Once upon a time there was an academic neo-Enlightenment (Norberto Bobbio’s, for instance) that defined the left as the bearer of values of equality, while the right would be the bearer of values of freedom… but the ideal would be to keep them both together. We can leave tales of this kind to Habermas, the only ideologist still to pursue them. But, ever since this notion of equality–freedom was taken up by Tony Blair in his reform of the Labour Party, the project has ended in nothing – or rather in catastrophe. At the present we are witnessing a series of self-criticisms so widespread that it is not surprising to find even the likes of Pierre Rosanvallon and Anthony Giddens among its spokespersons. In fact, in this period of triumphant neoliberalism, the distinction between left and right had become subtle and shifting. The left defends the welfare state as long as the cost is not too burdensome on the public debt (in other words on the desire to maintain the hierarchical order of society); and the right demolishes the welfare state as long as public order and security are not endangered. The monetary dimension became essential to managing social inequality behind a rhetoric of equality–freedom. In military matters the idea of a distinction between left and right has become even more hypocritical: while the right leads imperial wars and invasions of territories, the left contributes to those wars through humanitarian bombings from the sky. Anyway these distinctions too are superficial: the ideological transcendentalism of the propaganda on both right and left is a very brutal practice that makes no distinctions. Please note: my flattening of the left on the practices of the right really is not a caricature; actually it is not far from reality. Whatever way you read the concept of the left, there seems to be little space for it in the system of imperial governance. The project of a movement ‘of struggle and government’ (the old paradigm of the left) no longer works, because when you are up against imperial governance the capture power of the institutions is stronger than any attempt to renew the order of society and to democratise its administration.
I do not think, however, that the concept of the left has become meaningless or useless. On the contrary, the left can become important when conceived of as a constituent potentiality.
Why did we like Obama? Because both in the democratic primaries and in the presidential election he had expressed the constituent intention (not only as a ‘form’ of his project but also as a ‘strength’ of his politics) to use his executive powers so as to transform American society. That has all turned out to be illusory. Faced with the problems raised by the financial crisis, Obama has not found an adequate response to them, except by renewing trust in the financial institutions that dominate world politics and that had been the cause of that crisis in the first place; faced with the wars unleashed by George Bush, Obama not only failed to extricate himself from them, but actually stepped up the military and policing aggression. As regards welfare policies, and in particular questions of healthcare reform, Obama has only complicated the first reforming steps with crippling retreats and compromises.
But the problem is not Obama (even though obviously he is). The problem is the inability of the left to keep its promises once it has been swallowed into the system of power. Where does this limit lie? The left does not succeed in reopening the struggles while it is in government. Should we conclude that the weight of the structures of power has now reached such a level of complexity that elections can never match the necessary timings of reform? Or rather, are there other reasons (not only institutional) that render left proposals for reform illusory?
To answer these questions we have to remember that in both the United States and Europe there has been a big expansion of executive power over the past 30 years. Everywhere the executive bureaucracy has developed structures that duplicate the other two powers or compete with them: in the United States the legal officials of the executive dominate the judiciary; the executive’s Office of Legal Counsel has become more powerful than that of the attorney general; the economic experts of the presidency dominate the legislative powers. In Europe, for some time now, government has been hollowing out the power of parliament through legislation by decree; ministries of the interior and the police have been put beyond any kind of control. The powers of war and the running of the army represent perhaps the most dramatic moment of this transformation. Why, then, given this disproportion of the powers of the executive in relation to other powers, has Obama not been able to develop his projects for reform? Obama has not put an end to the use of powers that, in the Bush era, had operated in the form of exception; so why has he not been able to use them effectively? To what extent is Obama himself a prisoner of that executive structure of which he should be the boss? Of course, Obama is not a revolutionary but rather a person who came into power with the intention of carrying out some modest but significant reforms. The same could be said of the left in Europe: the last example of strong left-wing reforms goes back to the first two years of François Mitterrand. Since 1983 the left in power has never succeeded in renewing society through reformist projects.
To answer these questions, I think that we first have to note the difference between the effectiveness and success of the reforms of the right (Reagan, for example) and the ineffectiveness and failure of the reforms of the left – and analyse it. We believe that the right is able to make its reforms because democratic constitutions prefigure this possibility only for the right. Democratic constitutions, both the older ones and those built after the Second World War, were constructed within a framework of liberalism. The only opposing example, in other words the only radical left reform, Roosevelt’s New Deal, does not prove the contrary, nor do the triumphs of social democracy in the immediate postwar period in Europe. In those cases it was the disaster of the capitalist economy and the war that had just ended that imposed those reforms: they were not reforms but transient and reversible compromises.
