Revolutionary politics must be rooted in those who have been excluded from the cultural and political norm. Every instance and articulation of resistance is uniquely key. Only an impure politics that acts by for oppressed peoples and engages with structures of power can gain the foothold for radical resistance and create new political and social imaginaries.

The demand far moral and ideological purity often results in the rejection of any hierarchy or organization. The question-can the master's tools be used to tear down the master's house?-ignores both the contingency of the relation between such tools and the master's power and, even more importantly, the fact that there may be no other tools available. Institutionalization is seen as a repressive impurity within the body politic rather than as a strategie and tactical, even empowering, necessity. It sometimes seems as if every progressive organization is condemned to recapitulate the same arguments and crisis, often leading to their collapse. 54 For example, Minkowitz has described a crisis in Act Up over the need for efficiency and arganization, professionalization and even hierarchy, 55 as if these inherently contradicted its commitment to democracy. This is particularly unfortunate since Act Up, whatever its limitations, has proven itself an effective and imaginative political strategist. The problems are obviously magnified with success, as membership, finances and activities grow.

This refusal of efficient operation and the moment of organization is intimately connected with the Left's appropriation and privileging of the local (as the site of democracy and resistance). This is yet another reason why structures of alliance are inadequate, since they often assume that an effective movement can be organized and sustained without such structuring. The Left needs to recognize the necessity of institutionalization 56 and of systems ofhierarchy, without falling back into its own authoritarianism. It needs to find reasonably democratic structures of institutionalization, even if they are impure and compromised.

If the Left can give up its demand for purity, it may be able to make the compromises which may be necessary for effective political opposition in the contemporary world. It will act strategically and tactically. For example, it could use contemporary advertising to its own advantage (e.g., when Reagan came out in support of gun controI, or in the "Big Green" campaign in Califomia, where effective advertising could have prepared people for the corporate-sponsored media barage opposing the initiative). Politics is always a strategie matter: one must decide where and how to struggle. It has to be decided when identities, or ideologies or state politics are appropriate and important sites of struggle. And this will sometimes involve the need to compare, evaluate and perhaps even prioritize the demands and claims of particular struggles, based not solelyon moral commitments or theoretical reductions (as in alliances of solidarity) but on the exigencies and possibilities of the context. Questions need to be raised about the effective mobilization and deployment of resources, about when different fractions have to come together under a common identity, and when one group should act on behalf of another group's interest, rather than its own immediate interest. Such decisions will have to be based on political calculations of importance and possibility, but also on calculations about how best to mobilize people into the particular struggle and into a broader movement. Sometimes that will mean having to bear defeats in one place, in order to win a victory somewhere else. But at least there will be victories which can be slowly brought together to build a new optimism. But this will require, above all, the proliferation of forums of debate in wh ich any statement can be made and taken seriously, without the threat that "improper" statements condemn the speaker to being dismissed as a moral failure and political outcast. People have to be able to say that a particular battle is not worth it-perhaps because the odds of winning are too smalI, perhaps because it is likely to alienate too many other fractions, etc.

If it is capitalism that is at stake, our moral opposition to it has to be tempered by the realities of the world and the possibilities of political change. Taking a simple negative relation to it, as if the moral condemnation of the evil of capitalism were sufficient (granting that it does establish grotesque systems of inequality and oppression), is not likely to establish a viable political agenda. First, it is not at all clear what it would mean to overthrow capitalism in the current situation. Unfortunately, despite our desires, "the masses" are not waiting to be led into revolution, and it is not simply a case of their failure to recognize their own best interests, as if we did. Are we to decide-rather undemocratically, I might add-to overthrow capitalism in spite of their legitimate desires? Second, as much as capitalism is the cause of many of the major threats facing the world, at the moment it may aIso be one of the few forces of stability, unity and even, within limits, a certain "civility" in the world. The world system is, unfortunately, simply too precarious and the alternative options not all that promising. Finally, the appeal of an as yet unarticulated and even unimagined future, while perhaps powerful as a moral imperative, is simply too weak in the current context to effectively organize people, and too vague to provide any direction. Instead, the Left must think of ways to rearticulate capitalism without either giving up the critique or naively assuming that it can create a capitalism "with a human heart." Leaving such images to Hollywood, the Left can organize to change specific axiomatics of capitalism in particular local, regional, national and global contexts. For example, there is good evidence thatthe ways in which contemporary American corporations have chosen to deal with labor are not necessarily the most effective in terms of capital productivity itself. This does not entail simply championing unions as they have existed, but restructuring unions to meet the new demands of achanging labor force, and to work within the new systems of global capitalism. We can recognize and argue that the rich are no longer primarily entrepreneurs being rewarded fortaking risks, but managers (CEOs) and financial manipulators, even criminals of various sorts. The expansion of capital as a social utility has given way to its immediate private appropriation, with little reinvestment into capitalism's future. It therefore seems reasonable to limit the ability to privately appropriate wealth. In this context, we might argue for guaranteed minimum and maximum incomes, linking such arguments to notions of the value ofhuman life. We might propose to limit investors' abilities to reap short-term profits by any number of means, including linking executives' salaries to capital gains and investments rather than profits.

