On Resistance: A Manifesto

by Curtis White

A hands-on, don't-lose-hope guide to resisting the oppressive autocracy and impoverished spirit of contemporary America

From a veteran writer and activist comes a concise yet potent guide to standing up to the myriad tyrannies of our current political landscape. We live in a time where independent thinking, love of literature and ideas, and passion for human expression are all under attack from a ruthless and uncaring government and a culture that values only immediate gratification and digital flash.

In On Resistance, Curtis White offers spiritual hope and intellectual fortification for those in despair about the bankruptcy of American life. Drawing on a range of books, films, essays, and artworks, White shows how our rich collective literary heritage gives us mental ammunition for our fight against the forces that would reduce us all to commodities and consumers. In doing so, he has penned a new classic in the noble history of American polemics.

128 pages, Paperback

Published August 11, 2026

Reviews

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

My spiritual antennae seemed to say, “Okay, pay attention. You might actually be alive now.”

2.5 heavily-asterixed stars (see below), rounded up...

I’m a Curtis White completeist fanboy and, while I will gladly linger over every word that issues forth from the maestro's pen, not even I will try to sell you this (very very slim) book at the rather extortionate price which Melville House is asking (and which I paid).

My advice: read the following two books instead, where CW’s impassioned notions here are fully hashed out and to much greater persuasive effect...

(Spirit of Disobedience)
(Living in a World That Can't Be Fixed: Reimagining Counterculture Today)

...then come back and read this slight manifesto after it is on the used market/the remainder pile.

And as CW himself would agree, it is pre-remaindered, by what passes for a contemporary ‘culture’, one in which books like this could (and should) never fit.

CW is speaking from the final act of a remarkable life-in-art about a world long gone...

once lived in a vital world whose only limit was no limit, “free frame of reference,” as the Haight Street Diggers thought. It was a world of beatniks, Buddhists, hippies, free-jazz poets, pacifists, wandering guitar soloists, postmodern fabulists, soulful anarchists, and collaborative maunderers. It was also a world of close readers, deconstructionists, and afficionados of the beautiful, all performing in the heady atmosphere of refusal, a general strike of the Imagination.

It was the rebirth of the romantics, bohemians, Poets with a capital P, and Oscar Wildean dandies. In the face of the work ethic, bohemians old and new had the “right to be lazy,” as Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue declared, or the right to “do your own thing,” as freak culture would later agree

In its place, it seems that, at best we can mimic the likes of Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday (and lament its passing) or Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (and play out a ‘terminal comedy’ via the ‘laughter out of dead bellies’—which mocks this new world of the predigested predeceased ←or is that the other way round?)

Rather, this being called On Resistance, after all, CW would have us...resist, by (1) ‘telling better stories’, stories that refuse to be constrained by/in those cages-with-golden-bars of the publicly funded arts, or the by-gone world of the university and pre-AI print culture—or by the iron fetters of the neoliberal market which has ruled over all of that since, oh, 1982?

Rather again, we must rebel, live outside all of that, not on some commune but in the crazy, useless art we choose to create even though it will no longer sell, art which which above all refuses ...

to create stories that liberate us from the stories of our masters. This is what William Blake called for when he wrote in Jerusalem (1804), “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” Or, even more assertively, William Carlos Williams in Kora in Hell (1920):

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

...and (2) thereby create, in spite of our current culture's dead-endedness or nostalgia, an entirely new culture:

Contrary to what the media would have us believe, culture is not merely the customs of a place, its language, religion, and cuisine. Nor is culture merely the movies, the music, the Internet of Things, nor the rest of capitalist life’s fabulously stippled frou-frous. These are very static ways of thinking about culture. Properly understood, culture is a process of becoming. As Sigmund Freud wrote, culture is the act of “replacing what is unconscious with what is conscious.” A cult is unconscious. It simply does what it has always done. It follows instructions. Culture, on the other hand, brings to awareness the damage—the repression, irrationality, violence, ugliness, injustice, and tragedy—imposed by the cult. In this sense, culture is enlightenment.
[...]
There is still reason to mourn if what is passing out of our culture is what Wallace Stevens called poetry’s “nobility.” For Stevens, this nobility consisted in, at a minimum, two things that help us to live our still human lives. First, the Noble understands that literature’s beauties are dependent upon, as Williams says, “change.” Stevens put it this way in “Sunday Morning”: “Death is the mother of beauty.” It is the skillful openness to the world’s transience that creates a clearing in which the beautiful can appear.

There is something, though, after all, that we can learn from the 1960s. That was lat when a moment of radical refusal was reborn. We can learn not from their works (which are now trapped in the amber of their moment/our nostalgia), but from their spirit

Contrary to the common assumption that the 1960s counterculture was all about hippies, communal living, and the art and music of psychedelia, it was in truth a vortex of energies. Allen Ginsberg was mistaken to limit the counterculture’s “tribes” to freaks and leftists. There were in fact many tribes all in the orbit of an historic Great Refusal. These tribes attempted to create a revolution in everyday life, the utopian project that anarchist Bernard Marszalek, in his book Jobs, Jive, and Joy, calls “radical hedonism.”

