What Is Factionalism?

Introduction

Factionalism broadly describes the occurrence of conflicts between varying groups (or factions) within a social movement (Ghaziani and Kretschmer 2018; King 2008; Kretschmer 2019, 2022; McCammon, Bergner, and Arch 2015). Factionalism is often thought to be a negative feature of social movements. When social movement groups are in persistent high-stakes conflict with one another, it becomes difficult for those same groups to work together to achieve collective movement goals. One common example of factionalism concerns social movement groups that are in conflict over matters of ideological purity; there are often conflicts between moderate and radical ideological factions within a social movement. Contemporary identity politics—which organizes political projects along the lines of racial, gender, and other social identities—has also been criticized as factional.

Descriptively, factionalism undermines solidarity (Scholz 2008, 2015; Shelby 2009; Sangiovanni 2015; A. H. Kolers 2012), social movements (A. Kolers 2016b; Moody-Adams 2022; Lebron 2023; Heydari Fard 2024), and bottom-up (or citizen-driven) social change (Zheng 2022a). High levels of factional conflict will clearly impede collective action. While there is a more elaborate empirical story to be told about the mechanisms of factionalism, this paper seeks to answer a normative question about factionalism. What is wrong with factionalism? Call this the normative question.

One straightforward answer to the normative question is as follows. Normatively, the action-undermining nature of factionalism matters insofar as we believe that some instances of solidarity, social movements, and social change are morally or politically just. Here is an argument. Suppose that successful feminist social movements will result in just social policies. Factionalism within feminist movements undermines the realization of just social policies. Factionalism within feminist movements is wrong because, and the extent to which, it prevents the realization of just social policies. Call this the teleological answer to the normative question. It takes the problem with factionalism to primarily consist in the instrumental fact that it frustrates just ends.

The goal of this paper is to give an additional (complementary) answer to the normative question. Factionalism is not only a threat to collective action, but it is a threat to democratic autonomy, the ability for members of a political community to jointly author social and political affairs (Lovett and Zuehl 2022; Wodak 2024). What it is to be a factional agent, I argue, is to be an agent oriented toward (what I call) anti-solidarity power. Call this the agential answer to the normative question. It does not rule out the teleological answer, but it offers a sense in which factionalism is intrinsically bad.

The paper is organized as follows. I start by describing a paradigm example of factionalism and explain how scholars in social movement studies think of factionalism (§2). I then describe four tendencies of factional groups: in-fighting, division (splits and schisms), partisanship, and polarization (§3). I briefly describe the teleological answer to the normative question (§4). I then argue that factionalism, in the pejorative sense, is best understood by my account of factional agency as anti-solidaric agency (§5).

Factionalism: Motivating Example and Initial Definition

There are many examples of factionalism, but I will focus on a single real-world example.

In 2012, the killing of Trayvon Martin sent a shock through America, one that marks the beginning of the contemporary black liberation movement. Martin was not the first young black man to be killed for being “suspicious,” but his death at the hands of the vigilante George Zimmerman became national news. After Zimmerman’s acquittal, # BlackLivesMatter was born on social media, with the political organization Black Lives Matter (BLM) being created at the same time. Other organizations, local and national, mobilized a series of protests and campaigns against racism and police brutality. In 2014, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, leading to a coalition known as Movement for Black Lives (M4BL).

The first gathering of M4BL, called the Movement for Black Lives Convening, was held in 2015 in Cleveland, Ohio. Many organizations were represented: Black Youth Project 100, Black Lives Matter, Dream Defenders, and many more. At the gathering, there were many workshops and panels built around the emerging black liberation movement. Organizers discussed tactics and strategy. There was a clear interest in seizing the political moment, but deciding what kind of collective action to take was tricky. The organizers were from different backgrounds and had very different ideas in mind. Political scientist Woodly (2022, 40–41) describes the scene, writing:

It was June 2015, and thirteen-year-old Tamir Rice had just been murdered by police in Cleveland while playing with a toy gun in the back yard of a community center. People argued about what level of confrontation was appropriate. Some having traveled very far to make clear and uncertain statements that “turning up on the State” was not a tactic confined to the streets of Ferguson. Some had come expecting to shut down highways and sit in at municipal buildings and were disappointed that others were more interested in more limited actions like guerilla theater or legal processions on sidewalks as opposed to marching in the streets, which had been made temporarily illegal by the city. People couldn’t agree, so no action was planned. This was a source of extreme frustration for many, and as the convening ended, it was unclear what next steps for collaboration among this diverse group would or could be.

