by Jerome Roos
http://roarmag.org/2013/06/autonomy-revolution-movements-democracy-capitalism/
June 23, 2013
The global struggle for real democracy exposes the divorce of power and politics at the heart of the capitalist state. Autonomy is the only way forward.
As the ongoing uprising in Turkey and the mass protests in Bosnia, Bulgaria and Brazil confirm, the wave of struggles that kicked off with the Arab revolutions of 2011 is still in full swing. However, it is also clear that, two years hence, the “dangerous dreams” of the Arab revolutionaries, Europe’s indignados and America’s occupiers largely remain unfulfilled. In Europe, the austerity mantra is still being uncritically praised and dutifully imposed by governments of the left and the right. In Egypt, Islamist forces have successfully managed to hijack the revolution by taking state power and suppressing its epochal promise of radical emancipation. In the United States, meanwhile, the bodies that once assembled on Wall Street seem to have dissipated back into their previous state of social atomization.
Today’s Movements: Advancing Socialism Without the Politics?
The Divorce of Power from Politics
From Betrayal to Deception: The Left Turns Right
The End of Domination and the Unleashing of Autonomy
The Stirrings of the Multitude and the Revolutionary Process
Society as a Layer Cake of Historical Residues
Moving Beyond Capitalism: A Permanent Revolutionary Becoming
Concrete Forms of Action: Modalities of Protest
Concrete Forms of Direct Democratic Self-Organization
The Two Temporalities of Revolt
Bending the Moral Arc of the Universe
Jerome Roos is a PhD Researcher at the European University Institute and Founding Editor of ROAR Magazine. A revised and properly referenced version of this essay is now available in PDF format (more pleasant to read) on Academia.edu.
http://roarmag.org/2013/06/autonomy-revolution-movements-democracy-capitalism/
June 23, 2013
The global struggle for real democracy exposes the divorce of power and politics at the heart of the capitalist state. Autonomy is the only way forward.
You may resist the invasion of an army, but you cannot stop an idea whose time has come.~ Victor Hugo
EDITOR’S NOTE: A revised and properly referenced version of this essay is now available in PDF format
(more pleasant to read) on Academia.edu. We will keep the original
version online on ROAR, but we strongly advise you to read the updated
PDF version!
As the ongoing uprising in Turkey and the mass protests in Bosnia, Bulgaria and Brazil confirm, the wave of struggles that kicked off with the Arab revolutions of 2011 is still in full swing. However, it is also clear that, two years hence, the “dangerous dreams” of the Arab revolutionaries, Europe’s indignados and America’s occupiers largely remain unfulfilled. In Europe, the austerity mantra is still being uncritically praised and dutifully imposed by governments of the left and the right. In Egypt, Islamist forces have successfully managed to hijack the revolution by taking state power and suppressing its epochal promise of radical emancipation. In the United States, meanwhile, the bodies that once assembled on Wall Street seem to have dissipated back into their previous state of social atomization.
In the present
conjuncture, an old but important question arises — both for the
movements that kicked off in 2011 and for the ones currently underway in
Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere: what is to be done? According to some,
including prominent leftist thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou,
the spontaneous and autonomous character of the new revolutions poses a number of risks. Most importantly, these critics argue, the lack of centralized leadership and the fetishism of horizontality that
define these movements risk condemning them to an ephemeral existence
with limited influence on concrete political outcomes. Without the
necessary structuring leadership of what Badiou and Žižek call the Master –
presumably in the form of a radical party – the protests are bound to
resemble nothing more than flash mobs, marked by temporary explosions of
carnivalesque contestation that ultimately do little to undermine the
deeper power relations that constitute capitalist society. In the most
cynical of these interpretations, the new revolutions could even end up reinforcing capitalism.
Today’s Movements: Advancing Socialism Without the Politics?
In an article for Levantoday, David De Bruijn echoes
some of these criticisms, even if he is arguing more from a realist
point of view than a Marxist-Leninist one as such. First, he correctly
argues that the Tahrir uprising of 2011 was actually much more closely
connected to the anti-austerity protests in Syntagma than most observers
at the time were willing to recognize. But, after this basic
observation, David moves on to conclude that perhaps the sources of
similarity between these movements — which Leonidas Oikonomakis and I
consider to be part of the same movement family, which we refer to as
the Real Democracy Movement
— are also precisely their main weakness. In fact, the ongoing wave of
‘occupy’ protests, including the anti-austerity protests in Europe and
the Taksim uprising, may signify the Rebirth of History, but they ultimately do so by proposing the return of socialism without the politics:
Today’s protestors do not affiliate themselves with parties or programs; they do not enter the political arena to obtain particular political goals, or even to actually alter the system entirely. The common refrain is that politics ‘are all hopeless anyway’. As such, today’s protesters want socialism in the abstract: ‘values’ and ‘ideals’ like equality, fairness and non-materialist modes of existence, but not any particular potentially feasible practice embodying these values.
It
is a critique that the Occupy movement is very familiar with, of
course. First, the mainstream media and political establishment
chastised the protesters for failing to articulate any clear demands;
then the institutional left joined in, criticizing grassroots activists
for refusing to organize themselves into a party and to aim for state
power. It is a similar line of critique as the one that has been leveled
at the autonomous Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, the spontaneous popular uprising in
Argentina and the leaderless alter-globalization movement in Europe and
the United States, all of which helped to animate the world’s most
important anti-capitalist struggles around the turn of the century. In
fact, it is a critique that goes back much further than this, extending
from Marx’ thundering polemics against the anarchism of Proudhon and
Bakunin to Lenin’s scathing critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of
revolutionary spontaneity; and from the Stalinist crackdown on the
anarchist militias of revolutionary Catalonia to the contemporary
Marxist critique of the events of May ’68.
It
is quite interesting to note, in this respect, that there is a
long-standing and somewhat curious coalition between the theorists of
the institutional left — represented in this case by radical thinkers
like Slavoj Žižek — on the one hand; and the liberal political
establishment in democratic capitalist society on the other. Both have
consistently criticized the Real Democracy Movement for its refusal to
respect the organizational exigencies of party politics; both argue
that, to be taken seriously, the activists should cast aside their
revolutionary illusions and accept the basic rules of the game. Without
representation in parliament, they argue, no one will listen to them. If
only the protesters would get their hands dirty and do some politics,
these two strange bedfellows seem to agree, we can at least start a
conversation.
