Collective ethics of resistance: The organization of survival in the Warsaw Ghetto

Abstract

This article aims to shed light on how ‘powerless’ people can organize to survive in situations of mass oppression. Research on powerlessness often explains compliance and political inaction by a culture of silence, generated from the sedimentation of numerous experiences of defeat. We question this assertion by drawing from an illustration of certain inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto, who managed to create a micro-society and reclaim the social relations the Nazis sought to destroy. Building on the work of Schaffer, we explain these collective ethics of resistance as the view that people should actively participate in the creation and maintenance of their own social relations. Through this lens, we argue that ethics and resistance are intertwined.

The Nazi war against the Jews had become a war of annihilation. Jews were faced with cardinal questions of life and death, and no factor could take upon itself the sole responsibility for such issues. Only by joining forces could we face such crucial and constant problems.

Emanuel Ringelblum

Introduction

How do people survive in situations of mass oppression? Does powerlessness give birth to spaces of survival, where people develop ways to maintain their lifestyle despite radical restriction of freedom? These questions have received some attention in research on powerlessness (Gaventa, 1980), colonization (Memmi, 1991) and resistance studies (Courpasson and Vallas, 2016; Mumby et al., 2017). The general consensus is that people perceived as powerless do not necessarily portray apathy and ignorance (Eliasoph, 1998), apolitical and inoffensive resistance (Contu, 2008; Mumby et al., 2017). However, research suggests, challenges to oppression remain rare and quiescence is the most common response (Gaventa, 1980; Lukes, 1974).

This article questions the notion that powerlessness necessarily leads to political inaction, suggesting instead that disenfranchised persons can in fact alter power relations through the concrete organization of their everyday survival. This alteration does not lead to the upeaval of prevalent power structures, nor is that its objective. However, it suggests that a collective project of survival can enable the disenfranchised to actively participate in forming and nurturing their own social relations. This article draws from accounts of life in the Warsaw Ghetto to illustrate the capacity of certain groups of inhabitants to contribute to their own survival and preserve diverse aspects of their singular culture. Specifically, we examine such acts as the creation of schools, development of theatres, smuggling and distribution of food, forming and maintaining an underground press, and creation of historical archives to generate a type of micro-society in an unimaginably oppressive context. We turn our attention to how the organizing process of survival in conditions of mass oppression was an ‘ethical experience’ for those involved; that is, they constructed their response to oppression as a collective project, deriving from an ethical demand for political action (Critchley, 2008). We first draw theoretically from Merleau-Ponty’s view of ethics as a life-sustaining web of concrete achievements in which people are responsible for determining their fate through their own choices as they engage with their environment. Any situation is structured through practical individual engagements. For him, this means that ethical behaviour requires action – in particular, resistance to the dominant social order. Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) approach illustrates how generating an acceptable life under severe oppression constitutes a project because oppressed people can perceive ‘in a concrete way, that [their] life is synchronised with the life of other oppressed and that all share a common lot’ (p. 444). Our article focuses on these concrete actions that permit ghetto inhabitants to cooperate in the construction of a concrete world, which Merleau-Ponty calls ‘the flesh of world’. Second, we draw from Schaffer’s (2004) view of the relationship between ethics and resistance. That is, we defend the idea that ethical resistance is a praxis of working for and with others, ‘in an attempt to develop actual practical freedom, the situational and situated ability to develop and pursue one’s project’ (Schaffer, 2004: 88). Combining both theoretical perspectives, this article examines the resistance of powerless people through the everyday practice of liberty (Merleau-Ponty, 1969), on the concreteness of ethics.

This article contributes to research on the relationships between ethics and resistance. First, we show that survival under severe oppression turns the powerless into active ethical subjects (Ibarra-Colado et al., 2006) rather than passive recipients of years of cumulative defeats, or apathetic and quiescent agents of a prevailing game of power (Gaventa, 1980). We show that they organize their survival through everyday activities, permitting the creation of a micro-society within the ghetto that allows people to envisage, if not their liberation, at least the maintenance of their own social relations despite damaging oppressive forces. Resistance entails a collectively determined concept of how people should relate to one another while living under mass oppression. What marks the ethicality of resistance is the collective creation and maintenance of social relations that permit the powerless to make lifestyle choices despite a radical reduction in freedom.

Our second intended contribution is to the field of hidden collective resistance, a form of political action that has received scant attention in organizational studies to date (Mumby et al., 2017). We show the productive dimension of a non-oppositional practice of resistance. The organization of survival by the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto was not an infra-political practice (Scott, 1990), as it was directed not against the enemy, but for the creation of life-affirming alternatives. Distinct from ‘decaf’ (Contu, 2008), cynical (Fleming and Spicer, 2003), or humoristic and subversive (Rodrigues and Collinson, 1995), ethical resistance shows the appearance of quiescence without consenting to a life not worth living. In that sense, ethical resistance partially differs from post-recognition politics (Fleming, 2016). Where the latter regards emancipatory projects (such as those in the Warsaw Ghetto) as being developed for their own sake and radical silence as the fundamental strategy of people seeking invisibility to diminish the dangers associated with their extreme vulnerability, we argue that ethical resistance is not primarily about speaking or silencing but rather about doing. If concrete things can be done for people in a context of oppression, there is not much time for speech anyway. The circle of power being closed, ghetto inhabitants decide to act for others, rather than simply incarnating ‘a voiceless universe that merely makes up, observes and sinks back into anonymous oblivion’ (Fleming, 2016: 621). Oblivion, invisibility and silence are not even questioned in the ghetto; what matters is to envisage the possibility of eating, playing, talking to each other. Overall, we show that powerlessness does not necessarily prevent people from transforming an antagonistic power relationship that they are sure to lose, into the creation of an ethical resistance for defending life. The Warsaw Ghetto’s inhabitants did not initially try to challenge the power of the Nazis. Instead, they launched a parallel project of life that was directed not at winning over this powerful enemy (even silently), but at recreating acceptable conditions for living in a world that had ceased to be human (Arendt, 1973).

The article proceeds as follows. First, we discuss the reasons behind what usually is seen as political [in]action among powerless groups, reflected by the question: ‘Why, in a social relationship involving the domination of non-elite by elite, do challenges to that domination not occur?’ (Gaventa, 1980: 3). The prevailing perspective claims that individuals willingly subject themselves to systems of domination (Willmott, 1993). Thus, scholars from different traditions have elaborated on how the subordinate are induced to participate in their own subordination rather than resist it (Allen, 2008; Gaventa, 1980). This vision contends that dominant power relationships develop routines of non-challenge or of participation in inner-group oppression, making resistance an unlikely event.