First and foremost, the counterculture was about taking refuge in what Ingmar Bergman called the “little world,” because, the broader world “is a den of thieves and night is falling…Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good.” (Fanny and Alexander) The spirit informing this “little world” was play, and, for the large part, the form that play took was art.

All of this play spawned movements (Gay/womens' rights, Environmentalism, Cultural Studies...) which may have ossified, ‘sold out’, merged with the dominant culture to become dead institutions, but we can take from their first energies, CW insists. Today's artists must

go about their business of re-energizing the idea that narrative art can still matter as social and, in its own way, spiritual antagonist.

Spiritual antagonist? Yes. Because when narrative art is not merely a confirmation of dominant ideology, when it is not just another domestic drama that does nothing more than confirm the world we already know, the work of art is an act of refusal. A refusal to live in a dead world, the boss’s world, money’s world. Art is the one place where life insists on living. And that is spiritual.
[...]
In On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder asks us to say no to rising fascism by preserving liberal democratic institutions. But he never imagines that there might be reasons to say no to those institutions, to our “managers of despair,” as well. He offers little understanding of the importance of a resistant culture, innately anarchic, opposing all that is anti-human. Resistant cultures seek to provide a place where we can become who we really are, a place where we are not mere functions of the world we happened to be born into, not diminished creatures whose being has been reduced to a marketable “skill set.”

Resistant cultures work through honesty, intelligence, and beauty. They ask of us what Buddha asked of his followers: listen, consider, and cultivate. Listen to what we have discovered; consider what you have heard; and if you like what you have heard and considered, if it speaks to you, then join with others in the [...] community, where you can cultivate a path that others in their turn may follow.

Sounds good to me, and it was good to hear it again from CW (and I did need to hear it again), but first-timers out there? Check out any of his other books first, I say, particularly the two I mentioned above.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always enjoy White's non-fiction, and this is no exception, even though it's less vigorous than some of his earlier polemical books. This book could have been maybe 40 pages longer and gone deeper into private philanthropy ("the blonde child of capitalism") as well as the end of the "liberal arts dream." More on practical ways to resist would also have been welcome. His sudden jokes are part of White's style and they stand out in the midst of the reporting of attacks on the arts and education for its own sake launched by, most obscenely, deans and presidents and managers of universities. "Jess Helm's death in 2008 was the closest he ever came to honesty" stands out as a great line.

What is positive about this book is that White is still fighting and taking a stand, and he remains unafraid to speak his mind. Works of art as acts of refusal rings true, however few we may encounter in these current times. He ends by advocating that people make themselves useless, not part of capitalism, if that's possible. Whatever one thinks of the success in influencing readers to do that, White's latest is entertaining and very cautiously optimistic in a dispiriting time. Recommended.

[Jordan McC · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great jumping off point to thinking critically about our own existence and experience in this changing world.

His humor comes off a lil pretentious but I enjoyed it so maybe I am too.

[Dante Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

the most hilarious mis-marketed book i’ve ever read. As a “manifesto” for resistance, this book doesn’t pass the smell test from its earliest pages. The book is a meager 105 pages and we’re starting our guide to political resistance with 20 pages on… why philanthropic foundations are hypocritical?

This book offers NO guidance whatsoever on the act of resistance. It’s laughable how, 2/3 of the way through, it randomly becomes an autobiography??? I can’t wait to chuck this book into a Goodwill pile.

Adding a star because it contains a single interesting factoid about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

[Susie Dumond · Rating 1 out of 5]

wow this guy is insufferable

[Nic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Look, I don’t love giving negative reviews. In fact, I only request books I think I’ll enjoy. I don’t always make the right choice, and this appears to have been one of those times. Curtis White seems extremely intelligent- he has the citations and quotes to prove it.

His manifesto has strong “old man shouts at cloud” vibes. It reads as a deeply fractured series of thoughts. He seems to have a bone to pick with Timothy Snyder, multiple times calling him out and criticizing him for simplifying what he refuses to explain in his writings. It’s an odd choice. “My generation had to disengage from television, but a life lived online is another level of insidious alienation and, worse yet, it’s all on the inside, eroding inner life, leaving nothing for the soul, nothing for soul-work, everything for addictive pleasure and profit.” Again, old man, clouds.

My main issue with slogging my way through this short book was the truly dizzying number of quotes, references to films/television/literature, and just myriad tidbits of information that take any burden of sharing one’s own thoughts and saying, “here’s what I think”. What he thinks is Keats said this, Rolling Stone magazine published that, this film has a scene where X Y Z happened… If every single page doesn’t have a reference to something else, it’s probably just because of the size of my font I used while reading.

About 70% of the way into the book, he decides to tell his personal story… or he starts to, and then he starts quoting heavily again which feels curiously impersonal. I got excited for a moment because he begins writing a memory and the language he uses to paint the picture is beautiful... then BAM! Another quote. I’m conflicted because I genuinely couldn’t tell what was the point of the book I just read. Maybe you must be much more capable of navigating endless references to other things, but I feel I missed the point.