The Divorce of Power from Politics
But of course that is precisely what the activists do not
want. They do not want to engage in a dialogue with the political
establishment because they consider the entire system upon which it
rests to be fundamentally undemocratic. Moreover, the refusal to engage
in the representative politics of capitalist democracy is by no means
limited to moral considerations: it is not simply a “soft” and “fluffly”
rejection of politics in favor of values. In fact, most of the
organizers behind the grassroots movements of the past two years
recognize that moving through traditional party structures and state
institutions is likely to do their movement more harm than good. This is
ultimately a strategic consideration as much as it is a moral or ideological one. Look no further than Dilma Rousseff,
President of Brazil, to see what happens to revolutionaries — in this
case a former member of various Marxist guerrilla groups during Brazil’s
military dictatorship — when they take state power. Or look at the Papandreou dynasty in Greece. Or the Miliband family in the United Kingdom. The examples are endless.
Here,
we need to make an important distinction that radically alters the
basis of our analysis about relevant forms of revolutionary organization
under conditions of global capitalism. It is commonplace to claim that
politics is ultimately about power. When politics is seen in this way,
the refusal of today’s movements to get bogged down in representative
politics is indicative of a failure to recognize the social reality of
extant power relations and skewed power structures. The problem with
this line of reasoning is that it conflates two concepts that are
closely connected but nevertheless crucially distinct. In a word, we
need to take our political economy seriously and distinguish politics
from power. Zygmunt Bauman notes
that politics is about deciding what is to be done, while power is
about the ability to actually do it. In that respect, the nation state
and representative democracy are full of politics but devoid of power.
In
the analysis of structural power that forms the theoretical backbone of
my PhD research and my own social activism, the nation state is no
longer a valid or effective basis for transformative political action
(for more on this, check my latest conference paper
for a take on how the structural power of financial capital has
transformed the nature of political activism in the European debt
crisis). The worldwide crisis of representation
is precisely an outcome of the realization among disaffected voters
that elected representatives have ceased to represent their interests,
and that this is a problem not of the representatives themselves but of
the system of representation as such. What people everywhere are
starting to recognize is that voting is pointless if elected
representatives do not have the power — or the collective will — to put
into practice the promises they make in the lead-up to the elections.
What people are starting to realize, in other words, is that power has
been divorced from politics, leaving the politics behind in a hopelessly
vacuous rhetorical universe.
So rather than ignoring the question of power, the Real Democracy Movement actually exposes it for what it really is: it reveals the emperor of democratic capitalism to be naked. As Subcomandante Marcos of the EZLN put in,
“in the cabaret of globalization, the state shows itself as a table
dancer that strips off everything until it is left with only the minimum
indispensable garments: the repressive force.” All around us, we can
see the meaningless garments of representative democracy lying abandoned
on the ground — the parliaments, the voting booths, the campaign
posters — but the emperor who used to wear them has long since migrated
elsewhere. From time to time, the state still dresses itself up in the
destructive boredom of “free and fair” elections, but the imperial power
that once allowed it to translate their outcome into meaningful action
has all but evaporated into a de-territorial realm of diffuse capitalist
sovereignty. This is the essence of politics without power, and the
movements of 2011 are merely the latest and most concerted attempt on
the part of the general population to point this out.
From Betrayal to Deception: The Left Turns Right
Hence
the frustration with political parties. Hence the autonomous forms of
self-organization. Indeed, it seems that today the only substantive
domain of politics where the state still has some power to affect a
change in outcomes is the cultural politics of identity: it may no
longer be able to stem flows of money across borders, but at least the
state can still to some extent stop the flow of human beings — and so it
does, with brutal effect, cracking down on refugees and migrants as if
its life depended on it. When it comes to the economy, however, the
state is structurally constrained by the ability of bankers and
businessmen to move their investments around as they please: stuffing
away trillions of dollars
worth in profits in remote tax havens while moving investments to
whoever offers the easiest regulation and greatest returns. Politicians,
meanwhile, are structurally dependent on these private investors to
maintain adequate growth and employment levels, otherwise they simply
risk being ousted from office in the next elections. As a result, all
politicians ultimately have to cater to business interests — if they do
not, the market will just discipline them through divestment.
People
may therefore have the right to vote, but what is the point in voting
if all you get to decide upon is who will implement the policies that
favor big business anyway? Populists like Beppe Grillo
in Italy may scream “they’re all crooks, kick them all out!”, but what
we are really seeing is not corrupt politicians betraying their voters,
or the left betraying the workers, but capital gradually expanding its
structural power. As the dual processes of globalization and
financialization continue apace, elected politicians — both corrupt and
honest ones — are simply being reduced to managers: they just take care
of the state apparatus while the bankers and businessmen move their
money around. This is not a problem of “betrayal”. Even if liberal
voters may feel betrayed by Obama’s swing to the right, this is not just
about power corrupting people (it is also about that, but not alone).
Similarly, it is not just that the Workers’ Party betrayed workers in
Brazil, or PASOK betrayed voters in Greece. Cornelius Castoriadis, the
Greek philosopher of autonomy, was prescient when he wrote in 1955 that left-wing parties have never truly represented working people:
[S]aying that they ‘are betraying us’ makes no sense. If, in order to sell his junk, a merchant tells me some load of crap and tries to persuade me that it is in my interest to buy it, I can say that he is trying to deceive me but not that he is betraying me. Likewise, the Socialist or Stalinist party, in trying to persuade the proletariat that it represents its interests, is trying to deceive it but is not betraying it; they betrayed it once and for all a long time ago, and since then they are not traitors to the working class but faithful and consistent servants of other interests.
The Revolution’s Gradual Retreat into Reformism
It
is therefore not that today’s movements are refusing to confront the
difficult concept of power, but precisely the opposite. More and more
people around the world are beginning to recognize that the democratic
capitalist state plays a critical role in stabilizing the diffuse global
system of capitalist power relations, and that the parties of the left
in turn play a critical role in stabilizing the authority and legitimacy
of the capitalist state. As John Holloway put it in a recent ROAR interview,
“one thing that’s become clear in the crisis to more and more people is
the distance of the state from society, and the degree to which the
state is integrated into the movement of money, so that the state even
loses the appearance of being pulled in two directions.” Whereas the
temporary fixes of Keynesian demand management in the post-war years and
cheap credit in the last three decades may have led voters to believe
that the state did care about ordinary people, such illusions
have all but disappeared in the present conjuncture of widespread
capitalist crisis: not just in the eurozone but everywhere.
