The Most Damage I Can Do Joel Olson in PDF

New Political Science, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2014.894702
SYMPOSIUM
“The Most Damage I Can Do”: Joel Olson in Political
Theory, Political Critique, and Political Activism
Lisa Disch
University of Michigan
Bruce Baum
The University of British Columbia
Downloaded by [George Ciccariello-Maher] at 18:24 16 May 2014
Samuel A. Chambers
Johns Hopkins University
Lawrie Balfour
University of Virginia
Joseph Lowndes
University of Oregon
George Ciccariello-Maher,
Drexel University
Introduction
Lisa Disch
University of Michigan
The following essays were initially written for a roundtable in celebration of Joel’s
work that was convened at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science
Association in 2012. We set out to speak about the wide range of commitments and
concerns that shaped Joel’s career as an activist-teacher-scholar: anarchism, the
abolition of whiteness, the virtues of fanaticism, the dangers of corporate
capitalism, and the necessity and joys of grass-roots action. Joel set so many forces
in motion that what we hoped to accomplish by our engagement was not merely
to look back in remembrance but to keep moving forward. Yet very few, if any, of
us feel equal to the example that Joel set.
From the beginning of his academic career at the University of Minnesota in
1991, Joel integrated political activism with intellectual inquiry. This is not to say
that he bent ideas to serve political ends but that he posed questions to the history
of political thought that would bring insights to his politics. Early on, that politics
was anarchism and his political theory interlocutor was Hannah Arendt.
A seminar that he took with me inspired him to a critical engagement with
Arendt’s “council democracies” and the revolutionary committees of the Spanish
anarchists. It first took shape as a seminar paper but Joel lost no time in asking me
what it would take to develop it for publication. He was characteristically
q 2014 Caucus for a New Political Science

2 Lisa Disch et al.
confident that he had something to say that could and should be conveyed to an
academic audience.
I will admit that I gave him a first round of comments without fully believing
he would see the project through to publication. The distance between most
graduate seminar papers and articles is long, and few have the patience or the
writing “voice” to make the journey. Clearly, I did not yet know Joel. By the end of
that revision process, which occupied the better part of a year, I did. I came to
know his work ethic, to appreciate his fluidity and craft as a writer, and to
recognize that Joel-the-scholar could be nuanced in argumentation even as Joel-
the-activist tended to divide the world into allies and enemies. The final piece
does an admirable two-step. Joel argues, contrary to Arendt, that there is nothing
about a social revolution that dooms it to violence; on the contrary, the
achievement of the Spanish anarchists was to politicize the social by engaging
people to participate in the administration of social needs. Then Joel argues, with
Arendt, that the anarchist experiment faltered because they failed to
institutionalize this distinctive politics of the social: the committees “calcified
from bodies of participation into organs of administration and order.”1 In this, his
first published article, Joel had already established a distinctive practice of
political theory as an activist-scholar, taking from Arendt a lesson about political
institutions for anarchism and deriving from anarchist practice a critique of
Arendt’s public/social divide.
As the following essays will illustrate, he carried on this practice in subsequent
projects including his path breaking book, The Abolition of White Democracy (2004),
his published articles on fanaticism, and the nearly finished book, American Zealot:
Fanaticism and Democracy in the United States.
We offer the following essays, rewritten for publication, in hopes of capturing
some of the many facets of Joel’s work and career. We took the title from the post-it
that Joel kept on his computer screen, and that his friends, students and colleagues
at Northern Arizona University have inscribed as a memorial to him. With striking
simplicity, it poses a question that elicits honesty, self-reflection, and courage from
anyone (scholar or not) who aspires to activism:
“What is the most damage I can do, given my biography, abilities, and
commitments, to the racial order and rule of capital?”
– Joel Olson, 1967– 2012
For Joel Olson, with Trayvon Martin on my Mind

Bruce Baum
The University of British Columbia
What follows is a three-part tribute to Joel Olson. As a political theorist and

activist, Joel was inspired by a vision of an inclusive, egalitarian democratic
society. He was also deeply invested in the “American” political experience and in
1
Joel Olson, “The Revolutionary Spirit: Hannah Arendt and the Anarchists of the
Spanish Civil War,” Polity 29:4, pp. 461– 88, at 482.
Joel Olson in Political Theory, Political Critique, and Political Activism 3
how in its racial contours, as James Baldwin observed, the American dream too
often has “become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on
private, domestic, and international levels.”2 The acquittal of George Zimmerman,
a Latino, in July of 2013, on grounds of self-defense for the killing of Trayvon
Martin, an unarmed black seventeen year old, in Sanford, Florida in 2012, was
another stark manifestation of this American racial reality. Joel almost certainly
would have agreed with those who insist that we need to view Martin’s killing
and Zimmerman’s acquittal in the context of the long history of American racial
violence—which is to say in the full course of American history.3 He would have
added that we need to understand these events as rooted in the ongoing myopic
but stubborn dreams of a white America, or American whiteness—what Joel
called the American problems of white citizenship and white democracy.4
“I dreamed I saw [Joel Olson] last night . . . ”

The work of radical democratic and anti-racist political activists, such as Wendell
Phillips and John Brown, was close to Joel’s heart and soul. Therefore, I will start
by quickly, if idiosyncratically, situating Joel in the American radical egalitarian
activist tradition. As an activist, Joel vigorously stood up to support an array of
social justice struggles, whether this meant Take Back the Night marches in
Minneapolis or standing up to anti-immigrant folks in Arizona. In this, he was
something like a latter day Joe Hill, the US radical activist, union organizer, poet,
and folk singer who also lived too short of a life, from 1879 to 1915. Hill was
executed in 1915, after being convicted on what is widely seen as a frame-up.5 One
2
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York, NY: Vintage Books, [1963] 1993), pp.
88 – 9; and James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis,” in Angela
Y. Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, with a foreword by Julian
Bond (New York, NY: Signet Books, 1971), pp. 22 – 3.
3
See, for example, Ekwon N. Yankah, “The Truth About Trayvon,” The New York Times
(op-ed), July 15, 2013, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/opinion/the-truth-about-
trayvon.html?nl¼todaysheadlines&emc ¼ edit_th_20130716 (accessed July 16, 2013); and
Charles M. Blow, “The Whole System Failed,” The New York Times (op-ed), July 15, 2013, at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/opinion/the-whole-system-failed.html?src¼
ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB (accessed July 16, 2013).
4
Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis, MN: The University of
Minnesota Press, 2004). For Joel in action, see “Joel Olson on White Democracy and the
99%,” at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼ -0HlQNLhbBE (accessed July 16, 2013). For
a useful discussion of the sometimes triangulated relationship between white, Latino/a,
and black Americans, see Isabel Wilkerson, “In Florida, a Death Foretold,” The New York
Times (op-ed), March 31, 2012, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/su
nday/a-native-caste-society.html?ref¼trayvonmartin (accessed July 16, 2013). Wilkerson
cites a study of racial attitudes in Durham, NC, which has a fast-growing Latino
population, by researchers at Duke University that indicates a tendency among Latinos to
identify with white Americans and to dis-identify with blacks: “an overwhelming majority
of Latinos—78%—felt they had the most in common with whites, while 53% of them felt
they had the least in common with blacks. So it would make sense for those respondents to
act with the same assumptions about blacks that they perceive are held by native whites. In
fact the Latino respondents, many of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America,
actually reported higher negative feelings toward blacks than most native-born whites.”
5
See “Joe Hill,” Union Songs, at: http://unionsong.com/u017.html (accessed July 22,
2013); and Bill Scott, “‘Takes More than Guns to Kill a Man’: The ballad of Joe Hill,” Frontline
2:13 (November 2010), at: http://www.redflag.org.uk/frontline/nov10/joehill.html
4 Lisa Disch et al.
of Joe Hill’s best known songs was “The Preacher and the Slave”, written in 1908
or 1911. In rhyme, Hill calls for working-class unity to fight against capitalist
exploiters who unfairly have accumulated wealth and power from the labor of
working people.6
There is also a song about Joe Hill that seems to have been written as a poem in
1930 and turned into a song in 1936.7 Joan Baez sung “Joe Hill” at the Woodstock
festival in 1969, and it also has been recorded by activist-artists such as Paul
Robeson and Billy Bragg. It tells of how copper bosses had Joe killed but that he
“never died.”8 Several verses encapsulate the revolutionary-radical democratic
humanist spirit that links Joe Hill to Joel Olson. They recount that Hill was
wrongly convicted and then executed on a murder charge, but “didn’t die,” as he
lives on wherever working people organize, strike, and fight for their rights.9
For what it’s worth, Joe Hill was born Joel Haaglund, in Sweden.
Whiteness
Now I will turn to a story that more directly concerns Joel Olson and our common
interest—his and mine—in critical whiteness studies. I think I can trace my own
introduction to critical whiteness studies to a particular moment involving Joel at
the University of Minnesota in the mid-to-late 1990s.10 Chantal Mouffe was giving
a talk concerning identity politics to the Department of Political Science. Joel and I
were both in the audience; we both were Minnesota grad students. Joel was
working on his dissertation at the time; I was done with my PhD at that point.
After Mouffe had finished her talk, Joel asked a question. It was something like
this: “What about identities that shouldn’t be affirmed but that need to be
abolished, like whiteness?”
As I recall through the haze of time, neither Mouffe nor anyone else present
knew quite what to say in response. This was so even though David Roediger,
who was then in the History Department at the University of Minnesota and one
of the people with whom Joel worked, had published The Wages of Whiteness in
1991; and African Americans had been writing critically about whiteness for more
than a hundred years.11 Most of us gathered there, including me at that moment,
Footnote 5 continued
(accessed July 22, 2013). A recent book lends support to the view that Hill was wrongly
convicted of the murder, maintaining that he was the “victim of authorities and a jury eager
to deal a blow to his radical labor union.” See Steven Greenhouse, “Examining a Labor
Hero’s Death,” The New York Times, August 26, 2011, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/
08/27/us/27hill.html?pagewanted¼all (accessed January 23, 2014).
6
Joe Hill, “The Preacher and the Slave,” at http://www.folkarchive.de/pie.html
(accessed July 22, 2013). The song has been recorded since by activist-folksingers like
Peter Seeger and Utah Phillips.
7
Lyrics by Alfred Hayes; music by Earl Robinson. See “Joe Hill”; and Scott, “Takes
More than Guns to Kill a Man.”
8
“Joe Hill.”
9
The 1960s folksinger Phil Ochs also wrote a song for Joe Hill: “The Ballad of Joe Hill.”
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼yUR2PDTptO0 (accessed January 8, 2014).
10
Joel later gave me early feedback for my book, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race
(New York University Press, 2006).
11
See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class, revised edition (London, UK: Verso, [1991] 1999; and David R. Roediger
(ed.), Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (Schocken, 1999).
knew little about this work. In my case this was so even though I had already read
a lot of James Baldwin’s work, but not yet his essays “The White Problem” and
“On Being ‘White’ . . . and Other Lies.”12
That moment has stuck with me. In some ways I’ve been trying to answer
Joel’s question ever since: “What about identities that shouldn’t be affirmed and
that need to be abolished, like whiteness?”
Joel himself was persistently focused on the fact that claims to and defenses of
racial whiteness are intrinsically exclusionary and thus deeply problematic. In this
spirit, he argued compellingly that “[t]he task of a democratic politics . . . is not to
ignore nor redefine white personhood, but to abolish it.”13 I am not going to
elaborate my current, indeterminate view of this matter here, although I will offer
a few thoughts. Basically, I am still in sympathy with Joel’s basic abolitionist idea:
that, ultimately, whiteness—or at least whiteness as we know it (but I do not think
Joel would approve of this qualification)—should be abolished. For the time

