Post‑Liberal Movements of Contingent Solidarity

Introduction

Liberalism promises freedom through universal rights, yet its dream of neutrality hides a cage. Every right presumes a fixed subject authorized to claim it, and every universal story excludes those who live differently. The liberal order defines difference, manages it, and calls that management equality. But what if emancipation requires abandoning the very foundations of this promise? What if freedom lives only in contingency—in the capacity to change what we mean by we?

Activists instinctively sense that the inherited grammar of liberal politics is exhausted. Petitions read as polite begging, representation becomes spectacle, and intersectionality risks ossifying into new bureaucracies of identity. Stirner’s philosophy of egoism, reinterpreted by contemporary radical theorists like Saul Newman, urges a revolt against essentialism itself. He invites us to craft solidarities that are temporary, constructed through shared will rather than pre‑given categories. This is not nihilism; it is an ethics of invention.

The movements that will shape the next century will not rally around stable identities or institutional permanence. They will emerge as ephemeral constellations of difference, alive precisely because they know they will die. This philosophy of impermanence offers a counter‑language to liberal universality—a politics of flux aligned with creativity, risk and mutual transformation.

The thesis is simple: to challenge liberal essentialism, movements must cultivate contingency as strategy and pluralism as practice. By designing solidarity to evolve rather than endure, activists can keep power guessing and keep imagination free. The following sections unfold how to turn that principle into lived experiment.

The Liberal Cage and its Invisible Bars

Liberalism appears tolerant because it preaches universal equality. Yet its imagined individual—the so‑called rational subject—is a fiction born from a narrow historical context. The Enlightenment idea of the self, independent and autonomous, was always modeled on a specific social class, gender, and race. Its universality demanded the erasure of all who did not match the template. That erasure continues to structure global governance today.

Hidden Exclusions Beneath Universal Claims

When liberalism speaks of human rights, it implies a fixed humanity, a stable essence capable of being represented by law. Yet humanity has never been homogeneous. Attempts to enforce this sameness—colonial missions, development programs, securitized borders—transform the universal into an instrument of domination. Liberal inclusion often means absorption: difference swallowed by an existing order rather than allowed to redraw the order itself.

The contradiction is terminal. Liberal states cannot deliver both freedom and neutrality because one undermines the other. Every neutral system privileges the norms built into its architecture. Behind constitutional procedure hides the cultural imaginary of the few who designed it. Hence every appeal to universality smuggles a hierarchy.

The Fear of Contingency

Liberalism fears contingency because contingency undermines control. To admit that rights, identities, or norms are conditional is to admit that they can be otherwise—that authority could dissolve with changing belief. This is the anxiety liberalism continually represses. Its entire infrastructure works to stabilise meaning: bureaucratic permanence, judicial precedent, and national mythology.

Activism that accepts contingency as fundamental not only resists repression but exposes this hidden insecurity. By affirming instability, movements break the spell that law and progress are inevitable. They remind society that even its deepest institutions are temporary arrangements born from imagination and force. Recognizing that temporality is not weakness—it is power reclaimed from illusion.

Transitions from this critique to practice require a new understanding of solidarity. If liberalism bonds citizens through contractual abstraction, we must invent a solidarity that breathes—binding without freezing.

From Universal Subjects to Living Solidarities

The liberal worldview relies on two metaphysical errors: first, that the self is a fixed entity with intrinsic rights; second, that society can be harmonized through universal norms. Activists who inherit these errors find themselves trapped in repetitive moral loops. They demand recognition from power that defines recognition itself. The challenge is to build forms of belonging that exist outside those loops.

Solidarity as Process, Not Identity

True solidarity arises when people act together despite difference, not because a superior ideology has dissolved it. The Occupy movement glimpsed this when it abandoned official demands and declared, “We are the 99%.” The phrase did not describe a demographic fact; it invited subjective identification. Its power came from vagueness, from the open invitation to re‑imagine belonging. Yet even Occupy hardened into internal orthodoxy, rituals of consensus that mirrored old bureaucracies. Pattern decay set in because improvised solidarity congealed into form.

To avoid that decay, movements must ritualize fluidity. Assemblies can be constituted with expiration dates. Manifestos can carry built‑in self‑destruct clauses. Leadership can rotate by lot so that no persona becomes indispensable. These are not administrative gimmicks but spiritual safeguards against the desire for permanence. The lifeblood of pluralism is renewal.

Examples abound. In Québec’s 2012 student uprising, neighbourhood casseroles drew thousands of households to bang pots nightly. The movement’s rhythm emerged organically; when the sound ceased, it returned later transfigured. Participation was defined by momentary presence, not membership cards. Similarly, the Chilean cabildos revived during the 2019 uprising operated as pop‑up neighborhood parliaments, often dissolving before police could infiltrate. Each instance revealed that ephemeral structure can be the most democratic structure of all.

Ritualizing the Temporary

Designing expiration at the heart of organization transforms fragility from liability into strategy. When a campaign sets a public end date—a lunar cycle, a season—it suspends the illusion of infinite struggle. Participants engage fully knowing the project will die. This awareness intensifies energy and creativity. It also frustrates repression because there is nothing stable to crush once the cycle ends.

