In times of legitimate social anger, expressed instantaneously and spontaneously in reaction to events, we must carefully always assess the forces of liberal recuperation. The raw expression of events in the aftermath of injustice are always given a mediation by the system that encloses it within the liberal ideological imagination. Events are captured by liberals as law-abiding and peaceful on liberal terms, before protesting crowds demanding justice know which way they are going in securing it. They are immediately sprung into action, and soon they have liberals marching by their side, stealing their anger and regurgitating it back to them on terms that acknowledge it while boxing it into solutions. It becomes hard to tell in these moments where genuine anger starts and where liberal recuperation begins.

“Resist” is even now one of these words that close off space, in terms of what can be thought by radicals. “Resist” as an ideological buzzword is a prison. The system’s liberal ideologues are stamping reality on terms favorable to them before anyone else develops the capacity to articulate what is transpiring. They steal unfolding events before anyone beyond them can narrativize around events in a way that broadens the future of the protest activity. Once liberals frame it in their ideological terms, suddenly the whole flow of events that preceded their intervention starts to feel as if it was hatched in a meeting at the Center for American Progress.

About four months into George Floyd, we had Marxists and socdem leftists complaining that the riots themselves were somehow liberal in origin. Liberals have enough power to continually narrow the frame around events and redefine what is happening on their terms. We need activity that surpasses this liberal ability to absorb unfolding events into their ideological templates. Not just in the sense of “we need revolution”, but we need these events that are already guaranteed to happen to take on new dimensions.

Our acts can’t be so small that liberals can write them off as irresponsible, and must still be so norm-breaking that liberals fail to understand how to capture them within their narratives. The actions must be big in away where liberals can neither deny them nor claim them. We need these exact demonstrations of power to break from their past incarnations as safely within bounds and become something else. They must appear as they always do, and then shock society by taking a different path.

Something has to happen that a liberal can’t deny, but hat does not have to be machine guns firing. It does not have to be the revolution in and of itself, but we need to break down the protective liberal imagination, and before the fascists finish doing that on their terms. The protest activity cannot wait for others to decide what it is. It must speak something in its actions that go beyond the liberal imagination. The third precinct burning was exactly that, but liberals ultimately managed to win back space for themselves in the aftermath.

Police violence was such a clear wrong in 2020, and was an exclamation point to a whole sequence of activity in the prior decade, that burning down a police station became justified in the broad public imagination immediately. Liberals were stunned into silence. The system immediately began trying to recuperate the anger, and it wasn’t until liberals developed the “outside agitator” narrative that they managed to wrestle back some sense that certain types of protest were out of bounds.

Yet even in reestablishing terms in their favor, they only could dismiss destruction by saying a Boogaloo Boy or whoever was responsible. They still couldn’t outright suggest that the oppressed were out of line for burning down businesses. For a full month, liberal ideology around protest norms collapsed. We can find the breakdown of those norms again, but actions have to be sharp and speak to something latent in the public imagination, that liberals can’t acknowledge or address. You make what is anti-social from the liberal POV transform into something socially acceptable to the broad public and vice versa. Destruction carried out by the poor becomes morally justified per the terms of an unrealized form of society, and violence against the poor becomes a sign of what is properly anti-social. We must make it the highest crime that a system could deprive humans of what they need to survive and then sic the cops on them when they speak out.

As long as there is class, concepts like “rational” and “anti-social” are unavoidable. They are byproducts of liberalism’s false universalism. Liberalism’s contradictions make the highlighting of morality inescapable. True universal guarantees around life would render such words like “rational” and “antisocial” largely inapplicable, but they will be necessary for as long as a movement from below asserts a standard opposite to theirs. We have to talk about the “rational” and the “anti-social” because liberalism cannot address class conflict. Their insistence that their achieved universalism marks dysfunction a product of individual failure, means that we must assert that such cases of individual pathology result in “irrationality” only as a byproduct of liberalism’s invisibilization of class.

Someone’s pathology can’t cause them to become homeless in a society where housing is a right for all. We must find the modes of disruption and destruction that reverse the terms of liberal society. We can not take a post-modern approach of anti-universalism, because there is still a burning question around the universal, that provides a moral salience for the swift actions of the poor. We want a kind of destruction that latches on to the higher moral calling. The burning of third precinct proved, beyond whatever bourgeois polling data suggests, that there is a kind of attack on this society from its underclass that has moral leverage. That is what must be clarified, in theory and in action.

We are stuck in a situation where the false universalism persists until we find the right means to shatter it and supplant it with a concretely determined universal, of assuring no one remains in hunger. There is no refusal of liberal universalism in theory that will mean anything. It is all masturbatory. The universalism of liberalism is in fact only a shadow of the real potential universal implied by the conditions of the poor. The materiality of that poverty is the source of the urgency for liberals in apprehending a universal in concept, as a shield. You think you refuse liberals when you refuse the universal, but really you deny the poor redress. When they are no longer “poor”, when such a word can no longer be applied to anyone in a way that seems logical, we will have achieved the universal in such a way that it no longer needs to be a source of conflict in theory.