Revolutionary Defeatism in the Age of Empire

Introduction

Revolutionary defeatism is a scandalous phrase in polite political society. It sounds like treason. It sounds like surrender. It sounds like you are cheering for the fall of your own country. And in a narrow sense, you are.

But revolutionary defeatism is not nihilism. It is not the abandonment of oppressed people to their fate. It is a strategic and moral stance forged in the furnace of imperial war. It begins from a simple recognition: if you live inside an empire, your primary political responsibility is to disrupt that empire’s capacity to dominate others.

The trap is obvious. When you oppose your own state’s war machine, you risk appearing indifferent to the suffering of people under invasion or occupation. Worse, you may unconsciously slide into a paternalistic posture, positioning yourself as rescuer rather than accomplice in dismantling the system that produces conquest. In trying to be anti-imperialist, you can accidentally rehearse the very hierarchies you claim to oppose.

The task, then, is delicate but urgent. How do you practice revolutionary defeatism in a way that weakens imperial power while strengthening the agency of colonized and oppressed peoples? How do you sabotage domination without scripting yourself as the hero?

The answer requires strategic clarity, disciplined humility, and new organizing rituals. Revolutionary defeatism must be recast not as abstract ideology but as a lived practice of shared sovereignty. When done well, it erodes empire at its core while amplifying the self-determination of those it has sought to crush.

Reclaiming Revolutionary Defeatism for Today

Revolutionary defeatism emerged from a brutal insight. In inter-imperial wars, the working classes of rival empires are asked to slaughter one another for the profit and prestige of their rulers. The patriotic script demands unity behind the flag. The defeatist script shatters that unity and says: our enemy is at home.

This stance was never meant to deny the right of colonized peoples to resist. On the contrary, it insisted that wars of liberation against empire are fundamentally different from wars between empires. To confuse the two is to erase power asymmetry.

The Strategic Core

At its heart, revolutionary defeatism asks you to identify the war-making capacity of your own state and target it. Not abstractly. Concretely. Where are the logistical nodes? The ports shipping weapons. The tech firms designing surveillance systems. The universities incubating military research. The banks underwriting extractive projects. The media outlets laundering nationalist mythology.

If you live in an imperial core, your leverage lies here. You likely cannot influence battlefield decisions in a distant territory. But you can obstruct the arteries that feed the war machine. That is not symbolic protest. It is structural intervention.

Consider the global anti-Iraq War marches of February 15, 2003. Millions filled streets across 600 cities. It was a breathtaking display of world opinion. Yet the invasion proceeded. Why? Because the protests were largely expressive rather than disruptive. They signaled dissent but did not significantly impair the capacity of states to wage war.

Revolutionary defeatism must go further. It must create friction inside the imperial system. It must raise the cost of war materially and politically. Otherwise it risks becoming a ritual of moral purity rather than a lever of change.

Avoiding the Nationalist Trap

In moments of geopolitical crisis, movements are often pressured to choose sides between states. One empire frames itself as defender of civilization. Another claims to be resisting encirclement. Smaller states wrap their own elites in the language of sovereignty.

The defeatist position cuts through this theater. You do not align with your ruling class because it claims to defend freedom abroad. Nor do you romanticize rival states simply because they oppose your own. The enemy of your enemy is not automatically your friend.

This is where clarity matters. Your opposition is to imperial domination as a system, not merely to a particular flag. That means refusing both chauvinism and geopolitical campism. It also means maintaining a sharp distinction between states and peoples. You may oppose your government’s intervention without condemning the people resisting invasion. You may criticize a liberation movement’s leadership without denying its right to fight occupation.

Revolutionary defeatism becomes powerful when it is paired with rigorous analysis of power relations. Who holds structural dominance? Who is subjected to it? Without this analysis, slogans drift and solidarity frays.

If this first move is about targeting your own empire, the second is about transforming how you relate to those under its boot.

Solidarity Without Paternalism

The moral hazard of anti-imperialist activism in the core is paternalism. You can slip into a narrative in which oppressed peoples appear as helpless victims awaiting rescue from enlightened allies. Media incentives reinforce this. Journalists love a savior story. Donors reward dramatic heroism. Social media amplifies charismatic spokespeople.

But solidarity rooted in rescue reproduces hierarchy. It centers your virtue rather than their agency.

