1. The Rabble’s Lifecraft: Institutional Tinkering and Popular Illegalisms

Valeria Graziano (Center for Advanced Studies – South East Europe, University of Rijeka)

The following article was published in Croatian translation as ‘Životna Vještina Raje: Institucionalno Krparenje I Pučki Ilegalizmi’, in the journal Kritika: časopis za filozofiju i teoriju društva, 5(1), 125–146, ISSN: 2683-5959, 2024. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.11371833. Reprinted in English in Intelligence of Errors: Foundations and Fieldnotes (Institute of Philosophy in Zagreb / Croatian Architects’ Association, 2025), pp. 47–80.

1.1. Preface

This essay is part of the ongoing cultural project “Figure it Out: The Art of Living Through System Failures”. Figure it Out involves cultural organizations Drugo More (Rijeka, Croatia); Kiosk (Belgrade, Serbia); La Labomedia (Orléans, France); Unfinished Foundation (Malta); Vektor (Athens, Greece); artist collectives ŠKART (Belgrade, Serbia); RYBN.org (Paris, France); and !Mediengruppe Bitnik (Berlin, Germany); and researchers Mara Ferreri, Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak. Partners will work with and engage different communities sharing their stories through art productions, exhibitions, a radio festival, bonfire events and web-zines. The project is supported with funding from the European Union, the Ministry of Culture and Media and the Government Office for Cooperation with NGOs of the Republic of Croatia.

1.2. How to name it?

The exhortation “Snađi se, druže” – “Figure it out, comrade” – was a common phrase used in former Yugoslavia. It originated during the WWII indicating that partisans in action had to come up with solutions under extremely unfavorable conditions. When given instructions for a seemingly impossible mission, members of the partisan squads would often ask “But how do I do that?”; and the answer would often be, “You figure it out, comrade”. Later during the socialist period, this expression would be used for practices that people were devising when encountering bureaucratic or material constraints in everyday life: practices of cutting corners to cheat bureaucratic procedures and other small scale illicit activities, such as smuggling western clothes (in slang šana) and petty thefts or appropriations, that perdured in socialist Yugoslavia, hinting towards potential glitches within a new system busy to invent more just redistributive mechanisms. Yet, it would be too heist to discard these as mere gestures of residual bourgeois egoism, as often their protagonists were those lumpenproletariat classes that were the least and last to be reached by the benefits of socialist modernity, while already fully inserted in its libidinal economy (a classic example of “Snađi se, druže” would be the stealing of materials from construction sites to build one’s own’s unauthorized weekendica (holiday hut). “Snađi se, druže” took on yet another connotation as it continued to be evoked and practiced during the hardship of the Balkan wars and their aftermaths. In this new context, it came to indicate a range of practices such as food smuggling that became essential for survival.

The phrase “Snađi se, druže” continues to resonate in the former Yugoslavian region today, adapting to new challenges and persisting in the cultural lexicon. In contemporary times, it finds its expression in informal economies like wild markets and flea markets, but going beyond that, it refers to an attitude and a skill to hack systems or situations to turn them to one’s advantage.

In short, the specific history of the Yugoslavian expression “Snađi se, druže” opens up a vast array of problematics when considered from the standpoint of contemporary critical theory: was the trajectory of its usages a sign of the decay of its political import, a corruption of the original ethos for high values of liberation from nazi-fascism into the banality of everyday dwelling during socialism to the bare endurance during the 90s wars? Or would it be possible and legitimate to also reclaim a different but not less meaning to these arch, indicative of a continuity between the heroism required of partisanship and other kinds of significant politics, albeit performed in a minor key? In other words, what is the relation between the pragmatics of quotidian lying, cheating and stealing vis-a-vis governance systems – a range of practices that I refer to with the more capacious term of institutional tinkering - and political consciousness?

In what follows, I wish to trace the contours of the discussion that have been framing the phenomena of popular illegalism understood as practices characterized by techniques of institutional tinkering, or in other words, techniques of disobedience and re-appropriation of resources that while illegal elucidate a contradictory aspect of a system or institution. I argue that they constitute responses to the current multi-dimensional crisis of care (Fraser 2016) in an increasingly dysfunctional public sphere and illustrate how solutions cannot be conceived merely as an enforcement of legal frameworks. Appeals to ever stricter rules and regulations as a cure for a decaying public moral pave the way to the very authoritarianism such measures often set off to challenge. In this essay therefore, I wish to leave the more familiar pars destruens of the argument that is associated with widespread corruption for instance (Mungiu-Pippidi 2006; Ferragina 2009), to focus instead on the potential pars construens left open in the grey area between different ethical positions arising from practices of tinkering with, within and outside of institutions from a plebeian standpoint. By this I mean to focus on the practice of undertaking illicit activities and structuring one’s daily existence in a way that illegally or amorally secures essential living needs, access to services or otherwise unreachable pleasures, treating breaking or bending laws and norms as a practical life strategy. This can include not only activities like pickpocketing, basic counterfeiting, sex work, and small cons, as well as more forcefully repressed and racially targeted practices within the informal economy, such as unauthorized street vending, squatting, piracy of digital contents, illegally tapping utilities and more.

