Resistance

Building comes first in the definition and the order is the argument. Resistance is constructive before it is defensive, since what is defended has to exist, and a movement organized only around opposition has nothing to protect and nothing to become. Exosocial networks are named specifically rather than organizations, which follows from the rest of the framework, since a bounded group formed in opposition acquires an endo-ideal, a negative image and an exceptional myth and reproduces the structure being resisted. That is Marsh's standing objection to liberation movements that install a new endo-ideal with a new endo-identity, and resistance defined as building avoids it by never producing a group to be captured. The second half is defence against oppressive coercion, which she catalogues precisely elsewhere. Social coercion against exosocial expansion comes in three forms: guilt associated with expansion, negative image status associated with expansion and restriction of opportunities. Alongside those sit violations of autonomy and dignity, including manufactured busywork, attacks on health, attacks on the shared environment and the creation of interpersonal conflict. Defence means keeping conduits open against all of that rather than confronting anyone. Her practical writing follows the definition. What she recommends against a regime terrorizing the public is reminders of previous tyrants and what became of them, and what she recommends generally is making the work of building so absorbing that it is more interesting than any stale old dictator.

Resistance in political theory covers everything from civil disobedience to armed struggle, with Gene Sharp cataloguing nonviolent methods and James C. Scott studying everyday forms among subordinate groups. Prefigurative politics, the idea that a movement should embody the arrangements it seeks, is the closest existing parallel to Marsh's building-first definition and has a long anarchist lineage. Dual power describes constructing alternative institutions alongside existing ones. Where she goes further is in making the constructive element definitional rather than strategic, so an oppositional movement that builds nothing is not resistance on her account rather than being a less effective kind of it.