PE So what does the work of resistance look like in detail, if one’s decided one doesn’t want to pay the price for democracy? Where does it come from, and what forces are the real carriers of this resistance?
AB First of all, it’s important to think in global terms. At the global level, I see many forces at quite different levels – and I mean forces that are in reserve, not ones that have already constituted themselves.
The first, foundational force is what I call the ‘nomadic proletariat’, which is the collective available workforce worldwide that’s more or less wandering around to find work somewhere. So it’s an enormous mass of workers, billions of people who are trying to find their feet on the job market in one way or another – either because there’s no use for their labour power where they currently are, because they can’t live there or even because they’re threatened by civil wars, terrorism and so on. Even in our societies there are already huge numbers of people who belong to this nomadic proletariat, who came and settled here to find work, young people. I call that a ‘proletariat’, and in today’s world it’s a nomadic proletariat. What’s interesting is that it’s not really a national proletariat of the kind we know from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. It’s a proletariat comprising people from many different places. In a country like France alone, there are now between six and eight million people, simple workers, who come mostly from Africa. That’s really substantial. So when I speak of the ‘nomadic proletariat’, I don’t just mean people who travel around and so forth, but people who come from somewhere else, who don’t settle anywhere and may also move on to another place. Many of the Moroccan workers in France, for example, were previously in Belgium or Spain. These are often people, by the way, who speak several language. Of course this group also includes parts of the Chinese proletariat, or the people from Bangladesh who work in Korea. So it’s not purely a Western phenomenon.
That’s the first category. The second category I have in mind is part of what one could call the ‘middle class’, which is largely concentrated in the Western world, by which I mean developed countries – I certainly consider Japan a Western country, for example. This middle class consists mostly of employees and small business owners, whose status is defined by a certain number of democratic freedoms that they receive in exchange for accepting the capitalist oligarchy. I myself belong to this class, in a sense, as do you. That’s an objective status. The middle class also supplies the masses that form the base for globalized capitalism. Capitalism needs this base. It needs it for elections and such things.
Part of the middle class feels today that capitalism is in a state of crisis, that it’s under threat and that their democratic freedoms are by no means guaranteed; perhaps that’s why these people are realizing that it could be of interest for them to show solidarity with the nomadic proletariat. I saw that with the young people I met in Greece or Switzerland, for example, who were very active in taking in refugees, getting to know them and working with them. I myself have politically supported hostels for African workers for a long time, and know the African workers very well. On the other hand, a different part of this threatened middle class shows a tendency to turn towards fascism. So it’s deeply divided.
PE So there are two kinds of reactions within the middle class.
AB The more prosperous part of the middle class feels very closely tied to the oligarchy, in spite of everything, but the part of the middle class that includes the workers is, in my view, more likely today to declare its solidarity with the nomadic proletariat, or to seek protection in nationalism. But there is a small reservoir within this middle class.
That brings me to the third component: I think that there’s a movement within the Western youth, a part that shares in the worries and hardships of the nomadic proletariat and is even – because it’s always the youth that initiates such things – open to a new communist hypothesis. I think that part of the youth can be mobilized in that direction, not least because they long for a different future. They essentially long to find a form of modernity that’s not criminal. That’s the third part.
And the fourth is a certain part of the intellectuals. Because every movement needs intellectuals. So those are the forces I have in mind: a part of the nomadic proletariat, a part of the Western middle class, a part of the youth movement and a part of the intellectuals. But in all of these cases, it’s always just one part. They’re not unanimous totalities. And everything that happens in terms of an alliance of these elements is, in my opinion, part of the movement of modern politics, and this movement is neither capitalist democracy nor the old communism, and least of all fascism.
So that’s modern politics. Nothing like this exists at present. There have been some first steps, such as a long-standing support among some young people for the nomadic proletariat, for example in refugee hostels, or generally concerning the refugee issue. There have been encounters between junior employees from the Western middle class and people from other parts of the world or the youth, and so on. All those things are part of the future profile of what might develop into a global political force, and there’d be no reason there to abandon democracy. On the contrary, these forces have an interest in democracy: the nomadic proletariat simply because its members often come from countries where there’s no democracy; the youth because they’ve always been democratic in a sense; and of course the intellectuals, because they rethink the concept of democracy; and finally the weaker links in the middle class, because they see far more of a guarantee of their own safety from this side than from the side of capitalist development, which threatens them because it has the tendency to let part of the middle class slide into poverty. So a part of the middle class might come to realize that their interests are not adequately served by the capitalist deal of democracy. That’s what I have in mind, the political landscape that encompasses all those forces, which my commitment concerns: first of all my commitment as an activist – when I go to the hostels, organize groups for African workers, work with refugees and so on – but most of all my political commitment: the reformulation of the communist hypothesis in its full programme, which I believe is the inevitable perspective of all those things. Voilà!
PE You call that modern politics?
AB Exactly, I call that modern politics. But I think it’s in our interests to hold onto the term ‘communism’, because it’s a historical concept and also one that’s notorious and discredited. But it’s precisely that status as a discredited concept that makes it suitable to bring about a rupture. I want to hold onto it, even if that requires augmenting it with an adjective – speaking of the ‘new communism’, for example – and explaining that one has to go back to its original meaning, that is, to the sense in which Marx used it in the Communist Manifesto.
Ultimately the communist experiences in Russia or China were only local and isolated experiences, and both were also embedded in completely extraordinary circumstances, as they were connected to a world war. One mustn’t forget that they were war communisms! They emerged from wars. Not from politics, but from war. They’re the result of a politics of war. They’re marked by that. There was always a military side, also in the other communist parties after the civil war, and even more in the case of the Chinese communist party.
