It has been claimed that the main reason for the decline of social utopia in the last decades is that, due to technological progress, we no longer need to resort to utopias since in our reality itself (almost) everything is now possible. However, this sense of unlimited possibilities is accompanied by a set of impossibilities: today the very idea of a radical social transformation appears as an impossible dream – and the term ‘impossible’ should make us stop and think. Impossible and possible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into an excess.
On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is more and more possible (or so we are told): ‘nothing is impossible’. We can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions, entire archives of music, films, and TV series are available for downloading, going to space is available to everyone (with money . . .), there is the prospect of enhancing our physical and psychic abilities, of manipulating our basic properties through interventions into genome, up to the tech-gnostic dream achieving immortality by way of fully transforming our identity into software which can be downloaded from one device to another.
On the other hand, especially in the domain of socio-economic relations, our era perceives itself as the era of maturity in which, with the collapse of communist states, humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality (read: the capitalist socioeconomic reality) with all its impossibilities: you cannot engage in large collective acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), cling to the old welfare state (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), isolate yourself from the global market, etc. (In its ideological version, ecology also adds its own list of impossibilities, so-called threshold values – no more global warming than 2 degrees Celsius, etc. – based on ‘expert opinions’.)1
The reason is that we live in the post-political era of the naturalization of economy. Political decisions are as a rule presented as matters of pure economic necessity – when austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done. In such post-political conditions, the exercise of power no longer primarily relies on censorship, but on unconstrained permissiveness, or, as Alain Badiou put it in thesis 14 of his “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art”:
Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become pitiless censors of ourselves.2
Today we effectively seem to be at the opposite point of the ideology of 1960s: the mottos of spontaneity, creative self-expression, etc., are taken over by the System. In other words, the old logic of the system reproducing itself through repressing and rigidly channelling the subject’s spontaneous impetuses is left behind. Non-alienated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization, all directly serve the system, which is why pitiless self-censorship is a sine qua non of emancipatory politics. Especially in the domain of poetic art, this means that one should totally reject any attitude of self-expression, of displaying one’s innermost emotional turmoil, desires, dreams. True art has nothing whatsoever to do with the disgusting emotional exhibitionism – insofar as the standard notion of ‘poetic spirit’ is the ability to display one’s intimate turmoil, what Vladimir Mayakovski said about himself with regard to his turn from personal poetry to political propaganda in verse (‘I had to step on the throat of my Muse’) is the constitutive gesture of a true poet. If there is a thing that provokes disgust in a true poet, it is the scene when a close friend, opening up his heart, spills out all the dirt of his inner life.
The two lines from Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ seem quite an appropriate guide for those who want to remain faithful to communism: ‘If you can wait and not be tired of waiting, if you can dream – and not make dreams your master’. I see Fredric Jameson’s ‘American Utopia’ as a big step in this direction of censoring our dreams. Jameson recently proposed the utopia of global militarization of society as a mode of emancipation: while the deadlocks of global capitalism are more and more palpable, all the imagined democratic-multitude-grassroots changes ‘from below’ are ultimately doomed to fail. So the only way to effectively break the vicious cycle of global capitalism is some kind of ‘militarization’, which is another name for suspending the power of the self-regulating economy, and invoking the non-market command provision of goods in the manner of the American military.3
Jameson’s achievement here involves imagining a future outside the constraints of the existing order by mercilessly breaking old taboos. These taboos arise from the fact that every historical situation contains its own unique utopian perspective, an immanent vision of what is wrong with it, an ideal representation of how, with some changes, the situation could be rendered much better. When the desire for a radical social change emerges, it is thus logical that it first endeavours to actualize this immanent utopian vision, which is why it has to end in catastrophe. A voluptuous lady from Portugal once told me a wonderful anecdote: when her most recent lover had first seen her fully naked, he told her that, if she lost just one or two kilos, her body would be perfect. The truth was, of course, that had she lost the kilos, she would probably have looked more ordinary. The very element that seems to disturb perfection itself creates the illusion of the perfection it disturbs: if we take away the excessive element, we lose the perfection itself.