But crucially, institutional tinkering also wishes to address the doings of those who, from within institutional roles, such as street-level bureaucrats front-line and welfare operators (Piven 1972; Prottas 1978; Lipsky 1980; Brown 1981) keep bending, breaking or simply overlooking rules in order to produce beneficial results for citizens and mitigate the harm provoked by racist, sexist, ableist or otherwise oppressive policies.

The activities described demonstrate not only a response to immediate situations, but also extremely pragmatic and material forms of care and self-care in action. This care, born out of necessity and resistance, aligns closely with the anthropological understanding of care as tinkering as articulated by Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser and Jeannette Pols, editors of the volume Care in Practice. On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms (2010). The Oxford English Dictionary defines tinkering as an “attempt to repair or improve something in a casual or desultory way”, but Mol and her co-authors understand tinkering as a fundamental component of “good care” practices within and outside of institutions, a mix of experimenting and improvising which has the capacity of “holding together that which does not necessarily hold together” (Law 2010). By considering these unlawful practices as forms of institutional tinkering, I wish to bridge the gap between the personal and the systemic dimensions of agency, highlighting how individuals and groups navigate and negotiate within given frameworks and constraints.

Building on this insight, institutional tinkering emerges as a distinct form of agency that has received insufficient attention in recent academic discourse. Defined by anthropologist David Graeber as “the labor aimed at maintaining or augmenting another person’s freedom,” care forms the core of institutional tinkering. This practice can be conceptualized as a strategic exercise of freedom, wherein individuals creatively deploy workarounds, adaptations, and tools to expand their own and others’ ability to act freely within the confines of dysfunctional institutional systems characterized by unequal power dynamics.

In the first part of this essay, I shall consider some of the contemporary ways in which the same issue have been approached from particular political standpoints in contemporary discourse. In the second part of this essay, I offer a short historical genealogy of some intellectual debates that questioned the relationship of law-breaking to social life, to social movements with aims of revolution, and to understandings of power relations more generally. What is specific of each is the way in which these debates are not simply academic discussions, but rather are situated in specific moments of struggles.

1.3. South to South-East

Contemporary accounts of institutional tinkering are currently scattered across a range of disciplines, as diverse as its situated practices and knowledges. For instance, in Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India (2019), Amit Rai reports how in India the practice of jugaad—finding DIY solutions or hacks to solve problems—emerged out of subaltern strategies of negotiating poverty, discrimination, and violence but is now problematically celebrated in management literature as a form of disruptive innovation. Rai explores how this practice operates not just as a survival strategy for the economically disadvantaged but also as a mode of creative and critical engagement with the material and technological constraints of everyday life. Rai examines various case studies and narratives that showcase the jugaad ethos in action, from grassroots innovations in agriculture and healthcare to digital hacks and workarounds in the tech industry. By doing so, he challenges the Western-centric perspectives on innovation and entrepreneurship, arguing that jugaad practices offer valuable insights into alternative forms of creativity and resourcefulness that are often overlooked by mainstream innovation discourses. Yet the book also critically engages with the romanticization of jugaad as it became popularized in managerial literature to simply stand for a form of frugal innovation. Rai discusses the potential of jugaad as a critique of and resistance to the capitalist modes of production, while also acknowledging the risks of precarity and exploitation that can accompany the glorification of informality and self-reliance.

In Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies, sociologist Veronica Gago build on and extends the conceptual category of the “baroque” to offer a critical examination of how neoliberalism is experienced, negotiated, and resisted at the grassroots level in Latin America, with a particular focus on Buenos Aires’ largest illegal open air market, La Salada. Published in 2017, the book challenges conventional narratives that depict neoliberalism solely as a top-down imposition by global financial institutions and states, arguing instead for a more nuanced understanding of neoliberalism as a complex process that is also actively shaped by the practices and strategies of those it seeks to govern. Her description of the “baroque” builds on Aihwa Ong’s (2006) definition of contemporary spatiality as “baroque ecology” and Álvaro García Linera (2001) work on “baroque modernity”, but also, albeit without direct reference, on Bolívar Echeverría’s La Modernidad de lo Barroco (1998) to describe a distinctive Latin American way of experiencing and contesting coloniality and capitalism, characterized by “motley zones” of “temporal folding” (library⁄(Gago 2017: 21)), a “hodgepodge” (Ibid. 69) mix of adaptation, resistance, and innovation, a “simultaneous coexistence of modes” that challenges at the same time the “romantic totalities” of modernity and the competitive rationality of neoliberalism.

Her own theorization of the baroque rests on two postulates: first, “informality”, which she defines “not negatively, by its relation to the normative definitions of the legal and the illegal, but positively, by its innovative character and, therefore, its dimension of praxis seeking new forms” is the “instituting source” of reality (library⁄(Gago 2017: 15)). And second, informality is the force that can put neoliberal value creation into crisis, as it is “a source of incommensurability”, marked by “overflow, by intensity and overlapping, of the heterogeneous elements that intervene in value creation” (ibid.).

