Fellow Prisoners

by John Berger, Guernica

The wonderful American poet Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent lecture about poetry that “this year, a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that one out of every 136 residents of the United States is behind bars—many in jails, unconvicted.”

In the same lecture she quoted the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos:

In the field the last swallow had lingered late,
balancing in the air like a black ribbon on the sleeve
of autumn.
Nothing else remained. Only the burned houses
smouldering still.


***

I picked up the phone and knew immediately it was an unexpected call from you, speaking from your flat in the Via Paolo Sarpi. (Two days after the election results and Berlusconi’s comeback.) The speed with which we identify a familiar voice coming out of the blue is comforting, but also somewhat mysterious. Because the measures, the units we use in calculating the clear distinction that exists between one voice and another, are unformulated and nameless. They don’t have a code. These days more and more is encoded.

So I wonder whether there aren’t other measures, equally uncoded yet precise, by which we calculate other givens. For example, the amount of circumstantial freedom existing in a certain situation, its extent and its strict limits. Prisoners become experts at this. They develop a particular sensitivity towards liberty, not as a principle, but as a granular substance. They spot fragments of liberty almost immediately whenever they occur.


***

On an ordinary day, when nothing is happening and the crises announced hourly are the old familiar ones—and the politicians are declaring yet again that without them there would be catastrophe—people as they pass one another exchange glances, and some of their glances check whether the others are envisaging the same thing when they say to themselves; so this is life!

Often they are envisaging the same thing and in this primary sharing there is a kind of solidarity before anything further has been said or discussed.

I’m searching for words to describe the period of history we’re living through. To say it’s unprecedented means little because all periods were unprecedented since history was first discovered.

No, it’s not a metaphor, the imprisonment is real, but to describe it one has to think historically.

I’m not searching for a complex definition—there are a number of thinkers, such as Zygmunt Bauman, who have taken on this essential task. I’m looking for nothing more than a figurative image to serve as a landmark. Landmarks don’t fully explain themselves, but they offer a reference point that can be shared. In this they are like the tacit assumptions contained in popular proverbs. Without landmarks there is the great human risk of turning in circles.


***

The landmark I’ve found is that of prison. Nothing less. Across the planet we are living in a prison.

The word we, when printed or pronounced on screens, has become suspect, for it’s continually used by those with power in the demagogic claim that they are also speaking for those who are denied power. Let’s talk of ourselves as they. They are living in a prison.

What kind of prison? How is it constructed? Where is it situated? Or am I only using the word as a figure of speech?

No, it’s not a metaphor, the imprisonment is real, but to describe it one has to think historically.

Michel Foucault has graphically shown how the penitentiary was a late eighteenth-, early nineteenth-century invention closely linked to industrial production, its factories and its utilitarian philosophy. Earlier, there were jails that were extensions of the cage and the dungeon. What distinguished the penitentiary is the number of prisoners it can pack in—and the fact that all of them are under continuous surveillance thanks to the model of the Pantopticon, as conceived by Jeremy Bentham, who introduced the principle of accountancy into ethics.

Accountancy demands that every transaction be noted. Hence the penitentiary’s circular walls with the cells arranged around the screw’s watchtower at the center. Bentham, who was John Stuart Mill’s tutor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was the principal utilitarian apologist for industrial capitalism.

Today in the era of globalization, the world is dominated by financial, not industrial, capital, and the dogmas defining criminality and the logics of imprisonment have changed radically. Penitentiaries still exist and more and more are being built. But prison walls now serve a different purpose. What constitutes an incarceration area has been transformed.


***

Twenty years ago, Nella Bielski and I wrote A Question of Geography, a play about the Gulag. In act two, a zek (a political prisoner) talks to a boy who has just arrived about choice, about the limits of what can be chosen in a labor camp: When you drag yourself back after a day’s work in the taiga, when you are marched back, half dead with fatigue and hunger, you are given your ration of soup and bread. About the soup you have no choice—it has to be eaten whilst it’s hot, or whilst it’s at least warm. About the four hundred grams of bread you have choice. For instance, you can cut it into three little bits: one to eat now with the soup, one to suck in the mouth before going to sleep in your bunk, and the third to keep until next morning at ten, when you’re working in the taiga and the emptiness in your stomach feels like a stone.

The Gulag equation “criminal = slave laborer” has been rewritten by neoliberalism to become “worker = hidden criminal.”