It is at this level that we should also discern the mistake of Marx. He perceived how capitalism unleashed the breathtaking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity – see his fascinated descriptions of how, in capitalism, ‘all things solid melt into thin air,’ of how capitalism is the greatest ‘revolutionizer’ in the entire history of humanity. On the other hand, he also clearly perceived how this dynamism of capitalism is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism: the ultimate limit of capitalism (of the capitalist self-propelling productivity) is capital itself, i.e. capital’s incessant development and revolutionizing of its own material conditions, the mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing but a desperate flight forward to escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction. Marx’s fundamental mistake was to conclude from these insights that a higher social order (communism) is possible – an order that would not only maintain, but even raise to a higher degree and effectively and fully release the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle (contradiction), is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises.
Which, then, are the taboos to be broken in imagining a future outside the constraints of the existing order? There are (at least) three.
First, one should dismiss not only the two main forms of twentieth-century state socialism (the social democratic welfare state and the Stalinist party dictatorship) but also the very standard by means of which the radical Left usually measures the failure of the first two: the libertarian vision of communism as association, multitude, councils, and anti-representational direct democracy based on citizen’s permanent engagement. The truth we have to embrace is that, if we want to move out of representation towards direct democracy, this direct democracy always has to be supplemented with a non-representational higher power – say, of an ‘authoritarian’ leader. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez’s leadership was the necessary obverse of his attempts to mobilize direct democracy in favelas.
For Toni Negri, the dream to be censored is his idea of the goal of emancipatory movements: the state in which the ‘dual power’ shared between multitude and state organs is overcome and the self-organized multitude completely takes over social reproduction and regulation. It is as if, in the recent Brazilian revolts and mass protests, Negri, a long-time sympathizer with the Lula government, got his own message back in its true form – the government of Dilma Roussef, Lula’s successor, spectacularly failed to contain and integrate the protesting multitude. Although the lives of the poor and the middle classes improved considerably, it was as if this improvement, and the very attempt of the government to involve the excluded minorities in a dialogue and empower them as autonomous political agents, backfired and strengthened acts of resistance.
Hugo Albuquerque concisely describes this process in Negri’s terms: ‘The central issue is less that people objectively “improved their lives,” as the economists, sociologists, and statisticians . . . would have us believe, but rather that they feel authorized to desire and, therefore, now desire without authorization.’ He goes on to argue that the lead is taken here by a class with ‘no name because it does not need one; it is the very expression of many minorities – the poor, blacks, women, etc. – that are sufficient in themselves, that go beyond labels and labeling and simply live. Without a name, this class is in some sense not orderable, since only a subject that has a name, and is thus subject to a regime, is capable of receiving orders.’ The future of this nameless class thus ‘depends on positively embracing its own internal plenitude and differences. Carnival, with its masks and its lawlessness, not the normalization of bureaucratic seriousness . . . will allow a future for these lands. . . . no repressive formula is capable of containing the intense investment of desire – at least not for long.’4
There is undoubtedly a moment of truth in this description: it renders the reality of how the protesters experience their situation, and of the despair of the state power which fails to contain protests through ‘rational’ measures of material improvement. The dimension that prevents the satisfactory non-antagonistic collaboration of the protesting multitude with a ‘progressive’ state power is correctly characterized as that of desire – and to discern the problem, one should give to this term all its Lacanian weight. Desire is always a desire for its own non-satisfaction. Its ultimate aim is always to reproduce itself as desire, which is why its basic formula is always something like ‘I demand this from you, but if you give it to me, I will reject it because this is not really THAT (what I really want),’ i.e., desire is a gap, a void in the heart of every demand. Is not an exemplary case of this dialectic of demand and desire a protest movement that demands from the government a measure X (say, to repeal a new law or to abolish a new tax), and if the government immediately concedes, protesters feel frustrated and somehow cheated?
But there is another paradox that defines the protesting multitude: the quoted text which talks about the awakened desire among the multitudes also claims that they are ‘sufficient in themselves’, they ‘go beyond labels and labeling and simply live’. How can multitudes be ‘sufficient in themselves’ while engaged in continuous protesting, provoking the state power, bombarding it with demands?