Second, we offer an alternative version of political action in situations of powerlessness, discussing recent research on resistance to suggest that it has shifted to a focus on quiescent and individual forms of resistance, thereby neglecting the hidden collective forces that are likely to make a difference in contexts of oppression. Resistance studies often invoke an illusion of autonomy (Contu, 2008) that would explain the lack of emancipatory potential in most resisting processes (Thompson, 2016). We propose that this political fatalism can be overcome by better understanding the ethicality of resistance (Schaffer, 2004) in its concrete dimensions (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), according to which the central claim is not to alter or directly challenge power relations, but to carve a space out of the existing oppressive structures where concrete possibilities of life improvement can exist through everyday activities, even if fragile and precarious. Such a space where playing, attending school, enjoying theatre and musical performances, and having (from time to time) proper meals infuses life with meaning and safeguards mental survival despite a regime that does everything in its power to reduce life to mere existence and suppress such human activities.

Ethics is most often understood as a relationship between individual actions and the social norms and rules to which individuals decide to adhere or not (Crane, Knights, and Starkey, 2008; Rhodes, 2016). Being ethical is thus defined as ‘acting in a way that is detached from personal privileges, passions and emotions’ (Ibarra-Colado et al., 2006: 46). While sharing this view, our perspective ties ethics to politics (McMurray et al., 2011) when an ethical demand (in this case, trying to improve people’s lives in the face of severe oppression) is transformed into the political reality of resistance through everyday life.

We then illustrate this argument through an example: namely, that of certain groups of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto between 12 October 1940 and 21 July 1942 – the date of the first fateful mass deportation to Treblinka. This event is known to most organizational scholars and has been a subject of study for other disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, history and political science. We illustrate micro-social forms of everyday survival permitted by the recreation of freely chosen social relations. We then discuss the relationships between ethics and resistance, suggesting that the latter entails a collectively determined concept of how people should relate to one another (namely, how they define their social relations in a context that does not allow it). What defines the ethicality of resistance, we argue, is the collective re-creation and maintenance of social relations that are destroyed by the oppressive regime.

Understanding political inaction

Why do people not resist? Why it is they allow oppressive forces to overtake their lives and do nothing about it? Why would anyone comply with domination? The usual question asked by scholars studying political inaction is ‘Why, in a social relationship involving the domination of non-elite by elite, do challenges to that domination not occur?’ (Gaventa, 1980: 3). Certain situations of social deprivation seem to prevent issues from arising and subordinated actors from speaking up and being heard. Several explanations of political inaction are provided. First, research suggests that subordinated people are often themselves accomplices in their own domination (Allen, 2008; Bauman, 1989). This perspective considers that domination is based on the work of legitimation performed both by elite and non-elite members, building subordination on understandable grounds. In this light, quiescence in the face of oppression could be seen as evidence of the legitimacy of the existing regime/order, even if maintained by violent forms of power. It is also considered as a necessary instrument for decision-making by the oligarchs: that is to say, as a function of social stability (Gaventa, 1980: 4; Gramsci, 1971). Indeed, in the Gramscian tradition, the maintenance of political inaction from below is a condition of the reproduction of hegemonic forms of power. In the pluralist tradition (Polsby, 1963), political inaction reflects the existence of a ‘consensus’ that can be established despite deprivation, thus leading scholars to ‘blame the victim’ for apathy in oppression. However, Lukes (1974: 24) observes that ‘to assume the absence of grievance equals genuine consensus is simply “to rule out the possibility of false or manipulated consensus …”’. Not only manipulation, but also the capacity to set the agenda can explain absence of political action from the people with the greatest needs. According to Schattschneider (1960: 105), ‘… whoever decides what the game is about also decides who gets in the game’. And to be sure, the exercise or even the threat of violence, in its many forms, also contributes to creating and internalizing a sense of powerlessness and lack of hope.

These processes will lead the oppressed groups to ‘suffer some inhibition of their ability to develop and exercise their capabilities and express their needs, thoughts and feelings’ (Young, 1990: 40). Members of these groups may not be conscious of their oppression beyond general feelings of discontent and frustrations. Structural relations of oppression and domination, and the resulting sense of powerlessness of the dominated, may even be internalized in people’s identities and social relationships (Lipsky, 1987; Tew, 2006), thus leading them to lower their aspirations rather than contest social structures and their status of victims. Indeed, an important tradition of research on powerlessness considers that the powerless tend to ‘internalize their impossible situations and internalize their guilt …’ (Katznelson, 1973: 198). For example, gender scholars have argued that for many women around the world, the tacit threat of violence may have caused to ‘behave as if they do not like to go out’ (Cudd, 2006: 91), or to be especially cautious in their normal social exchanges. They further argue that such threats may explain why domestic violence and workplace harassment today is such a prevalent phenomenon, yet so covert and underreported.

Such lack of political awareness or knowledge, as we see, produces a ‘culture of silence’ that precludes the development of political action (Freire, 1972: 58–59). In short, being powerless would derive from socialization to compliance that produces a pattern of non-challenge to dominating groups. Power and powerlessness are accumulative processes that reinforce each other (Gaventa, 1980: 22). In this light, power would be primarily maintained not by exertion and coercion, but through the passivity and inaction of the powerless. For example, in his 1999 study on modern day slavery, Kevin Bales ([1999] 2004) explains how Thai girls forced into sexual slavery become fully compliant, to the point that violence and constant physical bondage become unnecessary. They come to perceive their situation as a normal, if unjust, ‘scheme of things’ (p. 84). Powerlessness is thus the shared feeling of being stuck, helpless and victimized: a situation that may relate to current circumstances or personal histories of subjection to unequal structures and social relationships (Tew, 2006: 42). Put differently, powerlessness relates to an absence of consciousness that freedom can be attained and practised (Foucault, 1984), diminishing the capacity to engage in a mutual relationship with a constraining regime to negotiate rules and norms (Ibarra-Colado et al., 2006).

The overarching picture that emerges from such accounts is that of quiescence of the oppressed, who are usually invisible and silent. Powerlessness is the product of an ethical incapacity generated by apathy (Eliasoph, 1998) – that is to say, hopelessness about improving one’s life and flourishing. As Freire (1994) put it, ‘Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle’ (p. 3).

Less extreme, but increasingly common, is the case of day labour (Kalleberg, 2009; Peck and Theodore, 2012) – characterized by erratic employment, low and irregular pay, and the routine violation of labour laws. Frequently, day labourers seek work at informal hiring sites such as street corners and store parking lots (Meléndez et al., 2014), with an ever-present fear of moving around in the cities with little or no means of self-protection (Menjívar and Abrego, 2012). In these situations, physical safety and economic survival may depend on silence, which can appear as conformity and compliance (Sennett, 1998; Vallas, 2012). One can see such mechanism at play, for example, in studies examining the workplace or work-seeking behaviour of immigrants without full or proper documentation. Immigration laws heavily contribute through the internalization of fear and different forms of violence to maintain inequalities among workers (Holmes, 2007; Menjívar and Abrego, 2012).

