It is dark. It may not yet be ‘midnight in the century’, but the new century, only just born, has had a very inauspicious start: intensified nationalism, proudly proclaimed xenophobia, and a bellicose religious fundamentalism whose most disturbing avatars take the form of a death drive1 – phenomena that recall the horrors of the last century in their most tragic guise. Along the gamut of contemporary neo-fascism, strange alliances emerge in which the most unbridled and criminal capitalist instinct mingles with every kind of identitarian irredentism. Neoliberal globalization, far from giving birth to a world pacified by trade as the irenic gospel of its preachers would have it, is the breeding-ground of a sanguinary confrontation between identities, which reveals religious and market ‘fundamentalisms’ to be complementary versions of postmodern reaction.2 A hankering for origins, a retreat into ethnic community, an absolute submission to transcendence: the great regression we are witnessing is pregnant with new disasters. Such is the requisition of thought by the deadliest forms of this regression that we find it extremely difficult to open up to new possibilities, as if we were fascinated by what is worse. However, we have no other choice. For a start, we must lucidly consider the condition to which we have been reduced.
The so-called governmental Left bears its full share of responsibility for the neoliberal radicalization. Contrary to what it would have us believe, it is not an innocent victim of evil financial markets or some abominable, Anglo-American, ultra-liberal doctrine. Rather than resisting the power of the neoliberal Right, it has scuttled itself, intellectually and politically. When it had a majority in Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s, some thought that a social and political Europe was finally going to prevail over the ‘Europe of the banks’. Alas, the opportunity for a reorientation of European policy was completely squandered by most leaders of ‘social democracy’. With Schröder, European solidarity went down the drain and German competitiveness through wage compression and flexibilization of the labour market was the sole priority.3
To understand this alignment, we must go back in time a little. If it has been so easy to impose austerity policies in Europe, the overwhelming culprit is European ‘social democracy’. Far from constituting a counterforce, it preferred to ally with the Right. Indeed, it went out of its way to prove even more zealous when it came to transferring the burden of the crisis onto the population by increasing taxes, reducing pensions, freezing civil service wages and attacking labour rights. The governmental Left is thus no longer that force for social justice whose objective was civil, political and economic equality and whose motor was class struggle. The Extreme Right needed to do no more than let down its net in abandoned working-class territory to instrumentalize the social anger of a fraction of the popular electorate, directing it against immigrants and a ‘system’ allegedly stacked in their favour.
The present political rot is a direct result of this reorientation of ‘social democracy’, but also of the defeats suffered by the social and democratic movement in its opposition to neoliberalism. Coming up against a brick wall, many of its forces have demobilized. Overcome by resentment, part of the left-wing electorate has been captured by an Extreme Right skilfully exploiting an ‘anti-system’ posture. The operation was considerably facilitated by the Socialist government’s explicit rallying to the logic of competitiveness and unbridled securitarianism. Indulging in a toxic one-upmanship out of electoral calculation, a conservative republicanism thus sought to outflank the most hardline Right, and even the Extreme Right, on their right. Like it or not, this uninhibited subservience has gradually affected all elements of the Left, so that they appear equally compromised in this turn. It is pointless to comfort ourselves by recalling warnings and criticism from within the Left. What is at stake, to the point where its imminent extinction is no longer unimaginable, is the very existence of the Left – the whole Left. Theoretical poverty, intellectual laziness, stereotyped oratory, grandiloquent appeals to rediscover great ‘values’, and shabby positioning dictated by the electoral timetable are certainly to blame. But more than anything else, the Left is suffering from a lack of any imaginary. In this respect, the historical collapse of state communism has made things worse. Yet there is no alternative to neoliberalism except in terms of the imaginary.4 In the absence of a collective capacity to put political imagination to work, starting with experimentation in the present, the Left has no future. The same goes for understanding the nature of the neoliberal imaginary – one of whose most striking forms today is Uberization.