Conversely, it can be noted that the transformation and expansion of executive power in the United States, which began under the Reagan administration, was not only carried through by the Republicans but also perfected by Democratic administrations. The policies of the White House under Clinton and Obama have also furthered that concentration of power in the executive to which we have referred. Even in Europe the movements of the left have not been able to impose onto executive power a force that could break through in the direction of reform.
There have been attempts (and in Italy one is currently under way) to bring about new constitutional equilibria and reformist openings through the use and mobilisation of the judiciary. Such attempts have also been pursued in the United States and have sometimes succeeded: the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court in the 1930s and 1960s contributed to social reform and to libertarian and antiracist changes in the constitution. But, as I said before, this was due to exceptional conditions of economic crisis or to situations of conflict that put the social order radically in danger. Things then immediately changed, and the judiciary once again recognised itself as conservative. Leaving aside the crucial role played by the US Supreme Court in the election of George Bush in 2000, one might simply point to the recent decision to allow unlimited contributions by big business to the election campaign, on the grounds that such contributions are a protection of the constitutional right to ‘free speech’. In Europe too there are, as I said, attempts to consider the judiciary as a constituent machine. What is being renewed here is an old Jacobin utopia, never efficacious and always ambiguous. In Italy in particular, the reforming power of the judges produces a deformation of the constitutional place allotted to the judiciary: when judges operate in non-conservative ways, they do so in a way that mimics political power. And this produces no end of disasters.
It is alarming to see how the places dedicated to reforms, namely parliament and the legislature, have been gradually emptied of their functions. The crisis of democratic representation seems today to constitute the point of greatest weakness in western systems of the organisation of power. The legislature now has a very weak, almost non-existent capacity to propose social budgetary projects, and above all to be effective in the control of military affairs. Its primary role is now to build support for, or create obstacles to, the proposals of the executive. The main activity of which the US Congress is capable, it seems, is to block the initiatives of the executive and to obstruct government. In this light, when the left puts its faith in legislative power (and often this is the only space in which it is present), either it is deceiving us or it is under an illusion about its effectiveness.
As always in these cases, the sense of alienation that citizens have about the political parties (which are the backbone of parliamentary representation) continues to grow. And this distrust is particularly marked when it comes to parties of the left. Some complain that the role of parties has become extraordinarily complicated in the transition to the twenty-first century: in addition to the classic problems of the representation of civil society, the political parties have had to deal with problems of public debt, migration, climate change, energy policy, and so forth, so that within this complexity their ability to represent issues should have expanded and specialised. But in reality it tends to disappear. Seen in this light, the parliamentary system seems to be totally inadequate, particularly because it is under siege from the lobbies. But how are we to reform it, how are we to renew it? Doing so would require new forms of representation, a new civic terrain of discussion and proposals, and new subjects formed through a constituent process that develops from the bottom up. But how are we to initiate this process? The left, whose responsibility it is to achieve this, tells us nothing about it. Debates on the electoral aspects of parliamentary representation have become incomprehensible and pointless. In Europe, when it comes to questions of electoral law reform, you can no longer distinguish between irony and cynicism. In any case people seem to forget that money plays a major role in electoral politics, both through the moneys contributed by the economic potentates and through the media, which are always an expression of the economic potentates. Their claims to represent society disappear behind the power of money. And so the road to corruption paradoxically becomes almost unavoidable, and this is particularly true for the left. In short, the left parties seem particularly unable to arrive at a proper relationship with civic society. We ask again: Why?