An important element in that process is the anticipation of defeat – that is, the reflection of the fatalism of subordinated cultures instilled through repeated experiences of defeat (Gaventa, 1980), thus reinforcing the prevalence of non-challenging behaviours: ‘Continual defeat gives rise not only to the conscious deferral of action but also to a sense of defeat … that may affect the consciousness of potential challengers’ (p. 255). A powerful illustration is provided by Hilberg’s (1985) otherwise highly controversial interpretation of the ‘almost complete lack of resistance’ by the Jews in Europe to the situation of death and struggle inflicted on them by the Nazis. According to Hilberg, part of the explanation of that ‘reaction pattern’ can be found in the long history of lack of resistance and defeats of the Jewish people.

All in all, a fundamental insight derived from this discussion is that apparent patterns of quiescence do not reflect consensual apathy or an innate sense of powerlessness. Discontent is hidden and contained because it is encompassed in specific power relationships working in the containment of resistance. In other words, powerless people and groups can generate challenges to dominance, but they rarely end up achieving social change because ‘powerless resistance’, to be successful, must both confront power and ‘overcome the accumulated effects of powerlessness’ (Gaventa, 1980: 258). Power relationships develop routines of non-challenge: once established, they are self-sustaining.

From ‘decaf’ to ethical resistance

Research from the last 20 years appears to suggest that resistance has all but disappeared, painting a picture of complicity and quiescence coherent with the explanations above (Mumby et al., 2017: 1158; Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995). What is indeed remarkable is that most research on resistance has fundamentally shifted its focus to quiescent and largely individual forms of resistance. Struggles over meaning and identity are central now, leading to ever increasing subtle constructions of resistant meanings (e.g. cynicism, humour and irony), or alternate identities (Fleming, 2013; Mumby et al., 2017; Scott, 1990). In that sense, even some scholars paint a world of decaf politics, which Contu (2008) defines as those with no real personal or political costs, in which dissenting and oppositional voices are ‘often covert and difficult to detect and shape a variety of forms of “under-life” in organizations’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999: 164–65). The injunction was therefore to investigate the hidden and offstage discourses, unofficial speeches, and practices (Contu, 2008; Fleming and Sewell, 2002; Scott, 1990) rather than mass mobilization and overt rebellion. This shift makes it even harder to see the possibility of everyday resistance in contexts of oppression where public displays of overt resistance are indeed dangerous; so, does resistance occur in these threatening contexts? If yes, what does it concretely accomplish?

To answer this question, we study the concept of infra-politics, which captures a range of resisting practices including a ‘wide variety of low-profile forces of resistance that dare not speak in their own name’ (Scott, 1990: 19). This involves small acts such as sabotage, foot dragging, feigned ignorance, and gossip, encapsulated in the concept of hidden transcript. People dissimulate observable signs of dissent and distance themselves from the power structures by adopting cynical postures, thereby keeping their personal beliefs without attempting to challenge the prevailing structures of power and oppression. The infra-political perspective is crucial to understand the capacities of specific groups of dissenters to silently articulate their claims and provoke possible future confrontations (Courpasson, 2017; Scott, 1990). However, it does not address the ethicality of resistance: that is to say, the practicalities and everyday micro-doings through which a person or a group develops a particular project of life, thanks to the concrete results of their action (Schaffer, 2004: 76). In other words, infra-political views are rather converging with current discursive and post-recognition versions of organizational politics (Fleming, 2016). Privilege is given, in these approaches, to hidden expressions of dissent that do not necessarily involve concrete political action, yet aim to improve living conditions. Some examples include creating a school (Marti et al., 2013) or smuggling food. We contend that these perspectives, although extremely useful for grasping contemporary relationships in the current workplace, are less adapted to the analysis of resistance to oppression, which can be better understood through the lens of ethicality. In other words, the infra-political approach does not equip the researcher to understand how survival can be organized and acceptable lives be lived in contexts of massive oppression.

Indeed, these things that matter (i.e. engaging people’s lives) in the context of oppression can well be done behind the scenes through practices that are not direct challenges to authorities because they are not necessarily understood as oppositional and it is difficult to evaluate whether they are sufficiently disruptive to catch the eye of the oppressors. But, we contend that they go beyond the mere fantasy of autonomy criticized by Contu (2008), among others, because they are rooted in ethical claims helping to envision and enact in situ certain modes of organizing survival that are not fantasies, but concrete possibilities of life improvement, even if fragile and precarious. This ethical view of resistance combines apparent consent with the fabric of a collective agency to transform some conditions of everyday life. There might be nothing the powerless can do politically against massive oppression, except by turning the expression of discontent with their treatment into concrete actions dedicated to improving people’s lives according to certain ethical demands (such as educating children, eating properly, going to the theatre, or enjoying religious ceremonies). Ethical resistance challenges the implicit social norms of apathy and the cumulative effects of the experience of impotence that characterize powerless populations according to most research. It also challenges the focus of most resistance studies on the politics of meaning (Mumby et al., 2017). Finally, the focus on ethical resistance also partially questions recent developments on post-recognition politics, which argue for the development of emancipatory projects for their own sake that are not designed to produce any concrete effect on power structures and people’s lives (Fleming, 2016), in ways that ostensibly have no political intent (Mumby et al., 2017: 1167).

This ethical view of resistance deliberately considers that resistance in oppressive contexts requires an active participation of the powerless to alter their conditions of living. Silence and quiescence can be means to avoid repression and punishment. However, what is ethical, according to Schaffer (2004) is what is not inert, like the sedimentation of past human experiences and practices that lead to apathy. Powerlessness derives from this ethical inertia, because defeats are internalized and render any commitment to a project – and therefore to ethics – impossible. According to Schaffer’s (2004) view of ethics as active, ethical inertia is what prevents powerless people from changing their situation. It makes their subjugation almost natural and at least mechanical (p. 38) because this inert ethics is based on rules and ‘rule-based conceptions of ethics of whatever stripe represent a form of inertia, one that can serve as a form of violence to the freedom of individuals and groups’ (p. 67).

For Schaffer, ethics is an active process whereby people act in relation to their chosen moral principles. Therefore, people are free to try to become ‘active ethical subjects’ (Ibarra-Colado et al., 2006: 47). Thereby, a relation can be established with constraining regimes of power, permitting the creation of ‘spaces where we can be free within and against the constraints of the particular regimes of truth we inhabit’ (Fillion, 2004: 122, quoted in Ibarra-Colado, 2006: 47). It is obviously difficult to not see the tension existing between this definition of resisting ethics and the idea of a cumulative learning of not being free and not trying to be free that dominates existing literature. Nevertheless, we argue that oppressed people can create a collective ethical conduct that can trigger possibilities of mobilization in situations of massive oppression. Recent developments on business ethics seem to offer similar possibilities (Rhodes, 2016; Weiskopf and Willmott, 2013), highlighting the potential to mobilize and construct collective projects through a practice of cooperation allowing the oppressed to collaborate in mounting an ethically significant ‘challenge to the dominant apparatus of power’ (Munro, 2014: 1129). Such ethical position does not necessarily presuppose a pre-existing collective moral orientation; rather, it is created through the situation of duress that is always historically and culturally specific. In that perspective, the individual is a ‘historical person’ engaged with and living in the concrete world. She or he lives and experiences a world of things. Such position requires ‘face-to-face’ proximity among the members of the group that permits, in the collapse of all hope, the emergence of what Jan Patočka (1996) named a ‘solidarity of the shaken’. Following Merleau-Ponty (1964), this view conceives of resistance as cooperation in the construction of a concrete world, where our freedom rests upon the freedom of others (p. 68).