The
position of the institutional left in this respect is extremely
self-defeating. On the one hand, most state-oriented radicals,
revolutionary socialists and communists would agree with the analysis
that the power of capital has grown exponentially under neoliberalism
and that the state is becoming increasingly submissive to the
dictatorship of the markets. As Žižek himself puts it,
the left’s reactionary defense of the welfare state is ultimately a
hopeless endeavor: “the utopia [of today's left] is not a radical change
of the system, but the idea that one can maintain a welfare state within the
system.” In fact, he even argues that “if we remain within the confines
of the global capitalist system, then measures to wring further sums
from workers, students and pensioners are, effectively, necessary.”
Clearly such views are difficult to square with Žižek’s support for
SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left in Greece, and the latter’s
defense of the welfare state. One day, Žižek’s own theoretical
reflections on the Greek debt crisis force him to conclude that the prospects for leftist regimes in general are “‘objectively’ hopeless”; the next day he finds himself praising SYRIZA for its “courage to take over [and] banish the left’s fear of taking power.”
The
best that leftists can hope for in such an “objectively hopeless”
situation is for some modest reform: an Argentina-style debt default,
the re-nationalization of some public utilities or perhaps a bank, maybe
some family allowances or subsidies to help uplift the poor or bring
education to the excluded; not much more. Žižek even ends up
enthusiastically praising Obama’s disastrous healthcare reforms, not realizing that they basically stripped away hundreds of billions
of dollars from hospitals and donated them as profits to Big Pharma and
Wall Street insurance companies. Whatever happened to the good old
revolutionary idea of socialism
as the “social ownership of the means of production and co-operative
management of the economy”? It is now clear that all state-oriented
forms of revolutionary theory and practice have long since retreated
into a defeatist reformism. This is not simply a sectarian jab at the
institutional left: the leading radicals themselves recognize it.
Speaking at the Subversive Festival in Zagreb this year, Richard Seymour
— author of the blog Lenin’s Tomb — admitted
that “in practical terms we are all reformists now.” As a result,
radical thinkers generally end up supporting political parties whose
final policies will be all but radical. In fact, with enough
time spent in power, their principal function inevitably becomes the
stabilization of the liberal democratic state that anchors the social
relations of the global capitalist order. In the process, the cycle of
deception that Castoriadis identified – really a cycle of collective self-delusion — continues unabated.
While Slavoj Žižek expresses his unconditional support
for a young and charismatic comrade like Alexis Tsipras — the leader of
SYRIZA upon whom all radical hopes are now pinned — the latter actually
goes to visit Wolfgang Schäuble in Berlin to tell the German Finance
Minister that he need not fear a Greek euro exit, before embarking on a
charm offensive in the United States to assure the IMF and private
bankers of the same, even telling
an audience of businessmen, US officials and policy wonks at the
Brookings Institution that “I hope to convince you that I’m not as
dangerous as some are trying to say.” Apparently the disciplinary power
of markets is so great that it even exerts its influence on opposition
parties. “Is there anything to fear of the left wing in Greece?” the
leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left asked his audience of liberals rhetorically. “In what way are we radical?” By now, the answer should be clear to everyone: in name only.
The End of Domination and the Unleashing of Autonomy
So
what is to be done? Rather than reproducing the capitalist state
through our continued participation within it, we should destroy it. On a
theoretical level, the institutional left would agree with us on this
lofty abstract goal. But on a practical level they contradict themselves
by continuously trying to seize it, be it through revolutionary or
through electoral means — only to be repelled time and again in their
objectives of establishing socialism by the exigencies of the market
place: from Morales’ Movement for Socialism embracing “Andean-Amazonian capitalism”
and cracking down on grassroots movements to expedite large-scale
resource extraction in Bolivia, to the Sandinistas of Nicaragua repaying
Somoza’s odious debts and selling their land for a nickle and a dime to the Chinese; and from the multi-billionaire Princeling descendants of Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the Revolutionary Family of
neoliberal technocrats in Mexico — not a single revolutionary party
that obtained state power managed to actually wield that power to bring
about anything other than capitalism.
To
stay true to its revolutionary roots, the radical left now needs to
recognize that the struggle against capitalism can only succeed if it
starts from the basis of radical autonomy from the capitalist state.
Protesting alone is clearly not enough: at this point, the most it can
achieve is to scare the government into mild reforms,
not much more. Similarly, occupying a square or park for a few weeks or
a few months or so is not enough either. Both are a start, however, as
they can serve to pry open the suffocating ideological straitjacket that
There Is No Alternative,
swiftly activating and rapidly expanding the radical imagination of the
masses. Large-scale protests, or the refusal to obey the logic of
submission, cannot overthrow capitalism as such; but they can radicalize
a generation of participants on the spot by revealing the framework of
institutionalized violence upon which the allegedly democratic
capitalist state ultimately rests. Similarly, a handful of neighborhood
assemblies cannot bring about a truly free and genuinely democratic
society, but it can serve as a crucial lesson in democracy
to those who participate in them, helping to expand revolutionary
consciousness and develop new prefigurative forms of direct democratic
revolutionary praxis.
In the
long-term, however, lasting forms of self-organization will need to be
devised that can both replace the vacuous politics of the nation state and destroy
the structural power base of global capital. Here we need to make
another crucial distinction between two forms of power. John Holloway
speaks of the meaning of revolution
as “the end of power-over and the unleashing of power-to”, in other
words: the end of domination and the unleashing of autonomy. At its most
elementary level, the revolution must have as its goal the elimination
of all power structures that allow the few to exert power over the many,
in particular the power of capital to undermine our most basic human
needs; which would immediately free everyone to be fully autonomous
(i.e., rule their own destiny) and do whatever they need or want to do
to live a materially and spiritually fulfilling life. While the Real
Democracy Movement shares that overall objective, we should be careful
not to be naïve here: the total abolition of power-over, while forever
the objective of genuine revolutionary action, is simply impossible.