being, I feel pretty confident in saying that on the road to something like the
abolition of white citizenship and white privilege, whiteness first needs to be
avowed, or owned up to, by those of us who benefit from the wages of whiteness.
This must be pursued not to in any way defend or celebrate whiteness, but on the
way to dismantling white power and white privilege.
That said, I am not sure that the abolitionist program—in the sense of the
abolition of whiteness—is quite the way to do this. At the same time, I do not see
any plausible way to, as Lucius Outlaw has suggested, “rehabilitate whiteness.”14
For those of us who have been racialized as white people—with white people
historically having been the main gatekeepers of “whiteness” and who are
accepted as white—I do not see a clear path beyond avowing whiteness and
working as diligently as we can to undercut its power and privileges. Joel was
certainly right to emphasize that whiteness is a mode of social identity and
categorization that has been forged within relations of power and domination; it
has been fundamentally bound up with a constellation of social status distinctions
and social valuation that has perpetuated white supremacy and ongoing white
privilege. Indeed, it has produced the sort of social identity—the idea that some of
us are really white people—that has had as its raison d’être the work of producing
and sustaining bogus but politically potent claims to racial superiority. In this,
whiteness is not so dissimilar to racist theories about a supposed “Aryan race,”
but with a longer, somewhat more multifaceted genealogy.15
Thus, Joel’s call for us to abolish whiteness is righteous. Yet, as a social identity,
whiteness simultaneously comprises one of the myriad ways in which some
people have come to understand themselves and their relations to others.16
12
James Baldwin, “The White Problem,” in Robert A. Goldwin (ed.), 100 Years of
Emancipation (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1964); James Baldwin, “‘On Being ‘White’ . . . and
Other Lies,” in Roediger (ed.), Black on White, pp. 177– 81.
13
Joel Olson, “The Limits of Colorblind and Multicultural Personhood,” Stanford Agora
2:1 (2001), p. 18.
14
Lucius Outlaw, “Rehabilitate Racial Whiteness?” in George Yancy (ed.), What White
Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, (New York, NY and
London, UK: Routledge, 2004), pp. 87– 106.
15
Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race, Introduction and ch. 4.
16
See Linda Martı́n Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 2006).
6 Lisa Disch et al.
As such, it is bound up with webs of meaning and self-understanding that,

however power-laden, cannot simply be sloughed off. We might think that racism
and whiteness readily would be abolished if we were to overturn capitalism and
its accompanying class divisions. But this is doubtful for two reasons that Joel
appreciated, following W.E.B. Du Bois and David Roediger: first, it assumes that
racism is simply epiphenomenal to capitalism’s class divisions; second, this
envisioned abolitionist scenario fails to address the ways in which many of the
poor and working class people who arguably have a class interest in overturning
capitalism are poor and working-class white people who are more deeply
invested in their whiteness than in their putative class status.17 Consequently, the
project of dismantling or democratically transforming capitalist class divisions
will not likely be advanced unless white working people join this effort by
simultaneously working through and against their existing investments in
whiteness.18
There are precedents for such a political praxis in the efforts of such white race
traitors like John Brown, Wendell Phillips, and the white Freedom Riders to defeat
racism and white privilege and to advance social justice.19 For Joel, this sort of
practice, combining an avowal of his own whiteness with persistent efforts to
dismantle the ideological and political conditions that reproduced whiteness and
its unearned advantages, was basic to his work as a writer, teacher, and activist-
revolutionary.
Regarding the matter of white people responsibly avowing whiteness, Drucilla
Cornell and Sara Murphy explain the moral imperative for them, as white women,
to identify as “white and Anglo because these categories continue not only to
reproduce privilege but also to enforce it. To deny that we are part of the
privileged group, then, is not only false; it is, more importantly, unethical.”20 One
practical implication of this point in societies with histories of white racial
domination—for example the United States, Canada, South Africa, Brazil, and in
Europe—seems to be as follows: there are good reasons for white people along
with “non-white” people to support “race” conscious policies, such as affirmative
action and reparations, to promote substantive equality for historically
17
See W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York, NY: The
Free Press, [1935] 1999); Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Olson, The Abolition of the White
Democracy.
18
My view of this task may be different from that of Samuel Chambers (see his essay
below). While I would not necessarily dispute Sam’s notion of a white capitalist social
formation in the United States, I see the challenge of transforming it in terms of an agency-
structure dialectic: transformation of the social order would require a critical mass of
people—including many white people—to mobilize effectively, starting from their existing
socio-politically constituted self-conceptions, to change it. Joel addressed these issues
indirectly in Joel Olson, “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” Political
Research Quarterly 61 (December 2008), pp. 704– 18.
19
On Phillips, see Joel Olson, “The Freshness of Fanaticism: The Abolitionist Defense of
Zealotry,” Perspectives on Politics 5 (December 2007), pp. 685– 701; on Brown, see Joel Olson,
“The Politics of Protestant Violence: Abolitionists and Anti-Abortionists,” in Andrew
R. Murphy (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence, (Chichester, UK; Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 485– 97.
20
Drucilla Cornell and Sara Murphy, “Anti-racism, Multiculturalism and the Ethics of
Identification,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 28 (July 2002), pp. 419– 49, at p. 435.
subordinated racialized groups for as long as distinctly racialized inequalities

persist.21
As Joel understood well, though, much crucial critical-hermeneutical work
still needs to be done to understand white people’s possessive investments in
whiteness—both psychological and material—on the way to building a sustained,
effective movement to achieve this goal. In this regard, reflecting on how white
Americans historically have projected their own “fears and longings”
destructively on black Americans, James Baldwin remarked,
The only way that [white man] can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power
over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become a part of that
suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his
lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveller’s checks, visits surreptitiously
after dark.22
Joel, being white, took Baldwin’s idea to heart in the best way, without, I think,
falling prey to another kind of false projection—imagining that he could really
simply leave behind his whiteness. Instead, he self-consciously worked to
overcome what Baldwin judged to be “most terrible” about white Americans: that
they “are not prepared to believe my version of the story, to believe that it
happened.”23 Joel grasped the version of the American story lived by black and
other non-white Americans, and he worked in solidarity with “that suffering and
dancing country” that has had such a burdened relationship to the myths and
manifestations of American whiteness.24
Theory and Practice

These considerations lead us back to the question of politics: how can a personal
ethical project—one white man’s efforts to work in solidarity with “that suffering
and dancing” America—serve as a basis for an effective political project. This
question was raised in a slightly different way after presentations at the panel in
Joel’s honor for which I presented an earlier version of this paper: how can we best
honor the spirit of engaged political theory that Joel’s work exemplified as
opposed to being captivated by more rarefied but politically disengaged
theoretical abstraction that we find too often in political theory and in political
science more generally? My tentative answer derives from my understanding of
Joel’s side of a friendly “debate” that he and I had concerning radical democracy
and Marx’s political thought.
For my part, I have long been interested in Marx as a theorist of a radical-
communist democracy to come, from his early Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
‘Philosophy of Right’ (1843) through The Civil War in France (1871), on the Paris
21
Amy Gutmann, “Responding to Racial Injustice,” in K. Anthony Appiah and Amy
Gutmann (eds), Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1996); Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ch. 4. This proposition raises various
practical complications that need to be answered contextually.
22
Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, p. 129.
23
Baldwin, “The White Problem,” p. 84.
24
See Olson, “The Limits of Colorblind and Multicultural Personhood”; Olson,
Abolition; and “Joel Olson on White Democracy and the 99%.”
8 Lisa Disch et al.
Commune.25 My point was and is that Marx arguably remained true to his early
idea that, as he said, “Democracy is the solved riddle of all constitutions. Here, not
merely implicitly and in essence but existing in reality, the constitution is
constantly brought back to its actual basis, the actual human being, the actual
people, and established as the people’s own work. The constitution appears as
what it is, a free product of man.”26 From this perspective, his idea of
“communism”—for instance, as he sketched it in The Civil War in France—was
basically a vision of a radically democratic society, with practices of cooperative,
democratic self-government extended beyond the state and into the economic
institutions and relationships of modern civil society. For Joel, Marx’s more
consequential “radical democratic” legacy was his activist work. The key lesson
here concerned the need for ongoing coalition building and struggle against
tenacious opposition to bring about substantive radical democracy.27
I still think that I am right about Marx in a way, and Joel did not really dispute
my point. But I think Joel was probably right in a more crucial way. Revealing an
ideal-radical-democratic Marx from his texts does not get us very far politically
toward achieving such a goal. The intellectual project is surely of some value in
rebutting lazy readings of Marx and Marxism as anti-democratic. But Joel was
more deeply attuned to one of Marx’s most famous dictums: that the important
thing is not merely to interpret the world but to change it.28
I’m sure of one thing, then: wherever people—especially his family, students,
friends, and readers—are out fighting against the Florida “stand your ground”
law that enabled George Zimmerman to be acquitted for killing Trayvon Martin,
the New York City police’s racial profiling, “stop ’n frisk” practices, and other
forms of racism and white privilege, Joel Olson is at their side.
Whiteness and the Social Formation: Democracy