For the remarkable strength of neoliberalism is that it feeds off the reactions it provokes. Why? Because these reactions are precisely no more than reactions. Reaction is to be understood here as the opposite of action. It means a response, of a predominantly adaptive kind, to an action. Reaction is not initiative; it draws on what it reacts to. In this sense, it is subordinate to it; and that is why it is passive. The fact that neoliberalism celebrates ‘reactivity’ is by no means innocent. For neoliberalism, the ability to adapt to a given situation is the cardinal virtue of those exposed to competition, because it makes them internalize competition. But for those seeking to challenge the system as a whole, such an attitude is intellectually and politically suicidal. The crisis of the Left derives, above all, from its powerlessness to overcome the logic of a purely reactive self-definition. While neoliberalism has been reinforced in and through the crisis, the same cannot apply to those struggling against it. Far from mechanically strengthening them by its profundity, the crisis can only weaken and paralyze them. To create the conditions for a confrontation with this system, the Left must stop being a ‘reactive Left’. It must make itself capable of genuine activity. It must retake the initiative. It must directly challenge neoliberalism as a life form. It must open up the horizon of a ‘good life’ without conceding anything to a libertarian pseudo-radicalism that spurns norms and institutions, and with its refusal of any limits on ‘desire’ consecrates the limitlessness of the market.
But the Left must also stop, once and for all, reducing neoliberalism to ‘ultra-liberalism’, conceived as a project to undermine states in favour of the market, or even making ‘ultra-liberalism’ the culmination of neoliberalism left to its own devices. Countering an ‘ultra-liberal’ project of this variety would involve rehabilitating state power and the prestige of public law. This error is still commonplace. Thus, Alain Supiot refers to an ‘ultra-liberal globalization’ whose end result would be the ‘withering away of the state’, therewith amalgamating ‘ultra-liberalism’ and ‘libertarian demands’.5 This view blinds people to the great phenomenon of recent decades: instead of the withering away of the state, its profound transformation in the direction not of some straightforward ‘restriction of the perimeter of democracy’,6 but of a hollowing out of democracy at the state’s instigation.
This is by no means a form of totalitarianism, granted, but it is definitely not the classical Rechtsstaat either. And for good reason. The whole register of ‘foundations’ has switched to competitiveness and security – two principles that are the increasingly open secret of the ‘neoliberal constitution’. That is why it is not enough to speak, as did Jacques Rancière some ten years ago, of ‘States of oligarchic law’.7 That they are oligarchic is not in dispute, but whether they are ‘Rechtsstaaten’ calls for clarification. According to Rancière, these states are ones where ‘the power of the oligarchy is limited by a dual recognition of popular sovereignty and individual liberties’. This definition possibly fits classical liberal democracies, but surely not our neoliberal political systems. In them, ‘popular sovereignty’ and ‘individual liberties’ are the constant target of challenges, denunciations and restrictions. It would be more accurate to claim that the oligarchy’s power increasingly limits popular sovereignty and individual liberties. Above all, we must not forget that, in the language of the neoliberal oligarchy, the ‘rule of law’ refers to the exclusive superiority of private law and, to go straight to the point, the prevalence of property law.8 And this is what Rancière identifies when he stresses that ‘the social power of wealth no longer tolerates any restrictions on its limitless growth, and each day its mechanisms become more closely articulated to those of state action’.9 In other words, oligarchic states erode the authority of public law to the exclusive advantage of the norms of private law.
The precondition for reconstructing the Left is a correct understanding of the state’s active role in the offensive to undo democracy in all its forms, including liberal ones. Mistrust of the state is therefore in order. A basic fiction of statism, the ‘state as tool’ – a lever readily available for public action – serves very conveniently to veil the harsh reality of a state that is no longer a corrector of markets, or even the external guarantor of their operation, so much as a full-fledged neoliberal actor. The neoliberal imaginary is not the libertarian utopia. Rather than consign the state to non-existence, it ropes it into the logic of competition – something altogether different. This imaginary will not be thwarted by advocating the ‘return’ of the State or ‘restoration’ of the Law. That would simply reinforce its sway. In this sense, the return of nation-state schemas10 merely betrays the Left’s persistent intellectual subordination.