PE And after the Second World War?
AB After the Second World War, there were a number of communist states that had been artificially installed during the war; the applies to practically all the communist states, except for Yugoslavia. The others were a product of the war! I think that all these communist states were heavily scarred by war. That’s particularly clear in the fact that they were extremely military in their organization. The party was, in part, constructed on the military model.
That’s a question that interests a great deal, and this is why: in politics, one is always facing people that have power and means, who control capital, the state apparatus, the channels of information, the media and ultimately also the police and everything else. Today we have virtually nothing with which to oppose that. So what recourse does one have against people who control all of these things, while we stand there empty-handed? What remains is our own conviction and our own discipline. We’ve already spoken about conviction, that’s the starting point for everything.
So let’s talk about discipline: I think one has to invent a new form of discipline! Because in historical communism, discipline was always based on military models. That’s really fundamental. It means that there are those who command, and those who obey; there are the troops and the leader; there are the cadres as well as the grassroots members, and so on. The orders are passed down from above, and one has no choice but to obey. That’s exactly like in the army.
PE Yes, that’s military discipline.
AB That was the case in the party too, incidentally, because the questions that arose there were of a military nature. The story of Mao Zedong is, in fact, primarily a military one. After all, he waged war for thirty years! One has to be realize that! People always talk about the October Revolution, but the most important point regarding the October Revolution is the civil war! That was the really terrible thing. The civil war was horrific! It was in the civil war that violence became the norm, the execution of enemies and so on. And the party, which was conceived on the military model, became the executive organ of all that. That’s why it was necessary to have a leader whose decisions could not be questioned, because in the army one doesn’t contradict one’s leader.
So what could an efficient form of discipline look like that isn’t based on the military model? That’s an extremely complex problem, perhaps the most difficult problem of all. That is, a form of discipline that genuinely enables a discourse allowing people a right to discuss. The difficulty lies in preventing this right to discuss from ultimately resulting in an absence of discipline.
PE Yes, I understand. Do you have a concrete idea of what this new form of discipline could look like?
AB I think it would have to be a capillary form. Many people are currently saying that it should be horizontal, but I think that horizontal and vertical are overly simplistic opposites. In my view it should be capillary instead. There’d have to be separate groups that could act with greater independence, without constantly feeling the burden of the hierarchy on their shoulders. I imagine the interplay of these groups more along the lines of an organism: in an organism, all cells are independent of one another, and every cell is a living organism in itself. Naturally there’d have to be authorities functioning transversally, like the brain, but not in the sense of a permanent organization of the whole capillarity of the active individual groups on a hierarchical model – you know as well as anyone how deep-seated that is among communists. There’s the politburo, the politburo’s standing secretariat, the central committee and those responsible at the federal level. Exactly the same as in the army. So I think one needs a model that’s less hierarchical and more biological.
This means that there are four questions of central importance to politics today: firstly, the question of people’s general conviction, that is, what I call the ‘new communism’, the four-point programme and so on. Secondly, the question of how to realize, through concrete attempts on a global scale, to unify or integrate the four forces: the unification of the nomadic proletariat, the lower part of the middle class, the youth movement and the intellectuals. Here one should draw inspiration from people’s experience, for example the experiences of young people who support refugees. That only concerns a small part of the problem, but at least it’s one area of experience. Or among intellectuals who help workers with no papers. All of that happens in the interplay of these four forces. The third question is how to invent a new discipline. It relates to the problem of organization – an organization that no longer follows the model of the communist parties.
And finally, we have to discuss the issue of violence. Because I think that one characteristic of previous communist attempts was that destruction was always in the foreground. I remember one slogan that people constantly repeated: ‘No construction without destruction.’ But what they forgot was that pure destruction actually precludes any construction. I think that communist politics is rather a politics of affirmation, first of all, in which the desire to create something is the highest aim.
People thought that the new idea would emerge from destruction. I think that was a misconception. When one destroys, one comes to feel at home in destruction, that is, in the constant use of violence. Therefore, what I would say is that any use of force – provided it’s necessary – should be purely defensive. If one produces something, one has a duty to defend it; but one has no right simply to destroy something simply because one doesn’t like it. I think it’s necessary for the use of force to be strictly controlled, for the defence of affirmations, constructions, innovations and new discoveries to be its sole purpose, not a way of blaming problems on some scapegoat that one can subsequently dispose of.
The culture of communist parties was often a destructive one predicated on the idea of class hatred. As it was very much philosophically indebted to Hegel, it emphasized the negative and promoted the idea that negativity was creative. But it’s not true that negativity is creative. Negativity is negativity. The truth is that creation may, in some cases, also require negativity. That’s how it should be understood, not the other way around. And if one explains that to people, this form of discipline, then the result will definitely be a different one from what happens if one trains them as before. In the socialist states, there was a dominant notion that if something didn’t work, there had to be a guilty party who was responsible for it not working. So one would find a culprit, punish him, eliminate him, and then it would work. But it’s rather a cop-out to say there must be a saboteur as soon as something doesn’t work. And in the end, all one spends one’s time with is liquidating some people or other. This was the fate of most junior cadres in particular. They couldn’t make decisions any more because they were afraid of being eliminated.
PE Yes, that was the reality in all these countries.
AB Varlam Shalamov very aptly describes the situation in the Soviet prison camps, where the gangsters and crooks were ultimately more powerful than the cadres running the camp, because they knew that the cadres were in danger of grave consequences as soon as there was a problem. So they made sure that there was a problem, and the cadre was punished while the crook got away. So the authority of the criminal network was actually greater than that of the camp wardens. That’s all connected to the problem of negativity. I think that’s an extremely important issue, and it’s also connected to the question of discipline.