The Un-Shock Doctrine

by Slavoj Žižek, Guernica

The Left today faces the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing with political economy—that there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, violating its rules will indeed cause economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, facilitated by global market conditions (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists, but an urgency imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse. For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.

The idea of communism, as elaborated by Alain Badiou, remains a Kantian regulative idea lacking any mediation with historical reality. Badiou emphatically rejects any such mediation as a regression to an historicist evolutionism which betrays the purity of the Idea, reducing it to a positive order of Being (the Revolution conceived as a moment of the positive historical process). This Kantian mode of reference effectively allows us to characterize Badiou’s deployment of the “communist hypothesis” as a Kritik der reinen Kommunismus. As such, it invites us to repeat the passage from Kant to Hegel—to re-conceive the Idea of communism as an Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, as an Idea which is in the process of its own actualization. The Idea that “makes itself what it is” is thus no longer a concept opposed to reality as its lifeless shadow, but one which gives reality and existence to itself. Recall Hegel’s infamous “idealist” formula according to which Spirit is its own result, the product of itself. Such statements usually provoke sarcastic “materialist” comments (“so it is not actual people who think and realize ideas, but Spirit itself, which, like Baron Munchausen, pulls itself up by its own hair”). But consider, for example, a religious Idea which catches the spirit of the masses and becomes a major historical force? In a way, is this not a case of an Idea actualizing itself, becoming a “product of itself”? Does it not, in a kind of closed loop, motivate people to fight for it and to realize it? What the notion of the Idea as a product of itself makes visible is thus not a process of idealist self-engendering, but the materialist fact that an Idea exists only in and through the activity of the individuals engaged with it and motivated by it. What we have here is emphatically not the kind of historicist/evolutionist position that Badiou rejects, but something much more radical: an insight into how historical reality itself is not a positive order, but a “not-all” which points towards its own future. It is this inclusion of the future as the gap in the present order that renders the latter “not-all,” ontologically incomplete, and thus explodes the self-enclosure of the historicist/ evolutionary process. In short, it is this gap which enables us to distinguish historicity proper from historicism.

Why, then, the Idea of communism? For three reasons, which echo the Lacanian triad of the I-S-R: at the Imaginary level, because it is necessary to maintain continuity with the long tradition of radical millenarian and egalitarian rebellions; at the Symbolic level, because we need to determine the precise conditions under which, in each historical epoch, the space for communism may be opened up; finally, at the level of the Real, because we must assume the harshness of what Badiou calls the eternal communist invariants (egalitarian justice, voluntarism, terror, “trust in the people”). Such an Idea of communism is clearly opposed to socialism, which is precisely not an Idea, but a vague communitarian notion applicable to all kinds of organic social bonds, from spiritualized ideas of solidarity (“we are all part of the same body”) right up to fascist corporatism. The Really Existing Socialist states were precisely that: positively existing states, whereas communism is in its very notion anti-statist.

The problem is how to avoid radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, or retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality (for Buddhism we are all equal—in nirvana).

Where does this eternal communist Idea come from? Is it part of human nature, or, as Habermasians propose, an ethical premise (of equality or reciprocal recognition) inscribed into the universal symbolic order? Its eternal character cannot, after all, be accounted for by specific historical conditions. The key to resolving this problem is to focus on that against which the communist Idea rebels: namely, the hierarchical social body whose ideology was first formulated in great sacred texts such as The Book of Manu. As was demonstrated by Louis Dumont in his Homo hierarchicus, social hierarchy is always inconsistent; that is, its very structure relies on a paradoxical reversal (the higher sphere is, of course, higher than the lower, but, within the lower order, the lower is higher than the higher) on account of which the social hierarchy can never fully encompass all its elements. It is this constitutive inconsistency that gives birth to what Rancière calls “the part of no-part,” that singular element which remains out of place in the hierarchical order, and, as such, functions as a singular universal, giving body to the universality of the society in question. The communist Idea, then, is the eternal demand co-substantial with this element that lacks its proper place in the social hierarchy (“we are nothing, and we want to be all”).

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Müntzer, including within the great religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalism versus Confucianism, etc.). The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality (for Buddhism we are all equal—in nirvana). It is here that the originality of Western thought becomes clear, particularly in its three great historical ruptures: Greek philosophy’s break with the mythical universe; Christianity’s break with the pagan universe; and modern democracy’s break with traditional authority. In each case, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a new positive order (limited, but nonetheless actual).

The democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one directly qualified for the vacancy, either by tradition, charisma, or leadership qualities.

In short, the wager of Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to being expressed in short ecstatic outbursts after which things are returned to normal. On the contrary, radical negativity, as the undermining of every traditional hierarchy, has the potential to articulate itself in a positive order within which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. Such is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith can not only be expressed in, but also exists as, the collective of believers. And this faith is itself based on “terror,” as indicated by Christ’s insistence that he brings a sword, not peace, that whoever does not hate his father and mother is not a true follower, and so on. The content of this terror thus involves the rejection of all traditional hierarchical and community ties, with the wager that a different collective link is possible—an egalitarian bond between believers connected by agape as political love.

Democracy itself provides another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror. As Claude Lefort notes, the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one directly qualified for the vacancy, either by tradition, charisma, or leadership qualities. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it must be maintained at all costs. This is also why Hegel’s deduction of the monarchy can be given a democratic supplement: Hegel insists on the monarch as the “irrational” (i.e., contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power apart from the expertise embodied in the state bureaucracy. While the bureaucrats are chosen on account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is the king by birth—that is, ultimately, he is chosen by lot, on account of natural contingency. The danger Hegel was trying to avoid here exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy, which was precisely the rule of (Communist) experts: Stalin is not a figure of a master, but the one who “really knows,” an expert in all imaginable fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.

We can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral result: far from being a limitation, the fact that elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totalitarian temptation (which is why, as was already clear to the Ancient Greeks, choosing rulers by lot is the most democratic form of selection). That is to say, as Lefort has again demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what for traditional authoritarian power is the moment of greatest crisis—the moment of transition from one master to another, the panic-inducing instant at which “the throne is empty”—into the very source of its strength: democratic elections thus represent the passage through that zero-point at which the complex network of social links is dissolved into a purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchical links, is thereby re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable political order.

Measured by his own standards of what a rational state should be, Hegel was thus perhaps wrong to fear universal democratic suffrage (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1832). It is precisely democracy (universal suffrage) which, much more appropriately than Hegel’s own State of estates, performs the “magic” trick of converting radical negativity into a new political order: in democracy, the negativity of terror (the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify with the place of power) is aufgehoben and turned into the positive form of the democratic procedure.

The question today, now that we know the limitations of that formal procedure, is whether we can imagine a step further in this process whereby egalitarian negativity reverts into a new positive order. We should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including in scientific communities. The way the CERN [acronym for what is now known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research] community functions is indicative here: in an almost utopian manner, individual efforts are undertaken in a collective non-hierarchical spirit, and dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs any material considerations. But are such traces, no matter how sublime, merely that—marginal traces?

In his intervention at the 2010 Marxism conference in London (organized by the Socialist Workers’s Party), Alex Callinicos evoked his dream of a future communist society in which there would be museums of capitalism, displaying to the public the artifacts of this irrational and inhuman social formation. The unintended irony of this dream is that today, the only museums of this kind are museums of Communism, displaying its horrors. So, again, what to do in such a situation? Two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no immediate European revolution, and that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote: “What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?”

Is this not the predicament of the Morales government in Bolivia, of the (former) Aristide government in Haiti, of the Maoist government in Nepal? They came to power through “fair” democratic elections, rather than insurrection, but having gained power, they exerted it in a way which was (partially, at least) “non-statist”: directly mobilizing their grassroots supporters, bypassing the Party-State network. Their situation is “objectively” hopeless: the whole drift of history is against them, they cannot rely on any “objective tendencies” pushing in their direction, all they can do is to improvise, do what they can in a desperate situation. Nevertheless, does this not give them a unique freedom? (And are we—the contemporary Left—not in exactly the same situation?) It is tempting to apply here the old distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom for”: does their freedom from History (with its laws and objective tendencies) not sustain their freedom for creative experimenting? In their activity, they can rely only on the collective will of their supporters.

Wherever an opening for taking power does arise, the Left should seize the opportunity and confront the problems head-on, making the best of a bad situation.

According to Badiou, “The model of the centralized party made possible a new form of power that was nothing less than the power of the party itself. We are now at what I call a ‘distance from the State.’ This is first of all because the question of power is no longer ‘immediate’: nowhere does a ‘taking power’ in the insurrectional sense seem possible today.” But does this not rely on an all too simple alternative? What about heroically assuming whatever power may be available—in the full awareness that the “objective conditions” are not “mature” enough for radical change—and, against the grain, do what one can?

Let us return to the situation in Greece in the summer of 2010, when popular discontent brought about the delegitimization of the entire political class and the country approached a power vacuum. Had there been any chance for the Left to take over state power, what could it have done in such a situation of “complete hopelessness”? Of course (if we may permit ourselves this personification), the capitalist system would have gleefully allowed the Left to take over, if only to ensure that Greece ended up in a state of economic chaos, which would then serve as a severe lesson to others. Nevertheless, despite such dangers, wherever an opening for taking power does arise, the Left should seize the opportunity and confront the problems head-on, making the best of a bad situation (in the case of Greece: renegotiating the debt, mobilizing European solidarity and popular support for its predicament). The tragedy of politics is that there will never be a “good” moment to seize power: the opportunity will always offer itself at the worst possible moment (characterized by economic fiasco, ecological catastrophe, civil unrest, etc.), when the ruling political class has lost its legitimacy and the fascist-populist threat lurks in the background. For example, the Scandinavian countries, while continuing to maintain high levels of social equality and a powerful Welfare State, also score very well on global competitiveness: proof that “generous, relatively egalitarian welfare states should not be seen as utopias or protected enclaves,” writes Göran Therborn in “The Killing Fields of Inequality,” “but can also be highly competitive participants in the world market. In other words, even within the parameters of global capitalism there are many degrees of freedom for radical social alternatives.”