Thus, ethics is located in a collective practice that is produced by individuals whose proximity with the ‘other’ – oppressed like them – compels a sense of obligation and urgency: a moral imperative (Bauman, 2008; Weiskopf and Willmott, 2013) by which they decide ‘what beliefs to hold and what actions to perform for reasons of their own’ (Bevir, 1999: 358). In that perspective, ethics is a situational and processual phenomenon depending on the possibilities of communal achievement when previously sedimented and embodied beliefs, practices and identifications become unsettled, reactivated and rearticulated. A collective ethical subject may then be constructed as oppressed people seek creative solutions allowing relations with others (Bernauer and Mahon, 1994).

This article argues that the shaping of a collective project of survival entails the production of mutual respect and recognition among people, based on their common experience of oppression, despite the inability to calculate the consequences of their actions. People must share the ingredients comprising the social fabric of these experiences in order to generate collective ethics and defy the imposed identities, status and labels that enable power holders to separate them from each other and strip them of their humanity.

Organizing survival in the Warsaw Ghetto

The example of the Warsaw Ghetto illustrates this complete fabric of ethics of resistance, showing how oppressed people can become ethical subjects and resisters. We strive to illuminate how numerous inhabitants reflect on their own values through their present situation to reject the values of the oppressor and thus conceive collective projects of survival. Research on powerlessness reviewed above has described how fear and the internalization of a culture of silence paralyze people, making resistance highly unlikely.

The level of oppression attained in the Holocaust, which was gradually mounting and horrifying, was possible through an immense process of dehumanization. Jews lives were made tougher in increments, creating a confusion that made resistance virtually impossible (Browning, 1985; Cesarini, 1994; Gutman, 1982, 1994; Hilberg, 1992). Accordingly, important and controversial accounts of the Holocaust indicate that the reaction pattern of the Jews was characterized by almost complete lack of resistance (Arendt, 1973; Hilberg, 1985). Such apparent inertia tortured even some actors who were to play a very active role in the underlife of the ghetto. In a short note entitled ‘WHY?’, written on 15 October 1942, Ringelblum expressed his pain:

Why was there no resistance when they deported three hundred thousand Jews from Warsaw? Why did the Jews let themselves be taken like sheep to the slaughter? Why did the enemy have such an easy and smooth task? Why did the executioners not suffer even a single death? Why could fifty SS men (some say even fewer), with the help of a detachment of two hundred Ukrainians and Latvians, carry this out without difficulties? (quoted in Kassow, 2007: 351)

The persecution of the Jews started with the labelling of the category, followed by the creation of devices signalling those belonging to the category, then gathering and confining the targeted category into ghettos, and finally culminated in their transportation to work and death camps. Of this entire complex – albeit surprisingly rather quick – process (Bauman, 1989), we shall focus on the ghettoization, understood as the creation of new social spaces and structures that fully regulated the possession and distribution of goods, privilege, prestige, and ultimately life itself through different practices and regulations. The ghettos were a fundamental step in the process of increasing oppression and terror, marked by the annihilation of millions of people. At the same time, a focus on the underlife of the ghetto illustrates how different kinds of collective resistance were possible. First, however, we will introduce the process of the ghettoization and what it meant to the hundreds of thousands of human beings there confined and condemned to misery and starvation. Thereafter, we will specifically focus on the underlife of the ghetto until the first mass deportation that began on 22 July 1942.

The Warsaw Ghetto

The Germans set up hundreds of ghettos in occupied Eastern Europe, no two alike, ranging from tiny ghettos of a few thousand Jews, to the enormous Warsaw Ghetto. The ghettos in Poland were neither normal communities nor concentration camps. Some were ‘open’, meaning that people could leave the premises during set hours. They differed in their internal regime and economic functions, in the behaviour and composition of the governing Jewish Council (named Judenrat), in their social structure and the supply of food and other vital resources.

All ghettos experienced terrible suffering: hunger, disease, death. However, few suffered more than Warsaw’s. Before the Second World War, Warsaw was the largest Jewish centre in Europe and one of the most important Jewish cultural centres in the world (Paulsson, 2002). After the war commenced, Jews were quickly transported to the ghetto, and a total of 490,000 lived there at some point during its 30-month existence. Different reasons were used by the Nazis to justify the closing of the ghetto, ranging from economic factors to health-related concerns such as avoiding the spread of typhus. Pronounced social differences existed among the ghetto’s population, ranging from those whose pre-war homes and businesses were on the space occupied by the ghetto to the tens of thousands of refugees who arrived in different waves, lacking any social support or money. The later were clearly confronting the worst situation, and often the first to collapse and die.

The Warsaw Ghetto’s 30-month life span can be divided into four distinct periods. The first one is the closing of the ghetto. On 12 October 1940, the Germans informed the Jews that they had 2 weeks to move into a tiny and crowded area (1.5 square miles, occupying about 2.4% of the city), which included some of Warsaw’s poorest neighbourhoods. The deadline for final resettlement was 15 November. The ghetto was encircled by a wall two and a half metres high, which was topped by a barbed wire.

The second and most critical period of the ghetto’s life spans from 16 November 1940 – when Jews learned that the ghetto would be ‘closed’ and free access to the Aryan side was forbidden – until 21 July 1942. The Jews were sealed and cut off. To ensure the efficient control over the ghetto, the Nazis established a Judenrat (Jewish Council), headed by Adam Czerniakow, a controversial figure who was caught between German threats and Jewish anger. Faced with a ‘Sysyphean effort’ and ‘(reaching) a point of unending despair and helplessness, which lead him to prefer death to participation in what he considered criminal acts’ (Gutman, 1982: 57), he committed suicide the day after the Great Deportation began. The Judenrat oversaw a vast number of activities such as the Jewish police, health services, sanitation, and mail delivery. It quickly became apparent that members of the Judenrat and, particularly, of the Jewish police found ample opportunities for patronage, favouritism, personal gain and abuse of authority as outright corruption mounted. The Judenrat made rather hopeless attempts to alleviate the suffering and reduce the mortality. Simultaneously, however, they responded to German demands with quasi-automatic compliance. In Hilberg’s (1985) words, the organization ‘both saved and destroyed its people, saving some Jews and destroying others, saving the Jews at one moment and destroying them in the next’ (p. 76).

