political Science @ UMass-Amherst 2008 Elva Fabiola “Borderlands Theory: Producing Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldúa” Masters Thesis submitted to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008-175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf From another perspective, it assumed that Anzaldúa’s theory would automatically take us to a safe land, namely, that the Borderlands now transformed into a place that has become familiar, agreeable, and even safe. Since the aim is to heal the self, to put it together, to make it knowledgeable, it is implied that this reconciliation at the inner level will follow the processes in Borderlands with the desired outcomes. In this regard, awareness in the sense Anzaldúa intended, should not be taken for granted, since it is probable that the exposition to the Borderlands may lead us to reject the epistemologies of the other and to identify largely with western knowledge. One may decide that the west is better, white is better, capitalism is better than everything else that exists around. In sum, the colonized may wish to remain colonized, no matter how irrational or nonsensical that decision would be. Lugones also sees this risk when she states, we feel the temptation to stay within the "confines of the normal" since reality and we in it are familiar to ourselves. We always may feel the temptation to engage in political activity without this preparation [Borderlands processes], as if oppression did not touch our selves (Lugones, 2005: 92). Perhaps the colonized decides that despite all the things that have been imposed on her, colonization is better. It is possible that she decides that she is too angry, that she wants to take revenge and revolts against the system instead of negotiating or mediating, or she can decide that the theory does not make a big difference to her life so she puts the theory aside. The possibilities that identity suffers a transformation are there, yes, but it does not mean that these will be positive for the self for this can be a false agency. As a theory that addresses the inner self, the Borderlands theory can possibly, although not forcibly, work towards the empowerment and liberation from different forms of oppression, and towards the undermining of western epistemologies that claim for them the right to explain the world rightly. However, although Borderlands theory directly confronts those who hold power, we cannot assume that the system that one tries to confront is a democratic one. That is, Anzaldúa calls white-Anglos to assume historical responsibility for forcing Mexico to cede half of its territory, for vandalizing Mexicans after the war forcing them to leave behind their lands, for taking their corporations to Mexico and Latin-America to use Latin Americans as a source of cheap labor, for having Mexican-Americans/Chicanos and illegal immigrants in the United States doing the hard work in exchange for few dollars, for extracting Mexico’s wealth out of Mexico leaving the country impoverished, for doing all these things based on the argument that their neighbors were inferior. In Borderlands Anzaldúa calls America accountable for being an oppressor in almost the entire world, and, in doing so she assumed that the democratic values of this country would respond to her call, yet neither United States nor Western Europe have ever shown any intention to heal the open wound by publicly recognizing that colonialism and economic exploitation are something negative. On the contrary, colonialism, imperialism, and now globalization are for the most part justified in the name of freedom, democracy, God, reason, etc. As Mignolo and Tlostanova state, “[Border resisting projects] have yet to find a way in which ‘either-or’ is a deadlock, which seems to be maintained by the success of capitalism in wearing different masks (liberal. Islamic, etc)” (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 217). Institutions SolveInstitutional engagement is key to material changeSchwartz Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook & Young PhD candidate in history at SUNY Stony Brook 2012 Michael & Kevin “Can prefigurative politics prevail? The implications for movement strategy in John Holloway's Crack Capitalism” Journal of Classic Sociology 12:220 Sage Publishing Institutions are also necessary as soon as the cracks begin to coalesce into durable formations; they will be vital to ensuring accountability, equity, and efficiency in distributing resources, even when the distribution system is not tyrannized by markets. The trick to avoiding devolution of the process into the trading of abstract labor is relentless democracy. The historical experiences of the Paris Commune, the Spanish anarchists, the Zapatistas, worker-run factories in Argentina, indigenous communities around the world, and diverse other liberatory experiments offer a rough guide of what those institutions might look like. Economic and social planning should be participatory and involve workers’, consumers’, and community councils. Individuals should have input in the degree to which they are affected by particular decisions. Representation should be revolving and any delegates subject to immediate recall (Albert and Hahnel, 1991, 1992; Lavaca Collective, 2007 [2004]; Sitrin, 2006). These are just loose guidelines, and liberatory movements will not all adopt the same forms. But there must be a self-conscious effort to construct these sorts of structures at the earliest moment in the process of coalescing liberatory actions. Experimenting with alternative institutions in the present can empower participants, prove that another way of living is possible, and become the most powerful tool for extending the cracks into fractures. As we construct these alternatives, we must simultaneously work for reforms in dominant institutions, both to achieve tangible improvements in living conditions and to protect incipient liberatory formations from attacks by the state and other elite interests. Survival requires pressing for needed reforms in the functioning of dominant institutions, both to stop repression and to reduce the continued encroachment of abstract labor and its associated tyrannies. Our antipathy toward states, markets, and other illegitimate institutions must be accompanied by a constant reassessment of what strategies and tactics are likely to be most effective in improving people’s lives (both in the material sense and in the sense of expanding their areas of self-actuation) in the here and now.16 Holloway’s vision of liberation through the construction of ‘cracks’ is compelling and, we think, practicable. But it must involve self-conscious commitment to large-scale collective action that is capable of moving the national and global needle in a liberatory direction, a process that requires large organizations and institutions capable of confronting and reforming established institutions.
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