Perhaps the most succinct characterization of the epoch which began with the First World War is the well-known phrase attributed to Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.” Were Fascism and Stalinism not the twin monsters of the twentieth century, the one emerging out of the old world’s desperate attempts to survive, the other out of a misbegotten endeavor to build a new one? And what about the monsters we are engendering now, propelled by techno-gnostic dreams of a biogenetically controlled society? All the consequences should be drawn from this paradox: perhaps there is no direct passage to the New, at least not in the way we imagined it, and monsters necessarily emerge in any attempt to force that passage.

One sign of a new rise of this monstrosity is that the ruling classes seem less and less able to rule, even in their own interests. Take the fate of Christians in the Middle East. Over the last two millennia, they have survived a series of calamities, from the end of the Roman Empire through defeat in crusades, the decolonization of the Arab countries, the Khomeini revolution in Iran, etc.—with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia, the main U.S. ally in this region, where there are no autochthonous Christians. In Iraq, there were approximately one million of them under Saddam, leading exactly the same lives as other Iraqi subjects, with one of them, Tariq Aziz, even occupying the high post of foreign minister and becoming Saddam’s confidante. But then, something weird happened to Iraqi Christians, a true catastrophe—a Christian army occupied (or liberated, if you want) Iraq.

The Christian occupation army dissolved the secular Iraqi army and thus left the streets open to Muslim fundamentalist militias to terrorize both each other and the Christians. No wonder roughly half of Iraq’s Christians soon left the country, preferring even the terrorist-supporting Syria to a liberated Iraq under Christian military control. In 2010, things took a turn for the worse. Tariq Aziz, who had survived the previous trials, was condemned by a Shia court to death by hanging for his “persecution of Muslim parties” (i.e., his fight against Muslim fundamentalism) under Saddam. Bomb attacks on Christians and their churches followed one after the other, leaving dozens dead, so that finally, in early November 2010, the Baghdad archbishop Athanasios Dawood appealed to his flock to leave Iraq: “Christians have to leave the beloved country of our ancestors and escape the intended ethnic cleansing. This is still better than getting killed one after the other.” And to dot the “i,” as it were, that same month it was reported that al Maliki had been confirmed as Iraqi prime minister thanks to Iranian support. So the result of the U.S. intervention is that Iran, the prime agent of the axis of Evil, is edging closer to dominating Iraq politically.

In short, our times can be characterized as none other than Stalin characterized the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves.

U.S. policy is thus definitively approaching a stage of madness, and not only in terms of domestic policy (as the Tea Party proposes to fight the national debt by lowering taxes, i.e., by raising the debt—one cannot but recall here Stalin’s well-known thesis that, in the Soviet Union, the state was withering away through the strengthening of its organs, especially its organs of police repression). In foreign policy also, the spread of Western Judeo-Christian values is organized by creating conditions which lead to the expulsion of Christians (who, maybe, could move to Iran…). This is definitely not a clash of civilizations, but a true dialogue and cooperation between the U.S. and the Muslim fundamentalists.

Our situation is thus the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.), but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the New just in order to maintain what was good in the Old (education, healthcare, etc.). The journal in which Gramsci published his writings in the early 1920s was called L’Ordine nuovo (The New Order)—a title which was later appropriated by the extreme Right. Rather than seeing this later appropriation as revealing the “truth” of Gramsci’s use of the title—abandoning it as running counter to the rebellious freedom of an authentic Left—we should return to it as an index of the hard problem of defining the new order any revolution will have to establish after its success. In short, our times can be characterized as none other than Stalin characterized the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves.

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem: the problem of the commons in all its dimensions—the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (“intellectual property”), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem. continue reading

Tunisia, Egypt: When an Eastern Wind Sweeps Away The Wind of The West

by Alain Badiou, El Kilombo

Until when will the idle and crepuscular West, the “international community” of those who still believe themselves to be the rulers of the world, continue to give lessons in good management and good behavior to the rest of the world? Is it not laughable to see well-paid and well-fed intellectuals, retreating soldiers of the capital-parliamentarism that serves us as a moth-eaten Paradise, offering their services to the awe-inspiring Tunisian and Egyptian people, in order to teach these savages the ABC of “democracy?” What pathetic persistence of colonial arrogance! In the situation of political misery that we’ve been living in for the last three decades, is it not evident to surmise that it is us who have everything to learn from the popular uprisings of the moment? Don’t we sense the urgency of giving a close look at everything, that, over there, made possible, by collective action the overthrow of oligarchic and corrupt governments, who — or maybe especially — stood in a humiliating position of servitude to the Western world? Yes, we should be the students of these movements, and not their stupid professors. For they give life, with the genius of their own inventions, to those same political principles that for some time now the dominant powers tried to convince us were obsolete. And in particular the principle that Marat never stopped recalling: when it is a matter of liberty, equality, emancipation, we all have to join the popular upheavals.

It Is Right To Revolt

Just as in politics, our states and those that benefit from them (political parties, unions and complaisant intellectuals) prefer management to revolt, they prefer peaceful demands and “orderly transition” to the breach of law. What the Egyptian and Tunisian people remind us is that the only action appropriate to the sentiment of scandalous takeover by state power is the mass uprising. In this case, the only rallying cry capable of linking together the disparate aspirations of those making a crowd is: “you there, go away!” The exceptional significance of the revolt, namely its critical power, lies in the fact that its rallying cry, which is repeated by millions of beings, gives the measure of what will be, undoubtedly, irreversibly, its first victory: the flight of the designated man. And whatever happens next, this triumph, illegal by nature, of popular action, will be forever victorious. Now, that a revolt against the power of the state can be absolutely successful is an example of universal reach. This victory points out the horizon over which any collective action, unencumbered by the authority of the law, itself outlines: what Marx called “the deterioration of the state.” The knowledge that someday the people, freely associated and resorting to their creative power, will be able to throw away the funereal coercion of the state. That’s the reason why this idea arouses boundless enthusiasm in the entire world and will trigger the revolution that ultimately will overthrow the authority in residence.

A Single Spark Can Start A Prairie Fire…

It began with the suicide, a self-immolation by fire, of a man who had been downgraded to unemployment, and to whom was forbidden the miserable commerce that allowed him to survive; and because a female police officer slapped him in the face for not understanding what in this world is real. In a few days this gesture becomes wider and in a few weeks millions of people scream their joy on a distant square, and this entails the beginning of the catastrophe for the powerful potentates. What is at the root of this fabulous expansion? Are we dealing with a new sort of epidemic of freedom? No. As Jean-Marie Gleize poetically said: “The dissemination of a revolutionary movement is not carried by contamination. But by resonance. Something that surfaces here resounds with the shock wave emitted by something that happened over there.” Let’s name this resonance “event.” The event is the sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of a myriad of new possibilities. None of them is the repetition of what is already known. This is the reason why it’s obscurantist to say “this movement claims democracy” (implying the one that we enjoy in the West), or that “this movement pursues social improvement” (implying the average prosperity for the petit bourgeois de chez nous). Starting with almost nothing, resonating everywhere, the popular uprising creates unknown possibilities for the entire world. The word “democracy” is hardly uttered in Egypt. There is talk about “a new Egypt,” about the “true Egyptian people,” about a constituent assembly, about complete changes in everyday life, of unheard-of and previously unknown possibilities. There is a new plain that will come after that which no longer exists, the one that was set on fire by the spark of the uprising. This plain to be stands between the declaration of an alteration in the balance of forces and the grasping of new tasks. Between the shout of a young Tunisian: “We, children of workers and of peasants, are stronger than the criminals;” and what a young Egyptian said: “As from today, January 25, I take in my own hands the matters of my country.”

The People, Only the People, Are the Creators of Universal History

It’s amazing that in our West, the governments and the media consider that the insurgents in a Cairo square are “the Egyptian people.” How can that be? Aren’t the people for them, the only reasonable and legal people, the one usually reduced to the majority of a poll, or the majority of an election? How did it happen that suddenly, hundreds of rebels are representative of a population of eighty million? It’s a lesson that should not be forgotten, and that we will not forget. After a certain threshold of determination, of stubbornness and of courage, the people, in fact, can concentrate their existence in a square, an avenue, some factories or a university… The whole world will witness the courage, and especially the wondrous creations that go with it. These creations prove that there, there is a People. As an Egyptian rebel strongly put it: “before I watched television, now television is watching me.” In the stride of an event, the People is made of those who know how to solve the problems brought about by the event. Thus, in the takeover of a square: food, sleeping arrangements, watchmen, banners, prayers, defensive actions, so that the place where it all happens, the place that is the symbol, is kept and safeguarded for the people, at any price. Problems that, at the level of the hundreds of thousands of risen people mobilized from everywhere, seemed insoluble, all the more that in this place the state has virtually disappeared. To solve insoluble problems without the assistance of the state becomes the destiny of an event. And this is what makes a People, suddenly, and for an indeterminate time, exist where they have decided to assemble themselves.

Without a Communist Movement, There Is No Communism

The popular uprising we speak about is obviously without a Party, without an hegemonic organization, without a recognized leader. In time, we can assess whether this characteristic is a strength or a weakness. In any case, this is what makes it have, in a very pure form, undoubtedly the purest since the Paris Commune, all the necessary characteristics for us to call it a communism of movement. “Communism” here means: a common creation of a collective destiny. This “common” has two specific traits. First, it is generic, representing, in a place, humanity as a whole. There we find all sorts of people who make up a People, every word is heard, every suggestion examined, any difficulty treated for what it is. Next, it overcomes all the substantial contradictions that the state claims to be its exclusive province since it alone is able to manage them, without ever surpassing them: between intellectuals and manual workers, between men and women, between poor and rich, between Muslims and Copts, between peasants and Cairo residents. Thousands of new possibilities, concerning these contradictions, arise at any given moment, to which the state — any state— remains completely blind. One witnesses young female doctors from the provinces taking care of the injured, sleeping in the middle of a circle of fierce young men, and they are calmer than they have ever been, knowing that no one will dare to touch a single hair of their heads. One witnesses, just as well, a group of engineers entreating young suburbanites to hold the place and protect the movement with their energy in battle. One witnesses a row of Christians doing the watch, standing, guarding over bent Muslims in prayer. One witnesses merchants of every kind nourishing the unemployed and the poor. One witnesses anonymous bystanders chatting with each other. One can read thousands of signs where individual lives mix without hiatus in the big cauldron of history. All these situations, these inventions, constitute the communism of movement. For two centuries the only political problem has been how to set up in the long run the inventions of the communism of movement? The only reactionary assertion affirms that “This is impossible, verily harmful. Let’s trust the state.” Glory to the Tunisian and Egyptian people because they conjure the true and only political duty: the organized faithfulness to the communism of movement taking on the state.