Flip Authorship

One practical discipline is to flip authorship. When your movement issues statements about a conflict, foreground voices from the affected communities. Quote them. Invite them to co-author. If you organize a disruptive action against a weapons manufacturer, pair it with a clear articulation of demands shaped by those living under the bombs.

This is not tokenism. It is strategic alignment. Every tactic embeds an implicit theory of change. If your action claims to support a liberation struggle but is disconnected from that struggle’s articulated priorities, you risk performing solidarity rather than enacting it.

Diaspora communities often become crucial bridges. They hold lived knowledge of both contexts. Instead of treating them as symbolic endorsements, integrate them into decision-making structures. Grant them real influence over target selection, timing, and framing. Consider veto power over actions that claim to act in their name.

Shared authorship reshapes internal culture. It disrupts the savior impulse before it hardens into habit.

Measure Agency, Not Applause

After every campaign cycle, ask a different question. Not: did we get media coverage? Not: did our numbers grow? Ask instead: whose agency expanded?

Did communities under occupation gain resources, protection, or strategic breathing room? Did your actions force public debate that amplified their narrative rather than substituting your own? Did you absorb risk that would otherwise have fallen on them?

This reframing shifts your metric from visibility to sovereignty. Counting heads at rallies is obsolete. Counting degrees of self-determination gained is harder but more honest.

History offers warnings. Many well-meaning solidarity campaigns during the Cold War ended up instrumentalizing liberation struggles to advance domestic ideological battles. Movements became chess pieces in superpower rivalries. The result was disillusionment and, at times, betrayal.

To avoid repeating this, embed humility structurally. Institutionalize self-critique. Maintain a living log of missteps where paternalism crept in. Review it publicly within your organization. Humility becomes muscle memory only through repetition.

Solidarity is not a feeling. It is a set of disciplined practices.

Designing Acts of Resistance That Deepen Reciprocity

Revolutionary defeatism in practice often involves disruption, sabotage, and refusal. These tactics carry risk. They can also generate spectacle. The question is how to design them so they deepen reciprocity rather than inflate ego.

Target the System, Shoulder the Risk

If you sabotage the machinery of empire, do so in a way that concentrates legal and political risk within your own context. Build defense funds that protect participants in the core. Do not expose partners in colonized regions to retaliation because of your actions. Make it explicit that any blowback will be absorbed locally.

This inversion matters. Empire externalizes harm. Your organizing should internalize it. By taking on risk, you signal that solidarity is not symbolic. It is material.

The Diebold email leak in 2003 offers a small but instructive example. Students mirrored internal documents revealing vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines. When the corporation threatened legal action, the controversy escalated only after a U.S. congressional server joined the mirroring. Institutional actors within the core absorbed the pressure, allowing the information to circulate widely. Risk was redistributed strategically.

In anti-imperialist contexts, similar thinking applies. Disrupt the supply chain at home. Pressure investors. Expose contracts. Create friction where you have structural leverage.

Ritualize Mutual Decision-Making

Shared agency does not emerge spontaneously. It requires ritual.

Begin meetings by naming the privileges and positionalities present. Invite updates from comrades directly affected by the conflict. Let their priorities shape the agenda. Use transparent budgeting with joint approval mechanisms so funds flow according to agreed strategy.

Rotate spokesperson roles. Use lotteries when appropriate to prevent charismatic monopolies. When media requests a single face of the movement, redirect them to collective statements or to voices from the affected communities. If necessary, refuse the platform rather than allow a hero narrative to crystallize.

These rituals may feel procedural. They are actually transformative. Movements become what they rehearse daily. Rehearse equality and you erode hierarchy.

Design for Epiphany, Not Martyrdom

Acts of sabotage can drift toward martyrdom theater. Arrest becomes a badge. Suffering becomes currency. While sacrifice has always been part of resistance, fetishizing it can distort strategy.

Instead, design actions that trigger epiphany. Expose contradictions so starkly that observers reassess their assumptions. The Québec Casseroles in 2012 offer a glimpse. Nightly pot-and-pan marches turned ordinary households into participants. The sound was irresistible. It signaled mass refusal without relying on centralized leadership or dramatic arrests.