How should we set about elaborating an alternative to neoliberalism? A methodological precondition is in order. If the only genuine challenge to neoliberalism is one that counterposes new life forms to it, we should look in the first instance to those who are experimenting with such forms. Nothing is to be expected of the parties and apparatuses demanding recognition from the state and anticipating positions and subventions from it. To have any chance of success, the elaboration of an alternative must come from below – from citizens themselves. This is not to say that we should simply revive the eighteenth-century phenomenon of ‘cahiers de doléances’ (lists of grievances). Far from being reactive, it was actually the latent bearer of an alternative project for reorganizing society. But the grievance was addressed to representatives deemed worthy of being representatives. Our current situation requires us to radically challenge the logic of political representation – first and foremost, in the very way the alternative project is developed. We would lose all credibility if we sought to dissociate the way the alternative is developed from its actual content. If, as we believe, the content must be democracy taken to its logical conclusion, the elaboration of the alternative must already consist in experimenting with such democracy – that is, experimenting with a political commons.
Entrusting this task to experts would immediately invalidate any claim to offer a genuine alternative. Worse, it would provide grist to the mill of neoliberalism. As we saw above,11 neoliberal governance disqualifies electoral democracy in the name of expertise. The experience it calls on is the non-shareable experience of bankers and managers. In this sense, neoliberalism involves a confiscation of common experience by expertise. Only the experience boasted by experts possesses the value of experience, common experience being dismissed as incompetence. To invoke ‘political expertise’ against financial–managerial expertise is, whether we like it or not, tantamount to accepting the logic of this confiscation. However, appealing to common experience is insufficient. What matters is not so much rehabilitating common experience as giving full rein to experience of the commons – that is, the experience of joint participation in public affairs. At stake is the difference between what is common and the commons. In this respect, the term ‘participatory democracy’ is inadequate: any democracy is direct participation in public affairs (not merely in the election of representatives). This is precisely the meaning of what we have called the ‘principle of the commons’.12 An experience that is common because it is commonplace is not as such an experience of the commons – far from it. On the other hand, a genuine experience of the commons is amenable to maximum sharing and, in this sense, can become common.
Here we should recall how Athenian democracy guarded against the risk inherent in the political promotion of expertise. Experts had the status of ‘public slaves’ (demosioi), which meant that they were the property of the whole city, not of a private individual.13 These slaves performed a number of tasks indispensable to the maintenance of civic life: management of the public archives and of the currency, stocktaking of public property, auditing of acting magistrates, and so on. In a city where the annual replacement of magistrates was practiced, along with the principle of non-iteration for all magistrates selected by lot, these slaves often remained in post for several years, conferring on them a certain power over members of the civic community. By entrusting its administration to experts who took no part in public deliberations and decisions, the city aimed to defend itself against the potential threat to its very existence entailed in a certain expansion of the state. Obviously, such an institution reminds us that in Athens the cost of freedom for some was slavery for others. But it also attests to ‘resistance by the community of citizens to the advent of a state conceived as an instance separate from society’,14 or rejection of a political apparatus superimposing itself on the ‘originating accord’ that founds the community of citizens or politeia.15 If expertise was deliberately excluded from the political field, it was so that the knowledge associated with expertise did not create any entitlement to exercise political power. In this sense, the originality of democracy is that it invalidates Condorcet’s jury theorem, according to which the making of a decision is a function ‘of the level of expertise of each of the participants in the deliberative process’.16 The quality of deliberation in an assembly depends not so much on each participant’s expertise as on the pooling of experience by the mass of non-experts – those who, taken individually, are ‘incompetent’.
‘How can we win battles if we never fight them on our own ground?’ Such is the question posed by Éric Fassin.17 He goes further: ‘It is the ideological collapse of the Left that makes possible the assertiveness of the Right.’18 What this means is that any alliance with a party whose only socialist feature is its name has been detrimental to the rest of the Left. It means that the Left’s defeats, while invariably the effect of an unequal balance of forces, are also intellectual retreats, failures of willpower, conscious submission to the ‘reality’ manufactured by the oligarchies. The strategic question is two-fold. Firstly, how can disparate forces be unified and concentrated, when the oligarchies are structured by countless ties of sociability and highly potent forms of organization? Secondly, how can struggles on a global scale be coordinated effectively? For, while the oligarchies have managed to equip themselves with national and international institutions that concentrate their power, in stark contrast to the illusion of an empire with no centre or hierarchy, the forces opposing them find it extremely difficult to conceive and pursue an alternative global policy.