Gago juxtaposes the baroque to the more materialist concept of “popular pragmatics” to describe the concrete strategies employed by marginalized communities to navigate and sometimes exploit the opportunities and challenges presented by neoliberalism. These practices include informal economic activities, barter networks, and various forms of collective organization that operate outside or on the margins of the formal economy and legitimate citizenship. She argues that by engaging in these practices, individuals and communities not only manage to survive in a neoliberal context, but also create alternative spaces of social and economic interaction that challenge its logic.

In Europe, the process of monetary integration of the 1990s was accompanied by intense political debates and the resurfacing of old stereotypes in media discourse, hinting towards a political anxiety towards potential cultural traits that might similarly hinder the neoliberal financial reforms. Thus the acronym PIGS was introduced by The Wall Street Journal in an article dated November 6, 1996, to refer to four southern European nations (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain), attaching a negative label to their cultural proclivities, a “Mediterranean indolence, to living beyond one’s means, to corruption, to the lack of rules, to the absence of that ethics of rigor and business, of moderation and work that Max Weber already posed as a sine qua non condition of capitalism” (Curcio 2012).¹

In Italy indeed, one of the PIGS countries, the southern way of living has long been the subject of a heated political debates, most notably inaugurated by Antonio Gramsci’s reflections on The Southern Question (1926), where the founder of the Italian communist party explores the economic and social divide between Italy’s industrial North and agrarian South, attributing the South’s criminality to socio-economic neglect by the state, rather than mere lawlessness. He argued that criminal organizations, such as the Mafia, emerged as a form of alternative governance, filling the vacuum left by the state’s absence in providing basic services and protection, obstructing the emergence of a united working-class consciousness necessary to confront the bourgeoisie. Already in the 1920s, the philosopher Benedetto Croce brought attention to a 1600s treaty titled “On Honest Dissimulation” by the Neapolitan writer Torquato Accetto. Published in 1641, library⁄the text engages with the ethical aspects of certain behaviors in politics and daily life, contributing to a broader debate within the Academy of the Idle, a literary institution focused on the “art of free time”. Accetto sees dissimulation—hiding the truth without lying—as a veritable Renaissance art, that is, a techne requiring moral discipline and presented as a strategy for dealing with harsh realities while maintaining virtue and truth. Thinking of Southern Italy, Walter Benjamin coined the concept of “porosity” to account for the Neapolitan otherness, which he compared to German rationality. While Berlin reminded him of military barracks, he saw Naples as a place where no form – social or architectural – should be taken as permanent, were everything is in constant state of transformation and re-adaptation. Even Alfred Sohn-Rethel in his The Ideal of the Broken Down: On the Neapolitan Approach to Things Technical (1926) reflected on how in the Neapolitan poverty-stricken everyday the technical objects of modernity get their proper social use only once they are broken and then reused with “tinkering proficiency” (Sohn-Rethel 1926), thus become des-alienated from the realm of capitalist commodities. More recently, contemporary theories such as Franco Cassano, Il Pensiero Meridiano (1996) and Franco Piperno’s Elogio dello spirito pubblico meridionale. Genius loci e individuo sociale (1997) and have been updating this genealogy of conversations offering political uses of the southern way of living.

Cassano views the South as an imaginative periphery, described as “Generally, in the North’s imagination, the South exists only as a tourist paradise or a Mafious hell” (library⁄(Cassano 2010)). He advocates for reclaiming the South’s intellectual dignity, challenging its portrayal solely through external perspectives. Through six essays, Cassano sketches his idea of a Meridian style, building on the distinctive approaches of Camus and Pasolini, intellectuals who critiqued established norms and morality and whom, Cassano argues, despite their different paths shared a commitment to freedom and skepticism of institutionalized emancipation.

Among the founders of Potere Operaio in the 1970s, Franco Piperno is a professor and philosopher of science and a former cultural commissioner for the Municipality of Cosenza in the 1990s. For him, the crisis of the modern state “explodes today because it has lost the last and not least foundation that conferred legitimacy to the state, the regulation of the national market.” (Piperno 1997: 27). In the face of this crisis, he propose to dissolve state sovereignty and replace it with “municipalities”: these represent the new political horizon for post-industrial society. Piperno’s southern municipality is a “natural city, to use Marx’s term; the city that has the ability to self-regulate. The city is that special place, topologically unique, where the power of the common intellect is manifested in the production of words, feelings, laws that externalize, so to speak, the specific qualities of the place, the genius loci. […] This potential being makes the city the common place where it is possible to live the experience of self-rule, of self-regulation. The point is that for every place, there is a threshold in human cooperation from which urban experience, political life, takes shape” (Piperno 1997: 89). This municipality is in contrast to the natural conception of human sociability, where men organize themselves into differentiated social bodies, starting with the family.

