Relational Beginnings Against the Global Right-Wing Counterrevolution
A Question That Refuses to Go Away
The title of this essay is borrowed, with a twist, from Lenin’s famous text What Is to Be Done? I do not borrow it because I think our current situation calls for Lenin’s answers: a vanguard party, a revolutionary line, or a centralized program of action. I borrow it because the question, what then, shall we do?, has not left us. It hangs in the air, especially now, as we live through the advance of a global right-wing counterrevolution.
I have written before about what I call a general theory of attrition. By attrition, I mean the slow erosion of our capacities for relation: the wearing away of trust, solidarity, and care under neoliberal capitalism. Attrition does not break us all at once; it weakens us bit by bit, until we struggle to imagine anything beyond survival. The counterrevolution we face today, nationalist and authoritarian as well as market-driven and punitive, accelerates that erosion. It thrives on division, fear, and exhaustion.
So the question returns: how do we resist? How do we fight back against something that is not only political in the narrow sense, but social, cultural, economic, and relational?
My starting point is simple: we cannot wait for a single text, leader, or science to tell us when and how to act. There will be no central voice saying, “Now is the time, and here is the plan.” Nor is there any neutral place we can stand to evaluate the situation before we leap into it.
Instead, what we have is each other. We have the histories of critical thought that help us see how power operates. And we have the everyday practices already in our hands, already shaping the world around us.
In this essay, I want to sketch four theorems, guiding ideas that can help us think about how to begin resisting the counterrevolution where we are. They are not rigid doctrines. They are starting points, distilled from Marx, Foucault, Brown, Harcourt, Lazzarato, feminist theorists, and my own reflections on relation and attrition.
The four theorems are:
- There is no neutral ground.
- Begin in the everyday.
- There is no neutral activity.
- Prioritization is politics.
Theorem 1: There is No Neutral Ground
We often act as if there is a safe, objective vantage point outside of politics, a place where we can simply “observe” until the right moment to act. But there is no such place. Neutrality is a myth, and more than that, it is a trap.
Karl Marx understood this well. In his critique of ideology, he showed that what appears “natural” or “neutral” is often just the hidden face of domination. The so-called “free market” is a perfect example. It presents itself as a neutral space where supply and demand meet, but in reality it is constructed through laws, property regimes, and coercive enforcement that systematically favor capital over labor. Neutrality disguises exploitation.
Michel Foucault sharpened this point in his lectures on governmentality. For him, there is no “outside” of power. We are always inside a web of norms, institutions, and practices that shape how we live and think. Even refusing to act is a form of conduct, and therefore part of the political field.
Wendy Brown helps us see how this plays out under neoliberalism. Neoliberal rationality teaches us that everything should be evaluated in terms of markets and efficiency. By presenting market logic as neutral, it makes alternatives look irrational, even dangerous.
Bernard Harcourt makes a similar argument in Critique & Praxis. He insists that critique is never enough on its own. We cannot simply analyze from the sidelines, waiting for the right formula. Critique must lead to choice, and choice means risk.
This matters because so much of the counterrevolution’s power lies in delay and hesitation. Think of climate politics. For decades, governments and corporations insisted that more data was needed before acting. This illusion of neutrality, “we are just waiting for the science,” bought time for fossil fuel companies to keep extracting. Delay was not neutral. It was a political choice that served powerful interests.
The same pattern repeats in debates over migration, policing, and public health. Neutrality is invoked as a cover, a way of holding off action while reinforcing the status quo.
And in our personal lives, the same logic seeps in. How many times have we told ourselves we will get involved “once we know enough,” or “once things are clearer,” or “once someone else takes the first step”? In a world of attrition, where exhaustion and fear already weigh us down, waiting for neutrality becomes a recipe for inaction.
But here is the truth: not acting is already a choice. Waiting is already siding with the current order.
The first theorem means we do not need to wait for a perfect analysis, a perfect leader, or a perfect plan. If we see someone drowning, we do not need a degree in hydrodynamics to throw them a rope. The same holds in politics. We do not need to wait for permission.
Theorem 2: Begin in the Everyday
If there is no neutral ground, the next question is obvious: where do we start? My answer is simple. We start in the everyday.
I have often argued that resistance begins not in grand gestures but in the fabric of daily life. Foucault called this counter-conduct — the small ways that people refuse to be governed as they are told to be. These refusals do not always make headlines, but they shift the conditions of possibility.