You empty a wheelbarrow full of rock. About pushing the barrow to the dump you have no choice. Now it’s empty you have a choice. You can walk your barrow back just like you came, or—if you’re clever, and survival makes you clever—you push it back like this, almost upright. If you choose the second way you give your shoulders a rest. If you are a zek and you become a team leader, you have the choice of playing at being a screw, or of never forgetting that you are a zek.

The Gulag no longer exists. Millions work, however, under conditions that are not very different. What has changed is the forensic logic applied to workers and criminals.

During the Gulag, political prisoners, categorized as criminals, were reduced to slave-laborers. Today millions of brutally exploited workers are being reduced to the status of criminals.

The Gulag equation “criminal = slave laborer” has been rewritten by neoliberalism to become “worker = hidden criminal.” The whole drama of global migration is expressed in this new formula; those who work are latent criminals. When accused, they are found guilty of trying at all costs to survive.

Over six million Mexican women and men work in the U.S. without papers and are consequently illegal. A concrete wall of over one thousand kilometers and a “virtual” wall of eighteen hundred watchtowers were planned along the frontier between the U.S. and Mexico, although the projects have recently been scrapped. Ways around them—though all of them dangerous—will of course be found.

Between industrial capitalism, dependent on manufacture and factories, and financial capitalism, dependent on free-market speculation and front office traders, the incarceration area has changed. Speculative financial transactions add up to, each day, $1,300 billion, fifty times more than the sum of the commercial exchanges. The prison is now as large as the planet and its allotted zones can vary and can be termed worksite, refugee camp, shopping mall, periphery, ghetto, office block, favela, suburb. What is essential is that those incarcerated in these zones are fellow prisoners.


***

It’s the first week in May and on the hillsides and mountains, along the avenues and around the gates in the northern hemisphere, the leaves of most of the trees are coming out. Not only are all their different varieties of green still distinct, people also have the impression that each single leaf is distinct, and so they are confronting billions—no, not billions (the word has been corrupted by dollars), they are confronting an infinite multitude of new leaves.

For prisoners, small visible signs of nature’s continuity have always been, and still are, a covert encouragement.


***

Today the purpose of most prison walls (concrete, electronic, patrolled, or interrogatory) is not to keep prisoners in and correct them, but to keep prisoners out and exclude them.

Most of the excluded are anonymous—hence the obsession of all security forces with identity. They are also numberless, for two reasons. First because their numbers fluctuate; every famine, natural disaster and military intervention (now called policing) either diminishes or increases their multitude. And secondly, because to assess their number is to confront the fact that they constitute most of those living on the surface of the earth—and to acknowledge this is to plummet into absolute absurdity.


***

Have you noticed small commodities are increasingly difficult to remove from their packaging? Something similar has happened with the lives of the gainfully employed. Those who have legal employment and are not poor are living in a very reduced space that allows them fewer and fewer choices—except the continual binary choice between obedience and disobedience. Their working hours, their place of residence, their past skills and experience, their health, the future of their children, everything outside their function as employees has to take a small second place beside the unforseeable and vast demands of liquid profit. Furthermore, the rigidity of this house rule is called flexibility. In prison, words get turned upside down.

The alarming pressure of high-grade working conditions has obliged the courts in Japan to recognize and define a new coroners’ category of “death by overwork.”

No other system, the gainfully employed are told, is feasible. There is no alternative. Take the elevator. The elevator is a small cell.

Somewhere in the prison I’m watching a five-year-old girl having a swimming lesson in a municipal indoor swimming pool. She’s wearing a dark blue costume. She can swim but doesn’t yet have the confidence to swim alone without any support. The instructor takes her to the deep end of the pool. The girl is going to jump into the water whilst grasping a long rod held out towards her by her teacher. It’s a way of getting over her fear of water. They did the same thing yesterday.

Today she wants the girl to jump without clutching the rod. One, two, three! The girl jumps, but at the last moment seizes the rod. Not a word is spoken. A faint smile passes between the woman and the girl, the girl cheeky, the woman patient.

The girl clambers up the ladder out of the pool and returns to the edge. Again! she hisses. She jumps, hands to her sides, holding nothing. When she comes up to the surface the tip of the rod is there in front of her very nose. The girl swims two strokes to the ladder without touching the rod.