As regards the first part of the question, two grand strategies have been formulated. One – that of Hardt and Negri – consists in banking on the elemental, spontaneous communism of the ‘multitude’ to constitute it as a political subject. Its failure, plainly visible today, stems above all from its dilution of the dimension of the institution. The latter is arbitrarily reduced to a modality of ‘production’ – that is, a material process supposed to encompass every dimension of existence in an undifferentiated fashion. Conversely, a second strategy, formulated by Ernesto Laclau,19 starts out from the fact that the ‘people’ is not a given but a construction. The point is to determine the character of this construction. For Laclau, in addition to the discursive operation of dividing society into two camps – ‘people’ and ‘power’ – ‘the symbolic unification of the group around an individuality’ is inherent in the formation of a people.20 More specifically, such symbolic unification is said to derive from individuals identifying with a leader who shares features in common with them, making it possible for him to be both their ‘father’ and their ‘brother’.21 We might query the possibility of reconciling the condition of such identification with the exigencies of democracy, which involves keeping leaders at a distance by citizens exercising effective control.
Even more important: can the electoral success of Podemos in Spain be interpreted as a confirmation of Laclau’s ‘populism’? To say the least, there are good reasons for doubting it. With the breakthrough of Ciudadanos, the strategy of ‘centrality’ (neither Left nor Right), which aimed to divide society into two camps – ‘caste’ and ‘people’ – has in fact failed.22 The cleavage between ‘them’ (the caste) and ‘us’ (the people) has not replaced the division between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. Podemos has ended up occupying the space of a left-wing party capable of harnessing aspirations for radical democracy, and benefiting from the support of forces that articulated them with great consistency (in particular, that of Ada Colau, leader of Barcelona en Comú). In this regard, inscribing social rights in the Constitution, introducing proportionality into electoral law and, above all, establishing a mechanism for recalling heads of government half-way through their mandate – these are so many programmatic demands that have played an important role. In the final analysis, Podemos’s political future will depend upon its fidelity to this resolute commitment to democracy. Both the spontaneism of the ‘multitude’ and the construction of ‘populist’ reason stumble over the key issue of democracy as an institution run by citizens themselves.
More generally, the question of the party as prop for the coalition to be constructed must be posed, without excuses and in the light of past experience. We must put it bluntly: for the imperative of a radical democratic politics, it is the party-form as such that must be openly challenged. Far from being an organizational structure that is neutral in content, this form delineates a specific institution entailing a certain idea of political activity. If we judge it in accordance with the normative conception of the ‘general will’, there is no doubt that any party is a ‘faction’, if not ‘totalitarian in germ and aspiration’.23 The party emerges as a ‘machine for manufacturing collective passion’, as the tool for an artificial division of society. But underlying such a critique is a view of the organic unity of society that excludes any pluralism.
We shall arrive at a clearer assessment of this form if we regard it as the form of a content constituted in very particular historical conditions. This content is the nation-state as it emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. Inseparable from that content, parties are devoted to engaging in electoral competition for the exercise of power and have a monopoly on the nomination of candidates for elected posts or government roles. In this sense, they ‘cannot be regarded as popular organs, but … are, on the contrary, the very efficient instruments through which the power of the people is curtailed and controlled’ – that is, they are cogs in an ‘oligarchic government’.24 In particular, they are a highly effective instrument for professionalizing politics. It follows that political parties are, by definition, tools for selecting a small number of representatives at the expense of mass citizen participation in public affairs, and hence are fundamentally oligarchic institutions. To this congenital vice must be added the effects of neoliberal rationality over several decades. With the extension of neoliberal logic, what Arendt could still deem a ‘conspicuous abuse’ has become systemic: ‘the introduction into politics of Madison Avenue methods, through which the relationship between representative and elector is transformed into that of seller and buyer’.25
That is why it would be utterly ruinous to transform a political movement like Podemos into a centralized war machine sacrificing everything – especially the primacy of the civic ‘circles’ – to the objective of electoral victory. For this would be to cede in substance to oligarchic logic, imitating the parties that belong to the ‘caste’ system. On closer inspection, however, it is even more counterproductive to hope for the creation of further Podemoses in Europe by ‘exporting’ the Spanish ‘recipe’.