Feminist theorists take us further by pointing to the realm of social reproduction. Politics does not live only in parliaments or protests. It also lives in kitchens, classrooms, hospitals, and care networks. It lives in the relations that maintain and reproduce life. When neoliberal capitalism devalues care, when austerity guts public health, when schools are run as businesses, we are being governed at the level of reproduction itself. Which means resistance also lives there.
Wendy Brown has warned us that neoliberalism reshapes us into “entrepreneurs of ourselves.” We are trained to compete, calculate, and maximize our value in every sphere. To resist in the everyday is to undo this script: to help a neighbor instead of outcompeting them, to share resources instead of hoarding, to teach solidarity instead of hierarchy.
Maurizio Lazzarato shows us that debt is one of the most powerful ways our everyday lives are captured. Student loans, mortgages, and credit cards do more than limit financial choices. They govern us through guilt, anxiety, and the future promise of repayment. To resist is to reimagine how we relate to debt: through mutual aid funds, debt strikes, or simply refusing to equate worth with credit scores.
During the pandemic, we saw what this can look like. Mutual aid networks sprang up almost overnight. People organized grocery deliveries, shared medicine, and pooled money for rent. These efforts were not secondary to politics. They were politics, because they reordered everyday priorities from profit toward care.
The second theorem means resistance begins in the everyday. It means taking up resistance against the very ordinary forms of restraint upon our lives (like debt). We do not need to wait for revolutions to arrive. What matters is how we live, cook, care, teach, share, and organize where we are.
Theorem 3: There is No Neutral Activity
Even once we recognize that resistance begins in the everyday, we may still think: some things are political and some things are not. The third theorem challenges this. It insists that there is no neutral activity.
Every action has political weight. The question is not whether something is political but what kind of politics it enacts.
Bernard Harcourt reminds us that critique and praxis must be judged by outcomes. Do they expand democratic participation, produce more just arrangements, or increase equity?
Maurizio Lazzarato makes this clear in his analysis of debt. Taking out a loan feels like an economic choice. But in truth it is an entrance into a political relation, one that disciplines conduct and dictates the future. Repayment schedules structure our possibilities, sometimes for decades.
Marx had already shown this dynamic in labor. Working in a factory or buying a commodity looks like an ordinary exchange. But it is not. It is part of the reproduction of capital, a system of structured exploitation.
Consider social media. Posting a photo or liking a comment feels like a personal, even neutral act. Yet each click is converted into data, surveillance, and profit. What looks neutral is actually part of a vast political economy of exposure.
The same holds for consumption, for work, for teaching, for caregiving. Nothing is neutral. Each act either strengthens or weakens the logics of attrition. Each act either deepens democratic life or narrows it.
The third theorem requires that we make conscious decisions about our ordinary activities because we recognize that these activities carry political implications.
Theorem 4: Prioritization Is Politics
Politics is not only about what we resist. It is also about what we choose to value, nurture, and protect.
In earlier posts, I argued that the deepest political decision we face today is relational: do we prioritize care, solidarity, and equity, or do we allow those to continue eroding under the forces of attrition? The counterrevolution thrives by convincing us that security must mean punishment, that prosperity must mean competition, and that belonging must mean exclusion. Each of these is a way of ordering priorities.
Wendy Brown explains that neoliberalism reorganizes our sense of value. Democracy is hollowed out, and decisions are justified not by justice but by efficiency and return. Harcourt shows us that counterrevolutions are never only reactive. They restructure the field of what gets secured and what gets dismantled. Feminist theorists remind us that one of the most urgent tasks is to reprioritize care and reproduction, to put life and relation at the center instead of profit and control.
We can see this clearly in moments of crisis. After the financial crash of 2008, governments rushed to save banks while leaving households to drown in foreclosures. During the pandemic, some leaders prioritized markets over protecting lives. These were political choices about what to secure and what to abandon.
The fourth theorem means we must view the things we value as a type of resistance against the attrition. It means that we choose the care for people over personal gain, that we choose truth even when it is difficult, and that we seek knowledge when spectacle is more entertaining. It also means that we pay specific attention to what institutions and the ruling class do and not to what they say they value.
Practices of Relational Resistance
If these theorems are to matter, they must come alive in practice. I see at least five areas where relational resistance is already taking shape.