We Don’t Want War, But Are Not Scared of It

The peaceful calm of the gigantic demonstrations was mentioned everywhere, and this calm was associated with the ideal of elective democracy that was attached to the movement. Let’s point out nevertheless that insurgents were killed, hundreds of them, and that they are still being killed every day. In more than one instance, those killed were fighters and martyrs of the event; they died for the protection of the movement. The political and symbolic places of the uprising had to be defended by means of ferocious fighting against the militiamen and the police forces of the threatened regimes. And who paid with their lives but the youth from the poorest communities? The “middle class” — of which our preposterous Michèle Alliot-Marie said that on them, and only on them, depended the democratic outcome of the events — should remember that, at the crucial moment, the persistence of the uprising was guaranteed only by the unrestricted engagement of popular contingents. Defensive violence is inevitable. It still continues, in difficult conditions, in Tunisia after the young provincial activists were sent back to their misery. Can anyone seriously think that these innumerable initiatives and these cruel sacrifices have as their main objective to prompt people “to choose” between Souleiman and El Baradei, as happens in France where we pitifully surrender our will in choosing between Sarkovzky and Strauss-Kahn? Is this the only lesson of this majestic episode?
No, a thousand times no! The Tunisian and the Egyptian people are telling us: raise up, build up a public space for the communism of movement, protect it by all means while inventing the sequential course of action; such is the real of the politics of popular emancipation. Certainly, the Arabic states are not the only countries that are against the people and, notwithstanding elections, are illegitimate. Whatever will happen, the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have a universal meaning. They prescribe new possibilities and thus their value is international.

translated by Antonio Cuccu – revised by Mark Joseph continue reading

Arab uprisings mark a turning point for the taking

by Peter Hallward, The Guardian

In the late 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir was already bemoaning our tendency to "think that we are not the master of our destiny; we no longer hope to help make history, we are resigned to submitting to it". By the late 70s such regret, repackaged as celebration, had become the stuff of a growing consensus. By the late 80s, we were told that history itself had come to an end. The sort of history that ordinary people might make was to fade away within a "new world order", a world in which a narrow set of elites would control all the main levers of power.

Sure enough, for much of the last 30 years, these elites have waged a relentless assault on the people they exploit. Trade unions have been decimated, real wages cut, public services privatised, public resources plundered. For many of these years during which "there was no alternative", resistance in most places was either marginal or symbolic. In one guise or another, resigned submission remained the prevailing order of the day.

Not any more. In different ways in different places (including most dramatically some places that until very recently were often taken for granted as among the most "docile" and "stable" countries around), people all over the world are rediscovering a principle at work in every revolutionary sequence: if we are willing to act in sufficient numbers and with sufficient determination, we already have all the power we need to devise and impose our own alternative. If we are determined to pursue it, we now have an opportunity to help change the world.

This isn't to say that either the neoliberal order or the imperial power that protects it are in any imminent danger of collapse. An opportunity is nothing more, or less, than an opportunity. The governments led by people like David Cameron and Barack Obama continue to press an agenda of "reform" that amounts to little less than a form of class warfare. In the UK, current government plans for education and public services are far more aggressive than anything Margaret Thatcher could have proposed. Nevertheless, in the last few years, and most obviously in the last few months, the general balance of power has begun to shift in three far-reaching ways, which together may well transform not just the Middle East but also the world as a whole.

First of all, of course, after demonstrating more clearly than ever before what the unrestricted pursuit of profit involves, in 2008 neoliberal credit mechanisms imploded in spectacular style, and the credibility of the capitalist world system itself took an unprecedented hit. The costs associated with what many have declared the "financial coup d'état" have now exposed the current rule of political accounting for all to see: privatise the profits, socialise the losses. This is the kind of rule that tends to suffer from publicity.

We have always been told that we cannot afford to pursue utopian projects that might reduce social inequalities, or prevent the millions of avoidable deaths that take place each year as a result of disease or starvation. Our governments and central banks, however, have now spent many trillions of dollars – thousands of times more money than what is required to end global hunger – to bail out some of the most blatantly corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. This public money was spent, just as blatantly, to avoid change rather than implement it. The underlying contradictions in the economy haven't been addressed, and the banking sector has been left to carry on more or less as before. As the consequences of this monumental failure start to hit more and more people over the coming months, class-polarising austerity may well become a difficult political position to defend, especially since measures once justified in terms of economic necessity are now so visibly a matter of deliberate choice and priority.

At the same time, the imperial power that only a few years ago insisted on "full-spectrum dominance" has encountered significant limits to its deployment, both at home and abroad. Washington hawks may still dream of attacking Iran, but it's perhaps more difficult now to imagine a new US war of aggression than at any time since 1945. Rarely has so dominant, so large and so expensive an army looked so powerless. Rarely, too, has so much diplomatic power looked so hollow, fractured and hypocritical. As it has done so often in previous decades, the US is still free to use its UN veto to thwart justice in the Middle East, but it now finds itself obliged to veto its own policy along with it, at a cost that has already endangered its most essential goal in the region: an end to the Palestine liberation movement.

The US and its allies have been discovering that it's a lot harder, these days, to lie about what this and other deceitful political processes involve – a difficulty that may soon also have consequences for the ongoing missions to stabilise Haiti, pacify Iraq, conquer Afghanistan, demonise Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, and so on. This is the second factor at issue here, dramatised most obviously in al-Jazeera's publication of the Palestine papers last month, following the WikiLeaks revelations last year. A combination of new technologies, new social media and new sources of information (not least al-Jazeera itself), enabling new forms of association and deliberation, are starting to make it more difficult for political elites to rely on a compliant press to set and limit the political agenda.

These new means of accessing and sharing information are also starting to have a transformative impact on the third and most important development: the extraordinary resurgence of popular mobilisation and solidarity – a renewal that began with the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador (and at work more recently, among other places, in Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe, in Iran, in China, across Europe), but that has now crossed a new threshold in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya. As one Egyptian protester put it, very concisely: "I used to watch television, now television watches me." On the other side of the world, the tens of thousands of protesters who are mobilising to protect their unions in Wisconsin are among the many millions who have been watching and learning, and who see some similarities between their state governor and Egypt's deposed president. In the UK, students and workers gearing up for another round of direct confrontation with Cameron's government have been watching, too.

Diplomats and pundits rush to assure us that what we're really seeing in north Africa is just an oriental variation on the east European uprisings of 1989, or the subsequent "colour revolutions" – uprisings that served mainly to consolidate rather than challenge the global status quo. Of course, no one can say how the north African mobilisations will develop, or how far they will spread. Like earlier revolutions in France, Haiti and Russia, these are mobilisations whose spatial and temporal (let alone ethnic or religious) dimensions are quite emphatically not fixed in advance. But we do know that they have already changed the course of history, and that they will continue to change it. In each new confrontation, they have demonstrated anew the truth of an old conviction that will always be more powerful than any amount of violent repression or scornful dismissal: the people, united, will never be defeated.

Whatever happens next, the people of north Africa and the Middle East have already won victories that will never be erased. The clashes in Tunis on 11-12 January, the capitulation of riot police in Cairo and Alexandria on 28 January, the retaking of Manama's Pearl Square on 19 February, the liberation of Benghazi on 20 February – in the annals of revolutionary history, events of the 2011 Arab spring may one day invite comparison more readily with the summer of 1789 or the autumn of 1917 than with the winter of 1989.

In each case, what's been at stake first and foremost is less a specific demand for objective change than a subjective process of self-empowerment. Every revolutionary sequence applies in practice a principle that every counter-revolutionary theory seeks to deny or disguise: there is indeed no deeper source of legitimacy than the active will of the people. A revolutionary sequence is one in which those people who set out to transform their situation find a way to clarify and mobilise the will of its people as a whole. Where it exists, the will of the people is sustained through the practice of those who compose and impose it in the collective interest – and who thereby invariably risk, at the hands of those few who oppose this interest, misrepresentation as criminals or outsiders.

As the philosopher Alain Badiou points out in a recent editorial, "once they cross a certain threshold of determination, persistence and courage, the people can indeed concentrate their existence in a public square or avenue, in a few factories, or in a university. In the wake of a transformative event, the people are composed of those who are able to resolve the problems posed by this event" – for instance, the problems involved in defending a square, or sustaining a strike, or confronting an army. Buoyed by the assertion of their hard-won power, the people of north Africa and the Middle East are currently inventing means of solving such problems at a rate that already defies any sort of historical comparison at all. Their priority now is clearly to consolidate and organise this power in the face of the many new and more daunting problems they will soon have to confront.

Needless to say, the struggle to come will again play out in different ways in different places. The consequences of even the most resounding victory are always uncertain, and it may take a long time for those of us who live in the more sheltered parts of the world to learn our own lessons from north Africa's example. The old neoliberal assault remains set to continue. Now everyone knows, however, that it will only prevail if we allow it to. continue reading

Egypt and the revolution in our minds

by Nigel Gibson, Radical Africa

‘What makes the lid blow off?’ Fanon asks in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, reflecting on the revolution against French colonialism in Algeria 50 years ago and thinking about the future ‘African revolution.’ In Egypt, a country where 50 per cent of the population is under 30 years old and which has known no other regime than Mubarak’s state of emergency, with its torture and surveillance, it was the reaction to the murder of Khaled Said, a young blogger beaten to death by the police, that was a turning point. It began with a protest of 1,000 people in Alexandria during Said’s funeral and then went ‘underground’ onto the internet. Pictures of his crushed face are still on his facebook page. The next spark in the North African revolution was in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, ignited by the self immolation of Mohamed Bouazazi, a vegetable peddler whose cart and produce were confiscated by the police. Over the next month, despite increased repression, protests grew across Tunisia and on 14 January President Ben Ali was pushed out of the country. The date of the Egyptian revolution is 25 January but its prehistory includes years of labour struggle: The sit-ins, strikes, and demonstrations of 2006, the almost daily workers’ actions of early 2007, and the massive strike of textile workers in Muhalla al-Kubra in 2008 initiated by working women. These struggles led to beatings and imprisonments as well as some wage increases and bread subsidies as the regime tried to cheaply buy its way out of crisis. The mixture of economic hardship, political repression and social control indicate how deep the uprooting of the old regime had to be.