The third period was the liquidation of the ghetto, which began on 22 July 1942 with the Grossaktion or Great Deportation, when some 265,000 Jews were transported to the Treblinka death camp and killed. A second Aktion took place from 18 to 22 January 1943.

The fourth and final period comprises the last phase of the ghetto evacuation and destruction, as well as the Ghetto Uprising and its aftermath from April to May 1943. Such uprising is considered the single most significant act of Jewish armed resistance to the Nazis and an act of great moral, symbolic, and political importance (Gutman, 1982, 1994; Hilberg, 1985; Paulsson, 2002). In the words of Hilberg (1985: 199), ‘In Jewish history the battle is literally a revolution’.

Existing accounts, diaries and testimonies describe a terrible struggle for survival that the Jews were slowly losing. Inexorably and ominously, conditions worsened. Jews were fighting not only for physical survival but also for dignity and to gain a foothold in conditions of growing chaos where the battle was increasingly challenging. They report how walking in the streets posed ‘unending moral problems’ (Kassow, 2007: 251), with dead bodies covered with newspapers, filth, petty theft, beggars everywhere, and social disintegration. During the second period of the ghetto’s existence, the situation quickly deteriorated. By the summer of 1942, a total of about 100,000 inmates had died of ‘natural causes’. For most of the ghetto inhabitants ‘each day was a battle for a crust of bread’ (Gutman, 1994: 88). The battle was lost by too many:

Every month, thousands lost their hope and strength in the struggle to survive. In appearance, they resembled human skeletons, with bones protruding in their gray and sunken faces. Spiritually, they were dead; their eyes had lost all expression or contact with reality. They were the living dead, indifferent to everything and succumbing to their fate. (…) Passersby turned away at the sight of these lost Jews because they could not do nothing to help them. (Gutman, 1994: 88)

Probably one of the most painful aspects of the ghetto life was the agony of the Jewish child. The numbers of children were staggering. Many of them were orphans, as their parents had died of hunger. In August 1941, Ringelblum wrote of a terrible scene describing the situation that many children faced and how adults felt:

In the silence of the screams of a hungry beggar child produce a shattering effect, and no matter how callous you have become, in the end you will throw down a piece of bread. If you don’t you won’t be able to sit quietly. … it often happens that begging children die at night on the sidewalk. I just heard about a terrible scene on Muranow 24, where a six-year old boy beggar lay dying all night, unable even to crawl to eat a piece of bread that someone had thrown to him from the balcony. (quoted in Kassow, 2007: 260)

German authorities had given clear orders to kill anyone who dared to venture outside the boundaries of the ghetto. The Jews were terrified, and resistance became unthinkable. As Abraham Lewin wrote in his diary on 16 May 1942, life at the ghetto was characterized by ‘an unremitting insecurity, a never-ending fear’. He added that ‘the most destructive aspect for our nervous systems and our health was to live … in a continual wavering between life and death – a state where every passing minute brought with it the danger that our hearts would literally burst with fear and dread’ (quoted in Kassow, 2007: 171). At the same time, all Jews knew that in order to survive they had to defy German laws and edits. The official rations, which they had to pay for, could not sustain life. Therefore, the ghetto quickly developed a massive underground economy with smuggling as its lifeblood. According to Czerniakow, more than 80% of all the food consumed in the Warsaw Ghetto was obtained by smuggling through illegal channels (Cesarini, 1994). The means of physically crossing the ghetto wall to get food (and many other things) were as numerous as human ingenuity could devise, ranging from the use of trams that crossed the ghetto, garbage collectors, ‘hideouts’ (known as ‘mety’) where the ghetto boundary was formed by internal walls in adjacent buildings. The riskiest smuggling ventures by far were those conducted by poor, hungry children who made their way in and out of the ghetto, climbing over, under, and through the wall – all too often being killed mercilessly by the Police (Paulsson, 2002; Hilberg, 1992).

Death by hunger in the ghetto was only the culmination of a long, slow road, also paved by the typhus epidemic (the major cause of mass deaths), the cold and frost, and ‘suffocating crowdness and melancholy’ (Gutman, 1994: 89).

The underlife of the ghettos until the First Deportation

Every day, ghetto residents struggled for survival in a context where death was pervasive. Yet, in the midst of such horror, a real political, economic, cultural and social life emerged. Alongside the formal structure of the ghetto, in which the Judenrat played a central, controversial and desperate role as prescribed by the Germans, an informal structure emerged with the intended objective of building a bearable life within the walls of the ghetto. To quote from an interview with ghetto women found in the Oyneg Shabes archives (a fantastic collective endeavour we shall reference below), ‘In the tragic and destructive chaos of our present-day life we can nonetheless observe flashes of creative activity, the low development and birth of forces that are building a base for the future’ (Kassow, 2007: 13). By focusing on such activities, we can understand how thousands of Jews helped their neighbours while struggling to survive as individuals and a community.

Taking advantage of the Nazis’ ignorance or indifference to a ghetto’s underlife, the Jews undertook a whole range of collective clandestine activities. Many such activities emerged as an alternative to the Judenrat, which was severely criticized in the ghetto for acquiring capital through indirect taxation. The mechanism for selecting conscripts for the forced-labour camps aroused deep bitterness, as the poor and vulnerable were always taken. Different sorts of institutional structures were devised to organize and conduct the social and cultural activities that developed in the ghetto. Most of them were parallel structures: Alongside the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (known as the JDC), Central Organization for the Protection of Children and Orphans (CENTOS), and Jewish Social Self-Help (ZSS) – which were tolerated by the Nazis – many others developed that were only quasi-legal or altogether illegal. In fact, the former were used as a cover for the parallel, underground activities, whose main objectives included not only the fight against hunger but also the preservation of individual and communal identities and the nourishment of spiritual needs and interests.

A key piece in the underground institutional arrangements was the so-called house committees, which operated under the aegis of the Social Self-Help organization. In April 1940, there were 778. Eventually the number reached 1518, covering more than 2000 houses in the ghetto (Paulsson, 2002). The house committees, called by some ‘a consolation in the darkness’, were the vital microcosms of ghetto society (Gutman, 1994) that permitted people to join together in a disciplined and purposeful effort. With curfews confining ghetto inhabitants to their apartments for many long evening hours, the committees would watch over the tenants and organize complex tasks such as the creation of kindergartens, soup kitchens, shelter, some cultural events, and the collection of money for poorer families. The members of the committees were often elected, and altogether they created a semblance of public space. Children and adults in the apartments were given different sorts of courtyard duties. Peretz Opoczynski, a journalist, writer and educator who worked as a mailman in the ghetto, put it this way: ‘Ordinary Jews construed the house committees as a symbol of political freedom, a reminder that they could still help themselves and function as a concerned community’ (quoted in Kassow, 2007: 127). For that to work, they assigned themselves clear and strict rules of procedure. Michael Mazor, a survivor of the ghetto, wrote that at the Central Commission of the house committees,