Maybe one should render problematic the very basic coordinates of this view, and turn around the opposition between fluid life of multitudes and the regulating oppressive power of the state apparatuses: what if the notion of power as the agency which regulates the de-territorialized flux of multitudes should be turned around? What if the basic units of social life, ‘sufficient in themselves’, tend to ‘simply live’ in their secluded groups, in their stable territorialized bases, while the de-territorializing agency is the state apparatus itself? The destabilizing logic of desire belongs to the fluid political superstructure – it is this superstructure that is in excess with regard to the base. No wonder then that in an interview from January 2015, Negri made two ‘general propositions,’ announcing a change in his position:
The first one is that after 2011 horizontality must be criticized and overcome, clearly and unambiguously . . . Secondly, the situation is probably ripe enough to attempt once again that most political of passages: the seizure of power. We have understood the question of power for too long in an excessively negative manner.5
The critique of political representation as passivizing alienation (instead of allowing others to speak for them, people should directly organize themselves into associations) reaches its limit here. The idea of organizing society in its entirety as a network of associations is a utopia which obfuscates a triple impossibility:6
1)There are numerous cases in which representing (speaking for) others is a necessity. It is cynical to say that victims of mass violence from Auschwitz to Rwanda (and the mentally ill, children, etc., not to mention the suffering animals) should organize themselves and speak for themselves.
2)When we effectively get a mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people self-organizing themselves horizontally (Tahrir Square, Gezi Park), we should never forget that they remain a minority, and that the silent majority remains outside, non-represented. (This is why, in Egypt, this silent majority defeated the Tahrir Square crowd and elected Muslim Brotherhood.)
3)Permanent political engagement has a limited time-span: after a couple of weeks or, rarely, months, the majority disengages, and the problem is safeguarding the results of the uprising when things return to normal.
There is nothing inherently ‘conservative’ in being tired of the usual radical Leftist demands for permanent mobilization and active participation, demands which follow the superego logic: the more we obey them, the more we are guilty. The battle has to be won here, in the domain of citizens’ passivity, when things return back to normal the morning after ecstatic revolts: it is (relatively) easy to have a big ecstatic spectacle of sublime unity, but how will ordinary people feel the difference in their ordinary daily lives? No wonder conservatives like to see from time to time sublime explosions – they remind people that nothing can really change, that things return to normal the following day. In the final scene of V for Vendetta, thousands of unarmed Londoners wearing Guy Fawkes masks march towards Parliament. Without orders, the military allows the crowd to pass and the people take over. As Finch asks Evey for V’s identity, she replies: ‘He was all of us’. OK, a nice ecstatic moment, but I am ready to sell my mother into slavery in order to see V for Vendetta Part 2: what would have happened the day after the victory of the people, how would they (re)organize daily life?
One should thus abandon (‘deconstruct’ even) the opposition between the ‘normal’ run of things and the ‘state of exception’ characterized by fidelity to an Event which disrupts the ‘normal’ run of things. In the ‘normal’ run of things, life just goes on following its inertia; we are immersed in our daily cares and rituals, and then something happens: an evental Awakening, a secular version of a miracle (social emancipatory explosion, traumatic love encounter). If we opt for fidelity to this event, our entire life changes, we are engaged in the ‘work of love’ and endeavor to inscribe the Event into our reality. At some point, then, the evental sequence is exhausted and we return to the ‘normal’ flow of things. But what if the true power of an Event should be measured precisely by its disappearance, when the Event is erased in its result, in the change in ‘normal’ life? Let’s take a socio-political Event: what remains of it in its aftermath when its ecstatic energy is exhausted and things return to ‘normality’? How is this ‘normality’ different from the preevental one?
The second taboo to be broken concerns the problem of resentment. One should totally reject the predominant optimistic view according to which in communism envy will be left behind as a remainder of capitalist competition, to be replaced by solidary collaboration and pleasure in other’s pleasures. Dismissing this myth, Jameson emphasizes that in communism, precisely insofar as it will be a more just society, envy and resentment will explode. He refers here to Lacan, whose thesis is that human desire is always desire of the Other in all the senses of that term: desire for the Other, desire to be desired by the Other, and especially desire for what the Other desires.7 This last makes envy, which includes resentment, constitutive components of human desire, something Augustine knew well. Recall the passage from his Confessions, often quoted by Lacan, describing a scene in which a baby becomes jealous of his brother sucking at their mother’s breast: ‘I myself have seen and known an infant to be jealous though it could not speak. It became pale, and cast bitter looks on its foster-brother.’