Édouard Glissant’s seminal essay on “The Right to Opacity” (1990) provides yet another key entry point to conceptualize practices of institutional tinkering. Glissant’s notion of opacity shatters one of the fundamental tenets of the Enlightenment project by arguing that clarity and transparency are far from being universal positive values. Rather, they have been routinely utilized in colonialism to reduce the texture of diverse realities. Stemming from the resistance of enslaved people to the master’s fixation on their measurability and knowability, the right to opacity is for Glissant the foundational theoretical concept for a philosophy of difference that can be summarized as the possibility of giving hospitality for the Other without pretension of reducing her to what can be known or understood. More recently, commentators have been re-activating the concept of opacity “not as a built-in protection of a population or as a summary term for cultural difference, but rather as a political accomplishment” (Davis, 2019) relevant for the ongoing decolonial work that today is taking place in institutions such as the museum and the academy. Echoing Glissant, Beirut-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan has been excavating the practice of taqiyya, a term belonging to Shia Islamic jurisprudence that connotes a legal dispensation for those who must dissimulate their faith when at risk of persecution. For Hamdan taqiyya is “an admission that free speech is not about speaking freely, but reclaiming control over the very conditions under which one is being heard” (Hamdan 2015).

When considering the corpus outlined above, it becomes immediately clear that cultures of institutional tinkering have often been spatialised in terms of a North / South divide, where the North (and West) is identified with productive efficiency, accomplished democracy and modernity, while the South (and East) is portrayed as its defective counterpart.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, author of Epistemologies of the South (2015), reminded readers that “The global South is not a geographical concept, even though the great majority of its populations live in countries of the Southern hemisphere. The South is rather a metaphor for the human suffering caused by capitalism and colonialism on the global level, as well as for the resistance to overcoming or minimizing such suffering.” (de Sousa Santos 2015: 18) Recast this way, it is possible to mobilize the qualities ascribed to the South in a more rounded political key, away from the dangers of geographical, or worse cultural, essentializations, string our focus instead onto a class analysis of systemic failures.

I argue that the division between north and south is just one of the many names given to the foundational division between winners and losers as presupposition for the normation of a society organized through different classes functional to capitalist production. In the aftermath of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, these distinctions between winners and losers keeps reflecting deep-seated regional disparities that continue to shape the cultural self-perception of post-Yugoslav societies, contributing to differing regional identities. In this sense, I argue that the culturalist framing of institutional tinkering remains insufficient on its own to produce an account of the practices and of the political potentiality of “snađi se druže” practices. In order to render this repertoire usable politically, make it a resource to read and act in the present moment, we must reinsert it with a specific range of debates and practices that confronted the issue of popular criminality as a directly political question. In the second part of this essay I will contour such genealogy by centering two scenes where the question of the unlawfulness of the subaltern became central to Europe-based political praxis and conversation in distinct ways: the anarchist movements of the 1920s and the French militant scene of the 1970s.

1.4. Anarchist bandits: Illegalism as rebellion

Originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries across France, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland, illegalism corresponds to a distinct approach within the anarchist movement, one that finds its philosophical backbone in its outright rejection of legal and moral standards underpinning the current capitalist structure. Practically, illegalism involves direct acts against the economic system, such as theft, fraud, and robbery, often as a means of survival for those in precarious financial situations. These acts of re-appropriation were not only seen as responses to dire circumstances but also as forms of direct resistance, intended to inspire others towards revolutionary endeavors. The embrace of criminality as a facet of revolutionary life sparked intense debates within anarchist circles, which revolved around the weekly publication L’Anarchie and the Parisian Causeries Populaires, forums for discussion scattered throughout the city. Victor Kibalchich, the editor-in-chief of L’Anarchie, encapsulated the illegalist stance, asserting:

In the ordinary sense of the word we cannot and will not be honest. By definition, the anarchist lives by expediency; work for him, is a deplorable expedient, like stealing… He takes no account of any conventions which safeguard property; for him, force alone counts. Thus we have neither to approve nor disapprove of illegal actions. We say: they are logical. (cited in Simons 2013)

Sébastien Faure’s Encyclopédie anarchiste published in four volumes between 1925 and 1934, presents as many as four different and conflicting entries on this term, offering a rich starting point for taking stock of the crux of the matter. The heart of the controversy lay not in the acts themselves but in the motivations behind them and the implications of these motivations for the broader anarchist project. The discussion in the Encyclopédie extends to the relationship between survival-driven material illegalism and broader political transformation, probing whether those engaged in economic illegalism share common ground with their intellectually motivated counterparts. Moreover, the commentators consider the fine line between anarchistic defiance and bourgeois illegalism, where the latter’s “crimes from above” are not only overlooked but glorified. This exploration goes beyond legality to question illegalism’s role as a survival mechanism, a form of resistance against capitalist exploitation and societal impositions like mandatory military service, or potentially, a stepping stone toward revolutionary change.