REVOLUTION 2.0

The 25 January revolution began as a movement against the odds, despite repression and torture and violence; despite the closing down of the internet which seemed so important to its birth; despite the conservativism of the world powers – Obama especially – and at times corporate media’s conformism. Despite all, the movement grew in size and grabbed the world’s attention as it developed in sophistication and in articulation – expressed so brilliantly in the endless debates, platforms and self-organisation (the organisation of the provision of security, food, blankets, stones, and medicine is a story to be told) around and in Tahrir Square, where the once cowed and silenced people of one of the world’s great cities could begin to speak and engage in seemingly endless debates, and decision-making, in open sessions. This had all the makings of a people’s revolution. There have been discussions of the revolution’s similarity with the velvet revolutions of 1989, Tiananmen Square in 1989, people power against Marcos in the Philippines and Duvalier in Haiti in 1986. It is akin to Paris 1968 and its decentralised working and bottom up democracy reflects the new beginning which began with the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Indeed, aided by social media the revolution has been dubbed Revolution 2.0, a revolution without leaders, a ‘Wikipedia revolution’ as Wael Ghonim (the young Google executive behind the ‘We are all Khaled Said’ facebook page) put it. With everyone contributing to its content, the revolution was never simply a revolt of the middle class and as it grew it increasingly came to reflect the socio-economic composition of Africa’s largest city.

THE RETAKING OF PUBLIC SPACE

The Egyptian revolution is like a Rorschach test: Everyone can see something in it. And while these insights are all true, it is also a revolution of the 21st century, not simply because of the social media technology (plus WikiLeaks and Al Jazeera). In this age of gated cities, of citadels, under surveillance and policed – what have been called ‘global cities’ – the Egyptian people opened up political space, as an ongoing public debate in the squares, outside the parliament, in the streets. Cairo, a city of 18 million – abundant in its history and riches and also in the lived realities of the majority of its citizens who are poor – became associated throughout the world, and especially the Arab world, with liberation. The Caireans have shown the world how social media relates to social transformation and the retaking of public space. They have implicitly brought into focus the idea of the ‘right to the city’ as a collective project of social transformation. They were not stopped by fears about maintaining order, nor by the police and the state’s paid murderers, nor by threats of a coup. Instead they organised a continuous occupation of a city’s central square by tens, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of people, defending it, feeding it, nurturing it, articulating it, developing it as their daily work. Cairo was the centre, but in other towns, like Alexandria, smaller groups – perhaps initially under the threat and reality of even more violence – continually gathered. The regime cracked. To remain hegemonic, Mubarak had to be sacrificed.

TOWARD A NATIONAL REVOLUTION

For Fanon, the timing of the revolution is a moment when the militants make contact with the poor from the outskirts of towns and rural areas and realise that they have always thought in terms of a revolutionary transformation. In Egypt this is only beginning to happen. What began to amaze organisers during the last days of Mubarak’s rule was the militancy of the youth from poor neighborhoods. Before the 28 January demonstration, for example,, a group of organisers ‘conducted … a field test’ walking along the narrow alleys of a working class neighborhood to measure the level of participation: ‘when we finished up the people refused to leave. They were 7000 and they burned two police cars.’[1]

The turning point in the struggle – the point when the ruling elites decided to dump Mubarak – came not after it defeated the police and paid goons, but as workers in the port towns and across the industrial and service sectors began strikes supporting the movement and raising their own demands. With revolts also in rural areas and in smaller towns, it was the beginning of a national revolution whose first phase ended with the departure of Mubarak. Strikes have continued, indeed expanded, but what is also at stake is whether the self-organisation learnt from Tahrir Square will take on a class character and whether the public political space, the democratic space opened up by the revolution, will remain open.

BREAKING THE MIND-FORGED MANACLES OF UNFREEDOM

Clearly things were changing during those eighteen days after 25 January and the speed of change, of development, of solidarity and fearless – of a new humanity experiencing freedom – took on a momentum of its own. Steve Biko, the South African Black Consciousness leader, argued that the most potent weapon in the oppressor’s arsenal was the internalisation of fear in the consciousness of the oppressed. But once that mind experiences freedom – not as an abstraction but in and through collective actions – it becomes a force of revolution. ‘People have changed. They were scared. They are no longer scared,’ argued Ahmad Mahmoud. ‘When we stopped being afraid we knew we would win. We will not again allow ourselves to be scared of a government. This is the revolution in our country, the revolution in our minds.’[2]

Once the lid is taken off a police state, it is very difficult to put back on. Mental liberation, Fanon argues, and the radical change in consciousness that accompanies revolution, entails a rethinking of everything, a questioning of everything that has been taken for granted. What had been normal for so long has been fundamentally shaken. After 30 years of life under the dictatorship, the Egyptian people had become historical protagonists. Tahrir Square, the revolution’s focal point, became territorialised by those who had not counted. It became the space of a new kind of work in Fanon’s sense, namely the hard but collectively joyous work of human liberation.

Mubarak’s departure represents a victory for the movement but it is not the goal of liberation. Egypt remains at a crossroads with the military as the only possible institution to renormalise it. Yet under the guise of the national interest any return to the old normal must include suppressing freedom, strikes, demonstrations, and any other manifestation of the economic and social revolt against injustice and exploitation that has been brewing for the past decade.

THE MILITARY INTERREGNUM

In 1956, four years after the 1952 Egyptian revolution and one year into the Algerian revolution, Algeria’s liberation movement met in the Soummam Valley to discuss the organisation and programme of its revolution. An important principle adopted there was that rather than militarising politics, the military and any military decision had to be subservient to, and under the control of, the political struggle. It is a principle that continues to haunt Algeria and Egypt where militarised states of emergency have been in place for decades, abrogating political rights and suppressing spaces for public discourse.

In 1959 Fanon presented his ‘Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ (which would become a central chapter of The Wretched of the Earth) as lectures to the Algerian liberation army camped on the Tunisian border. Looking forward to decolonisation, he goes further than the Soummam platform, arguing that the army too often becomes the pillar of a nation, which despite independence, does not undergo any fundamental reorganisation. The military enforces systematic pauperisation and ‘the strength of the police force and the power of the army are [simply] proportionate to the stagnation in which the rest of the nation is sunk.’[3] Where there is no parliament, he continues, the army takes over – as it has done in Egypt. But this changes nothing unless the army is truly nationalised and the development of the officer class is curtailed as it becomes a school of ‘civic and political education.’ Rather than a professional army, he adds, the military should become a political organisation which, as a servant of the people, needs to take the step from ‘national consciousness to political and social consciousness’ and become part of a genuine humanist and social national programme.[4] Too often, however, as we have seen in the fifty years since Fanon’s death, the army, as he feared, takes the place of a corrupt political party, and becomes the organizer of the profiteers.[5] This certainly was the situation under Mubarak.

In Egypt the army – intimately connected to the economy and self-interested in the maintenance of the status quo – is repeating the same calls it made during the last days of Mubarak under the slogans to ‘return to order’ and ‘return to normalcy.’ Yet the people are not naïve. During the commune days of Tahrir Square they understood that the tanks not only protected them but threatened them. People slept in the tank’s tracks not only to stop the tanks from moving but let everyone know that they were ready if the tanks did move; they marched around the tanks by candlelight at night to keep them in their place; and they continued to embrace the soldiers as their ‘brothers,’ but announced further demonstrations and encouraged the soldiers to join them. Thus after Mubarak’s departure and despite the army’s clearing of Tahrir Square and its threat to ban strikes and end street demonstrations, the question is can the military put the lid back on the multidimensional revolt? How reliable are the army’s young and badly paid conscripts?

SOCIAL IMAGINATION

It is the revolution happening in the minds of the people – including perhaps those among the army’s rank and file – that is really significant. Nasser understood its importance, calling his book on the liberation of Egypt a ‘philosophy of revolution’. A different philosophy of revolution came alive in the movement at Tahrir Square. As Sinan Antoon, the Iraqi born poet, novelist and film maker put it, ‘What distinguishes this revolution is the wonderful and sublime example it sets in terms of solidarity among protesters and citizens at large. The spontaneity and cooperation in managing their daily affairs without a hierarchy is what the state didn’t expect as it deprived the people of basic services and tried to spread fear and chaos to terrorize the citizenry.’ The ‘commune’ at Tahrir Square produced a new political form.[6] And in an attempt to de-communalise that form, it has now been deterritorialised. As youths moved to literally and symbolically clean the square, the military destroyed the shelters, banners, and artworks and removed the people. Traffic now moves across the square – but traffic can also be stopped.

WHITHER EGYPT?

There are at least two potential scenarios which Fanon also considered to be the problematic of decolonisation and the African revolution: On one hand, the horizontal movement based on the inclusivity of people’s power – on its ongoing support and democratic organisation – that overthrew Mubarak is understood not simply a fragment or a moment but something that becomes the basis for daily life. On the other hand, a vertical movement based on the exclusivity of an ‘elite transition,’ controlled by professional politicians, generals and planners with their own vested interest in the status quo, which suffocates the air of freedom and the ‘revolution in our minds.’

