Indeed, as Walzer argues, an oppressed minority should be able to judge the quality of their oppression and the extent of their obligations. But even in racist America, blacks have disagreed when they have tried to be precise about their situation. This raises the thorny issue of who speaks for the oppressed. According to Walzer, political activists emerge because the masses are unable to act for themselves. They must perform as unauthorized agents, or virtual representatives.
The black movement illustrates the unstable leadership which results from its haphazard process of virtual representation. For better or worse, community control has come to mean internecine warfare. Walzer clearly believes in black solidarity and worker solidarity, at least as some transcendent precipitant of social division, but he indicates how hard it is to represent this solidarity through legitimate, democratic process.
Activists may be obligated to push the masses faster than they wish to go-but how fast can an oppressed minority proceed against a majority? Walzer immediately rules out revolution, no matter how great the popular oppression, so long as the democratic rules can be exploited with some success. Democracy, as he defines it, involves mutual respect for the freedom to act. The activist need not fully respect the rules, but he must not undermine them.
In the perennial borderline case, the polity may recognize the oppressed as full citizens, honestly, count their votes, and consistently defeat their candidates. Here is a stalemate. The activists have acquired competing obligations both to the system and the system's victims. A radical himself. Walzer is uncomfortable with the paradox he has presented. His discomfort expresses a denial that "imperfect justice should be endured as long as possible." In a burst of patriotic optimism, he argues that in a democracy the hypocrisy of the majority can be exposed.
ACTIVISTS must live with tension in Walzer's state. They work simultaneously to raise the consciousness of the oppressed, keep open the possibilities of democratic action, and yet accept concrete improvements which may dampen that consciousness. All disclaimers aside, Walzer in fact asks frustrated activists to accept an incremental politics. "Equal rights cannot be won by a revolutionary attack on the social structure within which rights are being sought." Only a truly drastic oppression generates total freedom from the restraints of civility. Formally equal in law, the American poor and black have incurred some obligations to civility.
Citizenship may negate revolution in the state, but citizenship in the state does not generate corporate citizenship. Walzer forcefully insists on a right of revolution against corporate authority. Judged as a political community rather than a piece of property, the corporation is an authoritarian system, "The issue is not ownership but what ownership entails."
Walzer proposes ground rules for the corporate revolutionaries. Whenever corporate strife leads to violence against the state, the militants should exercise real caution. The liberal state, after all, benefits by democratizing the internal politics of the corporation. If officials remember that civil order and corporate authority rarely are equivalent, they can disengage themselves from a particular piece of social oppression. Liberalism, once again, is seen as retreat or strategic withdrawal. But the protection of civil disobedience depends on the state's ability to respond to changing communal values. It depends on the state's responsibility to power being commensurate with the citizen's responsibility to dissent.
When the state refuses to intervene, a new balance of power can take shape within the corporation. Negotiation begins. To achieve industrial democracy, weighted voting, or collective bargaining, the rebels must keep their position flexible. Walzer accurately dismisses unconditional surrender as an irrational political demand. With perhaps his own school in mind, he criticizes student militants for hasty initiatives and adventurism.
ADEVNTURISM surfaces as a failure to work seriously in the community to build majority support. The author fails to indicate, though, what composes a majority in the multi-layered estates of the university-or anywhere else. Defining one's constituency has baffled even the best-intentioned militant.
The terrorist has no such excuse. Walzer's approval of limited coercion to effect radical change makes convincing his distaste for student guerrillas. He detests "the directionless defiance of terrorism," whose agents are perfectly contemptuous of the needs of the oppressed. Terrorism bullies the weak; Walzer wants to challenge the state. Of course, one could make out a case for strategic terrorism with this objection in mind. What he really objects to, though, is any effort to shatter the minimal moral cohesion of the liberal community.
Wary of the student left, Walzer would defend the university against revolutionary violence. He notes students enjoy immense civil and personal liberties without parallel among workers. Contradicting his earlier sentiments, he would presumably question their right to feel oppressed.
What puzzles him most, I think-though he fails to articulate it-are the suicidal politics pursued by certain student radicals. They are betting on the apocalypse, the total conflagration that would swallow up even rational radicals like Walzer. He innocently thinks it a service to point out to militants the sensible limits of action. His coffeehouse radicalism can barely accommodate the drug-rock epoch of student politics. The student left embraces more than a mind-blown psychedelia-but the offspring of Lenin, the puritanical disciples of collective repression who infatuate Walzer, are fast disappearing. The prospect of an irrational left has chilling consequences for a theorist of responsible dissent.