Am I proposing that the girl in the dark blue costume and the swimming instructor in her sandals are prisoners? Certainly at the moment when the girl jumped without the rod, neither of them was in prison. If I think, however, of the years to come or look back at the recent past, I fear that, notwithstanding what I describe, both of them risk becoming or re-becoming a prisoner.


***

Look at the power structure of the surrounding world, and how its authority functions. Every tyranny finds and improvises its own set of controls. Which is why they are often, at first, not recognized as the vicious controls they are.

The market forces dominating the world assert that they are inevitably stronger than any nation-state. The assertion is corroborated every minute. From an unsolicited telephone call trying to persuade the subscriber to take out private health insurance or a pension, to the latest ultimatum of the World Trade Organization.

As a result, most governments no longer govern. A government no longer steers towards its chosen destination. The word “horizon,” with its promise of a hoped-for future, has vanished from political discourse on both right and left. All that remains for debate is how to measure what is there. Opinion polls replace direction and replace desire.

Most governments herd instead of steer. (In U.S. prison slang, “herders” is one of the many words for jailers.)

In the nineteenth century, long-term imprisonment was approvingly defined as a punishment of “civic death.” Two centuries later, governments are imposing—by law, force, economic threats and their buzz—mass regimes of civic death.


***

Wasn’t living under any tyranny in the past a form of imprisonment? Not in the sense I’m describing. What is being lived today is new because of its relationship with space.

It’s here that the thinking of Zygmunt Bauman is illuminating. He points out that the corporate market forces now running the world are ex-territorial, that’s to say “free from territorial constraints—the constraints of locality.” They are perpetually remote, anonymous and thus never have to take account of the territorial, physical consequences of their actions. He quotes Hans Tietmeyer, former President of the German Federal Bank: “Today’s stake is to create conditions favorable to the confidence of investors.” The single supreme priority.

Following this, the control of the world’s populations, who consist of producers, consumers, and the marginalized poor, is the task allotted to the obedient national governments.

The planet is a prison and the obedient governments, whether of left or right, are the herders.


***

The prison system operates thanks to cyberspace. Cyberspace offers the market a speed of exchange which is almost instantaneous and used across the world day and night for trading. From this speed, the market tyranny gains its ex-territorial license. Such velocity, however, has a pathological effect on its practitioners: it anesthetizes them. No matter what has befallen, “business as usual.”

There is no place for pain in that velocity; announcements of pain perhaps, but not the suffering of it. Consequently, the human condition is banished, excluded from those operating the system. They are alone because utterly heartless.

Earlier, tyrants were pitiless and inaccessible, but they were neighbors who were subject to pain. This is no longer the case, and therein lies the system’s probable weakness.


***

The tall doors swing background
We’re inside the prison yard
in a new season.

They (we) are fellow prisoners. That recognition, in whatever tone of voice it may be declared, contains a refusal. Nowhere more than in prison is the future calculated and awaited as something utterly opposed to the present. The incarcerated never accept the present as final.

Meanwhile, how to live this present? What conclusions to draw? What decisions to take? How to act? I have a few guidelines to suggest, now that the landmark has been established.

On this side of the walls experience is listened to, no experience is considered obsolete. Here survival is respected, and it’s a commonplace that survival frequently depends upon solidarity between fellow prisoners. The authorities know this—hence their use of solitary confinement, either through physical isolation from history, from heritage, from the earth and, above all, from a common future.

Ignore the jailers’ talk. There are of course bad jailers and less bad. In certain conditions it’s useful to note the difference. But what they say—including the less evil ones—is bullshit. Their hymns, their shibboleths, their incanted words security, democracy, identity, civilization, flexibility, productivity, human rights, integration, terrorism, freedom are repeated and repeated in order to confuse, divide, distract, and sedate all fellow prisoners. On this side of the walls, words spoken by the jailers are meaningless and are no longer useful for thought. They cut through nothing. Reject them even when thinking silently to oneself.

By contrast, prisoners have their own vocabulary with which they think. Many words are kept secret and many are local, with countless variations. Small words and phrases, small yet containing a world: I’ll-show-you-my-way, sometimes-wonder, pajarillo, something-happening-in-B-wing, stripped, take-this-small-earring, died-for-us, go-for-it, etc.

Between fellow prisoners there are conflicts, sometimes violent. All prisoners are deprived, yet there are degrees of deprivation and the differences of degree provoke envy. On this side of the walls life is cheap. The very facelessness of the global tyranny encourages hunts to find scapegoats, to find instantly definable enemies among other prisoners. The asphyxiating cells then become a madhouse. The poor attack the poor, the invaded pillage the invaded. Fellow prisoners should not be idealized.

