Through intertwined images and testimonials from union activists, protest performers and ethologist John B. Calhoun's experiments observing the collapse of rat populations under controlled "utopic" conditions, The Highest Form of Image Is Armed Struggle juxtaposes a historical revolutionary declaration with contemporary protest culture, asking how political action has come to intersect and stagnate with staging, cameras, and the structures of image production, and insisting on the role of conflict and struggle as the source of social creation.