Based on this insight, Jean-Pierre Dupuy proposes a convincing critique of John Rawls’ theory of justice.8 In Rawls’ model of a just society, social inequalities are tolerated only insofar as they also help those at the bottom of the social ladder, and insofar as they are not based on inherited hierarchies but on natural inequalities, which are considered contingent.9 Even the British Conservatives now seem prepared to endorse Rawls’ notion of justice: in December 2005, David Cameron, the newly elected leader, signalled his intention to turn the Conservative Party into a defender of the underprivileged, declaring how ‘I think the test of all our policies should be: what does it do for the people who have the least, the people on the bottom rung of the ladder?’ Theresa May said much the same thing on replacing Cameron in July 2016.
What Rawls doesn’t see is how such a society would create the conditions for an uncontrolled explosion of ressentiment: in it, I would know that my lower status is fully ‘justified’ and would thus be deprived of the ploy of excusing my failure as the result of social injustice. Rawls thus proposes a terrifying model of a society in which hierarchy is directly legitimized by natural properties, thereby missing the simple lesson an anecdote about a Slovene peasant makes palpably clear. A good witch gives the peasant a choice: she will either give him one cow and his neighbor two cows, or she’ll take one cow from him and two from his neighbor. The peasant immediately chooses the second option. As Gore Vidal once put it, succinctly, ‘it is not enough for me to win – the other must lose’. The catch of envy/resentment is that it not only endorses the zero-sum game principle where my victory equals the other’s loss. It also implies a gap between the two, which is not a positive gap (we can all win with no losers at all) but a negative one. If I have to choose between my victory and my opponent’s loss, I prefer the opponent’s loss, even if it means also my own loss. It is as if my eventual gain from the opponent’s loss functions as a kind of pathological element that stains the purity of my victory.
Friedrich Hayek knew that it was much easier to accept inequalities if one can claim that they result from an impersonal blind force: the good thing about the ‘irrationality’ of the market and success or failure in capitalism is that it allows me precisely to perceive my failure or success as ‘undeserved’, contingent.10 Remember the old motif of the market as the modern version of an imponderable Fate. The fact that capitalism is not ‘just’ is thus a key feature of what makes it acceptable to the majority. I can live with my failure much more easily if I know that it is not due to my inferior qualities, but to chance.
What Nietzsche and Freud share is the idea that justice as equality is founded on envy – on the envy of the Other who has what we do not have, and who enjoys it. The demand for justice is thus ultimately the demand that the excessive enjoyment of the Other should be curtailed so that everyone’s access to jouissance is equal. The necessary outcome of this demand, of course, is asceticism. Since it is not possible to impose equal jouissance, what is imposed instead to be equally shared is prohibition. Today, in our allegedly permissive society, however, this asceticism assumes the form of its opposite, a generalized superego injunction, the command “Enjoy!” We are all under the spell of this injunction. The outcome is that our enjoyment is more hindered than ever. Take the yuppie who combines narcissistic ‘Self-Fulfillment’ with those utterly ascetic disciplines of jogging, eating health food, and so on. Perhaps this is what Nietzsche had in mind with his notion of the Last Man, though it is only today that we can really discern his contours in the guise of the hedonistic asceticism of yuppies. Nietzsche wasn’t simply urging life-assertion against asceticism: he was well aware that a kind of asceticism is the obverse of a decadent excessive sensuality.
This brings us to the third taboo: democracy. When Badiou claims that democracy is our fetish, this statement is to be taken literally – in the precise Freudian sense – not just in the vague sense that we elevate democracy into our untouchable Absolute. ‘Democracy’ is the last thing we see before confronting the ‘lack’ constitutive of the social field, the fact that ‘there is no class relationship’, the trauma of social antagonism. It is as if, when confronted with the reality of domination and exploitation, of brutal social struggles, we can always add: yes, but we have democracy which gives us hope to resolve or at least regulate struggles, preventing their destructive explosion.