Illegalism was one of the topics that solidified the tensions within anarchist movements between the collectivist strands of anarchism and the individualist ones, which finally led to a split, over the course of the 1910s, between anarcho-communist components of these movements and their libertarian counterparts. Illegalists who favored collectivist anarchism mainly advocated for theft as a means of propagating their cause. Central figures of this strand of the praxis were French-born Clément Duval and Marius Jacob, whose criminal acts were intended to serve as revolutionary models and organizational tools aimed at fostering a wider movement of resistance.

Duval is often recognized as the pioneer of illegalism, contributing significantly to its theoretical foundation and engaging in criminal acts as a form of protest. His affiliation with the Panther of the Batignolles, a Parisian affinity group that staged a number of street actions to “imperil police officers and violate laws” (Simon 2013) highlighted his commitment to the cause. His writings from prison argued that “theft exists only though the exploitation of man by man… when society refuses you the right to exist, you must take it…” (Ibid.).

Marius Jacob was another influential figure embodying the specific conjuncture that made illegalism a significant trend within the anarchist movements at the turn of the century, as his figured blended revolutionary theory with resistance practice, leading the “Workers of the Night,” a collective that rejected employed labour and carried out over a hundred burglaries, redistributing stolen items worth about 5 million francs. His group, active not only in Paris but across France, Italy, and Belgium, chose targets to undermine the wealth of the elite while sparing those seen as socially beneficial. Jacob’s strategy of “pacifistic illegalism” emphasized non-violence and escape over confrontation, distinguishing his methods from more violent factions (Simon 2013; Delpech 2019).

The second faction of illegalists that emerged during the Belle Epoque, were closer to the philosophy of egoist anarchism of Max Stirner, which refused any idea of institutions as mediator of human relations, to affirm the self-interested individual as the sole authority in a social sphere ultimately always predetermined by sheer relations of force. Among the most notable figures in this camp was Jules Bonnot, who spearheaded the famous library⁄Bonnot Gang in France, a gang of bandits with its roots in Belgium—at the time a safe haven for political refugees and those evading compulsory military service in France. This segment of illegalists prioritized crime which they saw as an act of rebellion, over the dissemination of anarchist ideals via other means (Perry 197).

Across these two tendencies, the prominence of anarchist illegalism as a defining element of political discourse and action eventually waned. The changing economic landscape and penal policies led to the incarceration or dispersal of many of its adherents. Figures like Victor Serge, a staunch advocate for illegalism and an associate of the Bonnot Gang, later described the movement as a form of “collective suicide” (Serge 1978). Marius Jacob, reflecting later in life, bitterly concluded that “the unequal nature of the struggle” precluded the capacity of theft and petty criminality to successfully liberate the individual within contemporary society, concluding that illegalism, as a form of revolt, amounted more an expression of personal “temperament” than a coherent “doctrine” that could be taught to exploited and subaltern classes (library⁄(cited in Imrie 1994)).

1.5. 1970s illegalisms: Sartre, Maoism, Foucault and the Black Panthers Party

After the WWII, the discourse around illegalism resurfaced in contemporary concerns about the ethics of survival in the shadow of systemic injustices, the search for autonomy outside traditional labor structures, and the transformative potential of dissent. Through this lens, illegalism is seen not merely as a historical curiosity but as a living, problematic field, reflecting ongoing struggles to navigate the moral and practical challenges of living under capitalism. Essays on the relationship between lying and modern politics published in reaction to the experience of nazi-fascism, such as Alexandre Koyré’s The Political Function of the Modern Lie (1943) and Hannah Arendt’s Lying in Politics (1969) highlighted the difficult entanglement between different regimes of dissimulation and the regimes of power they underpin. The intellectual discourse on the political implications of lying and dissimulation, initiated by seminal works such as Koyré’s and Arendt’s, set the stage for a broader exploration of the strategies employed by political movements in their quest to challenge established power structures. This dialogue extended into the practical realm of political activism, where the theoretical underpinnings of deceit were tested against the realities of political engagement and resistance.

The transition from discussing the abstract dynamics of power and truth to examining their application in concrete political contexts underscored the evolution of the era inaugurated by 1968. A debate among figures like Jean Paul Sartre and co-founders of Libération Philippe Gavi and Pierre Victor (Benny Lévy) not only reflects a continuation of these philosophical inquiries but also illustrates the complexities faced by leftist movements as they navigated the terrain between subversion and participation within the very systems they critiqued.