Through Abolition
Samuel A. Chambers
Johns Hopkins University
Joel Olson and I went to the same graduate school, at the same time, and had the
same dissertation advisor, yet we never really knew each other while there
(partially because Joel was sometimes in Europe playing punk rock). We came to
know each other through Joel’s scholarly work: in 2000, I was asked to contribute
to a journal symposium that centered on an essay by Joel. In engaging closely with
Joel’s critique of multicultural and color-blind conceptions of race, I was
25
On this view of Marx’s political theory, see Jean Hypolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel,
trans. John O’Neill (New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1969; Shlomo Avineri, The Social and
Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1968).
26
Kark Marx, “Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Robert
C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Norton, 1978), p. 20.
27
Joel may have gotten this idea in part from August Nimtz, another passionate scholar-
activist at the University of Minnesota. See August H. Nimtz, Jr. Marx and Engels: Their
Contributions to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 2000).
28
Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” Thesis nos. 11, in The Marx-Engels Reader.
immediately struck by his uncanny ability to write with directness, clarity, and
above all incredible force. Joel’s arguments were fair and generous, but ultimately
fierce, and I envied his ability to take complex concepts or discussions and boil
them down to their real crux, without ever reducing them to something less than
they were. (Ever since, I have been citing Joel’s work as a model of how to do
political theory). I saw, then, not only the important contributions Joel’s work
made to the field, but also how exemplary that work proved to all students of
political theory. And thus I immediately took Joel’s essay from that symposium
and assigned it to my students, whom it never failed, at equal turns, to both
inspire and provoke. Over the course of the next few years, I taught Joel’s work
regularly, making his critique of so-called “white culture” the center of an essay
assignment that proved a regular favorite of both me and my students.
When the essay I had been teaching became a part of Joel’s book manuscript,
I naturally started to teach the book itself—first in draft form, then in proofs, and
finally in print. Over the past decade, then, I have maintained a deep ongoing
engagement with Joel’s book, The Abolition of White Democracy, a relationship to the
text that has run in parallel with my ever-deepening friendship with Joel. In this
brief essay, I would like to honor that friendship by working through one more
round of critical engagement with Joel’s first book. In his second book, Joel was
working on an important critique of agonism, arguing for the complementary
importance of Manichaeism to politics and political theory. This key argument
notwithstanding, anyone who knew Joel knows that in his encounter with other
thinkers and ideas, he powerfully exemplified the ethos of agonistic respect. Joel
respected those he disagreed with, but perhaps more importantly, he demanded
and relished criticism from those who were closest to him (those he agreed with
most). In that spirit I offer here a critical rereading of Joel’s book.
******
As a thinker, a scholar, a citizen, and an activist, Joel Olson never saw any trace of
contradiction in being a self-avowed Marxist who targeted racism as his most
important enemy. Of course, the fact that Joel was able to contain these two
dimensions within himself does not mean that these central theoretical planks are
easily reconcilable. Indeed, a class-centered framework and a race-centered one
clearly are not the same, and they can certainly conflict; in Joel’s work the adherence
to these two principles sometimes produces a tension (often a productive one, but a
tension nonetheless). My goal here is to work my way through this tension, to
explain it, explore it, and ultimately to propose a broad hermeneutic for reading
and thinking about Joel’s book in the context of this thorny yet profound relation.
Put differently, I will offer an explanation for the productive compatibility of a
certain sort of Marxist approach, on the one hand, with a thoroughgoing critique of
whiteness, on the other. The reading I sketch here may well be idiosyncratic to me,
as it invokes and calls upon my own version/vision of Marx, and it certainly
requires that I often read Joel’s book against the grain (occasionally even reading
Joel against himself). Nonetheless, I would defend this reading as utterly consistent
with Joel’s text and the broad principles that it articulates. I advance this reading in
the hope that it might serve to extend the political and theoretical projects to which
Joel was always committed.
10 Lisa Disch et al.
My contention, in short: we best call forth the political force and theoretical
efficacy of Joel’s first book by drawing out—pulling through—a certain Marxist/
Althusserian thread, while reweaving or even snipping a few other threads
(specifically those drawn from deliberative democratic theory). In particular,
I claim that Joel’s theory of both abolition and whiteness proves most powerful
when understood as an articulation and critique of the social formation that is,
and has been, American (racial) democracy. With the phrase “social formation”
I use a term that Althusser (in)famously implemented to describe Marx’s very
concept of society.29 The question of the social formation is one of the broadest yet
most important questions of politics. To ask after or inquire into the social
formation is to pose multiple queries:
. how a political order is put together
. what the political order has to do to stay together
. how the work required to stay together transforms the very regime that it
simultaneously maintains
To identify the “social formation” in any particular time or place (either
historically or in the present) is to point to that non-totalizing yet holistic structure
that simultaneously produces and maintains two elements: first, the vertical
relations of power that make any social order an order of domination; and second,
the latent horizontal relations of power that might undermine, expose, or thwart
that order of domination. The concept of the social formation thus cuts across
putative spheres like “the social” or “the political,” since within any social
formation we see overlapping and frictional connections between “domains” that
might otherwise be taken as separate—such as the economic, the cultural, the
social, the aesthetic. Most importantly, to attempt to grasp the social formation
conceptually is to try to understand how a social order can be held together in its
very contradictions. As I read him, this was always Joel’s aim: to understand (and
then to exploit as weaknesses) the contradictions that maintained American
democracy as an order of both white hegemony and capitalist domination.
Of course, nowhere that I am aware of does Joel ever cite Althusser—a fact that
should come as no surprise since Althusser (especially in the US context) is
perhaps best known for a kind of theoretical obfuscation and for a stubborn
insistence on a top-down view of politics. The most powerful critique of
“Althusserianism” may well be the simple fact of Althusser’s own failure to see
the radical political potential of May 1968; where Althusser showed early disdain
for the student revolutionaries, I easily imagine that Joel would have been one of
the first professors out on the streets of Paris. And Joel consistently understood
politics as an activity that always begins with the actions of the working class and
with the excluded.
Nevertheless, Joel’s approach to structures of hierarchy and domination shares
a great deal with Althusser, and, I contend, there are ways that Joel’s politico-
theoretic project can be illuminated and strengthened by drawing from certain
elements of Althusser’s Marxism. I do not make such connections randomly or ad
hoc; rather, I see links to many elements of Althusser’s concept of the social
formation in Joel’s own work. For example, on the very first page of the
29
Louis Althusser, For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster (London, UK and New York,
NY: Verso, 1969).
introduction to Joel’s first book he refers to “the American political order,” asking
how that same “political order” could hold together the contradiction between the
principles and aspirations of democracy (freedom and equality, above all) with the
discrimination and subordination at the heart of racism.30 Moreover, regardless of
his explicit language, Joel consistently conceptualizes American democracy in this
way: as a structure, a regime, a political order, that somehow not only contains
contradictions but also lives off of them. Whether famously or infamously,
Althusser is well known for proposing a theory of the social formation — one, as I
show here, that can explain the nature of just the sort of contradiction that frames
Joel’s book. Therefore, I use the idea of the social formation to work through both
this particular contradiction (which lies at the heart of American democracy) and
also the potential tension between Joel’s two explanatory lenses; that is, so-called
“historical materialism” and race.
The Abolition of White Democracy makes at least two profound and long-lasting
contributions to our understanding of American democracy. First, it doggedly
defends the idea of race as, first and last, a political category. To understand how
race and racism work, and have worked in the history of American democracy,
one can never forget that race is a category of power, and that race operates
through and as a political logic. Second, the book offers a theory of whiteness as
both the explanation and the solution to the contradictions of American
democracy. I can give these ideas the parsimonious appellation “a theory of
whiteness” precisely because I am here reading Joel’s work through the lens of the
social formation. Joel’s own text can, at times, be less clear about how it mobilizes
an understanding of whiteness. Frequently the book discusses whiteness in the
language of deliberative and participatory democracy; working within the
framework of mainstream democratic theory leads to a focus on citizenship and
the status of the citizen. In this context, the book frequently uses the language of
“the white citizen,” such that the problem of whiteness condenses down to the
form of the problem of the white citizen. In other words, whiteness is at issue
because of the white citizen. Indeed, the book once had a working title of “the
democratic problem of the white citizen,” a phrase the book still uses frequently.31
However, thinking whiteness as a problem of citizenship runs the risk of blunting
Joel’s otherwise radical critique by capturing it within the terms of deliberative
democracy or liberalism. Hence in what follows I will show that we do more to
expand the force of Joel’s own arguments, if we conceptualize the problem of whiteness in
terms of the social order and not in terms of the citizen.
To make this move away from the democratic citizen and toward the social
formation means to articulate the core idea of Joel’s book as follows: whiteness is
the glue that holds the American political order together. In an important sense,
this formulation expresses Joel’s own particular theory of the social formation,
since that formation cannot be sustained without whiteness. Of course, the history
of whiteness in American democracy has not been linear, and Joel charts the major
differences between the Herrenvolk democracy and the post-civil rights democracy
of colorblindness and multiculturalism. But across those differences, whiteness
maintains a cross-class alliance that itself holds together the American political
30
Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. xi; cf. xv.
31
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, pp. xx and ff.
order. Whiteness is Joel’s answer to the social order questions I posed above: the
American political order is a racial order, formed, sustained, and preserved by
whiteness. Given this basic understanding of the structure and insights of the
book, my remaining tasks are to magnify, examine, and further explain the nature
of Joel’s theory of whiteness as a theory of the social formation.
The first obvious question to ask might be this: how or why does Joel need
Marx (not to mention Althusser) at all, since the theory of whiteness can be
derived from the empirical source of American history (including the political
invention of race therein) and from theoretical sources that run from Du Bois
(himself a Marxist) to Roediger and beyond.32 Part of the answer here depends on
Joel’s own insistence on the importance of a certain sort of Marxism, as he
continually claims that his approach is “guided by historical materialism.” He
explains: “the development of productive forces explains the general course of a
society and [ . . . ] the function of the racial order is generally related to the
development of such forces.”33 And there can be no doubt that Joel, both in
Abolition and across his other writings, consistently proclaims the significance of
Marxism to his project.
I am not so certain, however, whether this answer proves adequate. The
coupling of Marxism with Joel’s anti-racism cannot be a mere predilection. In its
loose reference to “historical materialism,” Abolition refers implicitly to Marx’s
famous so-called “guiding thread” of the 1859 Preface, where Marx uses (for the
only time) the language of base and superstructure.34 But many who build their
Marxism from this apparent ground do so in a somewhat determinist manner that
would preclude the centrality of race to a Marxist project—clearly not Joel’s intent.
And Joel himself seems only to call on “historical materialism” to distinguish his
project, in a rough sense, from non-Marxists like Shklar. On my rereading of Joel’s
book over the course of a decade, I now see the general issue at stake in his version
of so-called “historical materialism” as resting on his belief that Marx’s critique of
capitalist society was generally on target; Joel was surely anti-capitalist. At the
same time, Joel saw the problem of race as the problem that defined American
democracy, so he held these two beliefs—historical materialism as explanatory of
domination, and the problem of whiteness as ruinous to democracy—in his own
self. But I do not think that in Joel’s book it is always all that clear how these two
strands are compatible, other than to say that Du Bois also holds them both.
The nature, extent, and character of Joel’s Marxism needs more fleshing out,
then, and I suggest that we see Joel’s Marxism more perspicaciously if we read it
not as a generic adherence to a base/superstructure model, but instead
understand it as a specific theory of the social formation. Put differently, and
somewhat polemically, I contend that the specific flavor of Joel’s Marxism can be
tasted more in his particular critical analysis of race and the way that account calls
on certain tenets from Marxism. To develop this account, one can look more
closely at a few key places where Joel does point directly to ideas from Marx and
32
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor LLC, 2008). David
Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London,
UK and New York, NY: Verso, 1999).
33
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, pp. xxvii.
34
Karl Marx, Marx: Later Political Writings, Terrell Carver (ed.), (Cambridge, UK
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Marxism. For example, Joel makes a crucial move of this sort when he analogizes
color-blindness to private property. The latter abolishes the property requirement
in the public sphere but normalizes the possession of property in the private
sphere. The former abolishes formal racial standing but turns whiteness into a
hegemonic norm. By way of the principle of colorblindness, race is transformed
(falsely) into a pre-political category.35
This logic does not apply Marxist categories to race, but works through a kind
of Marxist logic in order to understand race on its own terms. Moreover, it is
precisely in these sections of the text that readers begin to see race (whiteness) as
the invisible glue that holds the social order together. The social formation
described here proves to be a different kind of racialized police order: the
Herrenvolk democracy announced its racial structure and wrote it into law; the
colorblind democracy professes to erase race from the law, but by doing so it hides
it, buries it deep in the structure of American cultural politics. We need to