For fellow prisoners the opposite is true. Cells have walls that touch across the world. Effective acts of sustained resistance will be embedded in the local, near and far. Outback resistance, listening to the earth.


Without idealization, simply take note that what they have in common—which is their unnecessary suffering, their endurance, their cunning—is more significant, more telling, than what separates them. And from this, new forms of solidarity are being born. The new solidarities start with the mutual recognition of differences and multiplicity. So this is life! A solidarity, not of masses but of interconnectivity, far more appropriate to the conditions of prison.


***

The authorities do their systematic best to keep fellow prisoners misinformed about what is happening elsewhere in the world prison. They do not, in the aggressive sense of the term, indoctrinate. Indoctrination is reserved for the training of the small élite of traders and managerial and market experts. For the mass prison population the aim is not to activate them, but to keep them in a state of passive uncertainty, to remind them remorselessly that there is nothing in life but risk, and that the earth is an unsafe place.

This is done with carefully selected information, with misinformation, commentaries, rumors, fictions. Insofar as the operation succeeds, it proposes and maintains a hallucinating paradox, for it tricks a prison population into believing that the priority for each one of them is to make arrangements for their own personal protection and to acquire somehow, even though incarcerated, their own particular exemption from the common fate. This image of mankind as transmitted through a view of the world is truly without precedent. Mankind is presented as a coward; only winners are brave. In addition, there are no gifts; there are only prizes.

Prisoners have always found ways of communicating with one another. In today’s global prison, cyberspace can be used against the interests of those who first installed it. Like this, prisoners inform themselves about what the world does each day, and they follow suppressed stories from the past and so stand shoulder to shoulder with the dead.

In doing so, they rediscover little gifts, examples of courage, a single rose in a kitchen where there’s not enough to eat, indelible pains, the indefatigability of mothers, laughter, mutual aid, silence, ever-widening resistance, willing sacrifice, more laughter…

The messages are brief but they extend in the solitude of their (our) nights.


***

The final guideline is not tactical but strategic.

The fact that the world’s tyrants are ex-territorial explains the extent of their overseeing power, yet it also indicates a coming weakness. They operate in cyberspace and they lodge in guarded condominiums. They have no knowledge of the surrounding earth. Furthermore, they dismiss such knowledge as superficial, not profound. Only extracted resources count. They cannot listen to the earth. On the ground they are blind. In the local they are lost.

For fellow prisoners the opposite is true. Cells have walls that touch across the world. Effective acts of sustained resistance will be embedded in the local, near and far. Outback resistance, listening to the earth.

Liberty is slowly being found not outside but in the depths of the prison.


***


Not only did I immediately recognize your voice, speaking from your flat in the Via Paolo Sarpi, I could also guess, thanks to your voice, how you were feeling. I sensed your exasperation or, rather, an exasperated endurance combined—and this is so typical of you—with the quick steps of our next hope.
continue reading

The Rationality of Rebellion

Nigel Gibson, Seminar Presentation at the Centre for Sociological Research, University of Johannesburg, 25 May 2011

The Problem of Humanism

What is Fanon’s humanism, or better to say his new humanism? Simply put it is about putting invention into existence, or life into being. His is a living humanism. In Black Skin, Fanon speaks of this abstractly, he says, “yes to freedom no to exploitation”; but we have to also think of humanism as something that hasn’t happened. That is to say, critical of European humanism, which he says is an anti-humanism in practice, which kills and murders in the name of humanism (and still does). Fanon argues that a new humanism must include disalienation. There is a resonance with Marx here. After speaking about the abolition of alienated labor and the private property, which it creates, Marx posits a “positive humanism beginning from itself.”

So when Fanon calls on us, at the conclusion of The Wretched, to humanize the world what does this mean in the context of post-apartheid South Africa? We can intimate some transitional elements. At the very least it would mean redistributing wealth and land, abolishing the dividing lines, the security and policing of exclusion, the bio-ordering of citadels, the walls, razor wires of the gated communities, and creating space for human interaction, it would mean the right to the city in Lefevbrean terms, in terms of encouraging buildings and architecture that expresses social life. But at its basis, such reforms could not be instituted by decree. They would require every attempt to practice a fundamental decentralized democratization from the bottom up that would include everyone in decision making about what to do. It means, in short, living a life consciously in the world, creating if you will a human world, humanizing the world. It is not a grand scheme that needs to be realized in one feel swoop, it begins here and there, and is intimated often only for a moment, in struggles. But that struggle has not been realized--and so there is something out of wack with post-apartheid South Africa that has simply incorporated a Black elite into what used to be considered the racial capitalist system reformed by neoliberalism.