To summarize: attendees of the convening had disagreement about the theory and practice of black liberation. And while the convening was not intended to be a space for deciding on central leadership of the coalition, there was an expectation that representatives would build relationships that could feasibly lead to future collaborations. People were understandably frustrated when prospects for collaboration seemed dim.

Then something interesting happened. Woodly (2022, 41-42) describes convening attendees leaving the convening only to run into a scene of police arresting a young boy. According to the police officer, the boy had been drinking alcohol, and that the mother of the boy had called the police on her own son. The police officer was completely caught off-guard by the hundreds of activists who began to question the arrest of a child. The activists talked to the boy and called his mother. They also began surrounding the police officer and his police car. The scene was tense, but people quickly figured out how to collectively protect the young boy. As a result, the boy did not go to jail. He was released and went with his mother.

This example illustrates the sense in which factionalism is (or at least can be) a political problem that ought to be overcome. There are three features of the case that I want to highlight.

Social movements. The relevant kind of factionalism I am interested in will concern social movements. A social movement, here, is “a sustained campaign of claim making, using repeated performances that advertise the claim, based on organizations, networks, traditions, and solidarities that sustain these activities” (Tilly and Tarrow 2015, 11). ¹ The contemporary Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, for example, claims that black people have lives that should be respected and valued. It will be useful to distinguish between social movements and social movement actors. The social movement involves the campaign of claim-making as a whole. Social movement actors will be those who locate themselves as being agents of the movement. For example, the social movement actors with respect to BLM will consist of the individuals, groups, and organizations that explicitly organize around the values that animate BLM. In what follows, I will focus specifically on social movement groups, which may or may not be formally organized.

Conflict. A social movement is characterized by some kind of internal conflict. The conflict itself is sometimes understood as factionalism. Here is a representative definition of factions and factionalism from social movement studies. Kretschmer (2022, 1) says:

A faction is a subgroup of members within a larger group, who identify more strongly with each other than with other members, and who are advocating for a distinct vision from the larger group. The concept of factionalism can be applied to wide variety of conflicts, including intra-organizational conflict within a single social or political group, as well as conflicts between organizations that share a broader social movement.

The core of Kretschmer’s definition of factionalism is its emphasis on conflict. Factionalism occurs when factions—which are defined as subgroups of a larger social movement group—are in conflict with one another.

Normativity. Social science definitions of factionalism are descriptive. It describes a conflict but it does not tell us anything about the normative properties of the conflict. Pure descriptive theorizing is insufficient for the purposes of certain kinds of non-ideal social and political philosophy. Non-ideal theory, in the sense meant here, is about theorizing in a way that helps us characterize moral and political wrongs—structural injustice, oppression, etc (Mills 2005). ² In the narrative presented, factionalism is perceived as a bad thing. When movement participants came together to work to protect a young boy, this was seen as overcoming factionalism, which is a good thing. By speaking of “good” and “bad,” I am intentionally using evaluative (axiological) concepts rather than the deontic (or prescriptive) concepts. Furthermore, I am neutral on whether the evaluative concepts are moral or distinctively political; I will not take a stance on the debate about the exact nature of political normativity, here.

In this paper, I am interested in the normative properties of factionalism. For this reason, I am interested in the pejorative sense of factionalism. Factionalism is often thought of as a defect or problem. While there is a neutral sense of factionalism (in the same way there is a neutral sense of ideology), the neutral definition does not shed light on the widespread suspicion (at least among political actors) that factionalism is a bad thing. You can see my project as an exercise in conceptual engineering or ameliorative analysis (e.g., Haslanger (2000)). Going forward, when I talk about factionalism, I am talking about the kind of factionalism that necessarily has a negative normative valence.

I have used the M4BL example because it is important to examine factionalism from the perspective of movement participants, not because I have strong opinions about the harms of factionalism within M4BL. A theoretical discussion of factionalism is not the place to chastise or criticize social movements from the outside. My claim is only that there are presumably some cases of factionalism within social movements. For the sake of generality, I offer two broader potential examples of factionalism: identity politics and purity politics.

Identity politics broadly consists in social movements that are organized around social identities like gender, racial, and sexual identities. ³ Identity politics is often criticized for being factional. A classic Marxist view says (a) that the working class is exploited by the capitalist class and (b) the working class is best positioned to end its exploitation. From the perspective of the movement to end capitalism, the working class should be united. However, identity politics requires a fracturing of the social movement group that would otherwise be united. Marxists sometimes argue that identity politics, in its quest for recognition, undermines the goal of economic redistribution (Fraser 2014; McNay 2008).