In
fact, there will always be power-over, even if it develops in the form
of virtual hierarchies within nominally horizontal organizations; what
Jo Freedman referred to as the tyranny of structurelessness.
This implies that the struggle to unleash the self-rule of the
autonomous human being and establish an autonomous society is by its
very definition always an endless one, involving a continuous fight
against the corruption of its own principles and the concentration of
power-over in the hands of the few — a danger that forever lurks around
the corner. This, then, should be the real meaning of permanent revolution:
a recognition by the masses that, in an ideal world, all forms of
domination would be dissolved, but that in the real world human nature
will forever be plagued by imperfections and social interaction will to
some extent always know a (greater or lesser) degree of conflict — and
therefore a recognition that the struggle will be endless or it will not
be at all. As Subcomandante Marcos put it,
“the struggle is like a circle: you can start anywhere, but it never
ends.” In this permanent revolution, there is no End of History and
there will never be 1,000 years of peace.
But
while total human freedom and perfect equality may be fundamentally
unattainable, they can be constantly expanded — not through political
reform but precisely through ceaseless struggle. Political reform in
this sense is just a strategy of the constituted powers-that-be to
retain their structural position of domination; essentially a defensive
movement involuntarily forced upon them by the insubordination of the
masses. Left to its own devices, the ruling class would never let go of
an effective regime of domination or a profitable mode of accumulation.
It is only through the continued struggle of the masses that those in
power are eventually forced to compromise. Here we are reminded of Solon’s reforms
that established the first proto-democratic city state in ancient
Athens. With the aristocracy threatened by a crippling debt crisis and a
rebellious horde of angry debt slaves at the city gates, the oligarchs
realized that the city faced either reform or revolt. And so to manage
the crisis, they appointed the poet and statesman Solon, who cancelled
the debts, abolished debt slavery and instituted democratic reforms,
allowing poor Athenians to vote in the General Assembly and extending
its political powers. His reforms served to reinforce the aristocracy’s
weakened position of social dominance by expanding the ruling class to
include the non-noble wealth-owners and expanding the demos to include the rural poor. Now both groups would have an incentive not to rebel against the aristocratic oligarchy.
The
historical parallels are striking. Greece again has millions of debt
slaves today, while SYRIZA has undoubtedly assumed the functional role
of a modern-day Solon. Just as Solon’s reforms were ultimately the
product of the aristocracy’s fear of the masses and not of Solon’s
reformist agenda (after all, he was appointed a temporary Tyrant by
the aristocratic oligarchy precisely to solve the city’s crippling debt
crisis), so a potential SYRIZA government will probably end up
expanding some freedoms and democratic rights while generally
entrenching the capitalist oligarchy that truly rules Greece. Similarly,
if any greater freedoms or democratic rights are attained under a
SYRIZA government, it will be not be because of SYRIZA’s reformist
agenda but because of the revolutionary stirrings of the multitude that
animated the autonomous struggles at Syntagma in 2011. Leading SYRIZA
supporter Costas Douzinas recognizes this.
The Stirrings of the Multitude and the Revolutionary Process
Throughout
history, the only real factor to have animated the gradual and uneven
but nevertheless progressive march of human freedom, social equality and
democratic self-determination has been the “fear of the masses” induced
by the rebellious stirrings of the multitude;
or, to put it differently, by the concrete fruits of the endless
struggle for human dignity. Still, this line of reasoning raises a
crucial question: what meaning does the concept of “revolution” still
have if it is not fundamentally re-conceptualized as a process instead
of an event? Orthodox Marxists have generally equated the idea of
revolution with the notion of the event: from the October Revolution of
1917 to the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and the Cuban Revolution of 1959,
revolutions have tended to become associated with a clearly defined
moment: the seizure of state power. Insofar as one can speak of a
process, it simply leads from organizational preparations to armed
struggle, and ends with defeat or the overthrow of the government.
This idea of revolution as event
is perpetuated in a new guise in the work of Badiou and Žižek, who
focus on the event as a moment of rupture allowing possibilities to
emerge that did not exist before. In this view, and somewhat
simplistically put, the Egyptian uprising that started on January 25,
2011 created possibilities that did not exist on January 24. But while
the notion of the revolutionary event as a “rupture” is potentially very
useful — and we will return to it later — to equate “the revolution” as
such with the event would be highly problematic. After all, such a
conflation only makes sense for the type of political program that
stakes its entire raison d’être upon the singular
insurrectionary event leading to the seizure of state power (admittedly
Badiou is more subtle on this: see his latest piece on Turkey,
for instance). The problem with the conceptualization of revolution as
event is that it ultimately hinges upon a mystification of the notion of
possibility. Where did the new possibility itself emerge from? If it
arose from the moment of rupture created by the popular insurrection,
then was it not always-already a latent possibility? If popular
insurrections allow new possibilities to emerge, is that not the same as
saying that those possibilities had so far simply remained hidden from
view as the multitude’s un-actualized potentiality for revolt?
Once
we posit the question this way, we are forced to recognize that the
event is ultimately little more than the actualization of a set of
potentialities that are created over time through a protracted process
of social struggle. Revolutionary action, then, should be situated
within the historical process, and may take decades or even centuries to
unfold. It may be useful here to think in terms of waves. Ultimately,
the waves on the ocean are nothing but a body of water in motion — even
if they appear to our perception as separate and clearly identifiable
“events”. In the stormy weather of capitalist crisis, when the
revolutionary waves start building up in intensity, we may be tempted to
forget about the slow movements of the tides and currents that push the
movement of the water from below. We mistakenly assume the event of the
wave to be the real revolution, forgetting that it is the total
movement of the body of water we should really be focusing on. The wave
is merely the actualization of a latent potentiality for movement that
already lay embedded within the mass of water as such. A single wave may
break down the bedrock of the capitalist state; but only after the tide
and waves have pelted it with full force over an extended period of
time.