As strikes roll across the country, from industrial to service sectors, the idea of reconstituting ‘Tahrir’ in the factories remains a radical possibility.[7]

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Nigel C. Gibson is an activist and scholar.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] David Kirkpatrick, ‘Wired and Shrewd: Young Egyptians Guide Revolt,’ New York Times February 9, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10youth.html
[2] See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/09/egypt-north-africa-revolution
[3] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove: New York, 1968) p. 172.
[4] See Ibid. pp 201-3
[5] Ibid p.174
[6] See http://libcom.org/news/cairo-commune-07022011
[7] See Charles Levinson, Margaret Coker and Tamer El-Ghobashy ‘Strikes Worry Egypt’s Military, youth’ Wall Street Journal February 15, 2010 continue reading

Revolution Comes Like a Thief in the Night

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

Life, ordinary life, is meant to follow certain rhythms. We grow, seasons change and we assume new positions in the world. When you have finished being a child you put away childish things and move on to the next stage of life. But there is a multitude of people in this world who cannot build a home, marry and care for their children and aging parents. There is a multitude of people who are growing older as they remain stuck in an exhausting limbo, perhaps just managing to scrape together the rent for a backyard shack by selling tomatoes or cell phone chargers on some street.

Mohamed Bouazizi was one person amongst that multitude. He was born in 1984 in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid. His father died on a Libyan construction site when Mohamed was three. He went to a one roomed village school but had to start working from the age of ten and abandoned school altogether in his late teens. In a city with an unemployment rate of 30% he couldn’t find work and began, like so many others, selling fruit and vegetables in the street. With the thousand rand that he made each month he looked after his mother, his uncle and his younger siblings. He was, incredibly, managing to pay for his sister, Samia, to study at university.

Since he was a child he had been harassed by the police who regularly confiscated his wheelbarrow and his wares. On the 17th of December last year he had just laid out one thousand and five hundred Rand to buy stock when a municipal official asked him for a bribe to keep his place on the street. He couldn’t pay it and so they turned his cart over, confiscated his scales, spat at him and slapped him. He went to the municipal offices to complain but no one would see him. He went outside, bought some petrol, poured it all over his body and set himself alight outside the municipal offices. Mohammed’s mother told a journalist that he didn’t kill himself because he was poor but because he had been humiliated. "It got to him deep inside, it hurt his pride."

In 1961 Frantz Fanon wrote, from Tunisia, “The colonial world is a world cut into two....The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not how or where.”

Fifty years later cities are still divided into separate zones for those who count and those who don't count. These days what distinguishes those who count from those who don’t is usually the possession of wealth. But the people spurned by society continue to be taken as a threat to society. Jacques Depelchin, the Congolese historian, writes, “the poor in Africa have replaced the Dark Continent as the symbolic conceptual definition of the obstacle to civilization.”

But of course Mohamed Bouzazi didn’t die the invisible death of the average poor person. When he set his own body alight he ignited the uprising that drove Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from power in Tunisia, toppled Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and then spread like a prairie fire to Algeria, Yemen, Iran and beyond. Revolt is leaping across the borders that are supposed to contain people while money is moved, dissidents rendered and intelligence exchanged.

These revolts may, like the European Revolutions of 1848 or the revolts against Stalinism in 1989, remake the world order in ways that we cannot yet predict.

Popular anger can be mobilised against innocent scapegoats like gay people in Uganda, Muslims in parts of India or migrants in South Africa. Revolutions are often rolled back, co-opted or even used to strengthen oppression by modernising it. The future of Tunisia, Egypt and all the other countries where people are now taking to the streets against the police and party thugs has yet to be written. Local elites and imperialism will certainly aim to do more of that writing than the ordinary people that have already brought down two dictatorships.

But whatever the eventual fate of the struggles in North Africa and the Middle East something has been done that cannot be undone. That something is the fact that the refusal of a street vendor to continue to tolerate indignity and the sheer sadism of so much bureaucratic power was heard and acted on in a way that eventually brought down a brutal dictator and ally of imperialism and, for a moment at least, seized the initiative from the dictators, the officials, the experts, the police and the NGOs and put it, firmly and gloriously, in the hands of the people.

This is not the first time that the agency of people that don’t count has, like the proverbial thief in the night, suddenly appeared at the centre of the world stage without warning.

The Christian story is just one of many in which a poor man from some village in the provinces assumes a tremendous historical consequence that far outweighs that of his tormentors. And from the Haitian Revolution of 1804 to the Paris Commune of 1871 to the anti-colonial movements of the 50s and 60s that ignited a global rebellion in 1968 the modern world has periodically been remade by the intelligence and courage of the women and men it has most denigrated.

There are many lessons to be drawn from the drama unfolding in North Africa and the Middle East. One of them is that we should not assume that South Africans will continue to trudge through life without work, without homes and without dignity forever.

If we carry on as we are, the day will come when a fire will be lit in Grahamstown or Harrismith or Ermelo, or on some farm or in some school or shack settlement whose name we don’t yet know, and neither the rubber bullets, party thugs, offers of jobs and money to leaders or senior politicians arriving in helicopters with smiles and big promises will put it out. continue reading

In Egypt and Tunisia the will of the people is not a hollow cliche

by Peter Hallward, The Guardian

From revolutionary France and America to modern north Africa, this is a concept that can topple governments

The day after popular pressure forced Tunisia's autocratic president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali from power on 14 January, Egypt's government declared that it "respects the will of the Tunisian people". So did the governments of Yemen and Iran, and so did the Arab League. Jordan's government followed suit the next day. In his state of the union address on 25 January, Obama also celebrated Tunisia as a place "where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator", before reminding the world that "the United States of America supports the democratic aspirations of all people".

Routine reference to "the will of the people" has long been one of the most formulaic turns of phrase in the modern political lexicon. The actual mobilisation of such a will, however, is less easily dismissed. Ongoing protests in Egypt – and in Algeria, and Yemen, and Jordan, indeed throughout the Middle East – may well oblige their governments to decide fairly soon whether they mean what they say. So may renewed mobilisations here in the UK and across Europe, against the latest phase in the long neoliberal assault on public services and welfare.

Needless to say, the US and its far-flung clients have never hesitated – in Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Palestine, Haiti, Turkey – to undermine or crush those people whose wills did not dovetail with their own. But however facile its diplomatic invocations might seem, the "will of the people" remains in both theory and practice a profoundly transformative notion, and even a superficial consideration of its history should be enough to remind us of its revolutionary inflection.

In the 18th century, no less than today, to affirm the rational will of the people as the source of sovereign power was to reject conceptions of politics premised on either the mutual exclusion of society and will (a politics determined by natural, historical or economic "necessity") or on the primacy of another sort of will (the will of a monarch, a priest, an elite). Conceived in terms that frame it as both inclusive and decisive, Rousseau and the Jacobins forced evocation of a popular or "general" will to the divisive centre of modern politics. Reference to la volonté du peuple underlay the French revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens in 1789 and Robespierre's constitution of 1793.

Jefferson anticipated much of the subsequent history of his newly independent nation when he emphasised the struggle between "those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes", and "those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them" and consider them the "safest depository of their rights".

Clarification and concentration of the people's will would remain the guiding thread of Bolshevik strategy in the run-up to 1917, and Lenin's main concern, early and late, was to achieve a militant and tenacious "unanimity of will" powerful enough to overcome the defences of an indefensible status quo. For Mao, likewise, the goal was to unify and intensify the people's "will to fight" against their oppressors, before establishing a form of government that might most "fully express the will of all the revolutionary people". Mao's revolutionary contemporaries (Giap, Castro, Che Guevara, Mandela) adopted similarly militant and "universalisable" priorities. So did, in a different context, the more radical partisans of the US civil rights movement. The ANC summarised this whole line of thought when it insisted in its 1955 Freedom Charter that "no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people", and posed as its first demand: "The people shall govern!"

Around the same time, one of north Africa's most influential writers and activists, Frantz Fanon, conceived of political practice along comparable lines. The whole of Fanon's contribution to Algeria's liberation struggle (1954-1962) is oriented by a popular "will to independence", the "national will of the oppressed peoples", their "will to break with exploitation and contempt". The outcome of the Algerian revolution would be decided, he argued, by "the will of 12 million people; that is the only reality".

Rejecting all distraction through "negotiation" or "development", Fanon insisted on decisive action here and now – the goal was not to reform an intolerable colonial situation over an interminable series of steps, but to abolish it. The "fundamental characteristic of the struggle of the Algerian people", Fanon maintained, is suggested by their "refusal of progressive solutions, their contempt for the 'stages' that might break the revolutionary torrent, and induce them to abandon the unshakable will to take everything into their hands at once". The fate of their revolution depends on the people's "co-ordinated and conscious" participation in their ongoing self-emancipation.

In today's Tunisia and Egypt, as in 1950s Algeria, to affirm the will of the people is not to invoke an empty phrase. Will and people: rejecting the merely "formal" conceptions of democracy that disguise our status quo, an actively democratic politics will think one term through the other. A will of the people, on the one hand, must involve association and collective action, and will depend on a capacity to invent and preserve forms of inclusive assembly (through demonstrations, meetings, unions, parties, websites, networks). If an action is prescribed by popular will, on the other hand, then what's at stake is a free or voluntary course of action, decided on the basis of informed and reasoned deliberation. Determination of the people's will is a matter of popular participation and empowerment before it is a matter of representation, sanctioned authority or stability. Unlike mere "wish", if it is to persist and prevail then a popular will must remain united in the face of its opponents, and find ways of overcoming their resistance to its aims.

Whether it takes place in Tunis or Cairo, Caracas or Port-au-Prince, Athens or London, to ground political action in the will of the people is to reassert a collective capacity for deliberate and revolutionary transformation. As the people who are defying the governments of north Africa demonstrate, there are circumstances in which collective courage and enthusiasm can be more than a match for coercive state power. The cliche remains hollow until adopted in practice: "Where there's a will there's a way." continue reading

Feminism And the Politics of the Commons

by Silvia Federici, The Commoner

At least since the Zapatistas took over the zócalo in San Cristobal de las Casas on December 31, 1993 to protest legislation dissolving the ejidal lands of Mexico, the concept of ‘the commons’ has been gaining popularity among the radical left, internationally and in the U.S., appearing as a basis for convergence among anarchists, Marxists, socialists, ecologists, and eco-feminists.