An exemplary case of democracy as fetish is provided by bestsellers and Hollywood blockbusters from All the President’s Men to The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal that reaches up to the President, forcing him to step down. Even if the corruption is shown to reach the very top, ideology resides in the upbeat final message of such works: what a great democratic country is ours where a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the President, the mightiest man on Earth! This is why the most inappropriate – even stupid – name for a new radical political movement that one can imagine is the one which combines socialism and democracy: it effectively combines the ultimate fetish of the existing world order with a term which blurs the key distinctions. Everyone can be a socialist today, up to Bill Gates – it suffices to profess the need for some kind of harmonious unity of a society, for the common good, for the care of the poor and downtrodden.
Linked to democracy is what Badiou posits as the ultimate horizon of emancipatory politics, the ‘axiom of equality,’ in stark contrast to Marx for whom equality is:
. . . an exclusively political notion, and, as a political value, that it is a distinctively bourgeois value (often associated with the French revolutionary slogan: liberté, égalité, fraternité). Far from being a value that can be used to thwart class oppression, Marx thinks the idea of equality is actually a vehicle for bourgeois class oppression, and something quite distinct from the communist goal of the abolition of classes.11
Or, as Engels put it:
The idea of socialist society as the realm of equality is a one-sided French idea resting upon the old ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ – an idea which was justified as a stage of development in its own time and place but which, like all the one-sided ideas of the earlier socialist schools, should now be overcome, for it produces only confusion in people’s heads and more precise modes of presentation of the matter have been found.12
Does this not hold even for today’s French political theory, from Etienne Balibar’s egaliberte to Badiou? Back to Marx, he unequivocally rejects what Allen Wood calls ‘egalitarian intuition’ – egalitarian justice is unsatisfactory precisely because it applies an equal standard to unequal cases:
Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable by an equal standard only insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing else is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will receive more than another. To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal.13
In claiming that it is not just to apply equal criteria to unequal people, Marx may appear to repeat the old conservative argument for the legitimization of hierarchy. However, there is a subtle distinction that has to be taken into account here: this argument is false when we are in a class society in which class oppression overdetermines inequality, but in a post-class society it is legitimate, since inequality is there independent of class hierarchy and oppression. This is why Marx proposes as the axiom of communism ‘to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities’. Wood points out that this maxim, although popularly associated with Marx, originated from Louis Blanc who wrote in 1851 ‘De chacun selon ses moyens, à chacun selon ses besoins,’ and can even be traced back to the New Testament: ‘And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need’.14
While this maxim certainly has nothing to do with equality, it poses problems of its own, the main among which concerns envy: can any subject define his/her need without regard to what others proclaim to be their needs? As we have already seen, we should reject the predominant optimist opinion according to which in communism envy will be left behind as a remainder of capitalist competition, to be replaced by solidary collaboration and pleasure in other’s pleasures.
So, we have to qualify Badiou’s thesis that ‘equality is the point of the impossible proper to capitalism’.15 Yes, but this impossible point is immanent to the capitalist universe; it is its immanent contradiction. Capitalism advocates democratic equality, but the legal form of this equality is the very form of inequality. In other words, equality, the immanent ideal-norm of capitalism, is necessarily undermined by the process of its actualization. For this reason, Marx did not demand ‘real equality,’ i.e., his idea is not that equality as the real-impossible of capitalism should become possible; what he advocated was a move beyond the very horizon of equality.
Furthermore, the ‘point of the impossible’ of a certain field should not to be elevated into a radical utopian Other. The great art of politics is to detect this point locally, in a series of modest demands which are not simply impossible but appear as possible although they are de facto impossible. The situation is like the one in science-fiction stories where the hero opens the wrong door (or presses the wrong button . . .) and all of a sudden the entire reality around him disintegrates. In the US, universal healthcare is obviously such a point of the impossible, in Europe, it seems to be the cancellation of the Greek debt, etc. It is something you can (in principle) do but de facto you cannot or should not do it – you are free to choose it on condition you do not actually choose it. Therein resides the touchy point of democracy, of democratic elections: the result of a vote is sacred, the highest expression of popular sovereignty, but what if people vote ‘wrongly’ (demanding measures which pose a threat to the basic coordinates of the capitalist system)?
