Short Dialogue on the Present Times
Text published in Libération, 28 March 2011, under the title ‘Un monde de bandits, dialogue philosophique’.
You agree, my friend the street philosopher said to me one day, that the universal rule today, no longer discussed by any of the powerful of this world, is profit?
I agree, I replied. But what are you driving at?
Someone who unashamedly says: ‘I only exist for my own personal benefit, and I’ll liquidate yesterday’s friend to maintain or improve my lifestyle’, what is he? Come on, make an effort …
A gangster. That’s a gangster subjectivity.
Excellent!, exclaimed the street philosopher. Yes, our world is unashamedly a world of gangsters. There are illegal gangsters and official gangsters, but that’s a mere nuance.
Let’s agree on that. But what do you conclude?
That we’re entitled to refer to everything in the imagery of organized crime, said the street philosopher craftily. The godfathers, the lieutenants, the small-time bosses, the killers …
I’d like to see that, I said, very sceptical.
Look what’s happening at the moment: in numerous places people are rallying en masse, peacefully, to state the truth day and night that those who have commanded them for decades are nothing but gangsters. The problem is that these local bosses, whose departure is being demanded by the assembled people, have been installed, paid and armed by the most powerful of the godfathers, by the superior gangsters, the refined gangsters: the Usanian and his lieutenants, the Zeuropeans. The lands where peoples are rising up possess a strategic interest for these supreme godfathers and the local bosses were the brutal guardians of this higher interest. What’s to be done? Against people who have rallied and massed in their millions, who are unarmed but who are speaking, who know what they want and who speak the truth, killers aren’t enough. The Usanian and the Zeuropeans are forced to adopt a low profile. They even pay lip service to the popular cleansing.
But tell me: is this the beginning of the end for the planetary organized crime that passes for a world for us?, I hopefully said to the street philosopher.
If people can enduringly organize the illumination that is theirs in the event, History can change direction. But the civilized godfathers have hit on a trick. You know that in a corner of the desert with petrol there’s a small-time boss who’s been around for forty-two years.
Ah! The colonel! But it’s not looking good for him either. A section of the population is demanding his head.
Things started there like elsewhere, but they’ve gradually taken a very different turn. Some characters with weapons have taken over the leadership of the event. It’s no longer huge rallies speaking the truth, but little groups who parade up and down in 4x4s brandishing submachine guns, who are led by an ex-lieutenant of the small-time local godfather, and who cross the desert at top speed to go and seize undefended small towns.
And obviously, I said, the local mafia boss, the hysterical colonel, sends his killers against them. But how is this situation a gift for the refined big godfathers?
That’s the stroke of genius, exclaimed the street philosopher. The Usanians and the Zeuropeans are themselves going to take responsibility for liquidating the desert colonel.
But, I said, it’s very dangerous for them! He’s done them big favours! Without flinching he’s done the dirtiest work demanded by the Zeuropeans. He’s intervened in a horrific way against the poor African workers who want to come to Europe crossing his territory. He’s become the ferocious caretaker of the European home sweet home.
You don’t get something for nothing from gangsters. When their interests are at stake, the big godfathers know how to be pitiless towards those who were serving them yesterday. Civilization dictates!
And what are their interests, then, when they send their civilized killers against their crude protégé of yesterday?
Considerable. First of all, they’re finally getting to intrude in the political affairs of territories where people have been rallying and speaking the Truth for weeks. They were almost distraught, the godfathers, at being out of the loop, spectators of their own disaster. Secondly, they’re reminding the whole world that they are force, no one else. The real killers, whom everyone must fear, are them. Thirdly, they’re behaving as if they were acting in the name of Right, Justice and even (let’s not hesitate) Fraternity and Liberty. Since they’re coming to kill the small-time local gangster, no? Whereas he was their precious client. Isn’t that magnanimity? Fourthly, they hope that by scattering bombs around they’re going to return to the good old days when the only distinction that mattered was: either you are for the world as it is, with its inegalitarian laws, insignificant elections, commercial codes, international killers and profit as the only rule. That’s perfect! Or you are against all the godfathers, all the moth-eaten codes, for the end of universal organized crime, and that’s very bad.
