Only outcasts outside the system can mount uncooptable opposition

Evidence

However, underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not. Their opposition hits the system from without and is therefore not deflected by the system; it is an elementary force which violates the rules of the game and, in doing so, reveals it as a rigged game. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 886

Categorization

• XREF: Marcuse’s outcasts as the revolutionary subject echoes Fanon on the lumpenproletariat and anticipates the Black Lives Matter and civil-rights modes of disruptive protest from outside institutional channels. — connects to: Power is misimagined as exterior restriction rather than interior formation — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 25; Anti-O.A.S. units were designed as autonomous forces outside normal hierarchy — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1497; A critic of a central domain must stand outside its defining structures — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 322 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does ‘opposition revolutionary even if their consciousness is not’ survive the assimilation of formerly marginal identities into the attention economy?

Broader Connections

• A critic of a central domain must stand outside its defining structures #corroborates (0.88) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 322
• Power is misimagined as exterior restriction rather than interior formation #complicates (0.82) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 25
• Anti-O.A.S. units were designed as autonomous forces outside normal hierarchy #exemplifies (0.80) — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1497
• Oppositional forces are inherent to every structure of power #corroborates (0.80)
• One can only recognize a boundary by stepping outside of it #corroborates (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 787
• Power increases only through limitations that co-constitute counter-power #complicates (0.75) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 716