Society as a Layer Cake of Historical Residues
This
narrow conceptualization of the revolution as an event has important
consequences for the way we interpret history. We still consider the
French Revolution to be the high mark of the Enlightenment and
liberalism’s rise from the darkness of feudal Europe. But it is easy to
forget that the decapitation of King Louis XVI was followed just ten
years later by Napoleon crowning himself Emperor, while the remainder of
the 19th century witnessed the conservative aristocrats returning to
power on a number of occasions. The American Revolution is similarly
fetishized by liberals as the event that established the Land of the
Free, but it took a civil war, the civil rights movement and nearly two
hundred years of black struggle to overcome the fundamentally illiberal
reality of institutionalized racism that shackled millions of
African-Americans into constitutional unfreedom — not to mention the
feminist struggles and indigenous struggles it took to win women and
native Americans equal liberal rights.
In
other words, the tide went up and it went down again: there was by no
means a steady march of freedom unleashed by the great event of the
modern revolutions. The “promises” of liberalism were fulfilled only
insofar as the oppressed multitude actually struggled for these promises
to be kept, as it did in the Haitian slave revolt.
Nor did the events of the French and American Revolutions really create
any possibilities that did not already exist before. The seeds of
liberal democracy had already been sown by Solon — or really by the
Greek debt slaves — and were passed on in philosophical terms by
Spinoza, Locke and Hume to the free-market liberalism of Adam Smith; and
in terms of praxis led from the Medici bankers and Renaissance painters
to the Amsterdam stock exchange brokers and the Manchester
industrialists. Meanwhile, all of this capitalist development was built
on the back of slavery and colonial resource extraction: it was by no
means simply the product of free trade and enterprise. The point is that
even after the modern revolutions that established liberalism as a
dominant ideology, and capitalism as the dominant mode of accumulation,
fundamentally illiberal and pre-capitalist elements remained central to
the material constitution of capitalist society. Crucially, that same
contradictory revolutionary process continues today.
The
conceptualization of revolution as an event therefore also has
important consequences for how we see our own society. The revolutionary
mythology of liberal ideology leads us to assume that, because the
modern revolutions are already long past, our society is now truly
democratic and thoroughly capitalistic in nature. While there is a
moment of truth in this observation, it is clearly not the whole story.
In his book Debt: The First 5.000 Years,
anthropologist David Graeber makes a passing observation that has
profound implications for the way we see capitalist society. While the
totalizing tendencies of the capitalist mode of production certainly
lead the market to encroach upon more and more domains of human
interaction, many social relations actually remain profoundly
uncapitalistic in nature. Just imagine how absurd it would be if your
mother came up to you on your 18th birthday and charged you for all the
breastfeeding she did when you were a baby; or how offended your friends
would be if you invited them over for dinner at your place only to
present them with the bill after dessert. Thank you very much. We
logically and rightly perceive such relations to be outside of the
sphere of capital accumulation. Instead of selling our souls, we share
the love. And so, as Graeber puts it, we are all communists towards
family and friends.
Society, in other
words, resembles a layer cake made up of different historical residues
with associated forms of social relations and associated practices. It
contains the hierarchical social relations of domination that it
inherited from feudalism; it is continuously expanding the diffuse and
atomizing social relations produced by the totalizing nature of
capitalist development; and even though we cannot identify any clear
event that ever established socialism, our society still rests upon what
Graeber calls the bedrock of “baseline communism”, which constitutes
the “ground of all human social life”. Moreover, all three will
continue to coexist in a revolutionary society, even if there will be a
radical rearrangement of their relative importance. While baseline
communism is now mostly limited to the private sphere of the oikos, or individual household, the public sphere of the agora is
being increasingly privatized and usurped into the commodified realm of
capitalist relations. Meanwhile, as the violent police crackdown on
Syntagma, Zuccotti, Taksim and countless other squares around the world
demonstrated, the state uses its hierarchical powers of domination to
keep the masses from trying to re-appropriate the agora as part of the commons. One of the first objects of the revolution is therefore to reclaim the agora from the imperial expansion of the shopping mall and re-appropriate it as a public space for democratic deliberation.
Moving Beyond Capitalism: A Permanent Revolutionary Becoming
Now
that we have re-conceptualized capitalist society as consisting of at
least three historically-sedimented layers, and we have
re-conceptualized revolution as an interstitial process of continuous
social struggle, we can slowly start to see what “moving beyond
capitalism” might look like. First of all, it will be part of a
historical process of social struggle that hinges fundamentally upon the
actualization of a mode of social interaction that is always-already
latent in our current form of sociality. Rather than thinking that we
have to invent something completely new that has never been thought of
before, we have to conceive of our challenge as an activation of
unrealized potentialities and an expansion of really-existing
alternatives. In this sense, we have to recognize that a revolutionary
society is already in the making as we speak — whether it be through the
production and distribution of free open-source software or through the
occupation of bankrupt factories and the resumption of production under
workers’ control; whether it be through the formation of direct
democratic rural communes and urban neighborhood assemblies, or through
the creation of cooperatively-run alternative media collectives and
open-source academic journals — everywhere around us there are signs
that this world is already pregnant with a new one.
Furthermore,
insofar as this process is punctuated by revolutionary events of
rupture, these events will merely be temporary intensifications of a
process that will continue underneath the surface even after those waves
have subsided. Egypt’s revolution is a case in point. The immediate
outcome may have been the Islamists taking power and hijacking the
potential for immediate transformation, but the long-term impact of the
uprising and the broader historical process it helped to unleash are yet
to be written in the form of history books. It is simply too early to
tell how (un)important the event truly was (or will be). To presume that
we already have the definite answer in hand, as Žižek at one point
insinuated when he argued that 2011 will be remembered as the “end of the revolution”,
is not just a dramatic misrepresentation of reality, it is also very
disrespectful to those who continue to risk their lives to take the
revolution forward. Again, Žižek’s premature conclusions inadequately
equate the revolutionary process with its temporary intensification
during the insurrectionary event; a moment of rupture that is by its
very definition limited in time, but whose ending by no means signifies
the end of the process as such. Ironically, he thereby ends up echoing
both the regime’s and the media’s simplistic and pro-systemic narrative
of the revolution as a 17-day event.