There are important reasons why this apparently archaic idea has come to the center of political discussion in contemporary social movements. Two in particular stand out. On one side is the demise of the statist model of revolution that for decades had sapped the efforts of radical movements to build an alternative to capitalism. On the other, the neo-liberal attempt to subordinate every form of life and knowledge to the logic of the market has heightened our awareness of the danger of living in a world in which we no longer have access to seas, trees, animals, and our fellow beings except through the cash-nexus. The ‘new enclosures’ have also made visible a world of communal properties and relations that many had believed to be extinct or had not valued until threatened with privatization. Ironically, the new enclosures have demonstrated that not only the common has not vanished, but also new forms of social cooperation are constantly being produced, including in areas of life where none previously existed like, for example, the internet.

Download the full PDF here. continue reading

Meandering on the Semantical-Historical Paths of Communism and Commons

by Peter Linebaugh, The Commoner

The story begins at Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondacks when, at a gathering of cultural workers for the commons and through no wish of their own, Peter and George Caffentzis were asked to speak about violence and the commons. Accordingly following dinner after what had been a chilly October day, they settled into armchairs by the fire and explained to the gathering that way back in the day (history) the commons was taken away by blood and fire and that, furthermore, as we all basically knew, it was still violently happening which ever way you happened to look. Indeed, this violent taking-away, or “expropriation,” was the beginning of proletarianization and thus of capitalism itself!

George added that he thought that there was a difference between the commons and ‘the tradition of communism’ which began in the 1840s. Peter (that’s me) wasn’t so sure about that, thinking that it was earlier, and that in any case there was considerable overlap. He said something about Cincinnati and promised to get back to everyone. So, making good on that promise, here’s what I had in mind.

The full article can be downloaded at The Commoner. continue reading

The Politics of Dignity and the Politics of Poverty

by John Holloway

This is the text and notes for a talk given in Nottingham.

How far is Latin America from Nottingham? It depends on how you measure it. You can measure it in terms of a politics of poverty or you can measure it in terms of a politics of dignity.

If we speak of a Pink Tide in the area, we must remember that Pink is not a primary colour, that what seems to be pink is in fact a blend of colours that combine and conflict. There is a central issue that runs through so-called pink tide in Latin America and the way that we understand it. This is the contrast between a politics of poverty and a politics of dignity.

By a politics of poverty I mean a politics that starts from the poverty of the great mass of the population and the desire to eliminate it. This has a very real basis. There is enormous poverty in the region. This is one of the most striking things when you first go there: the number of people selling things at the traffic lights or begging in the streets, the shanty towns, the poverty in the countryside. A very big part of the population live in poverty or extreme poverty. And beside that, the big houses and the big cars, the obvious social disparities between rich and poor.

The immediate reaction when we see all that is to say that we must strive for the elimination of poverty and for an end to injustice. We need economic progress and we need a government that will introduce policies that benefit the poor and attack the structures of inequality, a government that will try to free itself from the neoliberalism that has caused so much misery in the region in the last thirty years or so, that will improve health and education. As we know, there are now a number of governments in the region that are firmly committed to making important changes in these directions, and that is most definitely to be welcomed.

But there is more to be said. Go back to the poor people we started with and talk to them, or rather listen to them. And as you listen to them, they open up in front of you, or rather your mind opens up, and you see them not as poor people to be pitied or cared for, but as people in struggle, in daily struggle for existence and very often in collective struggle for a better society. And as you listen, the third person dissolves, the third person relation that separates them from you: you realise that they and you are part of a we that are trapped in a world of injustice and trying to find a way out, part of a frustrated we that have the capacity to create a different world but cannot do it. Inside the poverty we discover dignity: the dignity of the poor and the dignity of ourselves. Inside the object an objectified subject struggling against her own objectification.

This changes everything, because it changes the way that we think about politics and the way we organise politically and the way we understand what is happening in Latin America and the world.

First of all, dignity breaks the state as a form of organisation. The concept of poverty leads to a state-oriented politics: the poor are a they – poor people – and the way to change things for them is by improving them on their behalf. The state is precisely that – a group of professionals that claim to do things on behalf of people, and this always involves imposing a view of what is for the benefit of people, treating people as objects. Dignity, on the other hand, says “No, thank you very much, don’t do anything on our behalf, we’ll do it ourselves. To think politics from the subject means thinking of different forms of organisation, forms that articulate the collective will of those involved – assemblies, councils, forms of organisation that aim at overcoming the separation of politics from everyday life. This is often referred to as a politics of autonomy, or of dialogue rather than monoogue, of listening rather than talking, a politics of mandar obedeciendo, as the Zapatistas put it: a form of organisation that seeks the effective subordination of all decisions to the collective will of the community.

This means a critique of representative democracy. A representative is someone who claims to act on our behalf. The very act of representation is the creation of a public sphere separate from the private, an act of distancing politics from life, an exclusion. A concept of dignity pushes towards a different form of democracy, one that does not exclude.

Dignity dissolves the third person, the state, representative democracy, and it also dissolves progress. The concept of poverty is closely linked to that of progress. Progress is generally seen as the antidote to poverty, but it is a progress that is understood as having an autonomous, objective existence, something that we must try to attain. Dignity, on the other hand, is anti-progressive, not in the sense of not wanting to develop human capacities to create a better life, but in the sense of subordinating changes to collective consideration: if progress means making bigger and bigger cities, that is probably not what we want; if progress means covering the world in highways, that is probably not what we want; if progress means accelerating global warming, that is not what we want. But Progress, as an autonomous force outside our control, is simply the operation of the law of value, the rule of socially necessary labour time, of that empty faster-faster-faster that determines what is done and how it is done under capitalism. Dignity, then, is anti-capitalist in the profound sense of breaking capitalist time, in confronting the faster-faster-faster of capitalism with a “whoa, let’s slow down, lets discuss whether we really want a new highway, whether we want the mechanisation of agriculture, whether we really want to work under so much pressure.”

Dignity, in short, takes us into a whole different epistemological universe where everything is laid open: the meaning of knowledge, the meaning of research, the meaning of politics, the meaning of revolution, the meaning of class, the meaning of work, time, space, the meaning of left and right. The person we start off by classifying as poor turns around to us and says “I am not poor, I am in struggle, I have dignity” and with that she hurls all our categories back in our faces and forces us to rethink everything. It is this manifest bubbling of dignity that makes Latin America such an exciting place at the moment, such a challenge to us all.

But of course dignity simmers in all the world. And of course the politics of Latin America, or even the radical politics of Latin America, is not just a politics of dignity. Rather, it is an extremely complex and tense intertwining of the politics of poverty with the politics of dignity. At one extreme, perhaps, we have the Zapatistas who proclaim dignity as their central principle - and in this they are echoed by many of the movements of opposition - , and on the other side we have the governments of Bolivia and Venezuela, say, who, by their form of existence as states, act on behalf of the people, however open they may be to consulting them. But of course it is not so simple: there are certainly instances in which the Zapatistas or other groups reproduce authoritarian practices or in which Zapatista supporters say “we must help the poor indígenas”, and there are also genuine attempts by the Venezuelan state (or part of the Venezuelan) state to break with the state as a form of social organisation and transform itself into what they call a Commune state, particularly through such measures as the promotion of the communal councils. With the distinction between a politics of dignity and a politics of poverty I do not want to say “these are the goodies and here are the baddies”, or “here is the answer”. Nevertheless I do find the distinction helpful in at least three ways.

Firstly I think it means that we (the two strands of anti-capitalist thought) should push together in the same direction as far as we possibly can. In that sense, I confess that I am one of the many adherents of the Otra Campaña in Mexico who did vote for López Obrador in the last election and certainly I think the governments of Chávez and Morales are preferable to their predecessors.

Secondly, however, I do not think we can simply add the two politics together, as was advocated by both John Foran and Mike Geddes yesterday, and is argued by the proponents of poder popular in Argentina and elsewhere, because there are really two different logics at work here, two different concepts of the world and politics, and of what is at issue in anti-capitalist social change. Put simply, it is the clash between the progressive and the anti-progressive left. Progressive governments are just that, progressive, with all that means in terms of slotting in to the faster-faster-faster of capitalist development and all the destruction that that involves, whereas many of the most important anti-capitalist struggles both in Latin America and the world are very explicitly opposed to the destruction that Progress entails, whether in the form of new metro lines, nuclear power stations or climate change. In that sense the Zapatistas are quite right to criticise the politics of López Obrador, and I have a great deal of sympathy for the many people involved in the important social movements in Bolivia from 2000 to 2005 who feel that the Morales government does not represent what they were fighting for. That is why, too, I do not feel very optimistic about the future of the more radical strands within the Bolivarian process in Venezuela.

Thirdly, I think the distinction is useful because it confronts us who work in the universities with what we are doing. If we think in terms of the politics of poverty, then we live in a world of pre-established categories in which we can define Latin America as our object of analysis, comfortably separated from us by the Atlantic Ocean. If however, our object of analysis turns into a subject who kills the third person and throws our categories back in our faces, then we find ourselves on very unstable ground in which we have to feel our way forward, experimenting and exploring, and always asking as we walk.

Measured in terms of a politics of poverty, Latin America is certainly over there, a million miles away from Nottingham. Measured in terms of a politics of dignity, Latin America is right on top of us, a raging challenge, an appalling terror, and a shining light of hope for the future.

Notes

Dignity is the push towards social self-determination against-and-beyond a world that is built on the negation of self-determination.

Poverty leads you to a politics on behalf of, dignity to a politics of No thank you, we’ll do it ourselves, autonomy.

Dignity and we-ness. Dignity breaks the third person. Poverty reproduces it. In Latin America there are two voices raised: the voice of poverty and the cry of dignity. Closely intertwined but very important to distinguish. Lead in different directions politically, reminding us that pink is not a primary colour.

The distinction between dignity and poverty is not concerned just with how we understand Latin America: it slaps us in the face, it is about how we relate to the world and understand what is happening.