We must not ignore the special circumstances that made Podemos’s breakthrough in the legislative elections possible, and the political victories in Madrid and Barcelona which formed the prelude to it. Everything began with the occupation of the squares in May 2011. Its termination did not betoken the end of the enormous energy accumulated and concentrated in the occupation movement. Quite the reverse, as Amador Fernández-Savater has observed; this energy, ‘metamorphosing, spread through the different domains of everyday life’:
First, neighbourhood assemblies were created, and then came the surge in defence of public services and public goods. The PAH [Platform for the Victims of Mortgages] developed and multiplied, and thousands of almost invisible initiatives began to proliferate everywhere: co-operatives, urban gardens, time banks, economic community networks, social centres, new bookshops, etc. It can be said that the 15M event [15 May is the purported date of the start of the occupation of the squares] covered the whole of society with a kind of ‘second skin’: an extremely sensitive surface in and through which everyone feels what happens to others, strangers, as their own experience … A space of high conductivity where different initiatives proliferate and resonate among themselves without reference to any centralizing instance; a nameless membrane where unpredictable, uncontrollable currents of affect and energy circulate, joyfully cutting through established social categories.26
To ignore this redeployment of energy from the occupation movement, to sever the birth of Podemos from the ‘setting in motion’ of society as a whole, would be to miss the crucial point. Thus, any attempt to reproduce the ‘Spanish schema’ from above is doomed to failure. For what is at stake, beyond the electoral breakthrough of December 2015, is the dangerous pre-eminence of the logic of representation and centralization over the logic of equality in participation, or (in the words once again of Fernández-Savater) the prevalence of the theatre over the skin. The lesson is clear: in order not to become imprisoned in the theatrical logic of representation, ‘we must start again with experimentation at ground level and at the level of ways of life’ – that is, it’s a matter of ‘re-opening the skin’ by inventing ‘new collective practices’.27
This is the only way to open new possibilities for governments themselves, loosening the noose in which they all too readily placed their own heads on coming to power, even when motivated by the best of intentions. The case of Greece once again warrants our attention. One of the Syriza government’s major weaknesses was that it allowed itself to be imprisoned in the most traditional allocation of roles – precisely the one imposed by the logic of the theatre. The rulers play the role of ‘actors’ on a stage and solicit the votes of citizens reduced to the equally traditional role of ‘spectators’ of the political drama. However, thousands of initiatives have sprung from the ruins of the social state, aiming not simply to ensure survival, but to defend ways of life and social existence. Most notably, we find self-managed enterprises, collectives of parents and teachers running crèches, nurseries and neighbourhood schools, the explosion of alternative cultures, health centres combining general practitioners, dentists and psychiatrists, etc. – in short, so many attempts from below to proceed ‘without the state, without budgets, without public subsidies and private intermediaries’, and deserving encouragement from above.28 The government would have increased its room for manoeuvre domestically had it relied on such initiatives, and encouraged their coordination and integration into a much broader political project. At stake, over and above the particular Greek situation, is the relationship between government and state. In effect, the neoliberal transformation of the state has now reached the point where a government genuinely concerned with popular sovereignty must dare to govern against the existing state and, more precisely, against everything in the state that pertains to oligarchic domination. But it can only do so if it knows how to appeal to the movements that form, or are liable to form, the ‘skin’ of society, in order to counter the neoliberal logic of state administration.
As to the second aspect of the strategic question (the coordination of struggles internationally), the answer seems to us to consist in the need to construct an international democratic bloc. Not a cartel of parties, like the Left Front in France or Syriza in Greece – forms that have revealed their limits – but a bloc composed of all political forces plus trade-union, community, ecological, scholarly and cultural organizations. These would engage in the anti-oligarchic struggle locally, nationally and internationally on the same platform. The international dimension would not be subsequently added to the national struggle, but would be co-extensive with it. The second lesson to be drawn from Alexis Tsipras’s capitulation is precisely that we must beware the illusion that a national electoral victory, even one derived from massive social mobilizations, is enough to change the situation. Once again, the weakness of that government was that it let itself be trapped in a face-off with the Eurocratic oligarchy, without seeking to construct a balance of forces at a continental level.