Terrible. How, then, do you explain the fact that nearly everyone supports the expedition of the Usanian and his Zeuropean accomplices against their ex-associate, the desert boss?
Fear of the masses, says the street philosopher gloomily. In our affluent countries, where the dominant oligarchy has the resources to buy countless direct or indirect clients, there’s a strong desire for the powerful godfather-states, under the fine-sounding names of ‘international community’ or the United Nations, to settle matters. You see, ‘we’ – I’m referring to our public, electoral, media ‘we’ – are too corrupt. Our rule remains: ‘my standard of living first and foremost’. We’re not really resigned to seeing this principle undermined by the flea-ridden of the world finally rallying to speak the Truth.
So that, my dear friend, is how you explain why so many people suddenly find merit in our rulers, who only yesterday were being barracked everywhere?
Exactly. For the occasion they’ve even wheeled out the Bigmouth of High Lineage.7 He’s previously served for the carving up of Yugoslavia by bombers. He’s a bit threadbare, but still serviceable. Given the opportunity.
Which always makes the thief.
1 For a modern, rigorous literary version of the Marxist theme of alienation – especially the prevalence of things over existence – and therefore of the subjective consequences of the fact that le mort saisit le vif, one might read or re-read Georges Perec’s book Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965). Let us recall that, in the idiom of the period, capitalism’s social potency was called the ‘consumer society’ or (in the Situationist version) the ‘society of the spectacle’. But forty years later we were to discover that, under the sway of Capital, we can have the most ferocious subjective disintegration without consumption (other than of rotten products) or spectacle (other than fire-fighting).
2 For a synthetic analysis of the Cultural Revolution, which is the historical point from which we must start out again if we wish to understand anything about the communist project, I refer to the pages I have devoted to it in The Communist Hypothesis, transl. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2010).
3 It is essential to reconstruct the genesis of the (parliamentary) concept of ‘the left’ starting from its ‘republican’ origins – namely, the government composed of the left opposition to Napoleon, which took power in 1870. It was Thiers and the three Jules’s, as Guillemin calls them (Jules Ferry, Jules Grévy and Jules Simon), who were the depressing heroes of this affair, welded together first by capitulation to the Prussians and then by the ferocious massacre of the Communards. Thereafter the French left (colonialism, union sacrée in 1914–18, broad rallying to Pétain, Algerian War, participation in de Gaulle’s 1958 coup d’état, financial globalization under Mitterrand, repressive treatment of workers of African origin, and so on) has been loyal to its origins. On the knotting of the term ‘left’ to a counterrevolutionary invariance, I suggest some leads in the chapter on the Paris Commune in my The Communist Hypothesis, transl. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso 2010).
4 One of the dialectical signs of the fact that contemporary capitalism is largely a return to the pure form of capitalism as it operated around the mid-nineteenth century is the fascinating similarity between the riots in the Arab world and the 1848 ‘revolution’ in Europe. The same seemingly trivial origin; the same general rising up; the same extension across a whole historical space (Europe in 1848); the same differentiation from country to country; the same passionate, vague collective declarations; the same anti-despotic orientation; the same uncertainties; the same deaf tension between the petit-bourgeois and intellectual component and the working-class component; and so on. We know that none of these revolutions really resulted in a new situation in the state and society. But we also know that, starting from them, an entirely new historical sequence was begun, which only ended in the 1980s of the twentieth century. This is because the Idea was knotted with the event. Defeated barricade fighters in the German insurrections, Marx and Engels signed one of the most victorious texts in History: Manifesto of the Communist Party.
5 For the theme of the Idea, readers are referred to the final text in The Communist Hypothesis.
6 The theory of identitarian objects and separating names can be significantly developed if it is immersed in the context of the transcendental theory of worlds, such as I present it in Logics of Worlds, transl. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009).
7 The reference is to Bernard-Henri Lévy. [Transl.]