Purity politics describes the kind of political conflict that results from an unwillingness or inability of social movement actors to productively resolve their philosophical, tactical, and strategic differences. Purism, so defined, is not merely about what beliefs or attitudes you hold. You could have quite radical beliefs without being a purist. Purism is about how you negotiate those beliefs within the context of a social movement. The factionalism exhibited at the movement for black lives convening is arguably a case of purity politics. More generally, there are historical cases of purity politics driving factionalism in the black liberation movement (McAdam 1999), student movements (Klatch 2004), and feminist movements (Ryan 1989).

To be clear: the claim is not that identity politics or purity politics necessarily involve factionalism. The suggestion is that at least some cases of identity and purity politics involve factionalism. Though even this weak claim can be resisted. Because all substantive political values and strategies are contested, any potential example of factionalism will be contested. Though I have used a clearly left-leaning example, I will not assume a substantive set of political values along the left/right or liberal/conservative dimensions. Presumably, there is a right-wing version of the example that conveys (from a right-wing perspective) the idea of factionalism.

Key Tendencies of Factional Groups

What is factionalism in the pejorative sense? Alternatively: what is wrong with factionalism? To answer these questions, I must first distinguish between factionalism and related phenomena—infighting, division, partisanship, and polarization. These are key tendencies of factional groups, but they are not definitive of factionalism.

Before turning to the tendencies of factional groups, I should briefly clarify the underlying assumption that factional groups can exercise group (or collective) agency. The social ontology literature offers several accounts of what it is for a group to act. On one prominent and demanding view, collective action requires that members share an intention to act in a certain way and that this fact be common knowledge among them (Bratman 2014). I do not rely on this model here. Taken at face value, it would imply that a group could be factional only if individual members themselves form the relevant factional intention. This is implausible because there are many real-world cases where individuals resist or lament the very dynamics their group sustains.

Instead, I take for granted functionalist or interpretivist accounts of group agency. On these views, groups qualify as agents insofar as they can be described as having (a) representational states (e.g., beliefs), (b) motivational states (e.g., goals or preferences), and (c) the capacity to act on the basis of those states. Factional groups meet these three conditions. ⁴ Factional groups have beliefs and motivational states. For example, a revolutionary factional group believes that social change requires revolution and it desires to achieve social change through revolutionary activity. Factional groups also act on the basis of their beliefs and desires. The factional revolutionaries may act to thwart more moderate movement actors, because they believe in the possibility and moral necessity of revolution. This functionalist framework allows us to attribute agency to factional groups even when individual members diverge from, or object to, the group-level orientation. ⁵

The most pronounced tendency of factional groups is infighting, “the expression of a dissenting opinion, a discrepant view, or a debate among activists that attempts to redefine past struggles, frame the present moment, or shape future trajectories of activism” (Ghaziani and Kretschmer 2018, 221). Infighting, in this sense, concerns disagreements about political beliefs, strategy, and decision-making. For example, Ghaziani (2008) gives an account of how LGBTQ activists managed disagreement about the inclusion of bisexual and trans people in their march on Washington. This decision mattered for the title of the march, participants, speakers, fundraising, the demands of the march, and so on. It is not a surprise that factional groups engage in infighting with other factional groups; the groups disagree about the nature and future of movement struggles.

Nonetheless, factionalism is distinct from infighting because infighting does not require the existence of anything like a factional group. Factional groups, in the sense I have in mind, are organized groups. Internal organizational infighting can occur between participants who are not determinately divided into organized groups. Furthermore, infighting is not necessarily a bad thing. While there is no shortage of scholars who argue that infighting is generally a destructive tendency for social movements (Davenport 2015; Gamson 1975; McAdam 1999), there are some who argue that infighting can strengthen social movements (Bernstein and Taylor 2013; Stein 2012). The empirical literature records several instances where disagreement strengthened movements rather than undermined them. Frame disputes in the nuclear disarmament movement facilitated innovation and cohesion (Benford 1993); internal debates within LGBT movements created unity through diversity and broadened repertoires of participation (Bernstein and Taylor 2013; Ghaziani 2008); and feminist organizations have used internal dissent to refine strategies or even gain political opportunities through radical flank effects (McCammon 2003; McCammon, Bergner, and Arch 2015; Rupp and Taylor 1987). These cases illustrate that conflict is not uniformly destructive and that some forms of disagreement can enable movements to clarify identities, diversify tactics, and adapt to shifting political conditions. The account I offer does not address cases of internal conflict that are primarily constructive in this way.

