Liberal Imperialistic Logic
Two centuries after the French Revolution, as an extraordinary marker of the bicentenary, the Berlin Wall toppled—torn down between the East and the West. The pope had nothing to do with it, nor did Western leaders, still less European intellectuals. The drive behind it came not from the outside, but from the inside. The Soviet system did not explode; it imploded like a machine whose internal parts had corroded. Falsely revolutionary—neither socialist nor communist—and wholly totalitarian and bureaucratic, the Soviet Union and its empire collapsed because it was not dialectical, that is, it failed to appreciate the lessons of History.
This event is just like the fall of many of the police states, military juntas, and fascist dictatorships in the twentieth century. Though it was allegedly founded in the name of the people and leftist principles, the Soviet regime was, for more than sixty years, comparable to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s military dictatorships. After so many years in power, what remains? Nothing—a country in disarray, crippled by mass poverty, deeply traumatized, bled to pallor over many generations. There has been zero literary, philosophic, cultural, artistic, or scientific production worth any mention. In short, it was an unmitigated catastrophe.
The Western opponent won without even showing up for battle. What was the outcome of the Cold War? The winner replaced Soviet poverty with liberal poverty. Of course, prison camps closed and the markets opened, but there were more important changes: prostitution became more widespread; dirty money rules everything; the strength of the mafia increased; hunger rose; there is mass homelessness; the only consumers are elites produced by the markets; the logic of consumerism dominates; there is rampant international arms dealing, ethnic wars, and the brutal suppression of terrorism; power is recycled by those once in the secret service, military, and police. All over the world, Marx and Tocqueville are considered nuisances.
In our time, it seems that liberalism is the one horizon we cannot go beyond. Just as in the once flourishing Soviet system, it has its intellectuals, guard dogs, and idiots who serve it. The media is full of countless supporters of America, despite the way it violates international rights, flouts the rules of war, denies human rights, scorns global legal conventions, floods the world with violent acts unaccountable to high courts, and supports regimes that have been condemned by human rights associations.
In the United States, some have even declared nothing less than the end of History!1 What else could we imagine after the global triumph of American liberalism? The world has become One, and no viable alternative has arrived to hold the victor accountable. When History realizes itself through its own conclusion, what remains is to ruminate on the winner, to erect temples to him, to celebrate his glory, and to collaborate with him.
Then what? 9/11 proved that History continues. Like Diogenes’s reply to Zeno,2 9/11 demonstrated the futility of arguments denying the movement of History. The destruction of the symbolic World Trade Center attested to that. And what a result! We were soon to find out how History continues to move in the tidy form of a new enemy of the liberal West: Political Islam, which, in its way, unites those left behind by the arrogance of the Western market. Fighting promises to be rough against this enemy who carries God in his back pocket and believes that death in battle instantly opens the door to a sweet, opulent, and definitive paradise.
It has been clear for a long time what side Europe has chosen. The governmental socialist Left has ideologically supported the liberal conqueror’s troops. It feigns arrogance, inventing a verbal resistance meant to hide its actual collaboration. Moreover, the Right has no problem claiming its natural territory. Democracy is long dead. All we find anymore, in France and Europe, is oligarchy in the first sense of the term: rule by a minority, whether the Right or the Left, who share the same dogmas about the free market and the excellence of liberalism. Thus, contemporary Europe is a useful link in the chain of a future global government.
In France, rallies are now pointless. There could be no directory large enough to list all the former Maoists, Trotskyites, Situationists, Althusserians, Marxist-Leninists, and other activists of 1968 who have renounced old ideals and converted and rendered services to liberalism in its most strategic sectors—business, journalism, media, publishing, obviously politics, banking, and so on. We know their names and about their careers, their journeys, and their self-importance. In their stubborn arrogance, they lecture today with the same unchanged aplomb that they had thirty years ago. What’s the difference now? Today they praise what they once mocked from the mouths of their parents!
Yet there is still and always a Left that has not betrayed itself and has stayed faithful to the ideals it had before it enjoyed power. It still believes that the socialist ideas that were valid before May 10, 1981, are still valid, as well as those of Jaurès, Guesde, Allemane, and Louise Michel.3 Of course, they have to be reformulated, tightened up, and passed through postmodernity’s sifter. But that only makes them more active and operational; it does not take away from their substance. Public sovereignty, defending the poor and the outcast, the common good, social justice, protecting minorities—all of these remain defensible ideals.