Temporary assemblies can close with rituals that celebrate contradiction. “Contradiction feasts” offer space for individuals to articulate changed minds, revised positions, or emergent doubts. Instead of concealing difference, they sacralize it. Memory survives not as archive but as atmosphere carried into the next experiment. What scholars call “non‑essentialist politics” is, in practice, a communal rhythm of creation and release.

Solidarity thus becomes a verb. To solidarize is to improvise care among shifting selves, always aware of impermanence. It thrives where identity falters. The outcome is not unity but continuous relationship.

Mutual Aid Beyond Rights: Obligation as Freedom

Liberalism grounds social bonds in rights—entitlements guaranteed by institutions. Yet every legal right presupposes the state that enforces it. For movements seeking autonomy, this dependency is fatal. Rights may name injustices, but they cannot by themselves remap power.

Shifting from Entitlement to Reciprocity

A post‑liberal movement foregrounds obligation instead of entitlement. It measures solidarity in deeds rather than declarations. Mutual‑aid networks that respond through improvisation—food deliveries during pandemics, rent collectives, neighborhood cleanups—replace the abstract subject of rights with a fabric of lived relationships. Care becomes proof of belonging.

When participants act from shared need rather than moral discourse, hierarchy loosens. The aid giver and receiver merge into one cycle of reciprocity. Political meaning emerges through action, not ideology. The effect is quietly revolutionary: community as ongoing negotiation rather than pre‑defined category.

Narrative Ecology of Contradiction

Because culture is persuasive infrastructure, movements must narrate contingency itself as virtue. Zines, podcasts, and online journals can open with the statement, “This story may contradict tomorrow’s.” Such framing habituates audiences to change. It builds tolerance for inconsistency, immunising against dogma. By refusing the burden of final truth, activists cultivate collective humility—a virtue more threatening to power than certainty ever was.

History offers evidence. The radical pamphleteers of the Paris Commune printed without continuity, each edition self‑contained. Their irregular rhythm mirrored the uncertainty of their revolt. Readers learned to inhabit the unpredictable. In a digital age where algorithms reward consistency, defying continuity becomes subversion. A politics of flux must master this paradoxical theatre: to communicate change without losing coherence.

Obligation‑based solidarity can employ symbolic tools like “solidarity passports”—documents that record acts of mutual aid yet expire quickly. Their non‑transferability resists commodification. Participation becomes experiential, not representational. Bureaucracy starves when memory is embodied instead of archived by servers and grants.

When power demands fixed identity for negotiation, the movement answers with ambiguity. Many cooperatives already sign contracts under rotating names to disrupt surveillance and co‑optation. Fluid identity preserves creative leverage. To act as many without pretending unity is today’s radical frontier.

Guarding Against New Essentialisms

No rebellion is immune to petrification. The moment a movement defines itself by what it is rather than what it does, the liberal virus returns in new clothes. Even non‑hierarchical groups often fossilize around unwritten norms that exclude dissenting temperaments.

Pattern Decay and the Trap of Orthodoxy

Every tactic, however fresh, decays once recognized by power. Police learn it; media absorb it; foundations domesticate it with grants. The solution is not purity but acceleration. Movements should track their own predictability and self‑destruct the moment efficacy declines. “Innovate or evaporate” must replace “stay until we win.” This temporal agility keeps state countermeasures perpetually behind.

Guarding creativity requires institutional humility. Digital platforms can automatically archive after a fixed period, forcing organizers to rebuild rather than accumulate. Leadership rotation by random draw can seed unexpected skills. Instead of guarding legacy, activists should treat forgetting as discipline. Memory fetishizes victory while ignoring mutation—the real story line of revolution.

Building Reflexive Structures

To resist emerging dogma, embed critique inside organization. A “meta‑circle” meeting quarterly can audit the group’s assumptions, mission statements, and aesthetic codes. Participants ask the taboo question: have we become what we once opposed? If yes, dissolve and redistribute resources. Radical honesty at structural intervals converts self‑critique into survival instinct.

In past movements, from anarchist collectives to early feminist consciousness groups, internal reflection repeatedly saved momentum. Yet such reflection decayed once institutionalized into professional NGO cultures. The challenge is to build reflection that cannot be professionalized. Random lotteries, anonymous polls, and alternating facilitators counteract charismatic capture—the tendency of eloquence to morph into authority.

Anti‑Institutional Memory: The Role of Ritual Again

Ritual offers what bureaucracy cannot: continuity without rigidity. Annual dissolution ceremonies, where archives are shredded or encrypted beyond retrieval, dramatize commitment to impermanence. Panels of former members may advise newcomers but never command. As in ancient mystery cults, truth rests in enactment, not scripture. The ritual reminds everyone that the point is not preservation of form but recreation of freedom.

When repeated, such acts generate a cultural immune system. Movements that practice self‑extinction on their own terms are uncolonizable. They embody Stirner’s egoism collectively: union without sacrifice of the unique.