One area is what I would call counter-subjectivation. Foucault taught us that power does not only repress; it produces subjects. Neoliberalism trains us to be competitive entrepreneurs of ourselves. Counter-subjectivation means creating spaces where we learn different habits: cooperation, solidarity, mutual care. These can be reading groups, collective kitchens, workshops, or cooperative projects. They may look small, but they train us in a different kind of subjectivity, one that resists attrition.
Another area is debt refusal and reconfiguration. Debt governs us through guilt and futurity. To resist is to loosen its hold. This can mean organizing debt strikes, pooling resources in solidarity funds, or experimenting with local credit systems designed for mutual support rather than profit. Even the decision to stop equating personal worth with credit scores is a way of breaking the script. Every time we reject the impingement of debt in our lives we get a little more free.
A third area is what I refer to as institutional wedging. Most of us are already part of institutions: schools, unions, clinics, NGOs, workplaces. These spaces may feel rigid, but they are not fixed. We can wedge them open, pushing for new priorities. Instead of efficiency metrics, demand equity. Instead of profit margins, demand justice. These small cracks in institutional life can open new paths for solidarity and democratic practice.
A fourth area is the building of counter-penal and anti-fascist coalitions. The counterrevolution has been deeply punitive, expanding prisons, policing, and borders. Relational resistance must shrink the reach of punishment and expand the reach of care. Abolitionist movements are already showing us what this looks like: redirecting resources away from cages and weapons and toward housing, healthcare, and community safety. Joining these efforts is one of the most powerful ways to resist today. Fascism operates through policing and “law and order” discourse. Thus we must be clear about our own values despite what the laws or the police might say. We must adhere to our own value systems even if the ruling order disagrees, or even criminalizes our values and activities. We must move everyday toward care and justice.
Finally, there is what I think of as apparatus hacking. Foucault described apparatuses as the assemblages of institutions, technologies, and norms that govern us. They can be hacked in small but significant ways. Choosing open-source tools instead of surveillance platforms, meeting in non-hierarchical ways, or creating alternative modes of exchange are all examples of hacking. Each small change opens a space for solidarity and weakens the grip of attrition.
These practices are already visible in movements around us: tenant unions fighting rent hikes, sanctuary campaigns protecting migrants, student-led divestment drives, and cooperative platforms resisting surveillance capitalism. None of these alone will defeat the counterrevolution. But each demonstrates that resistance is not an abstract idea. It is a set of choices about how to live, relate, and prioritize.
Conclusion: Relational Beginnings
The global right-wing counterrevolution is powerful. It deepens the erosion of relational life and thrives on fear, division, and exhaustion. But its strength depends on our hesitation, our belief in neutrality, and our willingness to let markets and punishment dictate our priorities.
The four theorems outlined here suggest another path. We can act without waiting for neutrality. We can begin in the everyday. We can see every action as political. And we can treat prioritization as the heart of politics.
These ideas are not a blueprint. They are an orientation. They tell us that the materials of resistance are already in our hands. They remind us that care, solidarity, and equity are not just values but practices that can be chosen and nurtured right now.
If attrition wears us down by eroding relation, then resistance must build us up by restoring it. The task is not to search for a final answer to the question what then, shall we do? but to recognize that we answer it every day in how we live, how we relate, and what we choose to protect.
Resistance begins here. It begins with relational beginnings that grow outward into institutions, communities, and movements. It begins wherever we decide that democracy, justice, and solidarity are worth more than fear, punishment, and exclusion.
Suggested Reading
For readers who want to go deeper, here are some of the works and resources that shaped the reflections in this essay:
- Bernard Harcourt, Critique & Praxis (2020) – A call to move from analysis to action, insisting that critique must lead to political choice.
- Bernard Harcourt, 13/13 Seminar Series at Columbia University – A treasure trove of open-access lectures and discussions on Marx, Foucault, Abolition, Uprising, Counterrevolution, and more. You can explore the series here: 13/13 Project – Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought
- Karl Marx, Capital (Volume I) – Classic analysis of how capitalism reproduces itself through labor, exploitation, and ideology.
- Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (2007) and The Birth of Biopolitics (2008)** – Lectures on governmentality, biopolitics, and neoliberalism.
- Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015) – A powerful account of how neoliberal rationality hollows out democratic life.
- Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (2012) – A study of debt as a political technology that reshapes subjectivity.
- Feminist Social Reproduction Theory – See Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (2004), Nancy Fraser’s essays on care and capitalism, and recent abolitionist feminism writing in Abolition 13/13.
- Mutual Aid Movements – Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (2020) offers an accessible introduction.
Social Science & Our Critical Times 