You know the rest. By necessity the poor, the damned of the earth, have to struggle to survive and in the neoliberal world, the gulf between poor and rich, so clear in South Africa, is ever widening. So South African capitalism has morphed into a highly securitized system, alongside alienation, commodification and destruction of the human (both in mind and body and environment (which is not really a third term). We need a shift in thinking.

The Problem of Method

I have just come from a conference on Reading Fanon 50 years Later in Naples Italy. What was not surprising, I suppose, since it was an academic conference, was that it was an academic conference, that is to say it was limited by at times highly intellectualized discussions—often marred by disciplinary squabbles-- which seemed by their nature to objectify as “other” and make absent the politics of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth that the conference was named.

In Naples someone called me a Fanon fundamentalist; I don’t really take umbrage from this. I am a Fanon loyalist, but I am not interested in checking affiliation cards. I am only interested in an organization in an eminent historical sense that is to say I take Fanon seriously as a thinker and practitioner.

But I do not come empty headed to Fanon, of course, nobody does. I come with specific concerns and my readings are influenced by my thinking for over thirty years, but I still regard him as an original thinker who is very much part of his time but give us something to think about.

While The Wretched does reflect on the Algerian and African situation, it provides no blueprints and there are no a prioris to a long and reflective and engaged dialectic. Fanon is a source, a guide, a way of thinking that requires, if you will, a shift in the geography of reason. That being said my reading is infused with Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-humanism. I can’t really say where one things starts and another ends. I was a student of Dunayevskaya in the 1980s and have been thinking of Fanon and Marxist-Humanism for 30 years (of course there are other thinkers and theoreticians who have been influential) but Dunayevskaya’s Marx is my Marx and central to that Marx is Dunayevskaya’s conception of the movement from practice as a form of theory. In Marxism and Freedom, published in 1958, she describes how Marx completely redeveloped Capital based on movements from practice, the civil war in the US, the struggle for the 8 hour day, and the Paris Commune and so on. The latter being central to his development of the fetish character of the commodity as well as his consideration of the possibility of non-capitalist roads to socialism, which is absolutely essential to understand Marx and the contemporary world. I make this point not as a caveat, nor to say that I claim Fanon as a Marxist.

The problem with the movement from practice as a form of theory is that one has to know when it is and when it isn’t. And one can’t know that before hand, so one has to be continually open to the world and its breaths as Césaire puts it; and at the same time always self-critical, always questioning and always listening and thinking.

In an almost counter-intuitive way, then, at least from the point of view of power politics but not from Fanon’s last writings, it is not surprising that new articulations of humanism, are being articulated in South Africa, even 16 years after the end of apartheid; perhaps because capitalism--namely neo-apartheid plus BEE has won—that it does seem abundantly clear to many that struggle is not over and that in such CRISIS ideas of liberation can be generated from the bottom up.

Paradoxically or not (not for me) the shift in thinking can be aided by social struggles and those thinking about these struggles. Fanon makes the point that the intellectual is always out of step with the people who are struggling to be free. They have changed, but the university-trained intellectual keeps repeating the old mantras. We need to catch up, and to catch up necessitates opening our minds and ears not only to history from below, but as its notional self-comprehension, how that thought is challenging thinking.

The Call to the Barricades?

This is not a call to the barricades even if it is a call to ideological combat not to confine new developments in a priori categories.

The struggle is a school, as Richard Pithouse puts it. And let’s be clear sometimes that school comes into contradiction with the academic system and can have dire costs both in terms of employment and in terms of threats of violence. Fanon talks about “snatching” knowledge from the colonial universities; he is also aware of the great sacrifices that this can entail. In The Wretched he makes a point to distinguish between the hobnobbing postcolonial intelligentsia and the honest intellectual who distrusts the race for positions; who is still committed to fundamental change even if presently does not see its possibility. I am not saying that the university should be given up on. It is a contested terrain, mired in assumptions about what constitutes academic research, and thus for those of us who work in the academy, one has to be very wary. The spaces of autonomy, the spaces for genuine, collaborative and political work with poor, excluded, the so-called illegal or marginal people, the wretched and damned is always compromised. As Fanon, the existential puts it, everyone’s hands are dirty.