understand whiteness as the cement that maintains the structural integrity of the
social order. It does so, significantly, by preserving the cross-class alliance (that
sustains the American capitalist system) but without offering itself up as a visible
target for critique. Althusser’s unique hermeneutic for reading Marx offers
enormous support for the work Joel is up to in these crucial sections of his first
book, because Joel, I contend, is describing a particular type of social formation—
one, as Althusser would show, that is uneven, overlapping, without an essential
core, but one that nevertheless is overdetermined both by whiteness and by
capitalism.
To see American democracy as a racial order that preserves class domination
means to envision it as a specific sort of social formation, in just the sense captured
by Althusser. Moreover, in saying that the social formation is overdetermined by
whiteness and capitalism I have articulated anew the central potential tension in
Joel’s argument, which could be expressed by asking whether race or capital is
determinative in the last instance. However, I am trying to show that
reformulating Joel’s argument in the language of the social formation does
more than merely replicate (in new terms) the tension between race and class.
Rather, I am suggesting something quite different: understood through the social
formation, the tension is a productive element of the American political order, and
thus not a limitation but a strength of Joel’s analysis. Put differently, we could ask:
is it possible that the very overdetermined nature of the structure is such that race
and capital are both determinants in the last instance—and thus race and capital
are somehow co-constitutive?
To respond to these questions, and to suggest an answer in the affirmative,
I want to close with brief interpretations of three key passages that make up a kind
of theoretical center to Joel’s book.
The abolition of feudalism abolished lord and serf.36
The answer to the problem of white (capitalist) democracy is to abolish the
cross-class alliance, and this can only be done by abolishing whiteness. So
I suspect that there is an implicit assumption buried at the base of Joel’s politico-
theoretical logic: the assumption that whiteness and capital are co-determinative
35
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, p. 72.
36
Joel Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, p. 81.
of the social order that is American “democracy.” This reading, in turn, seems
borne out by the rather profound claim that Joel makes when he says that we can
talk about abolishing whiteness in the same way we talk about the abolition of
feudalism: the category of “lord” is not abolished on its own, nor is the relation
between lord and serf altered; instead, the abolition of feudalism dissolves these
categories entirely. Once we live under bourgeois capitalism, once the structures
of feudalism have all been destroyed, then we quite simply live in a world without
lords and serfs. The question of “abolition” vis-à-vis American democracy must
not be misunderstood as an effort to alter one component of the social formation
while keeping the others intact. Abolition applies at the structural level of the
social formation itself. We are dealing not with the question of altering
perceptions, or changing relative positions. It is a question of transforming a social
order so dramatically that the subject positions within that social order quite
literally disappear.37
Here I can press my critique of Joel’s discussion of, and sometimes apparent
reliance upon, the terms and framework of deliberative democracy theory. In a
way that runs counter to the quote that heads this section, Joel frequently
mobilizes the language of abolition as if its target were individuals; he often talks
about abolishing “white identity” or the “white citizen.” While they express the
overall spirit of Joel’s central critique, I contend that these formulations slightly
miss their mark. Joel’s argument here does not target individuals any more than
Marx’s critique of capitalism was aimed at individual capitalists. Rather, Joel
wants to abolish a social order structured by whiteness and also therefore by
capital.
I would insist on the importance of thinking of abolition as the abolition of a
given social formation, precisely because the radical power of this abolition comes
not just from a challenge to individuals. Indeed, the force of abolition cannot even
be fully expressed as an abolition of “whiteness” writ large, since there cannot be
an independent disappearance of whiteness. If whiteness goes away, then as the glue
that holds this social formation together, the social order preserved by whiteness also goes
away. Furthermore, to abolish the social order preserved by whiteness means to
undo the cross-class alliance, and once the cross-class alliance falls, then, logically
at least, capitalism falls as well. Therefore, to demand the abolition of white
democracy is just as much a call for socio-economic revolution as it is a call for the
transformation of American democracy vis-à-vis race. To put it in a simple
37
Some readers might be uncomfortable with the notion of a subject position utterly
disappearing, as if the idea calls up science fiction scenes of alien spaceships beaming up
human beings. But I would defend the formulation of the point in its strongest terms, both
on hermeneutic grounds (as the best reading of Joel’s work) and on logical grounds (as a
tenable and important historical and philosophical argument). I see this as one of the key
insights of Marx’s work, and I see Joel’s deep understanding of Marx as one of his own
greatest strengths. Marx saw that social and political realities were made possible by
specific historical and material forces: you cannot have “labor in general” or Robinson
Crusoe stories unless and until you have a capitalist social formation. By the same token, we
cannot really grasp what a new social formation would look like until we bring it into being
(and this is why choosing between capitalism and some alternative to it cannot be anything
like choosing between two commodities). To abolish white democracy is not just to change
the terms of American citizenship; the abolition of white democracy would amount to no
less than a revolution. Karl Marx, Marx: Later Political Writings, Terrell Carver (ed.)
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 149, 128.
formulation that belies the complexity of what is at stake, we might say this: Joel
wants to abolish “white capitalism.” Of course, “white capitalism” here names the
particular social order of American democratic racial capitalism. Joel’s project
gives us not just an understanding of race in American democracy; it provides us
an implicit theory of a social formation that is overdetermined by both whiteness
and capital.
Lack of recognition and racial subordination, then, are not the same thing.38
This key point—that white supremacy cannot be challenged merely by
recognizing whiteness as a culture—comes out clearly throughout the
development of Joel’s analysis, since a multicultural theory of recognition cannot
grasp the problem of power. The logic of recognition fails to understand race as a
political category. Indeed, one could make a good argument that Joel presses no
claim in his first book more strongly than this one. Joel is insistent that the
discourse of multiculturalism lacks the theoretical resources—and lacks the