'Then that suffering that united us made us speak, and we recognised that in our words there was truth, we knew that not only pain and suffering lived in our tongue, we recognised that there is hope still in our hearts. We spoke with ourselves, we looked inside ourselves and we looked at our history: we saw our most ancient fathers suffering and struggling, we saw our grandfathers struggling, we saw our fathers with fury in their hands, we saw that not everything had been taken away from us, that we had the most valuable, that which made us live, that which made our step rise above plants and animals, that which made the stone be beneath our feet, and we saw, brothers, that all that we had was DIGNITY, and we saw that great was the shame of having forgotten it, and we saw that DIGNITY was good for men to be men again, and dignity returned to live in our hearts, and we were new again, and the dead, our dead, saw that we were new again and they called us again, to dignity, to struggle'.
- Marcos continue reading

Governments and Movements: Autonomy or New Forms of Domination?

by Raúl Zibechi, Envisioning a Post-Capitalist Order

The end of 2008 marked the ten-year anniversary of Hugo Chávez's first electoral victory (December 6, 1998), which initiated a new period marked by the emergence of progressive and left governments in South America. His clinching of the presidency was the result of a long process of struggles from below, beginning in February 1989 with the Caracazo—the first great popular insurrection against neoliberalism—which drove into crisis the party-system that for decades had sustained elite domination.

In the years that followed, seven other presidents embodying the ongoing political-institutional changes came to power, accounting for a total of eight out of ten governments in the region: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Fernando Lugo in Paraguay. These administrations were made possible—to a greater or lesser degree—by the resistance of social movements to the neoliberal model.

In some cases, admittedly, this change at the top level arose from years of steady electoral growth (notably, in Brazil and Uruguay), while in other countries it was the fruit of social movements capable of overthrowing neoliberal parties and governments (Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and to an extent Argentina). A decade after the start of this process, it is time for a brief evaluation of what has happened:

1. Beyond the differences between these processes, they share something fundamental in common: the return of the state to a central role as the driver of change.

2. Movements that in the 1990s and early 2000s were the central protagonists of resistance to the neoliberal model have been marginalized.

3. The dominant contradiction in this period is between the governments and right-wing sectors, a change that has sucked movements into a statist whirlwind from which most have been unable to escape.

4. There are some tendencies—still dispersed—that seek to rebuild the movements on new foundations, based on new issues and new forms of political action.

The twilight of the "progressive" decade as a source of social, political, and economic change makes it necessary for social movements to balance their accounts and take stock of the gains and losses this decade has brought to popular forces.

The risks of subordination

An initial stage was marked by government subordination of the movements, or rather by the movements’ demobilization and division, and the fragmentation of their initiatives. Only small nuclei remained in open confrontation with the governments, while most slid toward government collaboration in exchange for direct economic subsidies (known as planes sociales) and other material benefits. Many other movement collectives simply dissolved.

By contrast, in Chile, Peru, and Colombia, the movements are experiencing an era of vibrant activity. In all three countries, indigenous groups are taking the lead. In Chile, the Mapuche are recovering from the ravages of the Pinochet-era anti-terrorism law, which was reactivated by "socialist" President Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006). The Mapuche, along with high school students and workers from various sectors, particularly mining and forestry, have generated a major reactivation of social struggles.

Indigenous communities affected by mining in Peru are vigorously resisting through the grassroots Quechua organization Conacami, paying a high price in lives and arrests for their struggles. The group is leading the fight against genocidal mining projects that leave behind contaminated water sources and un-breathable air just to line the pockets of the multinationals. CONACAMI fiercely opposes the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and President Alan García's neoliberal policies.

In Colombia, the long struggle of the indigenous Nasa represented by the ACIN and CRIC has been doubly fruitful.[1] The broad social mobilization known as the "Minga" (literally, collective work), which brought together dozens of indigenous groups in October 2008 in Cauca, managed to break through a military siege and the militarization of society that had immobilized indigenous communities. Cane cutters—most of them Afro-Colombians—service workers, neighborhood organizations, and human rights activists all joined the indigenous-led Minga.

The example set by these movements, which are beset by and born out of adversity, should be a point of inspiration for the rest of the continent's movements. The long hunger strike by Mapuche advocate Patricia Troncoso between November 2007 and January 2008 and Colombia's indigenous Minga share the potent mission of breaking through the isolation and "soft" genocide that seek to wipe indigenous groups off the map in an attempt to silence their existence as a people.

In other countries, the panorama for the movements is extremely complex. Perhaps the most emblematic case is that of Argentina. The vast majority of the piquetero movement of unemployed workers has been coopted by the state through economic subsidies to families (the planes sociales) and the awarding of government posts to their leaders. The human rights movement—particularly, the Association of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which had played a prominent role in resisting neoliberalism during the 1990s—has joined officialdom, becoming an unequivocal defender of government policies. Meanwhile many neighborhood assemblies have simply disappeared.

Nonetheless, not everything has been a step backward. Over the last five years, innumerable collectives have sprung up, many of them focusing on environmental issues, such as open-pit mining, forestry, and soy mono-cropping. From this process, some 100 local assemblies have emerged and are organized into the Union of Citizen Assemblies (UAC), which has become one of the most active opponents of multinational mining.

Also in Argentina, campesinos and small farmers formed the National Campesino Front, made up of some 200 rural organizations representing family and community agriculture against the impetuous advance of soy agribusiness. The organization represents long-standing movements (such as MOCASE from Santiago del Estero) as well as new organizations of small producers, including a handful of collectives from urban peripheries.

In Brazil, the movements have been incapable of advancing beyond their long-standing defensive footing—a position aggravated by the Lula government. In Uruguay, despite organized labor's growing strength—largely attributable to state protection of labor leaders' activities—the movements are far from being an anti-systemic actor, and organizational levels among the urban poor remain local and fragmented. The planes sociales are largely responsible for this weakening of the movements.

In Bolivia, the situation is quite different. The movements have not been defeated and maintain their significant capacity for mobilization and pressure over the government and right-wing sectors. The September 2008 crisis, for example, was resolved in favor of popular sectors thanks to the movement's intense mobilization, which included the cordoning off of Santa Cruz and the resistance of Plan 3000—the poor and indigenous peripheral suburb of the oligarchic mestizo city.[2]

As Raquel Gutiérrez noted about the current conjuncture, Bolivian movements have "recovered a margin of political autonomy in relation to government decisions," particularly when they see the government as incapable of stopping the oligarchy. "But they have no inclination to be subordinated when it comes to the fulfillment of their demands."[3]

The pressure exerted by the movements, however, comes up against statist logic, which remains firmly enmeshed in bloated state bureaucracies (military, judicial, legislative, ministerial, and municipal). Those bureaucracies are reticent to change. Bureaucracies are not only conservative by nature, they are also managed by newly empowered officials—both elected (deputies, senators, council members, mayors) and non-elected (ministers and hundreds of advisers)—whose main ambition is to maintain their positions.

The new forms of domination

It is not possible for movements to overcome state dependency and subordination without understanding that the new "left" and "progressive" governments are exercising new forms of domination. The planes sociales aimed at "integrating" the poor play a central role in these novel modes of social control.

I recently had the following conversation with a top-level official of Uruguay's Ministry of Social Development:

The official said, "For us, social policies are emancipatory policies, not a way of disciplining the poor."

"Is this your personal opinion or is it the ministry's as well?" I wondered.

The official replied, "It's not just mine, it's also that of the national government and of the Ministry of Social Development. The national government did not come here to placate the poor; it came to generate opportunities for integration and emancipation."

Such affirmations, no doubt honest in their intent, implicitly undermine the role of social movements by adopting their discourses and even their practices. This raises three central questions:

1. The end of the old right: The new governments born from the crisis of the first stage of neoliberalism—the period of privatization and deregulation—consolidated their rule by destroying right-wing elites' traditional bases of domination. These elites had built extensive clientelistic networks with local political bosses (caudillos), who used their role as mediators with state institutions and the electoral system to subjugate the poorest sectors.

The movements arose to fight against these elites. The piquetero case is symptomatic: the piqueteros’ struggle for direct control of the planes sociales sought to snatch from caudillos their ability to control patron-client networks. In confronting the right directly, this wave of mobilizations strengthened the piquetero movement and modified Argentina's regional political map.

With mixed success, the new governments have sought to displace these clientelistic networks, putting government-directed state bureaucracies in their place. This is arguably the main "progressive" action of the new governments. In the process of dismantling the old elite networks, the governments have employed the same language and codes used by the movements of organized popular sectors.

2. New forms of control: The crisis of discipline as a way of molding bodies in closed spaces was one of the most prominent characteristics of the "Revolution of '68." The overwhelming of patriarchal hierarchies and the defiance of authority in the workshop, the school, the hospital and the barracks forced capital and the state to create new forms of open-air social control. They now had to find new ways to deal with the population and to maintain security.

The state-backed planes sociales, directed by a coterie of NGO officials, are how these new forms of domination are being introduced into spaces and territories that are impervious to discipline. In these sites, the state becomes capillary, working from within, stretching its reach into ramshackle neighborhoods that had been bastions of revolt. It works with the very sectors that had been organized as movements, but its aim is to disorganize them.

The state’s presence no longer manifests itself in the grotesque form of the police baton—though, for sure, it's never absent—but rather in the subtler form of "social development for citizen integration." For this, the state counts on all the knowledge accumulated by NGOs over decades of local "cooperation," during which they adopted the "participatory" practices of popular education.

Young NGO officials constitute a new army of functionaries who no longer wait for children at schools or tend to patients at hospitals, but who instead go directly to the territories of poverty and rebelliousness. And they have something that makes this job much easier: They have insider knowledge of these popular sectors, because many of these officials at one time participated in resistance against the neoliberal model; they had been militants or, at least, deeply tied to social activism.

Echoing Brazilian sociologist Francisco de Oliveira, it could be said that the planes sociales are instruments of biopolitical control in which the state classifies people according to their material needs and "restores a type of clientelism" (let's call it state-scientific) in which politics become irrelevant.[4]

True, the planes sociales help alleviate poverty, but they do not change the distribution of income, and they altogether avoid the growing concentration of wealth, while leaving the fundamental aspects of the model intact. And by affecting the organizational capacity of the movements and blocking their ability to grow, the planes sociales serve the neoliberal drive to turn all of life into a commodity. In this regard, it is alarming that left intellectuals are nearly unanimous in viewing the planes sociales as an achievement of progressive politics.