But this would mean that the Left could not remain outside the systems of governance. It has sometimes to work with, against and within bureaucratic systems of governance. 57 Consider the case of Amnesty International, an immensely effective organization when its major strategy was (similar to that of the Right) exerting pressure directly on the bureaucracies of specific governments. In recent years (marked by the recent rock tour), it has apparently redirected its energy and resources, seeking new members (who may not be committed to actually doing anything; membership becomes little more than a statement of ideological support for a position that few are likely to oppose) and public visibility.58 In stark contrast, the most effective struggle on the Left in recent times has been the dramatic (and, one hopes, continuing) dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. It was accomplished by mobilizing popular pressure on the institutions and bureaucracies of economic and governmental institutions, and it depended upon a highly sophisticated organizational structure. The Left too often thinks that it can end racism and sexism and classism by changing people's attitudes and everyday practices (e.g., the 1990 Black boycottofKorean stores in New York). Unfortunately, while such struggles may be extremely visible, they are often less effective than attempts to move the institutions (e. g., banks, taxing structures, distributors) which have put the economic relations of Black and immigrant populations in place and which condition people' s everyday practices.

The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance, understanding that such institutions are the mediating structures by which power is actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions that power can be challenged. The Left has assumed for some time now that, since it has so little access to the apparatuses of agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The Left does in fact need more visibility, but it also needs greater access to the entire range of apparatuses of decision making and power. Otherwise, the Left has nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have produced starvation and the other social disgraces of our world, although it is individuals who musttake responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they must act within organizations, and within the systems of organizations which in fact have the capacity (as weIl as the moral responsibility) to fight them.

Without such organizations, the only models of political commitment are self-interest and charity. Charity suggests that we act on behalf of others who cannot act on their own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the circuits of global capitalism, and everyone's position is increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will not take much to change the position of any individual in the United States, as the experience of many of the homeless, the elderly and the "fallen" middle dass demonstrates. Nor are there any guarantees about the future of any single nation. We can imagine ourselves involved in a politics where acting for another is always acting for oneself as weIl, a politics in which everyone struggles with the resources they have to make their lives (and the world) better, since the two are so intimately tied together! For example, we need to think of affirmation action as in everyone's best interests, because of the possibilities it opens. We need to think with what Axelos has described as a "planetary thought" which "would be a coherent thought-but not a rationalizing and 'rationalist' inAection; it would be a fragmentary thought of the open totality-for wh at we can grasp are fragments unveiled on the horizon of the totality.59

Such a politics will not begin by distinguishing between the local and the global (and certainly not by valorizing one over the other) for the ways in which the former are incorporated into the latter predude the luxury of such choices. Resistance is always a local struggle, even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to connect into its global structures of articulation: Think globally, act locally. Opposition is predicated precisely on locating the points of articulation between them, the points at which the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto the global. Since the meaning of these terms has to be understood in the context of any particular struggle, one is always acting both globally and locally: Think globally, act appropriately! Fight locally because that is the scene of action, but aim for the global because that is the scene of agency. "Local struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the precise point of their insertion into the field of immanence.”60

This requires the imagination and construction of forms of unity, commonality and social agency which do not deny differences. Without such commonality, politics is too easily reduced to a question of individual rights (i. e., in the terms of classical utility theory); difference ends up "trumping" politics, bringing it to an end. 61 The struggle against the disciplined mobilization of everyday life can only be built on affective commonalities, a shared "responsible yearning: a yearning out towards something more and something better than this and this place now. ,,62 The Left, after aII, is defined by its common eommitment to principles of justice, equality and democracy (although these might conRict) in economic, political and cultural life. It is based on the hope, perhaps even the illusion, that such things are possible. The construction of an affective commonality attempts to mobilize people in a common struggle, despite the fact that they have no common identity or character, recognizing that they are the only force capable of providing a new historieal and oppositional agency. It strives to organize minorities into a new majority.

This requires finding ways of getting people to care again: to eare about the potential eeological, political and economic disasters facing the world; to care about the structures of inequality which maintain some people in luxury and condemn others to poverty, starvation and death; to care about the attacks on people's freedom and equality, espeeially within a nation whieh claims to cherish these values; and to care about the feeling that any viable relationship between affect, desire and ideology in our lives has coIIapsed (even if we admit that the existence of such a relationship was only imagined). This does not require a spiritual transcendence or selRessness. "Others need the immortality of the soul, need gods and angels. We need to feel ourselves possessed by the demons that make us leave ourselves a little in order to try to love, to understand and to act on human history . ,,63 It does require strategie campaigns, aimed at creating something beyond a local commitment. It requires using the cultural logics and media that aIready connect to people's lives to articulate interconnected antagonisms to the present and a common commitment to the future. (Is this what we want to leave our children? Is this how we want to be remembered? Could this happen to us?) If people want to feel good, then such desires can be inAected into a progressive agenda.