Instead,
we should see the Egyptian revolution (and the global revolutionary
wave of 2011-’13 more generally) as a surface manifestation of a much
deeper tidal shift — a sea change — in the vast currents of
human history. Today’s wave of struggles may not yet have produced any
directly visible outcomes and may end up being remembered as another
“ephemeral” and ultimately “unsuccessful” 1848 or 1968; but the
historical significance of the dramatic events that have unfolded during
this most recent phase of struggle should always be situated in the
context of a historical process. This process, in turn, is animated by a
radical political project that — despite its countless detours,
setbacks and contradictions — forever inclines towards the establishment
of real democracy and a radically egalitarian autonomous society in
which the people freely and collectively manage their own affairs,
control their own production, and rule their own destiny: a process
whose outcome is never determined but always-already in the making. To
say that the Egyptian revolution has “come to an end” or that Occupy has
“failed” to bring about any change is utterly meaningless in this
respect.
Besides, the revolutionary
event has a value in itself that cannot simply be reduced to any binary
metric of victory and defeat (which, not coincidentally, is always
measured in terms of whether the movement (a) achieved its demands; or
(b) took state power — variables that are by definition completely
useless when applied to autonomous movements that do not make such
demands on the state nor aim for state power). In What Is Philosophy? the
French thinkers Deleuze and Guattari remind us that “the success of a
revolution resides only in itself, precisely in the vibrations,
clinches, and openings it gave to men and women at the moment of its
making and that composes in itself a monument that is always in the
process of becoming.” In this sense, they argue, “the victory of a
revolution is immanent and consists in the new bonds it installs between
people, even if these bonds last no longer than the revolution’s fused
material and quickly give way to division and betrayal.” This view of
the revolutionary event is not just an easy cop-out to deny or justify
defeat: speak to anyone who participated in any of the uprisings that
have rocked the world over the past two years and they will tell you
that their lives have been irrevocably altered (generally for the
better) following their their participation in the insurrectionary
event.
In this sense, insurrections
have impacts that are far more diffuse and invisible — but nevertheless
just as concrete and real — than any armchair socialist or conservative
critic could ever understand. They have the power to transform
consciousness and permanently alter the individual’s and the multitude’s
attitude towards society; but they also have the power to transform the
material practices that undergird the dominant forms of capitalist
sociality, thereby helping to disseminate alternative forms of social
organization like the assembly, the worker-run cooperative and the
commune — all of which may one day come to form the organizational
bedrock of the autonomous society. Here, Castoriadis was once again
correct to note that revolutionary events, even if they fail to visibly
bring about any immediate changes in the material constitution of
society, are still a crucial component of the revolutionary process
because they contribute towards the ideological maturation of
the revolutionary subject, as well as the flourishing of alternative
practices and their early development into new forms of organization
that may one day come to supplant the institutions of the capitalist
state.
Concrete Forms of Action: Modalities of Protest
In
this sense, the moments of rupture we witnessed in 2011 opened the
field of possibility by actualizing a number of latent potentialities
for self-organization. Most important in this respect were the
modalities of protest themselves: leaderless, decentralized, horizontal,
spontaneous, autonomous, and truly overwhelming. Organized through
social media and at the grassroots level without the interference of any
central or hierarchical organizational structures, activists still
managed to bring millions of people out onto the streets at coordinated
times and places. Once on the streets, new forms of solidarity and
cooperation developed that allowed the decentralized swarms of
protesters to secure impressive victories in running street battles with
the hierarchically-organized forces of the state, while in other
situations protecting and looking after one another during peaceful
demonstrations. From the construction of barricades and makeshift field
hospitals to the impromptu gatherings of citizens cleaning the streets
the morning after a riot; and from the emergence of fully-functioning
non-monetary mini-societies within the tent camps, replete with
kitchens, media centers and libraries, to the spontaneous emergence of
neighborhood assemblies, working groups and mutual solidarity networks —
the protesters self-managed it all.
Of
course, it was easy to crack down on the occupations that formed the
key hubs of these movements. Syntagma, Zuccotti and Taksim all still
adhered to a more centralized logic of territorial protest with which
the state generally feels pretty comfortable. All the police had to do
was show up on the spot and start repressing. What the state cannot
comfortably deal with, however, is the radical decentralization of
movements (which disperses police forces); their unpredictable
spontaneity (which makes it very hard to anticipate new actions); their
leaderless nature (which does not allow for dialogue or co-optation),
but perhaps most importantly the irrational rationality of the
multitude as such — which poses a neat inversion of the rational
irrationality of capitalism. In the latter, the rational self-interested
choices of individual investors produce fundamentally irrational
outcomes at the collective level of the public interest, ranging from
climate change to financial collapse; while the former, by contrast,
focuses on the remarkably rational outcomes you achieve when
millions of people begin to collectively act in a seemingly irrational
way, putting their own lives on the line to bring about collective
change even if it does not serve their immediate self-interest.
In his recent book on the movements, Why It’s (Still) Kicking Off Everywhere,
Paul Mason rightly argues that the network, in this case, simply beats
the hierarchy. Both in violent confrontations with the state and in
large-scale peaceful demonstrations or occupations, as long as the
numbers add up, the dispersed swarm tactics of an unarmed multitude can
completely overwhelm the state apparatus and even win serious strategic
victories. Ever since a 2002 military exercise
showed that Iran’s swarming tactics could defeat the far-superior navy
fleet of the US, American military strategists are perfectly aware of
this fact. Just think of how the London rioters totally overwhelmed the police with their Blackberry-powered swarming. It is for good reason that Adbusters, which originally called for the Occupy Wall Street protests, speaks of “anarchic swarms”
as the “emerging model of anti-capitalist mutiny”. It is also what a
hacker-activist friend meant when he told me at Syntagma Square that “we
are like bees, we operate with a hive mind.” For this reason it is not
fair to criticize the activists for failing to take into account the
question of power. They are playing power politics: they just
contest the static hierarchical power of the territorially-delimited
nation state by mobilizing the flexible power of the network. Rock,
paper, scissors.