In quite another time—namely in the anti-colonial epoch of the 1950s Fanon had a great job at Blida Psychiatric Hospital. It was what he wanted and he put enormous energy into fighting to reform how psychiatry was practiced in the hospital. He created space—both practical and intellectuals (reading groups) for himself and his colleagues.

Indeed the Algerian war politicized him, radicalized him. He began to see its effects; he began to treat the tortured and the torturer. The situation became untenable, he simply couldn’t continue there. The authorities were closing in on Blida, suspected as a hotbed of support for the FLN. It was dangerous. He resigned before he was picked up. He began to work full time for the revolution.

Fanon made contact with the FLN in 1955 and left the country around the new year of 1957. His identification with and commitment to the Algerian revolution was swift and absolute. Living the double life while at Blida, he prepared a paper for the First Conference of Black Writers held in Paris in September. Racism and Culture was written in the context of a state of emergency and emergence: the endless strikes, a curfew on Blida, and summary executions of FLN sympathizers (Cherki: 86). The paper had no direct reference to the Algerian struggle but Fanon’s commitment was obvious in its conclusions:

The logical end of this will to struggle is the total liberation of the national territory. In order to achieve this liberation the inferiorized man brings all his resources into play, all his acquisitions, the old and the new, his own and those of the occupant. The struggle is at once total, absolute (1967b: 43).

During the 1956/7 “Battle of Algiers” all these resources were brought into play. And Fanon was among them. Doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies were secretly tending to the wounded; other sympathizers were helping to distribute materials and information or provide safe houses; and so on. Fanon was contacted to help counsel militants. It was a very practical and concrete request, using his training to aid the defeat of the French, while being educated in what he called the “school of the people” (1968:150).

Fanon had never thought of psychiatry apart from society and thus it had become absolutely clear that sociotherapy could not be practiced in Algeria because the social structure was against it. At least, this is what he maintained in his resignation letter. Lawlessness, torture and inequality were the “logical consequence” of an “attempt to decerebralize a people” (1967b: 53), which he claimed had “put an end to my mission in Algeria” (1967b: 54). In reality, he had already begun another mission to put an end to one Algeria and help bring into being another one. From full time director of psychiatry he became a full-time revolutionary, working for the FLN.

So in early 1957 Fanon arrived in France. The Parisian left was full of discussions of the Hungarian revolution that had raised the question of a socialist humanism before being crushed by Russian tanks in October 1956. Yet the heralding of the Hungarian resistance and the mass resignations from the French Communist Party (which continued to support French colonialism in Algeria) did not translate into a shift in attitudes toward the Algerian question and the liberation struggle. On the contrary, even with the emergence of “new left” non-vanguard communist organizations like Castoriadis’ Socialism or Barbarism, which was loudly praising the self-activity and self-organization of the Budapest resistance, the French remained mostly quiet about Algeria. Fanon, on the other hand, who made clear in The Wretched that his sympathies lay with the Budapest revolutionaries (noting that it signified “a decisive moment” [1968:79] in the global anti-colonial movement), rejected the Parisian left talk and committed himself to decolonizing Algeria.

If Lenin had believed that his was the epoch of imperialism, for Fanon, decolonization was not simply the “bacillus” (CW 22:357) for the proletarian revolution, as Lenin put it, but a beginning of something quite new. Colonialism was dying, and from inside the Algerian revolution the problem was the emergence of a democratic, inclusive, and accountable society that could be the basis for a new internationalism (1968:247). This was the problem that Fanon found Lenin grappling with as he read the documents of the early Communist International at Jean Ayme’s apartment in early 1957. Namely the Communist International’s theses that national and peasant revolts are not only essential to the social struggle but as Lenin put it questioned the inevitability of “the capitalist stage of economic development” (Lenin: CW 31:244). Indeed, Lenin insisted that Bukharin’s idea of skipping the capitalist stage was “impossible” and could only be demonstrated “practically.” It was a remark echoed by Fanon in The Wretched when he argued that “whether or not the bourgeois phase can be skipped ought to answered in the field of revolutionary action not logic” (1968:175).