political sensibility—to fight white supremacy. Worse still, certain readings of
multiculturalism lead away from anti-racism and toward a conservative
celebration of the (false) equality of all cultures. In an early draft of Abolition,
in a formulation that I often asked my students to write about, Joel put the point in
his usually forceful-yet-succinct way: “a white culture doesn’t exist.” Joel practiced
agonistic respect, but that never stopped him from shouting out his truths, and I
always heard this line in a very loud voice. This was a polemical line—taken out of
the final version of his book under editorial duress—designed precisely to do that
dissolving work on whiteness. White people are connected not by their “culture”
but by the power structures of whiteness that hold together the social formation
(the white capitalist social formation) such that more whites end up in positions of
power and fewer non-whites do. The point, for Joel, was crucial: whiteness names
a relation of domination, not a cultural resource.
I argue that this centerpiece of Joel’s first book can be thrown into stark relief
by way of the interpretive lens I have been developing here. Once we read Joel’s
writing for its implicit theory of the social formation we see starkly why
“misrecognition” is not the problem. While there are key differences between the
visibility and invisibility of race within the social order, we must remember that
race was quite visible in the Herrenvolk democracy. Indeed, law went out of its way
to make race clear, to mark it even and especially when it might otherwise prove
illegible. Just because the colorblind social formation has hidden race away in
whiteness as a norm does not mean that our response should simply be shining a
light on it; doing so would not necessarily change the subordination and
inequality that structures the social formation. We must dissolve whiteness itself,
the glue that holds the social order together, in order for the hierarchy and
subordination of that order to collapse (and perhaps to re-form under another
guise, but that is another story).
This leads me back to expand on a point I hinted at in the beginning. Joel’s
latent theory of the social formation calls for an emphasis on the language of
whiteness as a structural and structuring force; that theory thus requires a
concomitant de-emphasis on the white citizen as an individual agent (problematic
38
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, p. 109.
or not). As my third and final piece of text I turn to a section heading from the
introduction of the book, one I alluded to earlier.
The Democratic Problem of the White Citizen39
This formulation, I contend, fails to capture the full force of Joel’s very own
argument. At worst, it may limit, perhaps even undermine, some of the more
powerful implications of the project by restraining that project within the terms of
liberal democracy. Put polemically, I am suggesting that we ought not read the
problem of whiteness through the problem of the white citizen. In the statement
above Joel attempts to express the problem of whiteness within the American
political order, but he reverts to the language of citizenship—falling back, I think,
on the framework of mainstream democratic theory that his work otherwise
exceeds. In more recent work Joel went well beyond this language, and he did so
in particularly powerful ways precisely when writing about democratic actors
defined by their non-citizen status. In his work on immigration and

undocumented immigrant workers, Joel even eschewed the primacy of citizen-
ship, showing, for example, that the “locomotion” of these political agents was
what mattered most, and what had the most potential to transform the social
order.40 Returning to Abolition, my claim is that the language of democratic
citizenship cannot do justice to the full force of Joel’s critique of whiteness in that
book—and this is not to mention either Joel’s broader analysis of race as a political
category or his illumination of the American political order. Joel’s own analysis of
the failures of American democracy should be understood as diagnoses given in
terms of the American political order—it is that order itself that is the problem.
Citizenship is not the problem, at least not in any straightforward sense.
To say all this is not to suggest that we cannot see the larger problems of the
social formation manifest themselves in the form of racial standing or unmarked
racial privilege. To put the point differently, the problem of whiteness surely
affects citizens, and undoubtedly we can observe the problem of whiteness in the
form of the “white citizen” (just as we can observe the problems of capitalism in
the form of the “capitalist”). But in order to analyze and challenge the problem of
whiteness as it applies at the level of the social formation itself we must resist any
tendency to reduce that problem to the level of the individual or to the question of
citizenship. To the extent that Joel’s rhetorical attempt to formulate the problem in
the language of “the problem of the white citizen” encourages such a dangerous
reduction, then I resist such a move. Nonetheless, my own rejection of this element
of Joel’s argument finds sustaining force in the overall logic of the book, so I do not
think that the critical thrust of Joel’s book would encourage its readers to sign on
to this particular formulation.
The problem of American racial democracy is not the problem of the white
citizen any more than the problem of capitalism is the problem of individual
capitalists; we would not describe the problems of feudalism in terms of the
problem with lords or serfs (at least we would not describe them well). The central
issue at stake lies with feudalism itself, as a system, as a structure, as a social
formation. As Joel himself explains later in the book, to abolish the white citizen
39
Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2004), p. xx.
40
Luis Fernandez and Joel Olson, “To Live, Love, and Work Anywhere You Please,”
Contemporary Political Theory 10:3 (2011), pp. 393– 400.
we must abolish the white capitalist social formation. When we do that, the white
citizen disappears. This means, however, that the later and more fully developed
logic of Joel’s call for abolition reveals the limitations of his earlier formulation.
The abolition of white democracy does not come about merely through a
transformation of citizenship or individual citizens. Joel’s broader critique takes
“white democracy”—which is always white capitalist democracy—as its object.
The target is therefore not “the white citizen” in any narrow sense, and of course a
generous reading of Joel’s work would insist that Joel is always concerned with
“white citizenship” in the broadest, structural sense—as part and parcel of white
democracy, the very social formation Joel wants to abolish.41 My goal here is
therefore not to reject Joel’s abolitionism, but to re-describe it in its best light and
thereby affirm it. Hence my claim that if we are to follow Joel and aspire to the
radical and revolutionary aims of abolishing white democracy then we must
move away from the liberal frame of deliberative democratic theory (a project
that, unlike Joel’s, often is concerned with particularities of citizenship or with
questions of individual citizens).
The abolition of white democracy is the full realization of democracy through
the abolition of white capitalism. Democracy-through-abolition was always Joel
Olson’s goal in his writing, in his political actions, in his work and in his life.
Democracy-through-abolition will remain his legacy. We—his readers, his
colleagues, his comrades, his friends—must carry on this legacy. While we must
do so in Joel’s absence, with his writings to guide us, we do not do so without
him—we do not do so alone.
“John Brown Was Right”: Joel Olson and Offensive

Political Theory
Lawrie Balfour
University of Virginia
Introduction
“Today at last we know: John Brown was right.”42 These words, which come from
W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1909 biography of the radical abolitionist, serve as the epigraph
for The Abolition of White Democracy. Perfectly, they capture the spirit of Joel’s book—
its ferocity on behalf of racial justice, its historical sensibility, its deep knowledge of
Du Bois and other theorists of democracy. Like so many people, I took the
opportunity to teach Abolition last year; it was the first book we tackled in my
graduate seminar on theorizing race and racism. Although I had read Abolition
more than once and cited it in my work, its impact on me, on the students, and on
the course of our discussions was a revelation. The students—who came from the
departments of politics, history, religious studies, and music—repeatedly returned
to key ideas and claims to which Joel had introduced them. They discerned
41
In pushing me, and helping me, to draw out this point, my thanks go to an
anonymous reviewer of New Political Science.
42
W. E. B. Du Bois, quoted in Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
evidence of the cross-class alliance and tested his political conception of race,
noting how Joel’s theoretical framework enriched and challenged their under-
standing of other thinkers, including Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Hannah
Arendt, and more recent work by Dorothy Roberts, Sharon Holland, and Cristina
Beltrán. Rather than focusing on Abolition, however, my comments here reflect on
Joel’s extension of the claim that “John Brown was right” in the line of research that
followed the publication of his book. More specifically, I want to explore Joel’s
appreciation for zealotry, both as a fact of American political life and as a necessary
antidote to what he decries as “the suffocating pragmatism of contemporary
democratic theory.”43 And, in the second half of my reflections, I will suggest how
Joel’s understanding of fanaticism informs and challenges my thinking about what
it means to go on the offensive in political theory when considering reparations for
slavery and Jim Crow.
In Defense of Fanaticism
In a series of essays, talks, and conference papers, Joel counters a political
theoretical tradition, dating back to Plato’s Republic that rejects immoderation and
prizes balance in public life. More recent inheritors of this strain of thinking cast
zealotry as an enemy of reason and tolerance and align it instead with
fundamentalism and terrorism. Against the continuing hold of this “pejorative
tradition,” Joel investigates arguments advanced by figures who have been
dismissed—and often violently repressed—as fanatics.44 In particular, he builds
from the foundation he laid in Abolition to elucidate the alternative that
abolitionism continues to offer against the truisms of American political thought
and action. His study of the counter-tradition of American zealotry makes at least
two important contributions.
First, Joel’s examination of the “paradox of scholarship on American political
thought” reveals the degree to which commentators and theorists have had to wrestle
with the fact of fanaticism even as they have insisted on the fundamentally
“moderate” character of American politics. Joel’s corrective to what he calls “the
pragmatist orthodoxy” is especially welcome in the post-9/11 era. If the language of
extremism is pervasive in public discourse today, it is too typically located somewhere
else. The assumption that political fanaticism is born and nurtured beyond US
borders or in foreign cultures, Joel shows, contributes to a misunderstanding about
the nature of Americans’ commitments, historically understood. In response, Joel’s
work reveals the costs of failing to confront the pivotal role that zealotry has played in
reshaping and achieving a moderate “common sense.”
Developing a “critical theory of zealotry,” Joel explores the speeches of
abolitionist Wendell Phillips to reveal the ways in which contemporary liberal and
agonistic democrats fail to come to terms with conflicts about the fundamental
terms of political life and to challenge the idea that zealotry is invariably
antidemocratic. Crucially, he demonstrates the antipolitical implications of the
moderate position and its complicity in prolonging the life of chattel slavery and
other unjust institutions. Phillips and other fanatical abolitionists, by contrast,
43
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, xxvi.
44
See Joel Olson, “The Freshness of Fanaticism: The Abolitionist Defense of Zealotry,”
Perspectives on Politics 5 (December 2007), pp. 685– 701.
refused to support union with slavery and forced their fellow citizens to choose
sides by “making the middle ground the site of political conflict rather than a
refuge from it.”45 We can trace the legacies of abolitionism and discern the power
of Joel’s analysis in the work of another, self-described “extremist,” who offered
one of the most incisive critiques of political moderation in the mid-twentieth
century. At the heart of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City
Jail” is a portrait of the “white moderate,” whose pleas for obedience to the law
sustain a violent political order and whose counsel of patience disguises an
acceptance of injustice.46 King’s alertness to the dangers posed by “people of good
will” finds its echo in Joel’s insistence that white citizens’ unwillingness to own
their interest in the prevailing racial order and dis-own the benefits of whiteness is
more insidious than the open racism of overtly white supremacist organizations.
Joel’s second contribution resides in his insistence on a shift away from
psychological explanations of fanaticism and toward an account of it as a political
phenomenon. For one thing, he demonstrates, many of the figures branded