Perhaps the Left needs to be less suspicious of the media's power to construct charismatic leaders who can caIl forth and mobilize those affectively charged places that will puIl people out of their everyday lives and propel them back into the social and politieal realm where the real struggles of power are taking plaee. I do not mean to suggest that a single passionate leader, or any number for that matter, will suffiee. If people are to change history, it is their passions that must be awakened, for the crisis of the Left is not ideological. It is a matter of people's affective involvement, of the intensity people are willing to invest in their political beliefs and struggles, and of the vectors whieh inereasingly diseipline and regulate their everyday lives. These affective relations are not determined solely by their loeation within a system of discursive differences or by their position within society. They are actively made and remade, and they now have to be unmade if the Left is to sueeessfuIly struggle to make the history that it desires. Those of us "on the left" have to find tactical ways of resisting and even breaking out of the disciplined mobiliziation of everyday life, to reenter the strategie politics of the soeial formation: "Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as those coercive maehines have for producing breaks [placesJ and mobilizing dlows [affect]. ,,64 I have tried to describe some of the ways this has been produced, but I have no answers for its demolition.

It will require locating sites of affective investment. Without the luxury of an innoeent beginning, such a project has to acknowledge the already existing sites of people's investments, the structures of their mattering maps. It ean struggle to reshape and reartieulate them, but it has to think twice before rejecting them entirely. For example, too often, attaeks on "America"-on the nation and nationalism-ignore the simple fact that many people eannot imagine living elsewhere, and eertainly not anywhere better. It is particularly ironie if one considers that popular eulture often represents the nation in terms quite compatible with the ideologieal commitments of the Left (e.g., Walt Disney's Tohnny Tremain). But it will also require constructing vectors which are able to link these sites into a movement, perhaps even into a range of organizations.

In fact, it is often the ca se that such sites and vectors are mapped in popular culture in such a way that politics is not immediately at stake. If one of the challenges facing the Left is to construct new sourees of hope and affective commonality, perhaps it should return to the possibilities of the rock formation and of postmodern culture. There it will face a paradox: how can a popular culture which is increasingly committed to the impossibility of commitments become the source of new oppositional commitments? How can a popular culture which is increasingly fragmented enable new structures of commonality? How can a popular culture which is increasingly contaminated by its own cynicism offer new maps of hope and possibility? It is finally the power of the rock formation to answer these impossible questions that has made it such a strategie site of struggle in the contemporary world. Its different strategies can be placed in the service of the new conservatism, providing at least a part of the context and resources for its hegemonie project. Yet the complexity of the Right's attacks on rock make two things cIear: first, that each of them is potentially a point sign from which lines of right can be reconstructed, lines which might breach the wall which they themselves have helped build around everyday life. Second, that the power of such popular practices depends on the mobility of the investments which they call forth. Every fan is something of a fanatic whose investments cannot easily be disciplined; it is not coincidental that the attacks on rock are often directed at just those forms where fans become fanatics. If it is still within the power of the rock formation to construct maUering maps, to redefine the configuration of places and spaces of everyday life, then this territorializing power must be policed (by the Right) and recharged and rearticulated by the Left.

After all, "hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually, the earth had not roads to begin with, but when many people pass one way, a road is made. ,,65 It is precisely the ability of the rock formation to make roads over which millions have passed and will pass, its power to locate people in an affective structure ofhope, that makes it dangerous for the Right and an important resource for the Left. But as both fans and critics, we must find ways of challenging the complacency of the rock formation, of pushing it beyond everyday life and reinvigorating its possibilities.

Above all, rethinking the possibility of a Left politics will require a new model of intellectual and political authority which does not begin by confidently judging every investment, every practice, every articulation and every individual. It will have to measure both intellectual and political progress by movement within the fragile and contradictory realities of people's lives, desires, fears and commitments, and not by some idealized utopia nor by its own theoretical criteria. It will offer a moral and progressive politics which refuses to "police" everyday life and to define a structure of "proper" and appropriate behaviors and attitudes. An impure politics-certainly, without the myth of a perfect reflexivity which can guarantee its authority (for authority is not an intellectual prize). A contaminated politics, never innocent, rooted in the organization of distance and densities through which all of us move together and apart, sometimes hesitatingly, at other times recklessly. A politics that attempts to move people, perhaps just a little at first, in a different direction. But a politics nonetheless, one which speaks with a certain authority, as limited and frail as the lives of those who speak it. It will have to be a politics articulated by and for people who are inevitably implicated in the contemporary crisis of authority and whose lives have been shaped by it. A politics for and by people who live in the contemporary world of popular tastes, and who are caught in the disciplined mobilization of everyday life. A politics for people who are never innocent and whose hopes are always partly defined by the very powers and inequalities they oppose. A modest politics that struggles to effect real change, that enters into the often boring challenges of strategy and compromise. An impure politics fighting for high stakes.