Practice Enlivens Theoretical Issues

To understand how practice resolves or enlivens theoretical issues, one must return to Fanon’s commitment to the Algerian revolution and the brilliance of its moment, while at the same time not freezing that moment but catching its dialectic, saturated by his experiences of 1956/7, the battle of Algiers and discussions with the FLN leader Ramdane Abane.

Central to Fanon’s conception of the new society is the politics of space. The reordering of colonial geography is a central marker to decolonial reorganization (1968:38) and Fanon’s famous description of the zoned cities of colonialism—the dark, cramped, poor, hungry, native town, and the light, spacious, rich, satiated colonial town—is based on his own observations especially Algiers. If in Black Skin he notes that the elites in Fort de France lived high above the shantytown below; in Algiers the European city is built around the port and its gaze is turned away from the Casbah toward the Mediterranean. Though there was not a formal organizational separation between the “European city and the Muslim one” there was, (Cherki notes (42)) a “keen awareness of boundaries felt by everyone.” In the interstices of the Casbah what Alice Cherki calls “the vast slums, groaning with misery, that cropped up ... places without public works or services of any kind [where] the rural poor came to settle” (Cherki 2006:41-42).

In reality, the poor urban populations living in the bidonville or “informal settlements” on the edges or in the interstices of the Casbah are the same displaced rural populations seen as an unruly, threatening mass by the colonial regime. For Fanon this subterranean and uncounted mass of people became the crucial actors in the liberation struggle. By the 1950s, the growth of shack settlements added what Zenep Çelik (1997:110) calls “a third element” to the dualistic colonial city that Fanon described. This third element formed the core of Fanon’s lumpenproletariat, which by 1954, on the eve of the Algerian revolution, had become over 40% of Algiers’ native population. During the Battle of Algiers, Fanon observed how the bidonvilles began to take on a more practical-critical role, not only as manifestations of the material/spatial divide between Europeans and Algerian zones, but as a center for the resistance. Algiers’ marginals, poor and unemployed, irrupted into history. The bidonville became part of the frontline of the struggle and in retaliation, “and as part of the war strategy,” Çelik remarks (1997:112), colonial “military forces bulldozed many squatter settlements, and army trucks transported the residents to dispersed locations to be rehoused.”

Traveling through the Blidean maquis on their way to the Soummam Valley in summer 1956, Abane and his colleague Ben M'hidi were impressed by “the courage of the young women ... mainly from bourgeois Muslim families ... who sacrificed their studies and their opulent lives ... [for] the hard life of the maquis” (Abane 2011) and Hocine Ait-Ahmed, one of nine “historic leaders” who founded the FLN and the only one of the external leadership around Ben Bella who approved Ramdane’s Soummam platform, argued, in what would become a Fanonian vein, that “the revolutionary must … descend from the pedestal of theory to root himself in concrete life, in order to draw upon it and verify there his principles of action” (quoted in Gillespie 1961:80). The idea of rooting oneself in concrete life, of practice and action trumping theory, was methodologically exactly what was at stake in Year 5 of the Algerian Revolution, where concrete life was one of radical mutation which had to be recorded by the revolutionary theoretician.

Fanon began working on what would become Year 5 quite soon after he arrived in Tunis. It reflected his Algerian experiences, his ongoing discussions with Abane and his commitment to the Soummam platform as well as according to Alice Cherki a polemic with Bourdieu’s writings on Kabylia. Year 5 was addressed to the French left but it also had a strictly Abanean thesis associating the power of the Algerian revolution not with guns but with the “radical mutation that the Algerian has undergone” (1967c: 32) and thus was clearly directed to the internal political struggle. Abane’s emphasis at Soummam that the mass movement dominated military strategy was echoed by Fanon, who in The Wretched argued that the subservience of politics to the military was a symptom of the revolution’s degeneration.

The dialectics of organization are not solely about the forms of organization—whether centralized or decentralized, military or political. For Fanon in Year 5, revolutionary organization also mutates and is implicitly connected with the idea of the whole nation undergoing change (see for example his essay on the radio). Yet it is also not surprising—since practice and commitment to the struggle for liberation do not end questions about how to create the new society—that the suffocation of the “oxygen” of revolution (Fanon 1967c: 181), and the suppression and indeed criminalization of the mass movements by the nationalist parties which had gained power after independence, meant that Fanon’s dialectic of liberation had to be further internalized. The Wretched—a book that he knew would have to be his last—would be a balance sheet seriously addressing the internal contradictions and misadventures that undermined the possibility of liberation.