fanatics by history and by their contemporaries were both well-adjusted in their
private lives and welcoming of contestation in their public ones. Regardless of
these considerations, furthermore, Joel’s research demonstrates why a preoccupa-
tion with the personalities of committed activists misses the point. In a fascinating
essay on the words and deeds of John Brown and anti-abortion activist Randall
Terry, he identifies key features of a recurrent fanatical strain in American political
discourse. In the case of Brown, this approach helpfully undercuts a
preoccupation of white commentators, even those sympathetic to Brown, who
have dwelt on the question of the abolitionist’s sanity. Black historians and
political thinkers, by contrast, have long questioned the assumption that Brown’s
radical commitment to black people indicated mental imbalance. With regard to
both Brown and Terry, Joel shows why focusing on personality deflects attention
from the substance of their criticisms of the political status quo. Further, it inhibits
our understanding of democratic politics. Insofar as radical movements are
reduced to psychological portraits, especially pathologizing portraits of their
leaders, we fail to grasp the work of zealotry as a kind of collective action. Finally,
Joel’s even-handed treatment of these figures displays an intellectual maturity
and a commitment to thinking that is itself democratic. Regardless of Joel’s own
views about the relative merits of Brown’s antislavery crusade and Terry’s
campaign against abortion (which are clearly signaled in the epigraph to
Abolition), he also demonstrates what can be learned through a careful analysis of
the political substance of the fanaticism they represent.47
This is not to say that Joel never takes sides. On the contrary, in addition to his
analytical contributions, he models an intensely committed scholarship. Joel’s
writing embodies a conviction that once the hard work of careful study has been
done, it is essential to speak plainly and act boldly. Like the abolitionists whose
work he admires, his target is “moderation, not reason.”48 Like them, he reminds
45
Olson, “Freshness of Fanaticism,” p. 693.
46
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” in James Melvin
Washington (ed.), Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San
Francisco, CA: Harper &Row, 1986), pp. 289– 302.
47
The preceding discussion draws from a draft chapter from Joel’s manuscript,
American Zealot.
48
Olson, “Freshness of Fanaticism,” p. 686.
us that there is nothing moderate about rape and murder and terror and other
practices that have defined life on the antebellum plantation, in the Jim Crow
South, in today’s immigrant detention centers and prisons, and in urban spaces
inhabited by racially marked, dispensable populations.
On the Offensive: Reparations

Joel’s study of fanaticism draws extensively from abolitionist critiques, but it
speaks directly to contemporary debates about racial justice (or the absence of
such debates in mainstream political discourse). Most pointedly, it questions
whether post-civil rights era reconciliation strategies inadvertently echo the
moderation of the antebellum and Jim Crow periods. Rather than assuming that a
balance of perspectives always serves democratic interests, Joel’s inquiry into
historical debates about fanaticism presses us to ask when partisanship,

principled refusal to compromise, and inflammatory political action may be
necessary. In this regard, he offers a fresh vantage from which to think about
recent debates about reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. Like the anti-slavery
movement, reparations activism has deep roots in African American political
traditions; and, although reparations demands are often explicitly tied to the
broad realization of democratic principles, they have also been repeatedly
dismissed as dangerously far-fetched. For women and men who are alarmed by
soaring levels of inequality—and the concentration of its devastating effects in
poor communities of color—engaging Joel’s work suggests why the dismissal of
reparations should activate, rather than stifle, oppositional thought and practice.
“Zealotry contributes to democracy,” according to Joel, “when it is put in the
service of a more democratic common sense.”49 The “common sense” view of
reparations is that, despite the moral and political rightness of the cause of racial
equality and the aim of coming to terms with historic injustice, any claims framed
in terms of reparations are inherently divisive and thus practically infertile. For
example, Desmond King and Rogers Smith’s eloquent call for a public response to
racial disparities excludes reparations as impractical and eschews polarizing
speech.50 Joel’s work clarifies some of the limitations of this view. First, while
committed racial egalitarians, including King, Smith, and Barack Obama, avoid
reparations talk for fear of generating antagonism, conservative commentators
have not shied away from reparations claims of their own. Especially during
Obama’s presidency, the term “reparations” has been attached to a wide range of
policies, both related to race and not, by critics of those policies.51 The idea of
reparations already circulates in public discourse, in other words, and yet its
definition has been left to those who oppose the realization of a more racially just
polity. Joel’s work enables us to recognize the Manicheanism operating in the
demonization of reparations politics. Whether or not reparations advocates follow
Joel in embracing a Schmittian conception of politics as a realm divided between
49
Joel Olson, “Friends and Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips,
and the Limits of Democratic Theory,” Journal of Politics 71 (January 2009) p. 94.
50
Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith, Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in
Obama’s America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
51
See, for example, Rich Lowry, “The Obama/Clinton Reparations,” National Review
Online (April 30, 2013).
friends and enemies, he demonstrates why democratic action entails a willingness

to be called an enemy, not only by conservatives but also by moderate would-be-
allies.
Further, Joel’s historical sensibility situates reparations claims within a
tradition of democratic ideas that have been rejected as too radical or immoderate.
The antislavery fanaticism he prizes is close kin to reparations arguments that
date at least as far back as David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the
World. Walker’s proposal that American democracy be radically reconstructed to
make amends for the crimes of chattel slavery and incorporate all citizens,
generated an outraged response in the form of repressive legislation in the South;
and many of the ideas he put forward, like those of reparations activists from
the Reconstruction period through the early twenty-first century, are still deemed
too extreme to engender serious consideration. Joel’s work traces the historical
source of such non-consideration, disclosing how white self-interest (interest in
whiteness) has foreclosed broad deliberation not only about reparations but about
the larger challenge of what Du Bois and Angela Davis call “abolition-
democracy.”
The radicalism of the zealots reveals the degree to which arguments used to
justify existing social and political arrangements in the so-called postracial era are
themselves profoundly immoderate. Such arguments misdescribe a present in
which racial disparities in many arenas of citizens’ lives are growing; and they fail
to contemplate the links between those disparities and legacies of state-sanctioned
white supremacy and individual attitudes and actions. Opposing the hegemony
of this common sense—in legislative bodies and courts of law, academic settings
and popular political culture—and undoing its effects may require precisely the
kind of partisanship Joel describes. If the idea of reparations is threatening, if it
gives offense, Joel reminds us emphatically why that may be to the good.
Looking Forward, Honoring Joel

In the week leading up to the roundtable on Joel’s work, one of my undergraduate
classes discussed the political thought of Malcolm X. In so many ways, Joel’s rare
combination of cool analysis, fierce passion, and profound humor recalls the
example Malcolm set 50 years ago. And I have no doubt that Joel would gladly
embrace the comparison. But as I have been thinking about what I could possibly
say to mark the myriad ways that Joel’s intellectual and political contributions
have challenged, enlightened, and inspired me, I keep returning to that other
fanatic, whose “Letter” resonates so profoundly in Joel’s arguments and who is
too often unhelpfully contrasted with Malcolm. In a stunning 1968 speech, one of
his last, King honored Du Bois for “his committed empathy with all the oppressed
and his divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice.” For all of us, who are
grateful for Joel’s legacy as a teacher, activist, and scholar, there may be no more
fitting way to honor him than to take to heart—and act!—on King’s concluding
thoughts: “Today we are still challenged to be dissatisfied. Let us be
dissatisfied.”52
52
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Honoring Dr. Du Bois,” in John Henrik Clarke, Esther
Jackson, Ernest Kaiser, J. H. O’Dell (eds), Black Titan W. E. B. Du Bois: An Anthology by the
Editors of Freedomways (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 183.
A Democratic Zealot in the Streets and On the Page