Another tendency of factional groups concerns their ability to segment social movements into increasingly smaller factional groups. I will call this tendency division. Division covers several different ways in which a movement group can divide itself up. A defection is what happens when individuals or groups leave social movements entirely. A split (or schism) is what happens when an organized group of movement actors leave a movement organization to start another one. For example, the National Organization of Women (NOW) is a well-known organization that advocates for women’s rights. The organization is an explicitly feminist organization and has hundreds of thousands of members. One key point of division among members of NOW, historically, has been the organization’s support of abortion rights. In response to NOW’s advocating for abortion rights, conservative members of NOW left the organization to form the Women’s Equity League (Kretschmer 2014).

Factional groups may lead to defections and splits, but they are not guaranteed to lead to this kind of division. Or more precisely: factional infighting is not guaranteed to lead to divisions. Balser (1997) gives empirical evidence for this. She studies infighting with four different organizations: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and Earth First! (EF!). Despite the presence of infighting, she notes that these organizations did not split.

Another feature common to factional groups is partisanship. In recent years, political theorists and scientists have paid more attention to the significance of political parties and partisan behavior (Bonotti 2017; Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz 2023; Muirhead 2014; Rosenblum 2010; White and Ypi 2016; Wolkenstein 2020). While parties are not the same as factional groups, there are parallels for factional groups in social movements. Partisanship, as I will understand it, is not about a group’s devotion to its political principles, but a group’s devotion to its members, whatever their political principles might be. Here, I turn to Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz (2023)’s account of partisanship in recent United States politics. They argue that parties are primarily in the business of acquiring political power, not realizing a coherent political vision. They give several cases where Democrats and Republican parties change their political justifications for a policy depending on when it is convenient for them, not depending on their stated political principles. It is plausible that factional groups are partisan in the sense that they are not bound by the political visions they purport to espouse. White and Ypi (2016) draw a distinction between partisanship and factionalism that is useful for present purposes. Partisan groups, on their account, advance principles and aims that can be justified to the political community as a whole, whereas factional groups pursue commitments grounded in group-specific interests (pp. 21, 35). Their definition of factionalism is similar to Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz’s notion of partisanship.

Still, it would be a mistake to reduce factionalism to partisanship (in the interest-based sense). If factionalism were simply a matter of preserving the narrow interests of members of a faction, we should expect factional groups to reject, or at least be indifferent to, broader political principles. Yet factional conflict is frequently shaped by the ideological commitments that factional groups themselves take seriously. Some of the ideological disagreements between factional groups can be taken at face value. For example, according to McAdam (1999), the 1960s black social movements had three factions with different approaches. Integrationists wanted racial equality and disavowed violence as a political tactic in all forms. The black power faction rejected integration as a fundamental goal and approved violence as a tactic. A large part of what explained the conflict between these factions is plausibly their ideological commitments.

Lastly, I turn to the presence of polarization in factionalism. Polarization can be ideological or affective. Ideological polarization refers to cases where people adopt positions that are, in some sense, distant from one another. Affective polarization refers to cases where members of one group dislike or are hostile toward members of others groups. Ideological and affective polarization has been well-documented in party politics (e.g., Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz, 2023). Polarization is not as well-studied in the context of social movements, but there is some indirect evidence of polarization in social movements. The evidence of affective polarization is the clearest. Ryan (1989) studies ideological disputes within feminist movements in the United States from 1966 to 1975. Despite the fact that feminists had more in common with each other than non-feminists, ideological disputes within the feminist movements were intense and often led to division. Why did this happen? Ryan (1989, 251–52) argues that “within the women’s movement, disputes over theory turned into disputes over who was most feminist of what as the right kind of feminist.” One’s ideology came to represent one’s character, and vice versa. For example, if feminists (in certain feminist movement groups) believed that heterosexuality was a pillar of patriarchy, feminists were expected to not be heterosexual; this kind of reasoning led to conflicts between those who believed there was some separation between theory and practice (Ryan 1989, 252). The political battle shifted toward internal members of the movement, away from external political structures and agents. A different example of affective polarization is presented by Klatch (2004), who studies the ways that student movements in the 1960s were affected by the development of negative affective bonds. Movement groups had strict demands around the lifestyle of their members, and these demands eventually resulted in polarization when those demands went unmet.

