Abstract
Resistance to unjust power and authority has long been the angry energy of everyday struggle, the defiant democratization of progressive social movements, and the motor force of progressive social change. As critical criminologists, then, our role is to defend the practice of resistance and to explore its radical potential. In doing so, we can usefully investigate emergent moments of resistance that transcend narrow notions of individual intentionality, and we can trace the intricate interplay between immediate acts of resistance and larger dynamics of social transformation. We can focus especially on forms of resistance that both reveal the operations of power and reverse those operations in the interest of social justice. Most importantly, we can move beyond the sort of faux-radical pessimism that denies the potential of contemporary resistance, and embrace instead a multitude of resistant possibilities.
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Notes
My sense here differs from William Z. Foster’s argument for “boring from within” institutions and trade unions so as to take them over (see Barrett 1999).
In the 1980 s, on New York City’s Lower East Side, Jerry the Peddler and other anarchists and squatters tended illegal gardens. Soon enough, city officials removed the gardens—but while it lasted, Jerry’s garden operated as “a communal meeting place…a real autonomous zone” (quoted in Patterson 2007: 527).
When, to the sounds of band music, members of the Paris Commune pulled down the Vendôme Column, a public symbol of the First French Empire under Napoléon Bonaparte, a reporter found that “the excitement was so intense that people moved about as if in a dream” (quoted in Edwards 1973: 40; see also Ferrell 2001: 21).
Likewise, the “palpable lack of definitional consensus” (Hayward and Schuilenberg 2014: 22) around resistance may present more of a problem for scholars engaged in the analysis of resistance than for those actively engaged in its practice.
Raymen (2018: 19) attempts to reclaim optimism, but in doing so still contrasts the “fantasy-world of organic resistance” with “the return to real politics:”
Nevertheless, beneath the pessimistic tone that characterises a surface-level analysis of this text, it is within the overall argument and demand for a more ambitious politics and diagnosis of leisure, capitalism and ideology that I hope you discover the book’s truer optimism. The critique and dismantling of the ideas and perspectives that dominate leftist discourse is not defeatist, but optimistic. Abandoning left-liberalism’s fantasy-world of organic resistance and acknowledging with honesty the post-political landscape of contemporary cities constitutes an important first step toward the imagination and renewal of a properly social civic life and, if we are lucky, the return of real politics.
Hired as a minimum-wage security guard to prevent “inventory shrinkage,” one learns the secrets of shoplifting. As seen in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), when made an unwilling and unpaid accountant for the warden, one employs those accounting skills to take down the warden.
For Thomas Dekeyser’s historical timeline of subvertising, see https://distortedspace.com/; see also Richards and Wood (2018) and Seal (2013).
Contemporary train hoppers and gutter punks double down on this sort of resistance, reclaiming consumer waste for everyday survival and commandeering the “hot shot” freight trains that transport global consumer goods for their own illicit transportation (Ferrell 2018).
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Ferrell, J. In Defense of Resistance. Crit Crim 30, 603–619 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-019-09456-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-019-09456-6