Meetings took place regularly every Tuesday at five o’clock in the afternoon; members prevented from coming had to supply an explanation. In general there were no absentees. Such details were perhaps trivial, but in the period of the Ghetto, when one had the impression that the world had gone mad and was rushing toward a precipice, such rules preserved the stability of moral values, and gave us the feeling that our activity was not in the vain. (quoted in Kassow, 2007: 429)

Most of the ghetto’s resources in the hands of the official organizations (including the Judenrat) were devoted to coping with the widespread hunger. In that struggle, soup kitchens played a fundamental role. In April 1940, some 70 soup kitchens were in operation in the ghetto, although the number quickly decreased due to the increasing scarcity of resources. While no one who depended only on the soup kitchen could have survived, they offered a critical supplement for those with other sources of food. Still, the soup kitchens were particularly important for the role they played in the underlife of the ghetto. It was often in their premises where clandestine classes were held, and political parties assembled illegally and operated their underground press. Beyond nurturing exhausted bodies, such activities were meant as a way to preserve the spiritual world and stay afloat in the face of a collapsing world. Thus, the September issue of Yugnt-Shtime (The Voice of the Youth), published by the Bundt’s youth division, warned that

Our rulers are mistaken in thinking that a draconian prohibition, an official stamp, can nullify cultural values that have been acquired over tens and hundreds of years … We, the working youth of the people, must assume the task of initiating and directing the cultural and educational endeavor among children and youth … otherwise our cultural movement among the youth is in danger of spiritual decline. (Paulsson, 2002: 142)

Thus, against explicit restrictions, after the last Jewish school was closed on 4 December 1939, a clandestine and illegal education system developed in the ghetto, utilizing children’s soup kitchens for a few hours a day. As an illustration, among their objectives, a programme developed by three of the house committees mentioned the hope to develop children’s ‘sense for hygiene and beauty’, ‘strengthen the spiritual lives of the children’, and provide them with opportunities ‘to experience normal emotions, particularly joy, as often as possible’ (Rudavsky, 1987: 47). In addition, various theatre and puppet shows, supervised games, dancing parties, libraries, and programmes commemorating Jewish holidays and important events in Jewish history were organized (Gutman, 1982, 1994; Kassow, 2007; Sterling, 2005). Although desperate, since most of these children would die, a fundamental effort of the ghetto’s underground battle struggled to save them from starvation, despair, and emotional and psychological collapse. In addition, informal lectures on Jewish and Yiddish studies were organized for adults ‘to imbue the listeners with hope for the future and pride in their Jewish identity’ (Rudavsky, 1987: 52).

The soup kitchens were also the centre of the underground press. Published in Yiddish, Polish and Hebrew, this activity was central to the youth movements in the ghetto. When the soup kitchen closed for the night and the classes were over, the hidden typewriters and outdated hectographs and duplicating machines were put to work. Initially intended specifically for youth, the many newspapers quickly began addressing issues of interest to the wider population including daily life in the ghetto, complaints about the Judenrat and Jewish police corruption, escalating mortality, abuses in the labour camps, street humour, or ghetto folklore. In Warsaw, the first newspapers appeared in the early months of 1940 and continued through the great deportation of 22 July 1942. In fact, their importance grew as ghetto conditions worsened. The length and frequency of each publication varied. They were often printed on coarse, bulky paper and duplicated up to 500 copies. Yet, as noted by Gutman (1982) – an inhabitant of the ghetto and survival of the uprising – existing figures do not reflect the true scope (and the difficulties) of distribution of the underground press:

As a rule, a paper passed from hand to hand down a chain of readers, and we can assume that each copy reached twenty people or more. … Moreover, the contents of the papers – especially political items and news from the fronts – were then passed on by word of mouth and spread throughout the entire ghetto. At a later date, duplicated news summaries were instituted in addition to the regular periodical press. Some of the youth movements distributed these summaries to a standard list of people in the ghetto. At a set hour a pair of youngsters would turn up at an appointed address, turn the summary over to the resident, wait until he had finished reading it, and then go on to the next address. (p. 146)

A final example of the underlife and collective resistance at the Warsaw Ghetto is the largest secret archive in Nazi-occupied Poland, known by the code name ‘Oyneg Shabes archives’, whose main objective was to ensure that the victims of the destruction of Warsaw’s Jewry ‘would be remembered for who they were, not just how they died’ (Kassow, 2007: 136). It was the brainchild of historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who wrote that it was ‘imperative that future historians receive material on the past written with precision’ (Gutman, 1982: 144). To that end, a large group of people contributed essays and reports commissioned by the archive. These documents became ‘an unsurpassable tool’ (Gutman, 1982: 144, see also Kassow, 2007) for understanding the internal life of the ghetto as well as the later armed struggle and uprising. The Oyneg Shabes archives was a collective enterprise, a tightly knit collective, and a secret but vital component of the larger illicit underground community that had developed out of the house committees and the Self-Help organization. As such, it played a fundamental role as collective motivator and proposer of ideas in an extremely difficult and dangerous context. In the words of Kassow (2007: 217),

Secrecy was paramount. The staff constantly worried that the slightest mistake, the smallest misjudgement could destroy the entire project. Prospective recruits were carefully scrutinized. The entire staff knew that they had to risk their lives to collect information. Still, despite the dangers, the Oyneg Shabes was a godsend for many … it provided a moral lifeline, an occupation, and a reason to go on living. Members felt needed and part of a community. Yet somehow, no matter how bad things became, the collective enterprise of the Oyneg Shabes went on, flexible, inventive, and determined to make sure that nothing escaped its attention.

These various collective endeavours in the midst of a corrosive and terrifying reality represent, we argue, major and significant efforts to combat despair, prove to themselves and others that they were still human beings, and express their willingness to survive. We believe that they represent privileged instances that illustrate how ethical demands can drive people to stop acquiescing and act: that is, to elaborate the conditions of an acceptable everyday life.

Discussion

This article opened with the following question: How do people concretely survive in situations of massive oppression? A major insight derived from the literature on powerlessness and oppression is that many people are complicit with the powers that be, and such complicity explains that inertial structures of oppression continue to ensure that very few among us can make decisions that affect everyone (Gaventa, 1980). The shift of resistance studies to a focus on meanings, identity work, and post-recognition politics seems to confirm that political actions may be reduced to ‘silent farts’, fake quiescence, and an inoffensive infra-political underlife (Mumby et al., 2017). Consequently, we have tried to theorize a situation in which oppressed people transcend this complicity and subtle forms of silent subversions while still maintaining the advantages of secrecy (Courpasson and Younes, 2018) to act against the dominant order that shapes their everyday life. We have suggested that understanding this process, requires a perspective that integrates resistance and ethics, allowing us to see what practice of each necessarily involves the other and how this dialectic explains the possibility of resisting under severe conditions of oppression. This dialectic is epitomized in this article by the notion of collective ethics of resistance.