Factional groups can be engines of negative polarization, but factionalism does not, at least in principle, require negative polarization. Still, factionalism is associated with polarization in some way. The causal relationship between factionalism and polarization is unclear, but it is plausible to think that factionalism increases polarization or that polarization facilitates factionalism.

I have distinguished between factionalism and four other phenomena in the vicinity. Though these distinct phenomena do not constitute necessary and sufficient conditions for factionalism, I do believe they should be seen as key tendencies of factional groups. Factional groups tend to engage in infighting, division, partisanship, and polarization.

The Teleological Account

I have presented examples of factionalism and outlined four key tendencies of factional groups. Now we are in a position to attempt to define factionalism in a pejorative sense.

Here is the teleological account of factionalism. Factionalism occurs when (a) a social movement group has factions and (b) the factions are in conflict with one another in a way that undermines the good aims of a social movement group. To criticize a group as being factional, then, is ultimately to criticize them for thwarting the good goals of some larger group.

The teleological definition answers the normative question we began with. The normative question was: what makes factionalism a bad thing? The teleological answer is: factionalism is bad because it is an obstacle to good goals. On this view, factionalism is relationally bad. What counts as a good goal is subject to debate. Nonetheless, assuming some substantive position on what good goals are, one is then in a position to criticize social movement groups as factional.

The teleological definition of factionalism neatly maps onto real-world conditions. It is not an analytic truth that intramovement conflicts are a major causal factor in demobilizing social movements, but it is close to a consensus within social movement research. The basic issue, as noted by Gamson (1975), is that intramovement and intra-organizational conflict deprives movement actors of time and energy that could be spent pursuing their external goals. This is not to say that this kind of conflict is uniformly destructive; there is no real question that these conflicts play some role in demobilizing social movements. If we take on board the normative premise that some of these movements have good aims, then it follows that the teleological definition of factionalism applies to the real world.

The teleological definition of factionalism may feel obvious. That is because it is. Indeed, the obviousness of this definition of factionalism may explain why factionalism has not been as prominent a topic as the growing literature on solidarity, social change, and social movements. The notion of factionalism is not receiving anything like the same treatment from political philosophers. This is most likely because factionalism, on the teleological view, is not normatively interesting. It also does not tell us anything that we could not have used common sense to infer.

I want to now suggest that the teleological account is inadequate. Or at least, it is not the whole story. I will now argue for a definition of factionalism that highlights the intrinsic badness of factional agency.

The Agential Account

On the agential account of factionalism, factionalism is principally characterized by a kind of anti-solidaristic agency. To explain what this means, I must first explain what I take solidarity to be.

There are different theories of solidarity, but I want to focus on solidarity as a form of power. Zheng (2022b, 903) has recently defended the idea of solidarity as “the collective ability of otherwise powerless people to organize themselves for radical, wholesale social transformation.” This notion of solidarity contrasts with notions that take solidarity as a kind of relation; a person is in solidarity with a group (A. Kolers 2016a), or some groups are in solidarity with one another (Sangiovanni 2015). Solidarity, in Zheng’s sense, is fundamentally a power, not a relation.

For two agents X and Y to have solidarity power with one another requires two basic things: (Power) X and Y have the collective power to organize themselves for radical social change; (Means) X and Y’s collective power largely depends on the number of people shared among X and Y and the particular position of members of X and Y, where the manifestation of this power consists mainly of mobilizing and organizing.

Start with the concept of power. The concept of solidarity as power is to be understood as a form of grassroots or bottom-up power. Elite actors have power via their wealth or political influence. Solidarity power, as Zheng conceives it, is a concept that is about actors who do not have this kind of individual wealth or influence. A straightforward example of the kind of bottom-up power that Zheng has in mind will be the potential solidarity power of the global poor or the potential power of the working class. In both cases, these groups could possess the collective power to organize for radical or transformative social change. By transformative change, I mean the kind of change that results in the change of widespread and entrenched social, legal, and political institutions. If the working class overthrew capitalist economic structures, this would count as radical social change.

Solidarity is a kind of power that exists or can exist among relatively disadvantaged or powerless actors. Specifically, it is an example of Allen (1999)’s concept of power-with. Having power-with a group is different from having power-over a group or power-to affect change. If two groups share solidarity power, they have power-with one another. This power will partly depend on the sheer number of the actors. Individual members of the working class are not powerful, but the working class, as whole, is quite powerful. This collective power is also partly due to the way the working class is positioned in society. A strike of the entire working class would massively affect the global political and economic order.