Joe Lowndes
University of Oregon
Having a forum focused both on Joel Olson’s political theory, political critique and
political activism is welcome for many reasons, not the least of which because
each tells us something about the other. Indeed, Joel’s writings were so valuable in
part because he was working out in theory much of what he experimented with
in practice. You can see it in his early writings in Hippycore and Profane Existence, in
the pages of the anarchist papers Love and Rage and The BLAST!, in Race Traitor, in
Bring the Ruckus, in his book, The Abolition of White Democracy, and his last work on
fanaticism. These were the writings of a deeply committed agitator who
continually helped us understand the harsh landscapes of power in this world by

sharpening distinctions, posing questions starkly, and offering analyses that ring
with extraordinary clarity.
I first met Joel a little more than twenty years ago when he had just moved to
Minneapolis to begin a graduate program in political theory at the University of
Minnesota, and to throw himself into revolutionary political work. He was a
welcome addition to the developing anarchist and antiracist scenes there. For as
long as I knew him, Joel’s political thought and action were mutually constitutive,
or perhaps it is more true to say that each enhanced the other.
Joel’s work simultaneously made important contributions to critical race
theory, democratic theory, US political thought and US political history.
Through his theorizing, Joel laid bare the limiting assumptions held by
deliberative democrats, demonstrating that the very question of what constitutes
politics and political claims must be addressed long before one gets to the
question of how best to deliberate. Through his use of W.E.B. DuBois,
Malcolm X, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips and others who were deeply
involved in the struggles about which they wrote, Joel also absorbed, built on,
and surpassed the insights of contemporary radical democratic theorists.
Directing our attention to the fundamental cleavages in society, Joel showed,
for instance, that Chantal Mouffe’s call for more agonal play within a
framework of shared commitments renders her work merely a kind of expanded
form of liberal democracy ill-equipped to challenge entrenched asymmetries of
power.
Joel’s theoretical position was perhaps closer to Laclau’s Gramscian notion of
hegemony, of empty signifiers and of internal frontiers—or cleavages—that drive
politics. Particularly in his later work, he understood politics as a real struggle
over profound differences, struggle that produces new political subjectivities.
I also think his work is closer to Rancière’s than he might have admitted. While
Rancière does not theorize class society as two hostile camps in the way that Joel
understood it, the moment of the political for him—when the part with no part
announces itself—transforms the polity in the way the zealot also wishes. This
I think, is an implication of zealotry that Joel points to but did not get a chance to
fully develop: the zealot does not merely divide society and push the middle to
choose sides. The zealot enacts a new notion of the people in her quest for
hegemony, creating new political subjects.
In the spring of 1993 the militant anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue,

fresh off a successful campaign in Wichita, announced that it would make
Minneapolis/St. Paul one of its “Seven Cities of Refuge,” mobilizing a major
summer campaign to completely shut down an abortion clinic, stalk and harass
clinic staff, and build its national base. The organization came to the Twin Cities
hosted by a local church, and recruiting and training local anti-choice activists to
join more seasoned (and menacing) activists to harass and threaten anyone who
dared enter the targeted clinic.
Moderates in NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and other organizations called for
a campaign to resist Operation Rescue with the slogan “Keep Minnesota Nice,”
and to show that the pro-choice movement was reasonable and measured in its
responses. Anarchists, communists, and progressive student activists meanwhile
built a militant coalition to drive Operation Rescue out of the Twin Cities. This
involved nightly coalition meetings, wheat-pasting aggressive anti-Operation
Rescue posters around Minneapolis and St. Paul, confronting protestors forcefully
at clinics every morning, and creating mayhem at the church that hosted their
summer campaign on Sundays. I have a clear memory of Joel, in a hot pink wig and
a dress, pounding the hoods of cars coming in for morning services, of all of us
getting pepper-sprayed and a number of folks—including Joel—getting arrested.
Liberal organizations denounced the militants in local op-eds and elsewhere
for discrediting the pro-choice movement. But the agitators never let up, and soon
the local church that was hosting Operation Rescue found that it did not have the
stomach for continual confrontations. The experience had been far more
antagonistic for them than they had been led to expect, and the City of Refuge
campaign was unable to continue to bring local people to their clinic
demonstrations. Operation Rescue announced that it would conclude its
campaign a month early, pulled up stakes and left town. The liberals who had
denounced the militants finally thanked that radical coalition, acknowledging that
they had made the defeat of Operation Rescue possible. As Joel later wrote, the
goal of the zealot is to draw clear lines between friends and foes, to target
moderates, eliminate the middle. While Joel fought abortion opponents in the
streets, he would defend their democratic zealotry as a practice of politics. These
were politics he could understand in form even as he opposed it in content.
Joel made what I think will be a lasting contribution to our understanding of
United States political thought and development by putting conflict—extreme
conflict—at the center of American politics. He offered a kind of populist account
of America—one of fundamental conflicts over hegemony. For him, these conflicts
centered on three major cleavages in the United States: race, religion, and
capitalism—and in his latest work Joel showed us actors on all sides of these
cleavages. Like Rogers Smith, Joel saw multiple political traditions as constitutive
of political identity in the United States. Unlike Smith, he did not see liberalism as
an egalitarian tradition to be defended against anti-liberal commitments to racism,
patriarchy, and Christianity. Rather he depicted fanaticism as central to political
freedom, and liberalism as a cover for unacknowledged forms of domination. Like
Michael Rogin, Joel understood that whiteness and class rule were central to US
political development. But unlike Rogin, who posited primarily a counter-
subversive tradition aimed at people of color, women, and radical workers, Joel
shows us a broader field whereby zealots from very heterogeneous political
positions share not an ideology or political tradition, but a way of doing politics.
Instead of pathologizing political actors, Joel painstakingly showed both how

common and how wrong it is to see fanatics as driven by resentment, irrationality,
or psychological disturbance.
The last time I saw Joel was in the autumn of 2011 when he invited me to give a
talk on the racial politics of the Tea Party movement in Flagstaff at Northern
Arizona University. Veteran agitator that he was, Joel made a provocative poster
for the event, including the iconic image from the militant hip hop group Public
Enemy showing a silhouette in a rifle’s crosshairs. The morning of the talk, the
chair of his department told us that she had heard that the local Tea Party
organization was in an uproar about the event. She was concerned about security
and wanted to know what kind of measures needed to be taken. She asked, “What
if they want to protest outside the hall?” “We should let them,” Joel replied. “What
if they want to come into the event with their signs?” she asked. “That’s fine,” Joel
responded. “What if they heckle or try to shout down Professor Lowndes?” She
asked finally. “No problem!” Joel exclaimed. Then, turning to me he asked, “Joe,
how many people have we shouted down over the years?” Then he laughed,
rubbing his hands together. “This is gonna be awesome!” As usual, he was right.
In his final writing, William Lloyd Garrison’s biographer Henry Mayes stated
that Garrison “became an agitator as much out of love as hate, as much from
plenitude as deprivation.” This description is completely fitting for Joel himself.
He was a proud zealot—and it would be really hard to find someone of greater
warmth and humor, or who was possessed of a greater democratic ethos. Having Joel
as a friend and collaborator in the academy was invaluable for those of us fortunate
enough to be influenced by his agonistic spirit of generosity and critique. Indeed this
is yet another sense in which contest, critique, and opposition were, for Joel, central to
healthy, democratic politics. Whenever he sent me an article or chapter draft to read,
he would inevitably say something like, “Destroy it. Rip it to shreds.” At the same
time Joel was also an unfailingly thorough and unstinting reader, offering sharp
criticisms while earnestly drawing out the strengths he saw in the work of others.
Anyone who knew Joel knew that he was at once a principled political actor, an
effective movement builder, an independent thinker, a sharp polemicist, an
inspiring teacher, a generous interlocutor and steadfast friend. I hope the memory
of Joel continues to inspire both activists and scholars. He stands as the rarest
example of each.
On Meeting Joel Olson

George Ciccariello-Maher
Drexel University
Joel Olson was a revolutionary first and foremost, propelled incessantly toward
the political act by a dialectic of Love and Rage, two elements not coincidentally
joined in the name of the anarchist federation in which he cut his teeth in the
1990s.53 But “Rage” here is but a more polite term for the hatred of oppression
53
For an overview of Love and Rage, see the anthology: Roy San Filippo (ed.), A New
World in Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist
Federation (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2002).
(and oppressors) that co-mingles with and is transformed into its opposite in the
unconditional and unalloyed love that Joel felt for the oppressed. From this
wellspring there emerged a new and still unfulfilled imperative in political theory
that can be encapsulated in a single potent term: abolitionism.54
Joel and I met under seemingly contingent circumstances. Nearly a decade
ago, I sent a message to the anonymous email address of a revolutionary cadre
organization, Bring the Ruckus, of which Joel was and I would later become a
member.55 A few short hours later, Joel replied. I, a first-year PhD student of
political theory at U.C. Berkeley, and he having come out of a similar pedigree at
the University of Minnesota, we developed an immediate rapport. We began
organizing together on the national level while commiserating about the “science”
in political science, about the job market, and about getting dressed up for
conferences (to the degree that either of us actually did so). Our shared two-ness
provided a sanctuary that I still miss today. When the theorists flew off into the
clouds, we could drop anchor and discuss practical politics, and specifically, how
best to rupture the stifling objectivity of the current conjuncture. When the
organizers got a little too self-righteous, moreover, we could take refuge in
theoretical questions that we considered both important and intriguing in an
unavoidably nerdy kind of way.
But for Joel, political theory and revolutionary organizing were never fully or
even mostly separate. Bring the Ruckus was in many ways Joel’s brainchild,
beginning as it did with a single member, Joel himself, distributing a combative
broadsheet of the same name in Phoenix, documenting early struggles against the
police and the now notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and encouraging like-minded
radicals to contact him at his home phone. For any police who might be inclined to
call, he reserved a special message: and I quote, “save your dime, pig.” When Bring
the Ruckus’s basis for political unity was sketched out in 2001, political theory was
front-and-center. Here was a budding national organization that was grappling with
questions as difficult as any grad seminar: how to conceptualize cadre organizing as
a middle-ground between hubristic vanguardism and ineffective networks; how to
resist intersectional analyses while building a feminist organization; how to oppose
the state not abstractly, but through the strategic consolidation of the Leninist
concept of “dual power”; and how “to break up this unholy alliance between the
ruling class and the white working class by attacking the system of white privilege
and the subordination of people of color.”56 To this day, Bring the Ruckus stands as
an impressive example of unrelenting dedication to practical political work that
never shied away from thinking through the hard questions.
Joel’s organizing was intimately bound-up with his thought, not as something
to be applied, but to be itself enriched through practice. His book on white
supremacy and abolition-democracy—which first appeared as a dissertation
entitled The Democratic Problem of the White Citizen in the same year as the Ruckus
54
This imperative is moving forward, fueled in large part by Joel’s memory. The 2014
meeting of the Western Political Science Association will include a conference within a
conference on “Abolitionism, Decolonization, and Political Theory,” to be followed, I hope,
by a journal dedicated to abolitionist and decolonial thought and practice.
55
The archives of the now-defunct organization, including a memoriam for Joel, can be
found at http://bringtheruckus.org/.
56
Phoenix Ruckus Collective, “Bring the Ruckus” (2001), http://www.bringtheruckus.
org/?q¼about.
statement—was a decisive intervention in the strand of thinking inspired by W.E.