Evidently, this Left that remains on the Left is called not a true Left (gauche de gauche), but rather an extreme Left (gauche de la gauche), or in other words, leftist. One suspects that this semantic trick is organized by liberals concerned with discrediting the ideas of the Left and turning them back into immature and irresponsible cerebral utopias. Those people think like the right wing, defend right-wing ideas (the law of the market as an unsurpassable horizon), live like the right wing, socialize in the right-wing world, and speak to the Left in ways that dissimulate (from themselves) the radicality of their denial. They say, “I have not changed so much. Look, I still vote for the Left!” Sure, but what Left? To such people, anyone who speaks of the People is a populist; anyone who talks about Democracy is a demagogue.
When will we admit the sources of our national hopelessness, as well as the sources of the last quarter century’s tendency to vote for the extreme Right? It’s because of these denials; it’s because of the reigning Left’s defection to the liberal enemy, this oligarchy that uses the media to intellectually terrorize any champion of realistic leftist ideas, this renouncement of sovereignty followed by a provision for a third-party authority (the United States or Europe); and it’s because of the failure of the elites in charge of the principal values passed down from 1789 (the Nation, the State, the Republic, and France—rallying points for Vichyism, Pétainism, fascism, and so on).
Inconvenient Poverty Versus Tidy Poverty
French Intellectuals speak poorly of Billancourt.4 What is Billancourt? you might ask. It represents a working class that doesn’t exist like it used to—the one Simone Weil wrote about in The Working Condition, the one Sartre dedicated so many dense pages to in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, the one Camus dedicated his Notebooks to. Billancourt is the new version of these kinds of poverty that Pierre Bourdieu analyzed, laid bare, and dissected in Weight of the World. It is something more. It consists of secretaries and caretakers, farmers and the unemployed, small-business owners and public school teachers, people from the outskirts and immigrants, single mothers and menial laborers, nightclub bouncers and part-time performers, laid-off steel workers and those whose unemployment benefits have run out, temporary and full-time community police—people who have been forgotten by politicians, victims of liberal violence, people left to fend for themselves by consumerist society.
Must we blame Bourdieu if he does not discover some secret about that poverty? Must we make a scapegoat of the man who gave a voice to those forgotten people? Must we drag his name, work, honor, methods, career, and reputation through the mud, as was done by almost every journalist and their intellectual friends? They kept it up until the hour of his death. I said what I thought of their garbage in Obituary for Pierre Bourdieu: A Celebration of the Splenetic Spirit.
They cry, “Down with those who hold up a mirror!” But we do not call out those responsible for the state of affairs—this widespread poverty. Rather, we spare them; we avoid mentioning them or naming them. Then we raise a hue and cry when someone carries out the work of an engaged intellectual and philosopher, a sociologist who talks about the problems, identifies them, formulates them, and appeals to the testimonies of the faceless and nameless victims. “Damn him who does not collaborate, who resists!” We set on him like dogs that will stop at nothing to discredit, refute, and lie—just like Jean Kanapa in his finest moments.5
So let’s ignore the smelly peasants selling newspapers and those we step over in the street on our way back home. Instead, let’s take a plane to Tehran, Kigali, Sarajevo, Algiers, Baghdad, or Grozny—those models of tidy poverty where we can send news reports while standing between two five-star hotels. Then, three days later, we can read lessons about humanism, human rights, and international politics in the columns of newspapers that welcome these reports into their pages out of professional habit, like some other professionals open their legs. What about Billancourt? Too lower class, too trivial, too provincial…
Poverty is in the background, in our cities, and all over the world, so we can orient ourselves in the world like Malraux,6 dedicating our bodies, talents, and energies to chronicling the conditions of the world. We can convert that poverty to hard cash by turning ourselves into a valuable commodity in publishing, syndication, and the marketplaces of worldly, sensational, and media-savvy intelligence. Marx tried to warn the greenhorns that history unfolds according to a merciless law: tragedy repeats itself, for sure, but as comedy. René Char and George Orwell did not get their material out of nowhere.
In Rebel Politics I describe a new kind of hell using the image of the ditches in The Divine Comedy. There are the enervated and physically incapable: the elderly, the insane, the ill, the incarcerated; the unable: immigrants, illegals, political refugees, the unemployed, menial laborers, migrant workers; those exploited by society, nomads, and the unsure: contract workers and apprentices; and the sedentary but unfree: adolescents, wageworkers, prostitutes, proletarians, part-time workers. These are the millions of people excluded from society and left out by purportedly democratic logic. The oligarchs don’t want to acknowledge the existence of those who are proof of the waste of a system working in full order, so they are banned from visibility. They are never represented, never called on, always marginalized. They are invisible within culture, politics, literature, television, media and publicity, film, reporting, academia, and publishing. The oligarchs are incensed by any pushback from them, and they authorize any means to annihilate them, impede them, or break them down. This includes radically immoral solutions.