This is why the ideal which emerged from the European establishment’s reaction to the threat of Syriza’s victory in Greece was best rendered by the title of Gideon Rachman’s comment in Financial Times that the ‘Eurozone’s weakest link is the voters’.16 In this ideal world, Europe gets rid of this ‘weakest link’ and experts gain the power to directly impose the necessary economic measures – if elections take place at all, their function is just to confirm the consensus of experts. (And incidentally, the same feature characterized Communist regimes in Eastern Europe: an apparently modest demand, totally consistent with the official ideology and the existing legal order – like the demand to repeal a certain law, to replace some top politician – threw the nomenklatura into a much greater panic than direct calls for the overthrow of the system.)
On account of the necessary inconsistencies of global capitalism, this paradox of the ‘point of the impossible’ takes the form of self-reference: the point of the impossible of the global market could well be ‘free’ market relations themselves. A couple of years ago, a CNN report on Mali described the reality of the international ‘free market’. The two pillars of the Malian economy are cotton in the south and cattle in the north, and both are in trouble because of the way Western powers violate the very rules they try to impose brutally on impoverished Third World nations. Mali produces cotton of top quality, but the problem is that the US government spends more money for the financial support of its cotton farmers than the entire state budget of Mali, so no wonder they cannot compete with the US cotton! In the north, the European Union is the culprit. Malian beef cannot compete with the heavily subsidized European milk and beef – the European Union subsidizes every single cow with circa 500 euros per year, more than the per capita gross product of Mali. No wonder the comment of the Malian minister of economy was: we don’t need your help or advice or lectures on the beneficial effects of abolishing excessive state regulations, just, please, stick to your own rules about the free market and our troubles will be basically over.
Advocates of capitalism often point out that, in spite of all the critical prophecies, capitalism is overall, from a global perspective, not in crisis but is progressing more than ever – and one cannot but agree with them. Capitalism thrives all around the world (more or less), from China to Africa. It is definitely not in crisis – it is just people caught in specific explosive developments that are in crisis. This tension between overall development and local crises and misery (which from time to time vacillate across the entire system) is part of capitalism’s normal functioning: capitalism renews itself through crises.
Let’s take the case of slavery. While capitalism legitimizes itself as the economic system which implies and furthers personal freedom (as a condition of market exchange), it generated slavery on its own, as a part of its own dynamics: although slavery became almost extinct at the end of the Middle Ages, it exploded in colonies from early modernity until the American Civil War. And one can risk the hypothesis that today, with the new epoch of global capitalism, a new era of slavery is also arising. Although it is no longer a direct legal status of enslaved persons, slavery acquires a multitude of new forms: millions of immigrant workers on the Arabian peninsula (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, etc.) who are de facto deprived of elementary civil rights and freedoms; the total control over millions of workers in Asian sweatshops often directly organized as concentration camps; massive use of forced labor in the exploitation of natural resources in many central African states (as in the Congo, and others).
But we don’t have to look so far. On 1 December 2013, at least seven people died when a Chinese-owned clothing factory burned down in an industrial zone in the Italian town of Prato, ten kilometres from the centre of Firenze, killing workers trapped in an improvised cardboard dormitory built onsite.17 We thus do not have to look for the miserable life of new slaves far away in the suburbs of Shanghai (or in Dubai and Qatar) and hypocritically criticize China – slavery can be right here, within our house, we just don’t see it (or rather pretend not to see it). This new de facto apartheid, this systematic explosion of the number of different forms of de facto slavery, is not a deplorable accident but a structural necessity of today’s global capitalism. Thus a consequent struggle against it can trigger global change.