Our perspective recognizes the social production of resistance as necessarily involving an ethical demand. Building on Schaffer (2004), we show that resistance requires a form of ethics that will motivate the powerless and push them to formulate a collective project of survival. Building on Merleau-Ponty (1962), we offer an understanding of a lived practice of resistance based on the appropriation of meaningful relationships that oppressed people can develop and maintain with others in a similar socio-historical situation. The case of the Warsaw Ghetto portrays the ethicality of resistance in the collective (re)creation and maintenance of social relations that permit the powerless to choose how to continue living their life within the walls of the ghetto, despite being constrained by the constant violent presence of the Nazis. By their everyday doings, the inhabitants of the ghetto show that an ethical subject is always a political subject (McMurray et al., 2011).

Indeed, according to Merleau Ponty (1962: 437), ‘freedom is doing’. Resisting therefore means to strive to create a social world through the very act of choosing to generate a collective project, because ‘As soon as we begin to live (…) we are what we do to others’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1969: 109). Consequently, there is no freedom without the actualization in a given oppressed group of the necessity to act and reject inert ethics. There is no ethics that manifests itself without concrete embodied activities (Schaffer, 2004: 76). This perspective makes resistance against an oppressive order appear to be the only ethical question because the awareness that we share an oppressed position with others entails a process of mutual recognition that is already a form of resistance (Schaffer, 2004: 77). Resistance begins when people come to realize how their freedom is suppressed. Then, in contact with others, they can create a ‘collective set of meanings through the realization of their similar structural position’ (Schaffer, 2004: 78). Fundamentally, this indicates that in situations of powerlessness it is in the face of the ‘other’ – who is regarded as similarly oppressed – that actors immediately live an ethical demand (to some extent at least). Ethics, as we see, is a praxis of working for and with others ‘in an attempt to develop actual practical freedom’ (Schaffer, 2004: 88). Thus, the perception that resistance is the only option turns into its actualization. That is, the group can posit concrete goals based on that intimate, profound perception of injustice, thus developing initiatives that transform life into something acceptable. Indeed, freedom is never an end in itself; rather, ‘it is processual, leading to new manifestations of freedom’ (Schaffer, 2004: 87) and – as the story of the ghetto suggests – to everyday doings that matter for people.

Put differently, the deeds of the ghetto’s inhabitants demonstrate a practical work of ethics accomplished through resistance, oriented to freedom-seeking initiatives of individuals embedded in powerless situations. It is a practical work for and with other individuals aimed to develop practical freedom, even in the acute consciousness that it is accomplished for an uncertain future. In the words of Merleau Ponty (1969: xxiv–xv), ‘It is the essence of liberty to exist only in the practice of liberty, in the inevitably imperfect movement which joins us to others, to the things of the world, to our jobs, mixed with the hazard of our situation’. The concrete, material dimension of ethical resistance is affirmed in this sentence, showing that ethics cannot be abstract or rule-bound, but must be oriented to the particular situation in which people exist. Such concrete focus allows people to discern the best response in each situation. Ethics is most often understood as an already existing moral code that represents the dominant social order, whether philosophically codified or merely practised in everyday life, thereby preventing people from ‘freely acting in the world’ (Schaffer, 2004: 96). We end up merely repeating the past praxis of existing oppressive structures. Instead, connecting ethics and resistance supposes to analyze how powerless groups can contradict the normative nature of a given social order in favour of an uncertain and unknowable future in which ‘humanity can take hold’ (Schaffer, 2004: 97). Resistance is therefore an ethical good, a necessary tool in the process of acting ethically.

Contribution to theory of ethics

While considerable research has been devoted to resistance, the role played by ethics in the development of resisting processes has largely been left implicit (Parker, 2003; Pullen and Rhodes, 2013). Organization studies usually regard ethics and politics as distinct domains (Parker, 2003), or view ethics as a restraint on political action because the latter (including resisting acts) is subject to moral judgement (Cavanagh et al., 1981). This study takes a different view; rather than regard ethics as a restraint on any form of power and resistance, we acknowledge that resistance is the political machinery ‘through which the ethical demand can be responded to’ (McMurray et al., 2011: 540; Schaffer, 2004). In this sense, resistance is how ethics become actualized in practice. This article contributes to a vision of resistance and ethics as interconnected in concrete situations of oppression, therefore understanding ethics as emerging from resistance in the face of oppression. The organization of survival in the Warsaw Ghetto affords interesting insight into the simultaneous practice of ethics and resistance, as certain subgroups decided to build a collective project aimed at maintaining a liveable life. The transformation of an ethical demand (taking action or remaining inert while facing domination) into resistance is accomplished through an everyday work of organizing, permitted by what Merleau-Ponty (1962: 444) calls the synchronization with the life of others. This, in turn, further motivates ghetto inhabitants to become ethical and political subjects (McMurray et al., 2011: 555), rather than silence their claim and accept their role as powerless people (Gaventa, 1980), or even choose escape and exit (Fleming, 2016) – although certainly did so when it was still possible. This project helps people to live acceptable lives by organizing such everyday activities as eating, talking, and enjoying certain moments without directly challenging authorities. McMurray et al. (2011: 556) argue that ‘It is the anxious space on the road between ethics and politics that provides the empirical ground in which ethics can be situated in practice’.

We contend in turn that this relation between ethics and resistance/politics (Schaffer, 2004) helps depict the concrete aspects of the ethicality of resistance, or in the words of Popke (2003: 305), ‘make decisions, render judgments, and negotiate alternatives in relation to multiple conflicting others’. The ethical subject is the one ‘who takes action in response to the call of ethical demand’ (McMurray et al., 2011: 557). It is not freedom that permits people to choose to act ethically, but rather a concrete practice of ethics triggered by a situation of oppression (Clegg et al., 2007). Critchley (2008) argues that it is the ethical experience that forms the decision to act politically in response to oppression, as such response involves an ethical demand. Ethical experiences involve political ones, as they oblige individuals and groups to prioritize their values. Ethicality derives from the response to oppression, which is naturally a responsibility to the other, ‘a care for the other, and a love for the other’ (McMurray et al., 2011: 545).