In anti-imperialist struggle, imagine tactics that make the war machine visible in everyday life. Map supply chains publicly. Project the names of bombed villages onto corporate headquarters. Transform silence into indictment. Silence, when chosen collectively, can dethrone regimes as surely as noise.

When tactics shift consciousness, solidarity expands horizontally rather than vertically. People join not because they are rescued but because they awaken.

Integrating the Four Lenses of Change

Most contemporary movements default to voluntarism. They believe that if enough people act with sufficient courage, power will yield. Numbers matter. Disruption matters. But without attention to structural timing, collective psychology, and ritual meaning, voluntarism exhausts itself.

Revolutionary defeatism becomes resilient when it integrates multiple lenses of change.

Structural Awareness

Monitor the material conditions that make wars possible or untenable. Economic downturns, energy crises, debt spirals, and electoral fractures can all create openings. The Arab Spring ignited in part amid spikes in food prices. Structural stress amplifies the impact of catalytic acts.

If you act during a lull, your disruption may evaporate. If you act when contradictions peak, it can cascade. Timing is not everything, but ignoring it is fatal.

Subjective and Cultural Shifts

Imperial wars depend on narratives. They rely on fear, honor, and myth. Countering them requires cultural work. Art, memes, spiritual gatherings, and consciousness-raising circles shift the emotional climate in which policy operates.

ACT UP’s Silence equals Death icon did more than protest government inaction. It reframed public perception of AIDS. It infused rage with clarity. In anti-imperialist work, symbols that expose the human cost of war can puncture nationalist spellcasting.

Do not underestimate this terrain. Outer reality mirrors collective imagination more than materialists like to admit.

Ritual and the Sacred

There is also a dimension many secular activists neglect. Ritual can invite moral seriousness that ordinary meetings cannot. Ceremonies honoring victims of imperial violence. Interfaith fasts against war. Collective moments of silence that transform public squares into sites of mourning and resolve.

These acts are not decorative. They recalibrate the moral atmosphere. They remind participants that they are not merely strategists but stewards of a different future.

When voluntarist disruption, structural timing, cultural reframing, and ritual depth converge, movements acquire durability. They no longer oscillate between spectacle and burnout. They evolve.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To embed revolutionary defeatism and reciprocal solidarity into daily organizing, consider these concrete steps:

• Map your empire’s local nodes: Identify corporations, financial institutions, research centers, and logistics hubs connected to imperial projects. Develop campaigns that target these points with escalating pressure.

• Establish joint decision structures: Create formal mechanisms where representatives from affected or diasporic communities share agenda-setting power, including veto authority over actions conducted in their name.

• Adopt a sovereignty metric: After each action, evaluate whether it increased the self-determination, resources, or narrative power of oppressed communities. Make this assessment public within your organization.

• Build risk absorption capacity: Set up legal defense funds, rapid response teams, and media strategies that concentrate consequences within the imperial core rather than exporting them to vulnerable partners.

• Institutionalize anti-paternalism rituals: Maintain a recurring review session dedicated to identifying moments where savior narratives crept in. Document lessons and adjust protocols accordingly.

• Fuse fast and slow time: Combine sharp bursts of disruption with long-term institution building, such as cooperatives, community councils, or alternative media platforms that prefigure post-imperial sovereignty.

These practices turn abstract principle into lived culture. They also signal to allies abroad that your commitment is durable, not episodic.

Conclusion

Revolutionary defeatism is not about cheering collapse for its own sake. It is about withdrawing consent from imperial domination and redirecting loyalty toward shared human freedom. It asks you to confront the uncomfortable truth that if you live in an empire, your taxes, your labor, and your silence may be underwriting violence elsewhere.

Practiced poorly, defeatism becomes empty contrarianism or paternalistic theater. Practiced well, it weakens the machinery of conquest while amplifying the autonomy of those resisting it. The difference lies in structure, humility, and strategy.

You must target the arteries of your own state’s power. You must embed shared authorship and mutual respect into daily organizing. You must measure success not by applause but by sovereignty gained. And you must innovate relentlessly, because any tactic that becomes predictable will be neutralized.

The era of mass marches as moral spectacle is fading. The future belongs to movements that combine disruption with disciplined solidarity, courage with self-critique, resistance with reconstruction.

If empire depends on your obedience, where will you begin to withdraw it, and how will you ensure that in doing so you expand, rather than eclipse, the agency of those fighting for their own liberation?