The Ethics of Contradiction and Post‑Liberal Desire

Challenging liberal essentialism is not just structural work; it is psychological deprogramming. Centuries of moral conditioning urge us to seek fixed meaning—loyalty, certainty, narrative closure. Contingency feels like betrayal of truth. The activist path beyond essentialism thus requires cultivating new emotional habits.

Embracing Inconsistency

Contradiction must become a collective art. What liberal discourse frames as hypocrisy—changing one’s position—is in fact a sign of aliveness. Movements can design forums where participants publicly revise opinions. The key is to make metamorphosis celebratory, not shameful.

Historically, revolutionary currents that allowed contradiction flourished. Early anarchist federations tolerated deep theoretical divergence as long as action continued. The failure of later ideological camps—cauterized by orthodoxy—proves the cost of purity. Ideological rigidity always precedes regime formation.

Contradiction, ritualized through open confession or creative exchange, activates empathy among differences. It acknowledges that unity is a choice renewed with every encounter. Instead of defending ideological borders, activists learn to cross them gracefully.

Desire Without Ideology

Liberation demands reeducation of desire. Liberalism teaches us to desire recognition—through rights, representation, success in moral capital markets. A post‑liberal ethos desires participation itself: the rush of co‑creation, the joy of temporary we‑ness. This ecstatic model of politics connects protest to play, governance to festival. It locates power not in winning but in generating new possible worlds.

The trick is to prevent euphoria from freezing into identity. After every surge, movements must cool down through decompression rituals. Music, storytelling, or communal silence metabolize experience before it becomes mythology. When activists compress grief and joy without venting, movements rot from inside. Spiritual hygiene is strategic necessity.

At Standing Rock, ceremony sustained resistance by linking structural blockade with sacred continuity. That fusion of theurgy, voluntarism, and subjectivism showed that plural causality—not one theory of change—anchors resilience. Post‑liberal activism extends this lesson globally: the sacred act is not occupation but renewal.

Pluralism as Strategic Advantage

Pluralism is not compromise; it is complexity weaponized. When a movement allows multiple logics—economic, ecological, spiritual—to coexist, opponents cannot pin down its core demand. Like a hologram, it changes with perspective. This ambiguity frustrates negotiation yet ensures survival. Power thrives on mapping enemies; elude the map and you endure.

Plural coalitions can cooperate through shared practice rather than unified doctrine: community kitchens, climate camps, digital freedom projects. Each node operates semi‑autonomously yet communicates through resonance of values rather than chain of command. This structure mirrors biological ecosystems—interdependence without central control. Contingency thus becomes infrastructure for collective intelligence.

Transitioning from morality to multiplicity is the deepest revolution: decolonizing the self from the need to be right. Only such reoriented desire can sustain a culture of continual experimentation.

Putting Theory Into Practice

Theory becomes credible only when lived. To cultivate contingent, plural solidarities without reverting to new essentialisms, activists can begin with these steps:

1. Design Everything with an Expiration Date. Every project, committee, or charter should include a built‑in end point. This encourages focus, guards against bureaucratization, and ritualizes closure as part of the creative cycle.

2. Replace Rights with Responsibilities. Structure mutual aid not around entitlements but around responsive care. Build coordinated networks that adapt to shifting needs rather than fixed membership lists. Freedom grows through obligation freely chosen.

3. Rotate Roles by Lot. Random selection disperses expertise and prevents power concentration. Treat leadership as a temporary stewardship, not a career.

4. Normalize Contradiction. Host regular “contradiction feasts” where participants share changed views. Publish materials that embrace inconsistency as honesty. This rewires collective culture toward flexibility.

5. Erase to Protect. Practice deliberate forgetting. Auto‑archive or delete communication channels after each campaign. Transfer continuity through oral transmission and trust instead of metadata.

6. Narrate Pluralism. Produce media that highlight conflicts within the movement as evidence of vitality rather than failure. Show audiences that disagreement is creative, not divisive.

7. Conduct Rituals of Renewal. Use symbolic acts—burned manifestos, shared silences, or art installations—to mark transitions. The aesthetic of impermanence sustains morale while ensuring adaptability.

By institutionalizing impermanence and embracing difference as method, you turn contingency into armor. The goal is not to escape structure but to make structure breathable.

Conclusion

A post‑liberal politics of contingent solidarity refuses the fiction of a universal subject. It knows that every claim to timeless rights conceals a bureaucracy of exclusion. Against that morality of sameness, it proposes improvisation, reciprocity, and continual rebirth. Movement becomes metabolism: taking in contradictions, transforming them into new possibilities, and exhaling obsolete certainties.

Such activism does not merely critique power—it changes the form of collective life. The self becomes ungovernable when it stops seeking recognition from dominant categories. Communities become sovereign when they can end and restart themselves by choice. Difference ceases to threaten unity because unity has learned to fluctuate.

This is not politics as solution but politics as rehearsal. Every campaign rehearses freedom anew. Each disbanded assembly leaves behind an afterglow of courage, enough to ignite the next experiment. In this chemistry of continuous invention lies the true end of liberalism’s spell.

What would it mean for your own organizing to embrace death—not as defeat, but as the strategic art of letting go so that something unimagined can live?