So this suffering part of the population is negated, and lights are put on the tidy poverty of the third world. Our intellectuals lose their connection to society, and we deny the inconvenient poverty in our own backyards. The leftist government has fallen apart and there has arisen a tendency toward libertarian liberalism in which we observe plenty of liberalism, but very little libertarianism. These conditions lead to three possibilities: abstention from politics and voting; the refuge-seeking vote in the most idealistic protestors; and the growth of the nebulous extreme right wing. Denying inconvenient poverty brings a return of repressed nihilism.
Micrological Fascism
We are no longer in the age of the helmeted, armed, and jack-booted fascist; but at least that formula had the advantage of being visible. Its exploitation played out in the street, commissariats, military academies, the media, universities, and other sites of civil society. We no longer see any lawless coup d’états coming out of beer gardens, aided by a column of tanks and a troop of elite soldiers. While the United States acted like old-fashioned fascists in their handling of Latin America at the end of the twentieth century, and certain African countries continue to act in this way, fascism generally no longer manifests so crudely. The fascism of the lion has given way to the fascism of the fox, and this needs to be analyzed.
The fascism of the lion was first. It was banal, classical, chronicled in history books, built on the supposition of a mystical national community that visibly ingests and digests individuals for the profit of a mystical national body: Race, People, Nation, Reich. Under such rule, private life disappears within the athanor of the all-powerful collectivity. Propaganda invades every area of life and makes people read, think, eat, dress, and behave in a clear, determined, and singular manner. Every alternative discourse is made difficult, censured, maligned, and essentially prohibited. Reason counts for nothing. It is presented as an element of decadence, a rotting ferment. One prefers the national instinct, popular drives, and the irrational energy of the masses riled up through impassioned speeches and the media’s techniques of subjection. Such pure unreason requires a charismatic leader, a great organizer around which the movement can crystallize.
Then we have the fascism of the fox. It learns from the past, constructing formal structures and symbolic revolutions. Liberalism is fluid, which is precisely how it gets its power. Coups are not popular: they are too visible and too indefensible in this era of global media dominion over images. Coups are the wrong kind of thing…Hence, we put aside the Machiavellian lion’s violence in favor of the fox—part of the same bestiary, but celebrated for its cleverness, cunning, and knavery. The lion uses the power of the army; the fox the force of subtle schemes.
In terms of content, things have changed very little. It is still about reducing diversity into unity and getting individuals to submit to a community that transcends them. We still use magic thinking and instincts more than reason. There is still intimidation and we still justify terror by calling it a fight against enemies we have turned into scapegoats. Our bodies are not really constrained, but our minds are dominated. Our flesh is not mistreated, but our spirit is pummeled. We don’t step away from the group; our minds are told not to think, or to think more. Nothing is new, and if it is, we repackage it.
The enterprise is validated by its own success. In the areas now under liberal domination—the territory of Maastrichtian Europe, for example—publishing and the press serve up the same insipid broth. The politicians in power on the Left and Right defend the same program, orchestrating false differences as a spectacle. The dominant way of thinking celebrates the thought of those who dominate. The market has power over every area—education, health, and culture, of course, but also the army and the police. Parties, syndicates, and parliaments join in an oligarchy that reduces social issues to a oneness. We discredit public use of critical reasoning in favor of irrational logics of communication—cleverly theatricalized and choreographed by monopolistic financial consortiums. Every day the lives of the masses are manipulated by a use of television that gathers people in. Every constructive project is halted for the benefit of a consumerist religion. And so on.
The fox’s fascism is micrological because it manifests in subtle and tiny moments. As Michel Foucault taught us, power is everywhere. It is in the intervals, interstices, and gaps of reality: here, there, outside, on the tiny surfaces, in the narrow spaces. The fox’s cleverness produces thousands of effects in a single day.
La Boétie taught us another magnificent lesson: In Discourse on Voluntary Servitude he argues that all power unfolds with the consent of those who are subject to it. This kind of microfascism does not descend from on high, but propagates like a rhizome with the help of passersby—perhaps each one of us—who become like electric conductors of its negative energy. We have to recognize this before we can build a logic of resistance. When we know where to find alienation, how it works, and where it comes from, we can finally have some optimism about what is to come.