Now let me clarify the means of solidarity power. Solidarity power principally involves mobilizing and organizing. Organizing, in the sense meant here, describes the process of building collective power via getting large numbers of a grassroots constituency to engage in an action or campaign (McAlevey 2016). Union organizing is the paradigm case of organizing, in this sense. To organize a union, you have to get other members of your workplace to agree to form a union. In this case, the collective power you can yield depends on whether workers will agree to form a union. Union organizing requires recruiting and developing individuals who may not otherwise be interested in union activity. It also requires building an association with other individuals who are affected by the same issues, and establishing decision-making procedures that allow that association to flourish. In contrast, mobilizing involves ordinary people, but it does not necessarily involve them at the level of decision-making and direction. Many mobilization campaigns are directed by a small number of professionals or committed activists, where there is no sense that the leaders of the mobilization efforts are the ones that the mobilized constituency would choose. Mobilizing consists of getting people to act in a certain way. Organizing consists of building member-based organizations and decision-making procedures that facilitate long term social change.

Zheng (2022b, 907) importantly notes that organizing

is a transformational experience for participants, whose effects extend far beyond the duration of a particular campaign. It teaches people key skills like communication and democratic decision-making, strengthens their political motivations and commitments, and above all, provides them with a first-hand taste of collective power.

Zheng gives examples where, after successfully organizing for social change, participants within social movements described having a sense of collective power that they never had before. Before winning a union, a teacher simply goes to their workplace and goes home afterward, alone. After winning a union, that same teacher has more of a sense of possibility; she feels that she is at least partly in ownership over her own decisions, and that she has power with other people in the workplace.

I claim that what it is to be a factional agent is to operate in a way that is, in some sense, completely opposite of the way that solidarity power transforms agents. Factionalism is a kind of anti-solidarity power. Another way of putting it: factionalism is collective anti-power. My idea is to think of factionalism through the lens of factional agency, rather than the lens of what outcomes factionalism results in. Factionalism clearly frustrates the ends of social movements, but I want to think through the kind of agency involved in being a factional agent. This agency is a vicious mirror of solidaristic agency, I argue.

Let me start with the broad idea of factional agency. Factional agency concerns the way individuals within factional groups, and factional groups more broadly, judge, deliberate, and act. Individual agency differs from group agency, but in both cases, one thinks and acts in factional ways. But what characterizes factional agency? There is a minimal sense of factional agency in which any agent that causes harmful conflict within a social movement is a factional agent, but this is too thin a notion for my purposes. I am interested in the idea of an essentially factional agent.

Factional agency is partly defined by its priorities. Factional agents prioritize conflict with other movement actors over conflict with actors external to the movement. There may be many reasons for this. Most obviously: factional agents may see internal actors as bigger threats than external actors to the success of the movement. Whatever the reasons, prioritizing internal conflict is a decision that fundamentally shapes one’s deliberation and decision-making. To be clear, the prioritization of conflict need not reflect the intentions of every individual within a factional group. As noted earlier, factional agency is principally a group-level phenomenon. The group can act in ways that prioritize conflict with other movement actors even when some members resist, regret, or explicitly oppose such conflict.

The other characteristic priority of factional agents concerns membership development. By membership development, I am talking about the development of ideological and affective bonds between members of factional groups. Ideologically, this may look like political education exclusively run by and for members of a faction. Affectively, this might mean social gatherings or other kinds of social dependencies of faction members on one another. While factions must find ways to recruit others to their factions, they do not prioritize bringing others into the broader social movement they are part of.

The priorities of factional agents manifest themselves, not as collective power, but as (what I will call) anti-power. Start with the idea of solidarity as collective power. Factional agency is anti-solidaristic in the sense that it is an agential perspective whose end is collective powerlessness. It is clear that factional agency causally promotes collective powerlessness. But what is distinct about factional agency is the fact that collective powerlessness is essentially the goal of factional agents. More precisely: factional agents aim to deprive their enemies of power, where their enemies are other members of the movement. It would be uncharitable to assume that factional agents abstractly hope for social movements to be crippled by powerlessness. My claim is that what it means to think and act factionally, in practice, requires one to prioritize disempowerment projects.

The other way that factional agency manifests itself is via demobilization. While mobilizing consists of getting people to act toward movement goals, demobilizing consists of getting them to not act toward movement goals. Demobilization, here, is not simply an effect of factional agency; it is one of the chief ends of factional agency. Factional groups do not want competing groups to gain adherents. The priority is to stop other factional agents, even if this means fewer people would be acting to realize movement goals. Again, I assume the factional agent acts in light of what they take to be their reasons, here. From a factional agent’s perspective, it would be better to demobilize people who would otherwise pursue bad aims, aims contrary to the faction’s goals or identity.