But much more than the power of swarm intelligence alone,
Paul Mason even argues that “the networked protest has a better chance
of achieving its basic goals because it is congruent with the economic
and technological conditions of modern society.” More specifically,
while the global uprisings can by no means be pinned down to one
specific generation, there is no denying that the millennial generation
of 20-somethings that is animating today’s global struggles grew up
under radically different socio-economic and technological conditions
from their parents and grandparents. The era of the printing press and
TV — with their centralized, hierarchical and unidirectional forms of
communication — has come to an end. The era of Web 2.0 — resting upon
loose but interactive communities of autonomous networked individuals
whose mutual relationships are defined by the sharing of
information — has only just begun. Of course, it is a cliché to note
that the Facebook and Twitter revolutions are ultimately based on
capitalist technologies. Of course they are. As Marx himself recognized,
the revolution cannot retreat into primitivism: it must be
built on the most advanced capitalist technologies available. After all,
this capitalist world is all we have — and one day it will be us who
inherit its technologies, whether we like it or not.
Concrete Forms of Direct Democratic Self-Organization
While
the new modalities of protest outlined above should be seen as
harbingers of social change in and of themselves, we already established
that we ultimately need to move beyond protest if we are to truly
challenge the structural power of global capital and the diffuse nature
of capitalist sovereignty. Here, the movements again provide their own
prefigurative answers, which are clearly replete with imperfections and
contradictions, but which may still provide us with a glimpse of what a
truly democratic, post-capitalist society could look like in the future.
The key “innovation” here is really a re-invention: the return to the
popular assembly as a basic platform of collective decision-making and
communal deliberation. I can already hear the critics groaning in the
background: how could a complex society like ours ever be organized on
the basis of direct democracy? Won’t we always need some form of
leadership and political representation to keep society from descending
into chaos? The short answer is: no. We don’t. We need organization, of
course, but we do not need leadership or representation, at least not in
their current liberal democratic form. We only need them now because
they form the pillars of the present system: a liberal democracy without
leaders or representatives would indeed implode.
But
not all societies would. In fact, there are numerous historical
examples of entire cities that were administered for months on end
precisely on the basis of direct democratic principles, with the workers
in control of their factories, workshops and offices; with residents in
control of their own neighborhoods; and with all these different
communities cooperating and coordinating their activities through
federated workers’ councils, syndicates and/or assemblies. The Paris
Commune of 1871 still stands as the high mark of revolutionary
achievement in this respect — although it also represents one of the
most disheartening examples of brutal military defeat. For nearly one
year, the workers were in total control of the city. Neighborhood
assemblies took care of all important local administration while
decentralized but federated workers’ councils effectively coordinated
production and distribution within the urban space. The schism between
anarchists, Marxists and socialists did not yet exist, and all factions
worked together closely for the establishment of total workers’ control.
Another
historical example includes Revolutionary Barcelona during the Spanish
Civil War of the 1930s. Here, anarchists and Trotskysts fought side by
side against the fascists (and later Stalinists) while the entire city
fell under workers’ control: the people armed themselves and kicked out
the government; factories were placed under worker self-management;
farmland was collectivized; the bourgeois hotels and restaurants were
expropriated and turned into military housing and soup kitchens; the
city’s public transportation system was free and run by the
anarcho-syndicalist union CNT; money was abolished; wages were equalized
and paid in coupons redeemable for basic commodities; all locally
produced goods were free if not too scarce; tipping was forbidden as a
bourgeois insult to the worker; the militias fighting on the front line
were made up of men and women who fought side-by-side on the basis of
full equality; the officers were addressed informally and wore the same
simple ragged uniforms, slept in the same barracks and received the same
pay as their soldiers; and everyone in the city called each other compañera or compañero, for comrade.
As George Orwell recounted in Homage to Catalonia, his classic work on the Spanish Revolution:
It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal.
A more
contemporary example of direct democracy are the EZLN-liberated
indigenous territories of Chiapas, Mexico. This summer, the Zapatista
communities of Chiapas are celebrating their first ten years of autonomy
since the foundation of the so-called Caracoles and Councils of Good Government in
2003. After the Mexican Army moved out of the EZLN’s zone of influence
following the 1994 guerrilla insurrection, the Zapatistas organized
themselves into autonomous municipalities run on the basis of indigenous
customs of direct democratic self-government. The municipal assemblies
send rotating delegates to the regional councils, which then decide
collectively upon questions of food and income distribution and
taxation. In just ten years, the system of self-government has
radicalized the entire poor population into democratic participation,
while administering fully autonomous schools and clinics and managing to
virtually eradicate the regional problems of alcohol abuse and drug
trafficking.
These concrete examples,
while each is specific to its own context, teach us at least one
important lesson: the establishment of real democracy will
require a radical decentralization of political power towards the
communities in which ordinary people live and work. In fact, it will
require the destruction of any form of power-over that does not
arise from the bottom-up. Still, in a profoundly interconnect world,
pure decentralization alone is not enough: to administer extensive
territories, large populations and complex organizations, it must be
accompanied by forms of democratic intermediation between the different
decentralized nodes. This is the function of the federated councils that
we just highlighted from the Paris Commune and Revolutionary Barcelona
to contemporary Chiapas. These types of councils are administered by
rotating delegates, not elected representatives, who continue to live
and work inside their own communities and who can be recalled by their
communities at any time.
To make direct democracy work in a complex global society, it is self-evident that we need to move beyond the fetish of horizontalism as
a pure concept and accept at least some degree of vertical integration.
This vertical integration, however, always rests upon the power base of
the local assemblies themselves, while the rotation of retractable
delegates ensures that no new bureaucratic elite will be abstracted from
the general population. David Harvey claims
that such a federated system of assemblies, councils and/or communes
would still constitute a state: “if it looks like a state, feels like a
state, and quacks like a state, it’s a state.” But whether you call such
a federated autonomous system a state or not is a rather meaningless
side issue. The anarchists do not. Castoriadis did. But they are still
talking about the same thing: radical self-organization from the
grassroots up. It is important to remember that we are not waging a war
on words here: we are waging a war against capitalism. As long as the
capitalist state is replaced it does not matter much what we call its
revolutionary alternative — as long as that alternative is direct
democratic in nature and functional in practice.