There is what appears to be a strong counter-argument against this strategy: many times the Left has engaged in a battle against a particular feature of capitalism with the presupposition that this feature is crucial for the reproduction of the entire system, and it was proven wrong. Marx’s analysis of the victory of the North in the American Civil War was based on the premise that cheap cotton produced by slaves in the South and then exported to England was crucial for the smooth functioning of the British capitalism, so that the abolition of slavery in the US would bring crisis and class war into England. The premise of socialist feminists and sexual liberation partisans was that the patriarchal family is crucial for the reproduction and transmission of private property, so that the fall of the patriarchal order will undermine the very roots of the capitalist reproduction. In both cases, capitalism was able to integrate this change without any serious problems.
But does this counter-argument really work? It certainly doesn’t work today when global capitalism not only cannot afford any widening of workers’ rights, but also even has to abolish many of the traditional social-democratic achievements and gains.
This brings us back to Jameson’s utopia of militarization. An obvious counter-argument to this project of militarization is that even if we concede its necessity we can conditionally endorse it only for a short period of transition: fully developed communism can in no way be imagined along these lines.
However, things here get very problematic. In traditional Marxism, the predominant name for this transitional period was ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, a notion which always caused a lot of discontent. Balibar drew attention to the tendency in official Marxism to ‘multiply the “intermediary stages” in order to resolve theoretical difficulties: stages between capitalism and communism, but also between imperialism and the passage to socialism’.18 Such a ‘fetishism of the formal number of these stages’19 is symptomatic of a disavowed deadlock. What if, then, the way to subvert the logic of the ‘stages of development’ is to perceive this logic itself as the sign that we are at a lower stage since every imagining of higher stages (to be reached through the sacrifices and sufferings of the present lower stage) is distorted by the perspective of the lower stage?
In a properly Hegelian way, we effectively reach the ‘higher stage’ not when we overcome the ‘lower stage’, but when we realize that what we have to get rid of is the very idea that there is a ‘higher stage’. And that the prospect of this ‘higher stage’ can legitimize what we are doing now, in our ‘lower stage’. In short, the ‘lower stage’ is all we have and all we will ever get. Jameson goes far in this direction, breaking many taboos, but it seems that one taboo remains: his anti-statal vision, his traditional Marxist idea of dismantling the state apparatus. Perhaps, the army as the universal model for organizing social production is ultimately an ersatz for the state; perhaps this last taboo should also fall, and the big task that lies ahead is how to rethink the state.
Let’s return briefly to China. A significant feature of Chinese power today is the redoubling of the state apparatus and legal system by Party institutions that have no legal standing themselves. As He Weifang, a law professor from Beijing, put it succinctly: ‘As an organization, the party sits outside, and above the law. It should have a legal identity, in other words, a person to sue, but it is not even registered as an organization. The party exists outside the legal system altogether.’20
It is as if, in Benjamin’s words, the state-founding violence remains present, embodied in an organization with an unclear legal status:
It would seem difficult to hide an organization as large as the Chinese Communist Party, but it cultivates its backstage role with care. The big party departments controlling personnel and the media keep a purposely low public profile. The party committees (known as ‘leading small groups’) which guide and dictate policy to ministries, which in turn have the job of executing them, work out of sight. The make-up of all these committees, and in many cases even their existence, is rarely referred to in the state-controlled media, let alone any discussion of how they arrive at decisions.21
The front stage is occupied by ‘the government and other state organs, which ostensibly behave much like they do in many countries’:22 the Ministry of Finance proposes the budget, courts deliver verdicts, universities teach and deliver degrees, even priests lead rituals. So, on the one hand, we have the legal system, government, elected national assembly, judiciary, the rule of law, etc. But – as the officially used term ‘party and state leadership’ indicates, with its precise hierarchy of who comes first and who is second – this state power structure is redoubled by the party which is all-present while remaining in the background. Is this redoubling not yet another case of diffraction, of the gap between the ‘two vacuums’: the ‘false’ summit of state power, and the ‘true’ summit of the party? There are, of course, many states, some even formally democratic, in which a half-secret exclusive club or sect de facto controls the government; in apartheid South Africa, it was the exclusive Boer Brotherhood, etc. However, what makes the Chinese case unique is that this redoubling of power into public and hidden is itself institutionalized, done openly.