In the discussion, held in 1972 and reprinted in the collection It is Right to Rebel, the trio debate the strategies available to the so-called “ultra-left” vis-a-vis electoral politics. In the view of Jean Paul Satre, leftist movements run the dangers of being flattened into the realm of legalism as they put forward their candidates. Sartre supports the idea of partaking in the electoral game, but only if candidates should be understood and in turn perform their role as a pure provocations, almost as carnevalesque incursions of denunciation within the dominant mediatic order of representation. While Sartre stated that “I’m not against a ruse against Power, something that I feel to be only fitting”, he warned against the seductive allure of playing by the rules of the State, since many groups, from the Italian Il Manifesto, to the Maoists² and the Trotskyists, ended up appealing to the very legalist frameworks that they wished to destroy. In other words, to “contest legality from within in the name of legality, and not from without, in the name of legitimacy” was a chimera, according to Sarte, who instead supported “another point of view: absolute illegality, or the contestation of the system through the legitimacy of direct democracy.” As a way forward, he recommends reorganizing the “sector of legitimate illegality” through the potentiation of initiatives such as “Red Aid, an organization that doesn’t carry out strikes or occupations of lodgings, but when they do occur assists them illegally.”³

Victor on the other hand, challenged Sartre’s position as too simplistic. While he agreed that “Problem number 1 since ‘68 is expanding the field of opposition between legitimacy and legality”, he also maintained that

We don’t want marginal groups to be the only ones fighting. […] Expanding the field of opposition doesn’t only mean carrying out at such and such a moment illegalist actions that are legitimate, and at others legal actions that provoke a certain number of contradictions within institutions. I used the expression “institutional subversive actions.” When Sartre takes the editorship of La Cause du peuple there is in that action a legal element and an element that breaks with legality. It is this unstable combination that gives the action all its force. (Sartre, Gavi, Victor 2019)

Victor’s point on the relevance on institutional tinkering as a necessary accompaniment to outright lawbreaking actions is symptomatic of the political environment that marked the 1970s, when every aspect of life, including one’s position within institutions, would be thought and re-articulated through the prism of tactical question on how to bring capitalism to a halt. In this sense, the illegalism discussed by Sartre, Victor and Gavi is already a matter of techniques of political organizing available to movements at different conjunctures. In his conversation, the matter of the subjectivizing effects of committing illegal act is not broached. The subjectivity of the revolutionary classes is presupposed in his context; the question is rather how to compose their force into revolutionary action, avoiding mistakes from the past and from the new tensions opening within movements in how to address questions of justice.

1.6. Foucault: popular illegalisms as counter-productivity

During the same militant years, Michel Foucault is preoccupied with questions and histories of illegalism from a different perspective, asking what productivity belongs to the “non-proletarianized plebs” (Foucault et al. 2001, 1:1200, 1202) that is not simply a reaction to the forces to which they are subjected. If Sartre’s focus on the strategic employment of illegal acts as a means to challenge and potentially supersede capitalist structures provided a foundation for understanding the role of direct action in the climate of the 1970s, however, it is Foucault who expands this conversation by examining the transformative potential of such acts on the participants themselves, thereby shifting the discussion from the external effects of rebellion to the internal processes of subjectivation and empowerment. This progression from the practical considerations of revolutionary tactics to the philosophical implications of those tactics on the self and the collective illustrates a critical evolution in the analysis of political resistance, emphasizing the close relationship between lived experience, subjectivity, and power.

Foucault’s term “illegalism” has often been inaccurately translated into English as “illegality,” a misinterpretation that has significant implications for understanding his genealogical work during its most activist years (Feldman 2019). This clarification moves us beyond viewing Foucault’s contributions as merely a chronicle of an ever-more-efficient engine of suppression to recognizing them as a militant exploration of power’s operations and of the forces able to challenge it on its own ground.

Foucault uses the term “popular illegalisms” (Foucault, 2013: 153) to describe various spontaneous acts of law-breaking among the impoverished, the plebs, the vagrants and the marginals. As highlighted by Foucaultian scholars Alex Feldman (2019) and Delio Vasquez (2020), who recently devoted extensive studies to this theme, Foucault’s reflection on this theme is grounded in the vigorous discussions characterizing militant political circles during the 1960s and ’70s. This includes not just the tensions with Maoism⁴, as already seen through Sartre’s conversations with Gavi and Victor above, but also a broader Marxist discourse on the historical (revolutionary or counter-revolutionary?) role of the lumpenproletariat, but also the insights coming from the antiracist struggles of the Black Panther Party, whom were a key intellectual and activist references for the Prisons Information Group (GIP) that Foucault co-founded in 1970. The Black Panther Party was emerging at the time as an exception political force able to combine, in practice, guerrilla and radical self-defense acts with breakfast for children and health clinic programs, and, in theory, to extend the insight of Mao Zedong and Frantz Fanon to advocate the revolutionary potential of the most marginalized lumpenproletariat, which they portrayed as an emerging international class, poised to drive the struggle against capitalism due to increasing automation and unemployment.