The Two Temporalities of Revolt
So
if these are some of the concrete examples of direct democratic modes
of self-organization that have existed throughout history, and if the
revolution is about the long-term process in which these potentialities
become actualized and these practices gradually mature and expand, then what
will our own future society look like? People still come up to us and
say: “you don’t have a model, you have no idea what you want, there is
no programmatic content to your revolution.” My answer to such silly
statements is simple: do you think a 15th century Florentine banker or
Genovese merchant had even the slightest clue what financialized global
capitalism would look like in the 21st century? Do you really think they
could have foreseen the proliferation of complex financial derivatives,
a market worth $600 trillion by 2009, whose principal product is
entirely immaterial and doubly or triply abstracted from the original
asset upon which it supposedly rests? Do you think the people whose
trades took about as long as it took a ship to sail from Pisa or Genova
to London or Bruges had even the slightest clue that one day their
industry would be dominated by computerized high-frequency trading, with
its lightening-speed transactions in which lasers send buy-and-sell
orders down an intercontinental optical fibre at 26 terabits per second,
just to save a few milliseconds on a transaction that could potentially
result in hundreds of billions of dollars in additional profits?
Clearly such an insinuation seems preposterous. The future is the future
precisely because it has not yet happened: how are we supposed to know
what socialism, communism or real democracy will look like a hundred
years from now? We are only just re-embarking upon the historical
trajectory, starting a process that will take years to get underway and
decades if not centuries to complete. We ourselves have many unanswered
questions, and so preguntando caminamos – we walk by asking.
This is what John Holloway and the Zapatistas mean when they talk about the two temporalities of revolt. First, there is the Ya Basta! Enough!
We can no longer live in this disaster of a system! Not only is it
burdening us with debt, stealing the fruits of our labor, evicting us
from our homes, marginalizing the poor, amplifying social inequalities,
commodifying our knowledge, commercializing our bodies, privatizing our
public spaces, appropriating our schools, roads and hospitals,
destroying our cultural heritage, reducing us to mindless consumers,
undermining our children’s development, preventing the
self-actualization of our human potential, annihilating our environment,
destabilizing our climate, and quite simply making our lives miserable —
but through the combination of all of the above it is also gradually
destroying the very possibility of living a materially and
psychologically fulfilling life on this planet. The first temporality of
revolt is therefore in the now: we must break away from
capitalism now — immediately, this instant! The only way to do so is to
stop reproducing it in our daily lives and to engage in different,
non-capitalistic practices.
But such
an immediate change in practice can never be complete and can never be
enough to revolutionize society as such: if left to itself it will
remain a kind of lifestyle anarchism at best. This brings us to the
second temporality of revolt, encapsulated in the Zapatista saying that
“we are going slow because we are going far.” This is about situating
our struggle within the historical process. It is about recognizing that
for all the immediate urge to break from capitalism now, extant social
institutions and dominant power relations will simply make it impossible
for us to break out and attain complete autonomy within this very
instant, or even tomorrow or next year. In this sense, the rejection of
representative politics by the Real Democracy Movement is not an
“escape” into a form of political apathy or a retreat into lifestyle
politics: it is an immanent recognition of the fact that we must combine
an immediate rejection of the system with the embrace of the type of
organizational forms that can eventually replace it: the assembly, the
syndicate, the workers’ council, the commune, you name it.
Bending the Moral Arc of the Universe
Now
we can start to see that the critical claim made at the beginning of
this article, that the movements want “socialism in the abstract”
without “any particular potentially feasible practice embodying these
values”, is not true — just as the idea that autonomous movements will
always be ephemeral is not true. In fact, there are numerous concrete
forms of direct-democratic self-organization occurring around the world
as we speak, many of which have proven capable of lasting for years if
not decades, from the Councils of Good Government in Chiapas to the
worker-run factories of Argentina, and from the autonomous rural
communities of the Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil to the participatory
budgeting initiatives in the same country. Right now, popular assemblies are popping up all over Brazil and Turkey, while Greece now has its first worker-managed factory in Thessaloniki as well Europe’s first worker-run TV station.
These examples are far from widespread enough to generate the type of
radical social change that we are ultimately aiming for, but they are
the first steps in a revolutionary process that will take decades to
unfold — but which we must embark upon right now if we are to
at least maintain the possibility of living a dignified life in on
increasingly undemocratic and inhospitable planet. These are the echoes
coming back to us from the future, prefiguring another world that may
still lie ahead of us. We would be foolish not to heed their call.
But
whether or not the project of autonomy succeeds and real democracy is
ever established, one thing is now crystal clear. The era of parties is
over. They are dead. Finished. Relics of a liberal polity whose content
has long since evaporated into the misty realm of capitalist
sovereignty. In the process, democratic elections have become a bad joke
about the vanity and impotence of political representatives and their
empty electoral promises. No one takes them seriously anymore. Instead
of casting their votes at the polls, the youth are now hurling molotovs
at police. Athens, Rome and Constantinople burn as the masses cry out to
be heard amid the deafening silence of the establishment’s contemptuous
complicity in the degradation of democratic institutions. The nation
state is equally finished, even though it will linger around in
increasingly authoritarian form for quite some time, drawing on the
cultural politics of identity to divide the multitude and keep it from
realizing its true power. The left fares no better. The road to state
power now lies strewn with the radical pretensions of nominally
socialist parties, thrown off in dutiful worship at the altar of the
marketplace, only to be picked up again by the next candidate once the
seasonal cycle of electoral self-delusion restarts the same sickening,
stale political marketing campaigns all over. In such times of universal
deceit, only radical autonomy from the state can take the revolution
forward.
At the same time, we need to
be realistic: the only meaningful alternative we have — the project of
autonomy — is by no means ideal either. There can never be a fully
autonomous or genuinely democratic utopia, and even the march towards it
will always be a long and arduous one. Society is forever in flux and
the temptations of power can never be fully exorcised. But as a young
Tzotzil community organizer in Chiapas told me a few months ago,
“autonomy is not perfect, but it’s the only thing we’ve got.” Democracy
can never be pure and freedom will never be absolute. But they can
be expanded and improved. Martin Luther King Jr once said that “the
moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” For
King, there was a God behind this moral magic. But now that the gods and
kings have abandoned us, only we can do the bending. Luckily,
the multitude is stirring everywhere and the global revolution remains
in full swing. The ones who desperately cling on to power can keep
sending their armies of riot police at us — but they cannot stop the
idea whose time has come.
Jerome Roos is a PhD Researcher at the European University Institute and Founding Editor of ROAR Magazine. A revised and properly referenced version of this essay is now available in PDF format (more pleasant to read) on Academia.edu.