3. An offensive against autonomy: States now adopt the language of the movements, even claiming support for the "critical autonomy" of those receiving the planes sociales. States have devised mechanisms of coordination so that the movements themselves participate in the design of the planes sociales and are involved in the implementation of local policies (never general policies, though, or those that might question the model).

The movements are persuaded to undertake a "participatory diagnosis" of the neighborhood or town; in fact they are even put in charge of carrying out the local charity work. This all falls into the policy of "capacity building" designed by the World Bank, which involves choosing which ministry each organization is suited to work with.

All of this is aimed at "state building" within the everyday practices of popular sectors, and it is done precisely in areas where people had learned "movement building." The planes sociales are directed straight at the heart of territories that were incubators of rebellion. These programs seek to neutralize or modify networks and forms of solidarity, reciprocity, and mutual assistance that were created by the poor (los de abajo) in order to survive neoliberalism. Once the social ties and knowledge that assured their autonomy have disappeared, these sectors are easier to control.

None of this should be attributed to a supposed malevolence on the part of the progressive governments. Whenever the poor have overturned existing forms of domination, new and more perfected ones have necessarily taken their place. Only by neutralizing these planes sociales and overcoming their offensive against the autonomy of the poor will the movements be able to get back on their feet and resume their march toward emancipation.

[1] [Ed. Note: For details, see Mario Murillo’s article in S&D, no. 51 (November 2009).]
[2] [Ed. Note: For Plan 3000 resistance to the right wing coup, see Marxa Chávez in S&D no. 51.]
[3] Raquel Rodriguez, “Winds of Civil War in Bolivia: Understanding a Four-party Conflict,” Center for International Policy-Americas Program, October 29, 2008 (http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5632).
[4] See Francisco de Oliveira, “The Duckbilled Platypus,” New Left Review 24, November/December 2003.
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Serving Our Life Sentence in the Shacks

by Zodwa Nsibande & S'bu Zikode, El Kilombo

People all over South Africa have been asking the leaders of Abahlali baseMjondolo as to why the government continues to ignore the demands of the shack dwellers. They have been asking why after all the marches, statements, reports and meetings the Kennedy Road settlement continues to get burnt down through the endless shack fires.

They have been referring in particular to the recent Kennedy Road shack fire on Sunday, 4 July 2010 that took four lives, leaving more than three thousand people displaced and homeless.

Without much more words to explain this continuous tragedy we have replied that in fact the shack dwellers of South Africa are serving a life sentence. Everybody knows that we are the people who do not count in this society. But the truth that must be faced up to is that we have been sentenced to permanent exclusion from this society.

Over the years it has been made clear that the cities are not for us, that the good schools are not for us and that even the most basic human needs like toilets, electricity, safety from fire and safety from crime are not to be met for us. When we ask for these things we are presented as being unreasonable, too demanding and even as a threat to society. If we were considered as people that did count, as an equal part of society, then it would be obvious that the real threat to our society is that we have to live in mud and fire without toilets, without electricity, without enough taps and without dignity.

Waiting for ‘delivery’ will not liberate us from our life sentence. Sometimes ‘delivery’ does not come. When ‘delivery’ does come it often makes things worse by forcing us into government shacks that are worse than the shacks that we have built ourselves and which are in human dumping grounds far outside of the cities.’Delivery’ can be a way of formalising our exclusion from society.

But we have not only been sentenced to permanent physical exclusion from society and its cities, schools, electricity, refuse removal and sewerage systems. Our life sentence has also removed us from the discussions that take place in society. Everyone knows about the repression that we have faced from the state and now, also, from the ruling party. Everyone knows about the years of arrests and beatings that we suffered at the hands of the police and then the attack on our movement in the Kennedy Road settlement.

We have always said that in the eyes of the state and the ruling party our real crime was that we organised and mobilised the poor outside of their control. We have thought for ourselves, discussed all the important issues for ourselves and taken decisions for ourselves on all the important issues that affect us. We have demanded that the state includes us in society and gives us what we need to have for a dignified and safe life. We have also done what we can to make our communities better places for human beings. We have run crèches, organised clean up campaigns, connected people to water and to electricity, tried to make our communities safe and worked very hard to unite people across all divisions. We have faced many challenges but we have always worked to ensure that in all of this work we treat one another with respect and dignity.

The self-organisation of the poor by the poor and for the poor has meant that all of those who were meant to do the thinking, the discussing and to take decisions on our behalf – for us but without us – no longer have a job. Our decision to build our own future may therefore not be an easy one to accept for those who can no longer continue to take decisions and to speak for us but without us. Some of the people who have refused to accept our demand that those who say that they are for the poor should struggle with and not on behalf of the poor are in the state. Some are in the party. Some are in that part of the left, often in the universities and NGOs, that sees itself as a more progressive elite than those in the party and the state and which aims to take their place in the name of our suffering and struggles.

We call this left a regressive left. For us any leftism outside of the state that, just like the ruling party, wants followers and not comrades and which is determined to ruin any politics that it cannot rule is deeply regressive. We have always and will always resist its attempts to buy our loyalty just as we have always and will always resist all attempts by the state and the ruling party to buy our loyalty. We will also resist all attempts to intimidate us into giving up our autonomy. We will always defend our comrades when they are attacked. Our movement will always be owned by its members. We negotiate on many issues. Where we have to make compromises to go forward we sometimes do so. But on this issue there will never be any negotiation.

We have done a lot for ourselves and by ourselves. But for a long time what we could not succeed in doing for ourselves was to secure good land and decent housing in our cities. We stopped the evictions and we were no longer going backwards but it was a real struggle to go forwards. But we kept pushing and made some small advances here and there. This really offended the authorities in the party. This became very clear and evident when the provincial government of KwaZulu-Natal passed the notorious Slums Act, meaning that the shack dwellers would never again have any place in our cities. Our successful challenge to the Slums Act in the Highest Court in the land was a great setback for the government’s plan to formalise our life sentence by eradicating our settlements and putting us in the human dumping grounds. The deal that we negotiated with the eThekwini Municipality to upgrade two settlements and to provide basic services to fourteen settlements was another setback to the eradication agenda of the politicians. The recent announcement by the eThekwini Municipality that they will accede to our demand to provide services including, for the first time since 2001 electricity, to settlements across the city is another victory of our struggle and another major setback to the eradication agenda. We are slowly but surely defeating the eradication agenda.

As South Africa was hosting the World Cup Abahlali warned that it will not benefit the poorest of the poor in our land. We warned that it would make the poor, poorer and more vulnerable. Leading up to the World Cup there were more evictions and pending court cases in different parts of the country. Poor street traders had their belongings confiscated as they had no permits to sell in restricted zones and the taxi industry suffered the impoundment of their taxis. Stopping the rush to celebrate the World Cup by raising all these questions and condemning these attacks on the poor as immoral and illegitimate has been a slap on the authorities’ faces. Although the fact is that all these huge soccer stadiums, hotels and other projects were built by the poor of the poorest they remained outside their benefit. The South African government has overspent its budget in building a ‘world class country’ and could not match and balance such expenditure with social needs such housing and the provision of the most basic services. The amount that has been spent for the World Cup could have built at least one millions homes for the poor. Although we acknowledge the efforts that have been put into this event we still feel that such effort could have been used to bring basic services and infrastructure to the poor. If that had been the case then the shack dwellers would not have been affected by these ongoing fires every time.

The truth about the attack on our movement has always been firm and not changing at any stage. We cannot make public comment on matters that are sub judice but our demand for an independent commission of inquiry that will bring the whole story into the light remains unchanged. The Kennedy 5, part of those who are already serving their life sentence in and out of the jails, have now been released from Westville prison. They had already been serving ten months of their punishment without any evidence of guilt being brought to the court and without the court saying anything about their illegal detention. The South African Constitution says there shall be no detention without trial and that a person cannot be detained for more than 48 hours without a proper bail hearing. The fact that, up until the release of the Kennedy 5, this trial was being conducted as a political trial outside of the rule of law even though it was taking place in a court of law tells us something very important about the position of the poor in post apartheid South Africa. Those who have handed a life sentence down to us always want to exclude us from fair and equal access to the courts and the rule of law. When they fail to achieve this through the commodification of the legal system they are willing to actively undermine the system from above.

The movement insists that the people shall govern; this is what the famous Freedom Charter says. Abahlali holds on to that. The strength and the autonomy of the movement compels us all to strive for a just world, a world that is free, a world that is fair and a world that looks after all its creations. We remain convinced that the land and the wealth of this world must be shared fairly and equally. We remain convinced that every person in this world has the same right to contribute to all discussions and decision making about their own future. For us all to succeed we have to be humble but firm in what we believe is right. We have to resist all our jailers, be they in the state, the party or the regressive left, and to take our place as equals in all the discussions.

We also know that the South African government still wants to look good in the eyes of the international communities and that they fear disgrace and shame. They want to show the world Soccer City but hide eTwatwa, Blikkiesdorp, Westville Prison, the red ants and the shack fires all around the country. We wish to thank all the international activists and organisations who have raised their concern against the repression that we have faced, including those that have organised protests against the South African diplomats in their respective countries.

We hope South Africa will become one of the world’s caring countries. We hope that one day our society will be an inspiration rather than a shock to you. As Abahlali we have committed ourselves to achieving this goal. But right now we are serving a life sentence and fighting all those who are trying to keep us imprisoned in our poverty, all those who demand that we know our place – our place in the cities and our place in the discussions. We have recognised our own humanity and the power of our struggle to force the full recognition of our humanity. Therefore we remain determined to continue to refuse to know our place.

Compiled by Zodwa Nsibande and S’bu Zikode -Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement SA.



Abahlali baseMjondolo, together with with Landless People’s Movement (Gauteng), the Rural Network (KwaZulu-Natal) and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, is part of the Poor People’s Alliance – a national network of democratic membership based poor people’s movements continue reading