Left-wing parties have increasingly become parties of complainers. In Europe they complain about capitalism’s inability to secure work for the people; and the destruction of the welfare state; and imperial military interventions. They also complain about the corruption of their own representatives and about their lack of representative legitimacy. The only position that they are capable of taking aggressively is a defensive recourse to the constitution: they protect an imagined past, consecrated by an antifascist rhetoric and by a constitutional compromise with the capitalist powers. They are affected by an ‘extremism of the centre’, which they often remember as an idyllic past. As for left-wing intellectuals (if such a thing can still be said to exist in Europe), they complain about the corruption of the constitution and about how the structures of representation have been voided of content. The same thing is happening in the United States. For example, Bruce Ackerman worries that the expansion of the power of the executive poses a danger of dictatorship. Sheldon Wolin claims that the democratic content of the US Constitution has been voided to such an extent as to create an ‘inverted totalitarianism’: whereas previously the totalitarian state controlled the structures of capitalism, in ‘inverted totalitarianism’ it is the capitalist structures that directly control the structures of the state. In Europe Rosanvallon, one of the fathers of the so-called ‘third way’, now admits the impossibility of a state that controls the power of finance. And Anthony Giddens laments the excessive power of media giants, denouncing their totalitarian effects.
We have arrived at the (somewhat paradoxical) point where it is only the populist movements – such as the Tea Party, the Northern League and others – that address problems of transformation or reform of the constitution. As regards the Tea Party in particular, although a part of it has undoubtedly taken on the standard rhetoric of the Republican Party in defence of the constitution (with literal interpretations and a return to the intentions of the founding fathers), the grassroots level of the movement recognises that representation has ceased to function and that parliament no longer represents it. So it is calling for a constituent assembly. The programmatic contents of the Tea Party are largely reactionary and often explicitly racist, but its basic political assumptions are correct. You could say the same perhaps of the principles underlying the populism of the [Italian] Northern League. These too are often reactionary and racist, but they are effective when they point to the crisis of the representative constitutional system. The institutional left, on the other hand, has not understood the depth of the crisis of representation and has not grasped the need for constitutional reform. In Italy in particular the left has not yet understood that the recent referendums were not defensive but were actually innovative in constitutional matters. Finally, one of the great contributions of the ‘Spanish revolution’ of 15 May has been to focus critical energy on the crisis of representation, not in order to restore some imagined legitimacy of the system but rather to experiment with new forms of democratic expression – democracia real ya. The Occupy Wall Street movement also advances this critique of representation and this demand for democracy. The camps at Puerta del Sol and on Wall Street are seeking a constituent process.
This should probably be the starting point of our discussion, namely that the left perhaps does not have the ability to grasp the radicality of the problems that democratic politics must now confront: the problems of a constituent power. These are the things on which public debate should now be opened. I believe that the only future for the left lies in the opening of a constituent discussion. So let us start by listing the major problems of a constituent dispositif in today’s world.
The first problem arises from the fact that liberal democratic constitutions are founded on private property, whereas in today’s world production takes place in ways that are increasingly marked by the common. Innovation and the expansion of the forces of production are based increasingly on free and open access to public goods, knowledge and information, while on the other hand the enclosure of the common into private hands reduces and hinders productivity. Capitalist accumulation is now organised in financial terms; capital exploits wealth that is socially produced and captures it principally under the form of investment incomes. Thus, in our time, the social nature of production comes more and more dramatically into conflict with the private nature of capitalist accumulation. This is the first point to be addressed by the constituent politics of a left alternative: it should be framed in terms of the expression of the common and should seek to fix the criteria for a ‘production of humans for humans’. In this framework the first objective obstacle is therefore private property and rent revenue. Constituent power has to organise an opening up of common goods to social productivity and the reappropriation of the financial structure of production in order to direct it to common goals. The reproduction of life should prevail over the accumulation of capital, and welfare over financial revenues.
The second problem today, or rather the second theme of attack of the constituent power of an alternative left, is that of the cognitive value of labour. Here the problem is how to develop, constitutionally, policies of self-formation and common education that extend over the whole structure of production. University policies and communications policies have to go not only beyond the current state of privatisation-related misery but also beyond the level of the public organisation of education, to become engines in the construction of the common and of social integration. It is on this terrain that the left has to prove its existence and its political will. Right-wing populism can be defeated on this terrain, through the expropriation of the means of production and communication that are now in the hands of both private and public capital. Freedom of expression is measured through the ability to make truth a commons, and the freedom to produce is measured through the ability to make life a commons.
The third point around which a left alternative needs to organise its constituent capacity is the need to move beyond political representation as a profession. This is one of the few slogans of the socialist tradition that can be put back at the centre of our civil condition. Building up the instruments of direct democracy is a fundamental necessity, and it has to extend over matters of the security of common life and over functions of protection and control of both ‘privacy’ and social relations. It is clear that the functions of justice also need to be brought into the arena of direct democracy by doing away with the illusion that, in virtue of their economic privilege and social class, professional magistracies can offer guarantees of independence and vision.