So far, I have highlighted the agential perspective on factional agents. But it is still unclear what can be wrong with this perspective other than the fact that it causally frustrates good ends. Now, I want to suggest that factional agency is the kind of agency that is the opposite of democratic autonomy.

My account of democratic autonomy comes from Lovett and Zuehl (2022). They want to give an account of what makes democracy intrinsically valuable. Their idea is that democracy is valuable in virtue of the fact that it is a form of autonomy. They say, “Just as it is valuable for me to be the author of my private life, it is valuable for me to share in the joint authorship of our common political life. We will call this democratic autonomy” (Lovett and Zuehl 2022, 469). Joint authorship can be understood concretely in terms of citizens determining policy outcomes; their example is US citizens being joint authors of social welfare programs like Social Security. To author policies in this way, we cannot replace democracy with some other kind of institution.

To make this point vividly, they pose the following thought experiment.

Imagine a reliable deity creates an algorithm for morally impeccable legislation: input current social conditions and it produces perfectly just laws. We could change our constitution, replacing our legislature with the algorithm. In a society as gravely unjust as ours, weighty reasons speak in favor of making the change. Still, it seems clear that in doing so we would be losing out on some important democratic value (Lovett and Zuehl 2022, 469–70).

What would be lost is democratic autonomy, on their view. We care about the joint authorship of social and political life.

I will not assume that democratic autonomy is what makes democracy valuable, but it is at least an important part of what makes it a good thing to be part of a social movement. Social movement actors, in the ideal case, are acting so as to jointly author social and political life. The social position of movement actors is different from the typical citizen, but this kind of joint making of the world is part of what is good about social movement activity. When movement actors are transformed by movement action, it is not merely a psychological transformation, it is a transformation in the kind of agency they come to exercise. Given the imperfect democratic institutions that exist, movement actors get a taste of democratic autonomy through movement actions.

In highlighting democratic autonomy, I would appear to assume that anti-democratic social movements are necessarily factional. However, I do not think this is the case. There can be grassroots movements for fascism, for example. Fascist movements seek to undermine democratic autonomy, but the mechanism importantly differs. Fascists generally seek to undermine democratic autonomy by winning political power and creating institutions that make it difficult to jointly author social life. Though they may nonetheless want to preserve bottom-up power among those who seek to ultimately abolish democracy. In contrast, factionalism undermines democratic autonomy by transforming our individual and group agency as we organize for social change, not necessarily after we achieve the desired change.

Factional agency does not merely obstruct democratic autonomy; it makes democratic autonomy within the movement practically impossible. And this is true not only of actual democratic autonomy, but of its potential; factional agency structurally undermines the very conditions under which democratic autonomy could emerge. The practical standpoint of factional agency involves a systematic redirection of energy and attention inward. Instead of coordinating for shared political ends, factional groups organize themselves around contestation with internal rivals. As a result, their deliberative energies, membership conditions, and organizational capacities become oriented toward internal opposition rather than collective authorship. When this structure becomes routinized, it produces a form of joint unmaking: the practices that enable democratic authorship—collective agenda-setting, mutual accountability, and shared political imagination—are displaced by practices of internal antagonism. This unmaking is not incidental. It is built into the agential structure of factional groups.

To better understand joint unmaking, I will highlight three of its key features.

First, factional groups establish membership conditions that require an oppositional stance toward other movement actors. Membership comes with expectations of exclusivity: to be part of the faction is, by design, to withdraw from other movement spaces. This forecloses the freedom to enter into collaboration with other movement groups and thereby blocks the conditions for shared political deliberation and action. Every movement group has membership criteria that distinguish it from others, but what is distinctive about factional groups is that their membership conditions make internal loyalty and external opposition structurally inseparable. It is in this sense that exclusivity is not merely a byproduct of factional organization but a mechanism of unmaking, one that dismantles the collaborative infrastructure on which democratic authorship depends.

Second, factional groups frequently adopt a strategic orientation in which internal competition is treated as a necessary precursor to social change. On this picture, factions must first struggle for influence within the movement; only after one faction prevails can collective action be directed outward. This two-stage orientation bakes internal conflict into the group’s long-term reasoning in a way that is self-perpetuating. The struggle for internal influence is never simply a means to an end; it becomes an organizing principle that shapes how the group understands its priorities, allocates its resources, and evaluates its successes. And because no faction ever fully prevails, the internal struggle tends to reproduce itself indefinitely. Joint authorship is practically unintelligible from the factional standpoint, because the conditions under which factions would be willing to engage in shared democratic deliberation are precisely the conditions that the orientation is designed to reject.