The New society (and its Misadventures) and Organization

In contrast to the opening up of space detailed in Year 5, the dialectic of The Wretched which begins with the suffocation of space under colonialism ends with its suffocation in neocolonialism. The time needed to rethink everything, to include all in decision-making, is quickly consumed in the rotten deals spun by the nationalist elite and withdrawing colonists. Time is eaten up by insider political deals: the already senile bourgeoisie (1968:153), aged before their time, the rotten huckstering petit-bourgeoisie, rotten on the vine, are consumed by the speed of the world market, the gleam of its shiny goods and get rich quick schemes (1968:166-176). The masses, Fanon adds, either mark time or go backwards (1968:147). These are all well-known parts of Fanon’s analysis. Yet a crucial divide between Year 5 and The Wretched is the assassination of Ramdane Abane. Fanon knew about it; but he remained silent. In a minority position, perhaps he felt that he could be disappeared. But it clearly indicated the degeneration of the revolution within the revolution, and as he told Sartre and de Beauvoir, Ramdane’s assassination remained on his conscience.

Thus if practice does solve contradictions in Year 5, clearly The Wretched complicates the issue. Beginning with “violence” and ending with “torture,” The Wretched reflects on subversion of the radical social actions of men and women detailed in Year 5. It is no accident, in the context of Abane’s politics, that the chapter the pitfalls of national consciousness was first presented as a series of lectures to ALN militants on the Algeria/Tunisia border as an ideological intervention against narrow nationalism. It remains powerful because it traced the speed of degeneration of the anti-colonial revolution from inside the revolution. But Fanon’s is not an a priori schematic critique of a bourgeois revolution that can be mapped onto the postcolonial Africa. The Wretched isn’t a neo-Marxist appraisal of the class character of nationalist leaderships.

Indeed, Fanon is quick to point out that after independence the “masses” become “frustrated” because for them there is no immediate change, no redistribution of land, no social and economic reforms. The “enlightened observer takes note of this masked discontent”. The feeling of injustice is real, but it often goes unheard or is violently suppressed. And thus we return to the brutal manicheanism that had characterized colonialism.

The discontent can be manifest in local acts of violence which appear spontaneous but are often micro-managed by ethnic entrepreneurs, local businessmen and local party leaders, or discontent can burst out regionally and even nationally, often organized through the politicization of indigeneity. The sources of injustice (the lack of land, jobs, and bread) are often articulated against “outsiders,” framed as “natives” against “settlers” or foreigners or religions (see 1968:160-161). And thus nationalism and ultra-nationalism, as Fanon predicted in 1961, and as we have witnessed for 50 years, leads to chauvinism and racism (1968:156).

But the problem with the anti-colonial movements cannot simply be answered by applying the logic of Marx’s slogan in light of the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, “never again with the bourgeoisie.” Fanon’s critique of the timidity and incapacity of the national bourgeoisie to act in a decisive way against colonialism echoes Marx’s critique, and Marx’s advice that the workers’ own organizations encourage and give direction to revolutionary excitement and “popular vengeance” (Marx 1975:325) is echoed in Fanon’s advice in The Wretched, that violence should be channelled toward its “real” cause. For Fanon the comprador character of the national bourgeoisie is expressed by its paucity of ideas. Thus, ironically, the end of colonialism offers an opportunity for revolutionary will because the nascent bourgeoisie in the colonies is so structurally weak. But for Fanon, it is a tricky position to navigate. It is almost idealistic because alongside an organized and principle resistance, Fanon posits a unifying liberatory ideology as what is lacking in the African revolutions. But this raises the issue of circulatory thinking. The lumpen-intelligentsia needs to be educated in the school of the people and the people need to be liberated from reactive thinking. This answer wasn’t a vanguard-type nationalist organization which he saw as a form for the one-party state preferred by the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” (1968:165) but he noted in 1960, the problem was the absence of ideology (1967b: 189), namely an idea of the future—what he calls a new humanism—practically spelled out in a way that is profoundly concrete. While Year 5 and The Wretched both concern the unfinished character of Fanon’s engagement with the dialectics of organization as prefiguring the new society, an important shift is seen in the conclusion to The Wretched. Rather than a “return” to Lenin’s aphorism that there can be no revolution without revolutionary theory, Fanon’s humanism begins from the rationality of the rebellion.
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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.

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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.

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