From this point of view, the call to ‘have done with Europe’29 evinces acute blindness. That it is necessary to make a ‘break with the institutional frameworks of actually existing Europe’ is something we can readily agree with. But should we regard ‘the European question [as] secondary’?30 Is it enough to assert the need to ‘start with the essentials in the contemporary crisis’, which is purely economic – namely, unemployment, the exhaustion of a mode of development, and the exacerbation of inequalities?31 In bypassing the political issue of Europe for a particularly reductionist economistic focus, do we not risk failing to confront the question of Europe at all? For such an argument to win support, it would have to be possible to reduce the ‘European question’ to the issue of the European Union as it currently exists. Can we flout several centuries of history by acting as if it all began with the Maastricht Treaty or the Treaty of Rome? Is that not to embrace the Eurocracy’s ‘legend of origins’? Over and above the historical dimension, the European question is already posed solely by the fact that, in the course of a few decades, the construction of Europe has created an institutional and political space, which it is all the more futile and dangerous to seek to bypass in that it possesses strategic significance for the struggle against ordo-liberal Europe. No left-wing government in one country can break out of the monetary and normative iron corset on its own. It can create and widen rifts, lead the way – but it will soon require the support of other governments and the backing of social movements in other countries. The point is therefore to construct the conditions for such solidarity now, rather than cultivate the illusion of a return to national sovereignty. If a political crisis must be provoked, it is at the level of Europe as a whole, by breaking with the system of treaties in such a way as to impose a re-foundation of Europe on the basis of European citizenship. At stake is shattering the framework of the EU in order to rescue the project of political Europe.32
More broadly, beyond Europe, we must tackle constructing a ‘global oppositional arena’. While the immediate terrain of any political struggle is unquestionably the national arena, today even more than yesterday the oligarchic adversary has to operate in a dual political space, national and international. This enables the division between national political arenas to be exploited, inciting competition between populations based in separate territories. The task before us is doubtless very different from the construction of the ‘Internationals’ of the past. But we nevertheless have much to learn from the experience of the International founded in 1864 in St Martin’s Hall. First of all because, amid the resurgence of virulent forms of nationalism, it remains true that ‘disregard of that bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries, and incite them to stand firmly by each other in all their struggles for emancipation, will be chastised by common discomfiture of their incoherent efforts’.33 Secondly, and perhaps especially, because that International opted for a principle of affiliation that remains entirely justified today: any association or trade union could address its request for affiliation directly to the International, without having to submit its candidature to a national organization purportedly representing the International in a given country.34 Here we have a way of imparting a practical political significance to internationalism that remains as valuable as ever. We might thus imagine a European and world federation not of different national parties, but of democratic coalitions combining political activity at various levels with establishment of the commons, as the concrete bases of an alternative.
Can we already define the programmatic contours of such coalitions? To claim this would be to contravene the very principle of democracy. But that principle involves a minimum of rules, or rather one minimal rule. This basic rule is the rotation of responsibilities, which guarantees the equality of citizens in the exercise of power by enabling each citizen to govern and be governed in turn. Non-re-electability or non-reappointment in public office is the non-negotiable rule of any political commons.35 A remark by Aristotle can help us to better appreciate how respecting it is difficult, but vital, for any democracy worthy of the name. While, in antiquity, all citizens thought it right to ‘take their turn of service … nowadays, for the sake of the advantage which is to be gained from the public revenues and from office, men want to be always in office. One might imagine that the rulers, being sickly, were only kept in health while in office.’ And Aristotle adds: ‘In that case we may be sure that they [will] be hunting after places.’36 It would be hard to find a more accurate description of the practices whereby the neoliberal oligarchy corrupts any democracy. Conversely, the ‘many’ (hoi polloi) will only prevail over the ‘few’ (hoi oligoi) if they establish this principle and prove capable of ensuring its preservation. Then, and only then, with victory over oligarchy, will Plutus be expelled from the temple of the City.