This paper addresses the constitutive dilemma of radical political movements: how to dismantle coercive institutions like the state and capital without reproducing the logic of domination through the means of dismantlement. It proposes a solution through the framework of the Negative Utilitarianism of Separateness (NUS), which assigns lexical priority to preventing Smax—suffering that destroys the agential architecture necessary for meaningful choice. The paper develops three interconnected arguments. First, it diagnoses state and capital as structural Smax-generators. They systematically produce conditions where the "Price of Refusal"—the cost of non-compliance—crosses the "Agency Functioning Threshold" (AFT), converting formally voluntary relations into structurally coerced ones. This diagnosis is distinguished from republican theories of domination (e.g., Pettit) by the NUS's grounding in the separateness of persons and its imposition of absolute, lexical constraints. Second, it derives a crucial operational distinction between Interdictive Force and punitive violence. Force is legitimate only when it interrupts an ongoing Smax-producing process (causal interdiction), and impermissible when it inflicts harm as retribution. This distinction, engaging with the literature on political violence (Coady, Frowe, Kutz), generates a "property/body asymmetry" that can justify material sabotage under stringent conditions, while absolutely prohibiting the "founding murder" logic where suffering is treated as a necessary means. Third, the paper translates the NUS framework into institutional design criteria for autonomous federated zones (AFZs). To prevent the internal reproduction of "Structural Command" and informal micropower—the "tyranny of structurelessness" (Freeman)—it prescribes mechanisms like binding mandates, obligatory rotation, and a "vulnerability metric" that prioritizes the pace of the most vulnerable. The paper concludes by proposing a theory of radical practice as the "armed peace of solidarity": a normative stopping rule against institutionalized pain-production, fierce in interdiction and human in victory, that builds the material conditions for refusal here and now.
Tommaso Biagi (Sun,) studied this question.