There is No Unhappy Revolution

Introduction and Book Review

by: Katrina Kniss

There is no unhappy revolution: the communism of destitution, by Marcello Tari, Common Notions, 2021, 210 pp., $18.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-942173-16-8

What is the relationship of Christianity to revolution? As followers of Jesus, we strive for the coming of God’s kingdom. The Church is the community we create to embody the possibilities of God’s kingdom in the present. This kingdom is free from hierarchy and removed from the stranglehold of state sovereignty; a place where life is lived in common and defined by love. But in a present world formed by the forces of racialized capitalism and the carceral state, how does the creation of such a world become possible? When there is no geography untouched by borders, how do we escape to a new world?

For too long Christians, and specifically Christian anarchists, have responded to this dilemma with a form of moralistic pacifism that refuses to engage with overt forms of armed conflict, yet also remains passive in the face of other forms of systemic violence. This isolation from engagement in political life is only possible for communities whose existence does not disrupt the status quo. Many marginalized communities are already living a life unrecognized and unprotected by the law and have created forms of life and survival where sovereignty holds no authority. For communities that hold privilege in our current world order, the potential for collective liberation cannot be harnessed without a voluntary exile from the system that upholds their rights, setting aside protections predicated on the harm of others to live in solidarity with those who never had the ability to choose in the first place. 

This exit is nothing short of a revolution. In his book There is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution, Marcello Tari names this type of revolution as a “destituent strike”. For Tari, the challenges of our era cannot be confronted with an antagonistic revolt, nor reforms that bring more people in as constituents of our governmental system. Our moment requires “both a destruction of the present and an exit…an exit that reaffirms our being here and now. Only a presence of this kind can deliver redemption.” 
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I begin this issue of Rock! Paper! Scissors! with a review of Tari’s book in the hope that it will provide a theoretical ground for the pieces that follow. Tari’s work points to the need for Christian communities to engage the conversations of radical theorists to help us better understand the pessimisms of the present and the new use of this world our faith is calling us toward. Political theory is inherently theological. The pieces that make up this issue show the wide reach these ideas can have in our communal life together. Some speak of historical lessons, some of the obscured wisdom of the Christian tradition, some of unlikely prophecy, some of necessary apocalypse; but all of these contributions name the devastating hope of the destituent spirit, alive with potential in every moment. ​

The Destituent Strike​

Tari states plainly, “capitalism revolves around catastrophe” (59). As we’ve seen in even sharper focus the last two years, the governing structures of capitalism will adapt amid pandemics and uprisings to squeeze out more profit, bringing more life under its management, reproducing itself again and again. Revolutionary movements that envision a far-off liberation in the future fail to meet the demands of these apocalyptic times. For Tari, revolution does not have a future, but is “an exit from the present as formed by domination” (61). Utopia is not an image by which we plan the future, but a map to identify what must be destroyed now (62). Preoccupation with the future does not serve us. All we have is now, and it must be destroyed. 

In this same gesture of abolition, is the discovery of hope (111). We Christian anarchists understand this well. The kingdom of God is not in some long-awaited-for future. It is in our midst, within our very beings, waiting to be accessed when we destroy the bounds of sovereignty that hold us hostage. While the destituent strike is an exit, its new home is a commune that sustains ungovernable forms of life. Tari calls this space the “internal exteriority”, a spiritual-political exit that can appear anywhere, despite sovereignty’s hold on every geographic area (90). Borrowing from Hannah Arendt, Tari also offers the crucial warning that even for those communities that attempt to distance themselves from the workings of Empire, these new territories “become destituent only to the extent that they are places that ‘let us live in the desert without becoming reconciled to it’” (91). The passive isolation of many mainstream Christian communities shows we have too easily reconciled ourselves to the violence of the world, safe in our oases of relative privilege. Instead, we are called to deeply inhabit an ethos of ungovernability that militantly refuses to be pacified into any institutional forms. “It is only by developing a revolutionary spirituality that can we reach such depths” (97). 

Revolutionary Becoming

In perhaps the most poignant chapter of the book, Tari likens the power of destituent revolution to the experience of loving (123-130). Love is often as destructive as it is creative. It can enter into any life in any moment, just like the Messiah. It allows us to access new use of the self and life itself, cutting across “even the most disastrous failures without losing an iota of its potential.” There is no unhappy love. “Love is one of the possibilities – the most powerful one – that increases the potential of existence, precisely because it allows us to perceive dimensions of existence that we previously could not…” (126). We can find joy even in a doomed love affair, if the experience has allowed us to perceive something we previously did not have access to. 

This potential of love speaks to the same abundant power of the destituent spirit. “The revolution – like justice or love – is not an institution, nor is it a particular form of morality, nor is it a virtuous historical adventure. Rather it is a ‘state of the world.’ It can be defeated, but there is no unhappy revolution” (131). The production of a viable future does not define the worth of any given action. The worth of an action is contained within itself. “To give the future the power of judgment means to postpone justice ad infinitum while nevertheless legitimizing its contemporary ministers, consigning works, epochs, thoughts, and life to an ethical relativism soaked in nihilism“ (137). In other words, the ends do not justify the means, as compromised means make way for the inevitable corruption of sovereignty. Always, the means are the end, in and of themselves. 

There is no unhappy revolution. Though the short-lived revolutionary experiments of history may have been defeated, they each teach us how to access a new dimension of liberated existence. Though our communal experiments in destituent power may seem insignificant, they join together with this tradition of fragments, unbound by institutional coherency. 

Imagining the destituent strike as a process that begins with a rupture means, on the one hand, to individually intensify such interruptions; on the other, it means allowing all those practices of destitution that have been sown everywhere to spread further and organize: at work and in relationships, in friendship and in thought, in living and in fighting, in love and in art. It means making all of this into a front for subversion that, in one blow, leaps over that false division between internal and external fronts. It means bringing to light the front of the forms of life. 113-114
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Tari weaves through histories of destituent spirit and thought, bringing the fragments of this tradition into one volume that forms a prophetic whole. His book provides a theoretical grounding for the infinite impulses of revolt that are the destituent spirit. Tari has gifted readers a language through which to name their power and see themselves in the tradition of the ungovernable. For those of us that also name ourselves in the tradition of Christian anarchism, may these words inspire us to face the pessimism of the present, renewed in the hope to “live every moment as if it were the moment in which the Messiah will arrive” (137).

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Katrina Kniss

is a graduate student at Wake Forest University, working toward both an MDiv and a JD. They were raised in the Anabaptist tradition and born-again into the movement. Their local organizing home is with Forsyth County Community Bail Fund. When not reading and writing about the end of the Law, you can find them chasing after mountain hikes, cat cuddles, good audiobooks, and bad reality TV. They’re occasionally on Twitter @kat­_kniss.