Third, there are epistemic dimensions of unmaking. Factional agents typically restrict epistemic authority to “in-house” sources. Other movement actors are regarded as ignorant, unreliable, or ideologically compromised. This is not merely a contingent feature of factional psychology; it follows from the factional standpoint itself. If other movement actors are rivals whose influence must be checked, there is little reason to treat their political judgments as worth engaging seriously. Over time, this produces epistemic bubbles (or echo chambers) in which the faction’s own analyses, strategies, and interpretations of events are treated as authoritative by default. ⁶ Yet shared authorship plausibly requires a willingness to treat others in the movement as epistemic peers. Factional agency structurally disrupts such epistemic practices, and in doing so undermines one of the basic preconditions of joint authorship. A group that has rendered itself incapable of genuinely listening to its movement partners cannot be a co-author of anything with them.

Joint unmaking, then, is not simply about intentionally frustrating the contingent ends of other movement actors. This happens all the time; oppositional parties, for instance, are not necessarily factional merely because they resist their opponents. What distinguishes joint unmaking is that it targets the conditions of collective agency itself, not just the particular goals that other actors happen to pursue. This is where the teleological account falls short. The teleological theorist correctly notes that factional agents tend to be destructive of social movements, but the focus remains on outcomes, not agents. The agential account focuses on the kind of agent that factionalism makes you into. I want to suggest that being factional is a bad way to be, not merely a bad way to act. ⁷

I should clarify that the joint unmaking involved in factional agency does not presuppose the existence of a single democratically organized agent. It does not even presuppose the existence of a single determinate social movement. To start, factional groups harm themselves and their members. Specifically, when individuals are transformed by factional agency, they may lose some of their capacity to jointly author social life with others, and that is a bad thing, independently of what happens with other movement actors. Moreover, factional agency can be a problem even if factional agents are not part of a shared social movement. Most obviously, the political radical may not care about frustrating the ends of political moderates, because they do not take themselves to be part of the same movement. We do not have to be part of the same social movement for it to be valuable for us to jointly author social life together. Factional groups, insofar as they undermine this general democratic autonomy, are bad inside and outside of movements.

Now recall the M4BL example. The concern, as expressed by participants, was that movement actors might be slipping into a form of factional agency, one that does not see itself as part of a broader democratic project. Crucially, what matters for my purposes are the attitudes of movement participants. The impromptu collective action outside the convening did not prove that M4BL was incapable of factionalism. There is a significant difference between responding to an immediate crisis and sustaining the kind of coordinated, outward-facing agency that movement work requires. But the episode was nonetheless reassuring, because it showed that whatever factional tendencies existed within the coalition did not fully dominate their agential perspective. Participants were relieved to find that their organizations retained clear tendencies toward solidarity as a form of collective power.

The M4BL example highlights both the danger of factional agency and the prospects of resisting or overcoming it. This is partly why it may not be a pure case of factional agency; the factionalism present within M4BL is real but not extreme. In real-world social movements, factional agency is better understood as a tendency that comes in degrees. Whether we are discussing poor people’s movements, women’s movements, worker’s movements, identity politics, or purity politics, movement actors will always be torn between factional and non-factional orientations. The goal of this inquiry has been to illuminate that tendency for the purposes of evaluating movement actors in context, not to deploy “factionalism” as a blunt instrument of shame or reproach. ⁸

To conclude, I want to clarify how the account I have offered relates to the pejorative notion of factionalism introduced at the start of the paper. My aim has been to identify and explain what makes certain forms of intramovement conflict objectionable. ⁹ I have argued that the pejorative sense of factionalism corresponds to a distinctive kind of agency, one structured around anti-solidarity power. The analysis in this section shows why this way of acting is a bad one for movement groups to adopt. It systematically undermines solidaristic power and the conditions for democratic autonomy, and it does so through the characteristic priorities and practices described above. In this way, the account of anti-solidarity power provides the explanation for why this subset of internal conflict merits criticism.

Conclusion

I have given an account of factionalism as anti-solidarity power. Factionalism does not simply disrupt social movements but constitutes an intrinsically bad way to be an agent. By developing a better understanding of factionalism, we gain a better grasp of the barriers to solidarity, social change, and transformative social movements.