A fourth fundamental point is the need to create a federalist programme, in other words with the decentralisation of power across territory. The crisis of the nation-state can only be resolved by developing federal forms of government that are close to the base, spread throughout the territory, and able to act on all aspects of society and production – in short, on the governance of common life. Modern sovereignty is over. The left, as a figure internal to the struggle between powers in modernity, symmetrical to and complicit with the right, is also over. If the left still has reasons to exist, its future lies not in aspiring to join the power groups of the ruling elites, but in grassroots democratic participation in a constituent process that remains always open-ended.
The last urgent point of attack in the definition of a left alternative is the capacity to match governance on an ongoing basis to the changes taking place in the social system. Any system of constitutional rules must be able to be modified quickly when the need arises. It needs to be able to keep pace with changes in productivity in an economic system that takes as its purpose ‘the production of humans for humans’, and to stimulate and deepen the participation of citizens in the functions of governance.
The current phase is characterised by a crisis of all those sections of the left that do not see themselves as constituent. We live in a period of struggles against the economic and political crisis of capitalism – struggles that are increasingly revolutionary in spirit. The insurrectionary movements in the Arab countries – and also in Europe – are turning against the political dictatorships of corrupt elites and against the political and economic dictatorships of our superficial democracies. I do not mean to confuse the one with the other, but there is clearly now a desire for radical democracy that is mapping a ‘commons of struggle’ on various fronts. The struggles today present themselves in various ways, but they are unified by the fact of recomposing peoples against new poverties and old corruptions. These are the struggles that move from moral outrage and multitudinarian jacqueries towards the organisation of an ongoing resistance and the expression of constituent power. They are not simply attacking the liberal constitutions and the illiberal structures of governments and states – they are also developing positive slogans such as guaranteed income, global citizenship, and the social reappropriation of common production. In many ways the experience of Latin America in the last decade of the twentieth century can be seen as the preamble to these objectives, also for the central countries of highly developed capitalism.
Can the left go beyond modernity? Here the question is, what does it mean to go beyond modernity? Modernity has been capitalist accumulation under the sign of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The left has often been dependent on this development, and so has been corporate and corrupt in its activities. However, there has also been a left that has moved within and against capitalist development, within and against sovereignty, within and against modernity. It is the logics of this second left that interest us, at least those that have not become redundant. If capitalist modernity is entering a state of irreversible crisis, antimodern practices that may have been progressive in the past now have no reason to exist. If we still want to talk about the logics of the left, we have to do so in terms of an ‘altermodernity’ capable of radically reviving the antagonist spirit of the socialism of yesteryear.
Neither the regulatory instruments of private property nor those of the public domain can fulfil this need for an alternative to the modern. The only ground on which the constituent process can be activated is now the common – the ‘commons’ conceived of as the land and other natural resources in which we share, but also and especially as the commons that is produced by social labour. This commons, however, has to be constructed and organised. Just as water is not common until a network of tools and devices is assembled to ensure its distribution and usage, so the social life that is based on the common is not immediately and necessarily qualified by freedom and equality. Not only must there be access to the common, but its management must also be organised and secured by democratic participation. Taken on its own, therefore, the common does not solve the problem of the future of the left, but it does show the terrain on which this can be rebuilt. The left needs to understand that only a new constitution of the common (and no longer the defence of nineteenth-century or postwar constitutions) can bring it back to life and offer the possibility of power. The constitutions we have today, as I said previously, are compromise constitutions that were inspired by Yalta rather than by the desires of the antifascist fighters of the time. They have not given us justice and freedom but have simply consolidated, through the public law of modernity, the capitalist structures of society. In the United States the left is caught in the same constitutional blackmail. It needs to overcome it. It must do so in order to go beyond the tragic periodical repetition of left governments that refinance the very banks that caused the crisis, continue to pay for imperial wars, and are unable to build a welfare system worthy of a great proletariat such as that of the United States.
What is needed today is a constitution of the common, and this factory of the common requires a prince. Nobody is suggesting that we should see this ontological principle and this dynamic dispositif in the same ways in which Gramsci or the founding fathers of socialism thought of it. Only from the new struggles for the constitution of the common will this prince emerge. Only a constituent assembly dominated by a left alternative will be able to bring it into being.