Are You the Right Person for the Revolution?
NoDAPL is the movement led by Dakota peoples to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline from being routed near the Standing Rock reservation. The goal of the movement is not just to protect the people from Standing Rock, but to protect all peoples who would be harmed if the pipeline were to break and contaminate the Missouri River.
To stop the pipeline, the Dakota peoples have set up camps to stop the pipeline from being built. They have faced intense violence from the police as a result. To defuse the violence, they have asked for as many people as possible to come to the camps to protect them.
Recently, however, there were a flurry of facebook posts (none of which came from the actual NoDAPL organizers) being circulated that non-Native peoples, particularly white people, should not come to the NoDAPL camps. Other articles complained that white people did not have the correct attitudes about NoDAPL and were causing more harm than good when they came to North Dakota. It did not seem that people were thinking these stories through logically. If non-Native peoples are not supposed to come to North Dakota, that would mean essentially Native peoples should suffer the violence of the state and the freezing cold by themselves. Coya Artichoker, an organizer with NoDAPL, finally had to intervene and correct these stories. She stated that of course all people, including white people, are needed now. NoDAPL is not an elite country club. It is a life or death struggle to protect the earth for everyone. But the assumptions behind this call for either non-Native or white people to stay away is that only some people are the only “right” people for the revolution. Only the truly deserving should join the revolution. Everyone else should stay home.
Foucault’s analysis of biopower helps us to deconstruct this narrative about good versus bad revolutionaries. Foucault argues that racism is permanent to the modern state. He contends that with rise of capitalism, governance shifts from sovereign power to biopower, which in entails a shift from punishment to normalization. That is, the person who fails to follow the norms of society becomes less a criminal and more of a “deviant” who must undergo processes of normalization. However, society simultaneously polices collective bodies and manages them as populations. In the service of life, others are allowed to die. “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. . .One had the right to kill those who represent a kind of biological danger to others.” Consequently, entire populations get marked as expendable because they are viewed as threats to the body politic. States Foucault: “Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity; massacres have become vital. It is as mangers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed.” Racism is the necessary precondition that marks certain people for death in a society based on normalization. Modes of death may not be direct physical extermination but can include creating social conditions that mark communities of color suitable for death. Racial logics are manifest through population politics in which racism essentially becomes normalized. The “life” of society simply requires the deaths of those populations that threaten it. “In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable.”
What is also important about this concept of biopower, however, is that it is not something employed exclusively by the dominant society, but is also employed by those seeking liberation from domination. The manner in which groups seek liberation continue to engage in biopolitics in when they organize around a permanent enemy. Foucault differentiates organizing around a “permanent enemy” from engaging in violent resistance per se. That is, it would be possible for a revolutionary group to forcibly seize control of a state and reorganize capital — presumably with violence- without engaging in biopower. However, once that revolutionary group identifies certain social elements as necessarily counter-revolutionary such that their constant expulsion is required to maintain the life of the revolution, then such states become definitionally racist. “Whenever, on the other hand, socialism has been forced to stress the problem of struggle, the struggle against the enemy, of the elimination of the enemy within capitalist society itself and when, therefore, it has had to think about the physical confrontation with the class enemy in capitalist society, racism does raise its head, because it is the only way in which socialist thought, which after all very much bound up with themes of biopower, can rationalize the murder of its enemies.”
By means of illustration, Disa Pimental’s and in bloom’s essays on Calexit implicitly show how biopolitics operate even within progressive movements. Their articles show that both Trumpism AND opposition to Trumpism can be equally biopolitical. As in bloom demonstrates, Trump’s polices is based on the idea that “our” society is threatened by racial others that are contaminating it. But as Disa Pimental notes, the Calexit movement is equally biopolitical. The good state of California is threatened by the no-good Trump supporters. We must now build a wall against California to protect our California way of life. As Pimental argues: “#CalExit proposes that we construct a barrier, be it physical or figurative, shielding our eyes from the rest of our nation’s flaws, as if California is a utopic wonderland free of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and sexism (the list could go on). Spoiler alert: it isn’t.” Essentially, in the name of progressive politics and promoting “life” for diverse Californians CalExit is replicating Trump’s policies to protect California from Trump supporters.
In addition, CalExit also erases the fact that California only exists because of the mass genocide it committed against Native Californians who still lay claim to these lands. So CalExit is also biopolitical move that requires that disappearance of Native Californians to be successful. Otherwise, why shouldn’t Native California nations also ban non-Natives from these lands by the same logic employed by CalExit?
Similarly, calls to tell non-Native peoples to not join the struggle for NoDAPL rely on the same logics of biopower. As Artichoker notes, it is not the NoDAPL organizers themselves who are telling non-Native to stay home. They have actually welcomed everyone because they recognize that a mass movement in needed to fight the corporate interests that Brenda Benites has described is behind the Dakota Pipeline. But others are trying to reformulate NoDAPL as essentially a NoDAPLExit — it should be a camp for the true revolutionary and we need a walls to protect us from bad revolutionaries who think they are at Burning Man.
In addition, this logic presents Native peoples very simplistically. It presumes all Native peoples are always on the right side of corporate and environmental battles. But in fact, many tribal councils have promoted environmentally destructive policies. As Foucault argues, we cannot understand power as simply a dichotomy between those who have power and those who are powerless because even those who are oppressed internalize and maintain the current power structures. An example can be found in the work of Mvskoke scholar Marcus Briggs-Cloud who argues that when Native languages were translated into English, western worldviews became internalized in Native communities. The concept of dominating, commodifying and exploiting the earth, concepts that cannot even be expressed in Native languages, become expressible when Native peoples learn English. Native nations then began to exploit the earth, often in the name of sovereignty. Thus, there are no peoples who are always on the right side of the revolution. A battle for a better world always entails a battle with ourselves to decolonize the way we understand the world.
As Foucault points out, acting non-biopolitically does not require that we not defend ourselves or not address actual threats. But rather, it means that even when we engage in struggle, we understand that even our opponents are not disposable or irredeemable. It also means that we recognize that we ourselves may often be the problem. As Artichoker states, the real revolution from an indigenous lens recognizes that we are all related, and hence we are all worth saving.
