That distinction is meaningless—the way the aff theorizes about politics matters

This suggests that the problem is not simply ‘out there’, with the creativity or radicality of social movements. It’s also ‘in here’ in the concepts deployed to make phenomena intelligible, political, and significant. In this sense, theory is itself a practice, and traditional theoretical concepts are actually the remains of old political struggles.7 Concepts of social movements, revolution, reform, politics, and resistance have emerged out of historical struggles, and the fact that they often appear natural or fixed is a symptom of their reification. For example, the concept of ‘social movement’ itself carries its own history and intellectual baggage, often married to the concept of revolution and ‘progressive’ social change.8 My purpose here is not to do a genealogy of the concept of ‘social movement’, however. What I want to suggest is that the concept of social movements is one way of tunneling into a broad set of problems about representation, intelligibility, transformation, politics, universality, and experimentation. From another perspective, these more philosophical debates are one way of tunneling into the problems of rigidification, oppression and transformation with which activists are often concerned.