Foucault’s exploration of “popular illegalisms,” highlights the emergence and criminalization of such behaviours in early capitalism. This concept prominently features in his 1972-1973 lectures on The Punitive Society and is further elaborated in his seminal work, Discipline and Punish (1975), particularly in the chapter “Illegalisms and Delinquency.” Here, Foucault conducts a historical analysis to understand the division of the lower classes into “workers” and “delinquents” during the initial stages of modern capitalism, a division that utilized a range of techniques to break the ties of solidarity between delinquents and their social milieux. He argues that the enduring and rigorous nature of this illegalist consciousness and practice within the lower classes demonstrated the limits of parliamentary and trade union efforts to fully incorporate its political potential, a point he emphasizes in his closing remarks of the Collège de France lecture where he introduced illegalism. In the “Illegalisms and Delinquency” chapter of Discipline and Punish, he further analysed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French sentences and press commentaries, and especially the Fourierist journal La Phalange of the late 1830s, which he saw as the most significant evidence of the political sensibilities that at the time were openly articulating a political theory of working-class crime which Foucault also embraces, as he exhorts his contemporaries to also consider the possibility that “crime constitutes a political instrument that could prove as precious for the liberation of our society as it has been for the emancipation of Black people” as well as “prisoners”.

In the same text, Foucault also explains that the very laws that redefined property relations, enclosing the commons and displacing millions, were themselves “bourgeois illegalisms” through which the new ascending class could forge its forms of agency in the cracks left open by sovereign power. Through the figure of Béasse, “a child of thirteen, without home or family, charged with vagabondage” Foucault reveals the crux of the great anxieties among elites concerned the lives and practices of vagrants, or “vagabonds”, which they had themselves created through dispossession. As Vasquez poignantly put it, being not just non-productive but “anti-productive,” the wandering vagrant without a master is even more dangerous than the worker who steals from his employer:

The wandering vagrant who refused the new capitalist regime of work by skipping out and “stealing” the “potential” commodification of their own labor: “illegalism of dissipation” is thus “a way of stealing the condition of profit” as vagabond, in effect “steals” their own body from capitalism. (Vasquez 2020: 950)

1.7. Conclusions: FIGURING IT OUT TODAY

The recent resurgence of interest in the theorization of illegalism, as noted by recent scholarship, reflects a broader recognition of the political and ethical dimensions of these practices. This contemporary discourse not only revisits the legacy of figures like Foucault but also situates the conversation within the urgent context of today’s social, economic, and environmental crises. The practices of institutional tinkering, then, emerge as a critical lens through which to understand the dynamics of power, resistance, and agency in a world characterized by pervasive surveillance and control. Moreover, the narrative of “Snađi se, druže” and its conceptual relatives in contemporary theory invite a reevaluation of what constitutes political action and agency, suggesting that acts of resistance, survival, and ingenuity are not peripheral to political subjectivation, but important techniques of the self, performing situated opposition to dominant paradigms of power and control.

It is relevant to remark here that the scholarly interest to the theorization of illegalism in Foucault is very recent. I reckon that it can be placed in an emerging turn in political philosophy, cultural studies and social sciences to re-visit questions pertaining to class composition, class subjectivation and class agency. This turn is especially apt in the light of the recent forceful contributions that emerged in the last decade from intertwined efforts in militancy and research in areas such as transfeminism, anti-racism, decoloniality, crip theory and activism, and environmental justice. As Vasquez put it, it is significant that while “Discipline and Punish must be grasped as an account of some of the earliest social movements in Europe against Capitalism” (Vasquez 2020: 950), its reception in this sense has been hindered because of “their illegal character and because of the reality that the political meaning of crime is nearly unspeakable under modern society” (Vasquez 2020: 936).

Such widespread avoidance in left cultures of dealing with practices of illegalism is currently under increased pressure, especially when considered from the standpoint of social movements facing the ongoing criminalization of solidarity with undocumented migrants, homeless populations, as well as those seeking bodily autonomy and reproductive self-determination. However, as I have presented in the first part of this surveying essay, contemporary debates on popular illegalisms are indeed present, yet they have been in the last decades most often articulated in oblique ways, perhaps fittingly to their subject matter.

In this concluding segment of the essay, I want to close with a reflection in anticipation of future work, on some of the ways in which the genealogy of political illegalism and the geographies of institutional tinkering perimeter a set of tendencies and specific urgencies that characterise the present conjuncture, marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the acceleration of environmental collapse and the persistence of neoliberal policies, in which new terrains of “war” between illegalisms from above and from below are once again reconfiguring.

The last two decades have seen an intensification of the conditions of “total bureaucratization” (library⁄(Graeber 2015)), a mix of surveillance, punishment and institutional neglect that already preoccupied the Black Panthers, Foucault, and their contemporaries. Colin Crouch (library⁄(2004)) described our time as one of post-democratic impasse, in which democratic procedures actually hide deeply hierarchical social formations, while resources and opportunities are administered via computerized “pattern discrimination” (Apprich, Chun, Cramer, Steyerl 2018).