Ethical resistance is therefore the transformation of inert structures of oppression into occasions of doing something that matters for people we care about (Schaffer, 2004). There is nothing powerless people can do about the oppressive structure per se; however, they can decide to challenge the implicit social norms of apathy and the cumulative effects of their experience of impotence by working on the concrete micro-activities aimed at addressing issues that matter such as culture, food, and play. There is no ostensible political intent in those activities (Mumby et al., 2017), except to the extent that we see resistance as the capacity to organize practices that push people to create their own channels of expression to show their concerns with matters that prevent them from living. This view confirms the importance of studying hidden collective resistance (Mumby et al., 2017) – enactments of collective projects often viewed as non-disruptive by authorities, therefore rarely opposed by the powerful. However, as shown by Courpasson (2017), these quiescent forces can serve as a precursor to overt collective confrontation. Maybe the story of the Warsaw Ghetto illustrates this point: Overt armed rebellions occurring in 1942 may well have resulted from the organizing capacities some inhabitants developed for survival. Far from the mere safety valve or apolitical emancipatory projects discussed by Fleming (2013), or resistance about meanings (Mumby et al., 2017), we enter the terrain of life and death, where the relation between ethics and resistance is crucial to envisage that the powerless can win over the powerful. That being said, generating an avalanche from tiny snowflakes (Scott, 1990) was never the intention of the Warsaw inhabitants. Their goal was to render tomorrow possible through future expectations, such as seeing children smile again and offering them the possibility to learn about their customs and traditions, or permitting inhabitants to (fragmentally) understand the otherwise indecipherable world around them. There was no expectation of changing the oppressive structure of their existence. However, because freedom is a process and never an end in itself, this just might be learned over time (Schaffer, 2004).

This permits ethical theorizing to be broadened in scope, into the context of engagement between and among individuals that is required to conduct concrete anti-oppressive projects (Martí and Fernandez, 2013; Pullen and Rhodes, 2013). Thereby, we further contribute to shifting the focus away from principles and towards the situations people confront in their everyday lives. Ethics are located in the places where individual subjects constrained by oppression decide ‘what beliefs to hold and what actions to perform for reasons of their own’ (Bevir, 1999: 358). Situating ethics in this domain does not naively presuppose the capacity of groups to resist situations of oppression. As the previous discussion should have clarified, there are ample reasons why people would decide to ignore or disregard such ‘moral imperative’ and collectively ‘work against forms of coercion, inequality, and discrimination that organizations so frequently and easily reproduce’ (Pullen and Rhodes, 2013: 12). Quite to the contrary, this view of ethics portrays the practice of collective ethics as a highly situational phenomenon depending on potential for communal achievement, however limited. The case of the Warsaw Ghetto is one such example.

Contribution to theory of resistance

Studies of resistance to date have not explicitly considered the concept as ethically charged (Ball, 2005; Pullen and Rhodes, 2014). When the literature addresses issues of power and freedom, it does so by restricting ethics to a ‘self-focused approach that does not adequately consider the ethical relations with others’ (Critchley, 2008; Pullen and Rhodes, 2013: 790). Resistance to oppression shows a different picture: resistance has been studied through lenses of subjectivity and discontentment (Fleming and Sewell, 2002), discourses (Fleming and Spicer, 2003), micro-politics of identities (Thomas and Davies, 2005) or the production of specific objects (Courpasson et al., 2012). But it does not account for a praxis that derives from a necessary ethical engagement in a political context shaped by external structures of oppression and the use of force. This article examines both ethics and resistance as intertwined in concrete anti-oppressive actions. In short, we argue that ethics are especially meaningful in practical situations of resistance, emerging as both a result and a condition of credible collective projects that are likely to modify the oppressive order, if only briefly. The issue of oppression has thus far laid outside of the radar of organizational ethics (Pullen and Rhodes, 2014), despite its centrality in the workplace through issues of discrimination, class or race. We have argued that the translation of ethical engagement into political resistance is made by practical everyday action against oppressive forces. This can help explain how organizational politics can still be constructed through struggles informed and nurtured by ethical practices. This has two major consequences for the study of ethical resistance.

First, we need to acknowledge the existence of an ethical solidarity because individuals experience themselves as part of the collective. That is, they act freely in concert with others yet remain aware of their individual capacity to contribute to the group’s project (Merleau-Ponty, 1969; Schaffer, 2004). This is particularly true in situations where all hope seems to have collapsed and only a community or ‘solidarity of the shaken’ (Patočka, 1996) can bring inner strength to resist. The consequence of ethical resistance is a collective responsibility that further binds resisters to one another and strengthens the cooperation. Indeed, actions against oppressive structures can turn against one’s intentions because the resisting project is potentially the cause of unintended effects such as the use of deadly violence. The full ramifications and consequences of ethical resistance are incalculable to be sure – particularly in a situation of all-or-nothing. Therefore, strong reciprocal obligations characterize ethical resistance, as it can lead to unethical acts. Following Sartre, Schaffer (2004: 257) observes that ‘… even in the ethical act, we are not pure; we have committed ourselves to a sequence of events that, once started, are no longer under our control but for which we are wholly responsible. We can in fact never be ethically pure’. The connection between ethics and resistance also derives from this uncontrollable process: resisting ethically embeds people within solutions that may be unforeseen and undesired, while failing to resist embeds us within the perpetuation of an unethical situation (Aronson, 2004).

Second, we need to recognize that ethical resistance begins with an act of consent. It supposes to allow all the people of a given group the ability to decide not to resist. As stated above, to be defined as such, an ethical act must allow people the option to respond negatively to or disregard the ethical demand imposed. This is an expression of agency and concrete freedom aligned with the definition of ethics as a practice of freedom. Simultaneously, a resisting ethic requires the individual’s acceptance to sacrifice personal safety for the ‘infinite unity of our mutual needs’ (Sartre, 1963: 27 quoted in Schaffer, 2004: 269) because, according to Merleau-Ponty (1969: 109), ‘As soon as we begin to live (…) we are what we do to others’.

Concluding remarks

This study has elaborated on how, in situations of mass oppression, the dominated population is stripped of all autonomy and deprived of the full human experience. We first tried to broadly sketch how different scholarly traditions have analyzed the concept of compliance, particularly in situations where it seems impossible to act as ‘active ethical subjects’ (Ibarra-Colado et al., 2006). Building on the existing literature on resistance and ethics, we portray an extreme example of everyday resistance to illustrate how certain actors manage to collectively challenge the implicit social norms leading to impotence and apathy. Against perspectives on powerlessness, the notion of collective ethics of resistance permits more positive discourse on how experiences of extreme duress can nevertheless permit individuals to develop active ethical practices based on proximity and a sense of emergency due to immediate life-threatening circumstances. This is not a naïve statement, but a way to recognize that being ethical comes at a high cost. This article also underscores the importance of further attention to situations of extreme duress, not only to hear marginal and subordinate voices but also to continue to analyze the intense engagement of individuals in shaping their lives in the face of oppression.

This study has implications for understanding how life is experienced in current liquid workplaces (Bauman, 1989). First, it signals that collective politics is not an obsolete notion, as long as it is shaped upon strong ethical foundations by which people decide to act together for the betterment of the community. It helps consider a third option between post-recognition and recognition politics (Courpasson, 2016) – an ethics of resistance that is preoccupied by efficiency rather than recognition. Second, it suggests that escape, exit, exodus or any other form of silent refusal is not the end of the (political) story in the workplace: Collective projects could well be possible, as long as the choice of the project is strongly established on our intention to defend ‘certain values in the world, and through our existence’ (Schaffer, 2004: 50).