B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.57 For Olson as for Du Bois, the tragedy of the US
labor movement has been the unrecognized centrality of the “public and
psychological wage” of whiteness that serves time and again to divide the
working class and cement a white-supremacist cross-class alliance.58 It was this—
the “unholy alliance” of the Ruckus statement—that an entire trajectory of
organizations sought to undo, from the Sojourner Truth Organization of the 1970s
to the journal Race Traitor, for which Joel was a central participant.59 It was this
approach, which emphasizes race as the primary barrier to working-class unity in
the United States, which formed the strategic backbone of our national organizing
in Bring the Ruckus: how could white supremacy be destroyed, thereby rendering
a communist revolution, if not certain, then at least possible?
So, too, with Joel’s developing theory of fanaticism and zealotry, which he had
been testing in practice for decades before attempting to formulate it conceptually

in his unfinished American Zealot.60 For Joel, the central and most laudatory
example of fanatical politics had always been the Abolitionists, and here he was
attempting to chart out a form alongside the historical and theoretical content he
had already analyzed. But he insisted on approaching the question of fanaticism
through an ambitious and occasionally troubling comparative framework that
centers on one hard question that he poses in the preface to American Zealot: “how
can we praise [radical Abolitionists] Stephen Foster or John Brown but condemn
Theodore Kaczynski and Osama bin Laden?”61 Whether struggling against white
supremacist nativism in Arizona, accompanying popular rebellions in Oakland,
battling the police in Philadelphia, or intervening in the messy social movement
that was Occupy, we struggled organizationally and without ever reaching a
consensus about how to operationalize fanaticism and zealotry without falling
prey to its negative side, its intrinsic but ineliminable dangers.
Joel’s last political act was to urge the disbanding of the political organization
he had founded, Bring the Ruckus, and here too we find a powerful example of the
implications of his theoretical work. Dialectical to the very marrow, Joel insisted—
following C. L. R. James and others—that organizations are born, live, and must
die once they become fetters to revolutionary activity, lest they instead become
their opposite: fossilized repositories of bygone dogma. For Joel, the moment had
come to turn the page, closing one chapter and seeking a new vehicle for radical
energies. It should be said that I fervently disagreed. One month later, I was with
Joel in Spain the day before his death. We stayed up late, as we tended to, we
drank, as we tended to, we listened to music, as we tended to, and we talked
57
Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004).
58
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York, NY: The Free
Press, 1935), p. 700.
59
For background on STO, see Michael Staudenmaier’s excellent recent book, Truth and
Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986 (Oakland, CA: AK Press,
2012). On Race Traitor, see http://racetraitor.org/.
60
A group of theorists and comrades, including Geert Dhondt, Luis Fernandez, David
Schlosberg, Alberto Toscano, and myself are currently in the process of finishing and
publishing this second and important book of Joel’s.
61
Joel Olson, “Rethinking the Unreasonable Act,” to be included in a special symposium
on Joel’s concept of fanaticism in Theory & Event (2014).
theory and politics, as we always did. He was irresistibly joyful, loving, and
optimistic, as he always was.
As I said at the beginning, I met Joel under seemingly contingent
circumstances, but the elements determining that meeting were too many and
too overlapping to believe that, had we not met that way, at that particular
moment, we never would have. In the course of our political work, Joel and I
amongst others participated in a study of dialectics called, somewhat
hubristically, How to Think, after a phrase of Lenin.62 Moving from Hegel and
Marx through Lenin and Gramsci, as well as Fanon, Du Bois, and C. L. R. James,
this was a revolutionary curriculum that sought to grapple with how revolutions
and revolutionaries are simultaneously created. In one of the included readings,
Georgi Plekhanov analyzed common misconceptions regarding the role of
accidents—and by extension, individuals—in history, misconceptions that can
apply to seemingly chance encounters more generally.

Plekhanov noted that, had Napoleon died accidentally before rising to power,
some other “sword” would have been put forward . . . . Bonaparte was a man of
iron energy and was remorseless in the pursuit of his goal. But there were not a
few energetic, talented and ambitious egoists in those days besides him. The place
Bonaparte succeeded in occupying would, probably, not have remained vacant.
In observing the accidental importance achieved by individuals, Plekhanov
noted what he called an “optical illusion” whereby Napoleon’s rise effectively
blocks others from fulfilling that historical role, “Once the public need for an
energetic military ruler was satisfied, the social organization barred the road to the
position of military ruler for all other talented soldiers . . . ” Napoleon’s
importance is thereby magnified in our minds, in Plekhanov’s words “because
the other powers similar to it did not pass from the potential to the real.”63
In the fight for liberation, there was no soldier more talented than Joel Olson,
and no more energetic a will, but there is more to be said here about the role of
accidents and of individuals, and here I return to my “accidental” encounter with
him some ten years ago. I only needed to meet Joel Olson once, and the
consummation of this one moment exaggerates its own chance nature. In reality, if
I had not met him the way I did, I would have met him at a rally, or at a meeting
of aspiring revolutionaries, or at a panel about Du Bois at APSA or the Western.
To believe this does not require sharing in Plekhanov’s understanding of
dialectics, but rather a dialectics of a more Olsonian sort, in which it is not the
internal movement of history but the unrelenting, fanatical will of the abolitionist
that provides our only guarantees. But as Plekhanov shows, the question of the
accident and of the individual are in many ways coterminous, and here we end
with sorrow inextricably bound up with the revolutionary optimism that was
synonymous with Joel Olson’s entire being: just as the world was allowed only
one Napoleon at a time, we must remember that in a world without Joel, another
Joel is bound to emerge.
62
This course was designed in the 1970s by the Sojourner Truth Organization. While its
content changed over time, one syllabus is provided in Sojourner Truth Organization,
“Marxist Education” and “How to Think: A Guide to the Study of Dialectical Materialism,”
Urgent Tasks no. 7 (Winter 1980), pp. 18 – 19, 19 – 29.
63
G.V. Plekhanov, On the Role of the Individual in History (1898), available online at: http://
www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html.
Notes on Contributors
Lisa Disch is Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University
of Michigan where she teaches and researches on contemporary political theory,
specializing in feminist and democratic theory. She has recently published articles
in the European Journal of Political Theory, the American Political Science Review, and
Perspectives on Politics.
Bruce Baum is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British

Columbia. He is author of Rereading Power and Freedom in J. S. Mill (2000) and The
Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (2006). He is
currently completing a new book, The Post-Liberal Imagination: Political Scenes from
the American Cultural Landscape.
Samuel A. Chambers is co-Editor of the journal Contemporary Political Theory and

Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, where he
teaches political theory and cultural politics. His work is broadly interdisciplinary,
ranging from contemporary democratic theory, to feminist and queer theory, to
critical television studies. His most recent book is The Lessons of Rancière (Oxford
UP, 2013), and he is currently completing a book manuscript titled Bearing Society
in Mind: Theories and Politics of the Social Formation.
Lawrie Balfour is Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. She is the

author of Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois and
The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American
Democracy. Currently, she is working on a book on reparations for slavery and Jim
Crow.
Joseph Lowndes is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of

Oregon. He teaches courses on racial politics, cultural analysis, and US politics.
His areas of research include populism, race, and US political development. He is
the author of From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of
Modern Conservatism.
George Ciccariello-Maher teaches political theory from below at Drexel

University in Philadelphia, having previously taught at U.C. Berkeley,
San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas.
He is the author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution
(Duke, 2013), and is currently finishing two books: Decolonizing Dialectics and
Building the Commune.

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New Political Science, 2014

q 2014 Caucus for a New Political Science

– Joel Olson, 1967– 2012

For Joel Olson, with Trayvon Martin on my Mind

What follows is a three-part tribute to Joel Olson. As a political theorist and

“I dreamed I saw [Joel Olson] last night . . . ”

Joel would approve of this qualification)—should be abolished. For the time

As such, it is bound up with webs of meaning and self-understanding that,

subordinated racialized groups for as long as distinctly racialized inequalities

Theory and Practice

Whiteness and the Social Formation: Democracy

it, buries it deep in the structure of American cultural politics. We need to

discourse of multiculturalism lacks the theoretical resources—and lacks the

defined by their non-citizen status. In his work on immigration and

“John Brown Was Right”: Joel Olson and Offensive

phenomenon. For one thing, he demonstrates, many of the figures branded

On the Offensive: Reparations

historical debates about fanaticism presses us to ask when partisanship,

friends and enemies, he demonstrates why democratic action entails a willingness

Looking Forward, Honoring Joel

A Democratic Zealot in the Streets and On the Page

continually helped us understand the harsh landscapes of power in this world by

In the spring of 1993 the militant anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue,

Instead of pathologizing political actors, Joel painstakingly showed both how

On Meeting Joel Olson

statement—was a decisive intervention in the strand of thinking inspired by W.E.

been testing in practice for decades before attempting to formulate it conceptually

apply to seemingly chance encounters more generally.

Bruce Baum is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British

Samuel A. Chambers is co-Editor of the journal Contemporary Political Theory and

Lawrie Balfour is Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. She is the

Joseph Lowndes is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of

George Ciccariello-Maher teaches political theory from below at Drexel

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