Despite the rapid spread of digital tools in the last decades, one that at its inception was heralded as a mean for eliminating “paper work” and streamlining effectiveness, systemic demands on individuals to comply with often cumbersome and invasive procedures of reporting and verification have not decreased, but multiplied. This phenomenon has been particularly visible in the United States, provoking a number of commentators to reflect on the issue of bureaucratic harm. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (library⁄(2008)) has called such harm “organized abandonment”, echoed by Elizabeth Povinelli’s reflection on library⁄“economies of abandonment” (2011), which targets Black Americans and poor people most violently. Dan Spade’s has written on “administrative violence” (2015) enforced by welfare institutions that are barely provided with the necessary resources to serve the public good. library⁄Fred Moten and Stefano Harney similarly speak of widespread “enforced negligence” on the part of public-interest institutions such as universities, which instead of supporting their constituencies and workers, weaponize professionalization as a process for privatizing the social individual’s capacity to care (2004).

Sociologist Loïc Wacquant poignant analysis of neoliberal bureaucracy in the article library⁄Crafting the Neoliberal State (2010) highlights how the punitive containment of the impoverished and the marginalized is founded on two pillars: on the one hand, the transformation of welfare provisions into workfare, a paradigm in which assistance —whether it be in the form of unemployment subsidies, social housing, food stamps or other similar provisions — is increasingly weaponized as a mean to scrutinizing and moralize behaviors and enforce psycho-social coercions skewed towards the introjection of the values of subordination embedded in work schemes, mandatory training and compulsory medical treatments (library⁄(Friedli and Stern 2015)). On the other hand, the expansion of policing, penal and carceral system and of the corollary prison industries (including those managing facilities specifically targeting migrant populations).

According to Loïc Wacquant, this revamping of the capacities of public authorities is “not the spawn of some broad societal trend—whether it be the ascent of ‘‘biopower’’ or the advent of ‘’late modernity’’—but, at bottom, an exercise in state crafting.” that is, it is a deliberate political project of advanced capitalism, a paradigm that, while originating in North America, is “in progress—or in question—in all advanced societies submitted to the relentless pressure to conform to the U.S. pattern” (library⁄(Wacquant 2010: 210)).

It is precisely in such contexts than the gap of legality and legitimacy returns to be felt in the open, that cultures of popular illegalism need to be re-considered as a practice of care for freedom that are more than sum of the circumstances that produced them. I argue that these practices of institutional tinkering are a counter form of state crafting, a life crafting that is necessarily a component of making a living under neoliberal governance and automated bureaucratization.

The significance of revisiting plebeian illegalism and street-level institutional tinkering stands to intervene as a corrective to two political tendencies. On the one hand, the popular experience of the necessity of cheating bureaucratic and market structures plays a role in the construction of contemporary far-right imaginaries, landing allure and legitimacy to the self-proclaimed anti-systemic personae of political figures such as Donald Trump or Silvio Berlusconi, to name but a couple who have reached iconic status in relation to their cavalier attitudes towards flaunting law-breaking. And conversely, several progressive political movements and formations have been cornered into becoming the upholders of laws and regulations, thus loosing the support of those classes that perhaps could be aptly called the “hustling” ones, rather than “working”.

Moreover, rather than becoming a site for the production of alternatives to the work regime, cognitive and affective labour have become paradigmatic of novel forms of intensification of productivity of surplus value that can be circulated and monetized within capitalist logics, and not against them. The figure of the creative worker, the immaterial laborer, the virtuoso (Virno 2001), the projectarian (Szreder 2021), the self-entrepreneur, etc. stand to receive the delinquent as their hidden doppelganger. Ingenuity is in this sense the big absent from the values celebrated in secular modern capitalist societies. Ingenuity is to class struggle what creativity is to arts and innovation is to techne. In this perspective, it can be seen as an antidote to the sterility crisis of artistic, cultural and creative production, which is a mode of production of aesthetic, poetic and ethic experimentations that however does not easily translate in an experimentation with forms of living. How can the work of staying legal be refused? How can we procure spaces for the formation of subjectivities that are not prone to call the police or to become the police? Cheating, stealing and lying should be seen as modes of production of different kinds of subjectivity, rooted in the refusal not simply of work, as in the tradition of operaist thinking, but of subjection.

And finally, contemporary illegalism is situated in the broader social environment as it interfaces with institutional rules, whenever institutions cease to be functional and collective agency seeks alternative routes. As practices of institutional tinkering and popular illegalisms serve as both a means of survival and a form of resistance within various social, political, and economic frameworks, they further undo the distinction between political, productive and reproductive regimes of practice. For those who are not (and perhaps were never) contemplated by the laws of the state and/or the market as full subjects, of citizenship, of democracy, of humanity, of rationality, of morality, tinkering is often the only chance for actualizing their constitutive power. This is an essential characteristic of the political agency of plebeian constituencies and I propose it should become as an important component of institutional analysis in the present.

While institutional tinkering cannot simply be embraced un-reflexively, as it can leads to the very undoing of the freedom in the name of which it is conducted, the capacity of institutions to not simply tolerate, but to make themselves sensitive and accountable to the needs expressed via such tinkering as a bottom-up response to exclusion, inequality, bureaucratic stupidity and inefficiency, is a key techno-political affordance to transform social interfaces from restrictive borders into lively membranes, where power can be redistributed and political pedagogies can take place.

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