All decisions on nominations to key posts (party and state organs, but also top managers in large companies) are first made by a party body, the ‘Central Organization Department,’ whose large headquarters in Beijing has no listed phone number and no sign indicating the tenant inside; once the decision is made, legal organs (state assemblies, manager boards) are informed and go through the ritual of confirming it by a vote. The same double procedure – first in the party, then in the state – is reproduced at all levels, up to basic economic policy decisions which are first debated within party organs and once the decision is reached, formally enacted by government bodies.
This brings us to the crucial idea of Jameson’s utopia: his rehabilitation of the old Leninist idea of dual power. Is what we find in today’s China not also an unexpected kind of dual power? And does the same not hold for Stalinism? Perhaps it is time to take seriously Stalin’s obsessive critique of ‘bureaucracy’, and to appreciate in a new (Hegelian) way the necessary work done by the state bureaucracy. The standard characterization of Stalinist regimes as ‘bureaucratic socialism’ is totally misleading and (self-)mystifying: it is the way the Stalinist regime itself perceives its problem and understands the cause of its failures and troubles. If there are not enough products in the stores, if authorities do not respond to people’s demands, etc., what is easier than to blame the ‘bureaucratic’ attitude of indifference, petty arrogance, etc.?
No wonder that, from the late 1920s onwards, Stalin was writing attacks on bureaucracy, and the bureaucratic attitude. ‘Bureaucratism’ was nothing but an effect of the functioning of Stalinist regimes, and the paradox is that it is the ultimate misnomer: what Stalinist regimes really lacked was precisely an efficient ‘bureaucracy’ (depoliticized and competent administrative apparatus). In other words, the problem of Stalinism was not that it was too ‘statist,’ implying the full identification of party and state, but, on the contrary, that party and state were forever kept at a distance. The reason was that Stalinism (and, in general, all the communist attempts until now) was not really able to transform the basic functioning of the state apparatuses, so the only way to keep them under control was to supplement state power with extra-legal party power. And the only way to break out of this deadlock . . . here, a new ‘seed of imagination’ is desperately needed.
Giorgio Agamben said in an interview that ‘thought is the courage of hopelessness’ – an insight which is especially pertinent for our historical moment, when even the most pessimistic diagnostics as a rule finish with an uplifting hint at some version of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative: the dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice, it functions as a fetish which prevents us from thinking through to the end the deadlock of our predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction.
1I owe this idea to Alenka Zupančič.
2Alain Badiou, ‘Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art,’ Lacanian Ink, 23. Available at www.lacan.com.
3See Fredric Jameson, ‘An American Utopia,’ in Slavoj Žižek, ed., An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, London: Verso Books, 2016.
4See Hugo Albuquerque, ‘Becoming-Brazil: The Savage Rise of the Class Without Name,’ The South Atlantic Quarterly, Fall 2014, pp. 856-7, 859.
5Antonio Negri and Jerome Roos, ‘Toni Negri: From the Refusal of Labour to the Seizure of Power,’ ROAR Magazine, 18 January 2015.
6I rely here on Rowan Williams’s ‘On Representation,’ presented at the colloquium ‘The Actuality of the Theologico-Political,’ Birkbeck School of Law, London, 24 May 2014.
7See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006, pp. 689-98.
8See Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Avions-nous oublie le mal? Penser la politique après le 11 septembre, Paris: Bayard, 2002.
9See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971 (revised 1999).
10See Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
11Quoted from Allen Wood, ‘Karl Marx on Equality,’ published online at http://philosophy.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/19808/Allen-Wood-Marx-on-Equality.pdf.
12Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works Vol. 24, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978, p. 73.
13Marx and Engels, Collected Works Vol. 24, p. 86.
14Acts 2:44-45.
15Alain Badiou, A la recherché du reel perdu, Paris: Fayard, 2015, p. 55.
16Gideon Rachman, ‘Eurozone’s weakest link is the voters’, Financial Times, 19 December 2014.
17See James Mackenzie, ‘At least seven dead in Italian textile factory fire,’ Reuters, 1 December 2013.
18Etienne Balibar, Sur la dictature du proletariat, Paris: Maspero, 1976, p. 148.
19Balibar, p. 147.
20Quoted in Richard McGregor, The Party, London: Allen Lane, 2010, p. 22.
21McGregor, p. 21.
22McGregor, p. 14.