Real liberation struggles necessarily articulate themselves within existing political discourses

Evidence

So the resistance to apartheid must remain inarticulate, must not seek to formulate a political programme and strategy: any attempt to do so would simply involve reincorporation into ‘the present state of law and force’ and perhaps even into the ‘European discourse of racism’. If this argument is valid, then the resistance was lost long ago: far from being silent, it is indeed positively garrulous, resorting to define itself to a variety of different discourses — social democracy, Stalinism, black exclusivism, syndicalism, revolutionary socialism, even Islamic fundamentalism. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 321

Categorization

• XREF: Central to the reader’s strategic-essentialism project: whether collective political action requires adopting available (race-tagged) categories that one holds at ironic distance. This is the strongest critique leveled at any position that forbids programmatic articulation.
• DEEPTHINKING: The twist — ‘the resistance was lost long ago… it is indeed positively garrulous’ — reframes the theoretical demand for silence against the empirical fact that actual movements do speak, and that silence-keeping theory would have forbidden every real struggle.