South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world … Suicide is the most common cause of death for those under 40 in South Korea … Interestingly, the toll of suicides in South Korea has doubled during the last decade … In the space of two generations their condition has certainly improved by the point of view of revenue, nutrition, freedom and possibility of travelling abroad. But the price of this improvement has been the desertification of daily life, the hyper-acceleration of rhythms, the extreme individualization of biographies, and work precariousness which also means unbridled competition …

High-tech capitalism naturally implies ever-increasing productivity and ceaseless intensification of the rhythms of work, but it is also the condition that has made possible an impressive improvement in life standards, nourishment and consumption … But the present alienation is a different sort of hell. The intensification of the rhythm of work, the desertification of the landscape and the virtualization of the emotional life are converging to create a level of loneliness and despair that is difficult to consciously refuse and oppose … Isolation, competition, sense of meaninglessness, compulsion and failure: 28 persons out of 100,000 every year succeed in their attempt to escape and many more unsuccessfully try.

As suicide can be considered the ultimate mark of the anthropological mutation linked to the digital transformation and precarization, not surprisingly South Korea is number one in the world when it comes to the suicide rate.’4

Even Nazi anti-Semitism, however ghastly it was, opened up a world: it described its critical situation by positing an enemy which was a ‘Jewish conspiracy’: it named a goal and the means of achieving it. Nazism disclosed reality in a way that allowed its subjects to acquire a global ‘cognitive mapping’, which included a space for their meaningful engagement. Perhaps it is here that one should locate one of the main dangers of capitalism: although it is global and encompasses the whole world, it sustains a stricto sensu worldless ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping. Capitalism is the first socio-economic order which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning. There is, after all, no global ‘capitalist world view’, no ‘capitalist civilization’ proper: the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East. Capitalism’s global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the Real of the global market mechanism.

Back to Korea, this analysis seems confirmed by Propaganda, a documentary from 2012 (easily available online) about capitalism, imperialism and the mass manipulation of Western culture for the purpose of commodification, and how they permeate every aspect of the lives of the blissfully ignorant, borderline-zombie masses. It is a ‘mockumentary’ that pretends to be North Korean, although it was made by a group from New Zealand – but, as they say in Italy, Se non è vero, è ben trovato. The use of fear and religion to manipulate the masses, as well as the role of the media that provide colourful distractions to keep us from thinking about the bigger problems, are all touched upon. One of the best parts of the film is its annihilation of celebrity-worship culture: talking about Madonna and Brad and Angelina’s ‘shopping for children in third-world countries’; western obsession with the glamorous lives of celebrities and self-absorption while ignoring the plight of the homeless and the suffering; celebrities being tools of commodification to the point that they often don’t even realize it, often driving them to the point of insanity – all this is so spot on it’s scary. It is the world around us. All of it, particularly the part about Michael Jackson – a look at ‘what America did to this man’ – rings so true it’s kind of hard to swallow. If, in Propaganda, one were to delete a brief passage here and there which mentions the wisdom of their great beloved leader etc., one would get a standard – not even traditional Marxist, but more specifically Western Marxist Frankfurt-School-style – critique of consumerism, commodification and Kulturindustrie. But what we should be attentive to is a warning at the film’s beginning: the narrator’s voice tells the viewers that, although the filth and perversity of what they will see will embarrass and shock them, the great beloved Leader has decided to trust them that they are mature enough to see horrible truth about the outside world – words that a benevolent protective maternal authority uses when it decides to inform children of an unpleasant fact.

Does North Korea then stand for something like the Indian Kali – the benevolent/murderous goddess – in power? One should distinguish levels here: in North Korea, the superficial level of manly-military discourse of the Leader as ‘General’, with the Juche idea of self-reliance, of humanity as a master of itself and its destiny, is sustained by a deeper level of the Leader as a maternal protector. Here is how Myers formulates the basic axiom of North Korean ideology: ‘The Korean people are too pure blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader.’13 Is this not a nice example of Lacan’s formula of paternal metaphor, of the Name-of-the-Father as a metaphoric substitute for the desire of the mother? The Name-of-the-Father (Leader/General) and, beneath it, the mother’s protective/destructive desire? 14

There is a well-known Jewish story about a child who, after being told a wonderful old legend by a rabbi, eagerly asks him: ‘But did it really happen? Is it true?’ The rabbi replies: ‘It didn’t really happen, but it is true.’ This assertion of the ‘deeper’ symbolic truth in contrast to the factual should be supplemented by its opposite – our reaction to many a spectacular ‘event’ can only be: ‘It did really happen, but it isn’t true.’ So we should be all the more grateful for any sign of hope, no matter how small it appears, like the existence of Café Photo in Sao Paolo. Publicized as ‘entertainment with a special touch’, it is – so I was told – a meeting place for high-class prostitutes with their prospective clients. Although this fact is very well known by the public, this information is not published on their website: officially, ‘it is a place to meet the best company for your evening’. Things really do proceed there with a special touch: prostitutes themselves – mostly students of humanities – choose their customers. Men (prospective clients) enter, take a seat at a table, buy a drink and wait, being observed by women. If a woman finds one of them acceptable, she sits at his table, lets him buy her a drink and starts a conversation on some intellectual topic, usually a theme of cultural life, sometimes even art theory. If she finds the man bright and attractive enough, she asks him if he would like to go to bed with her and tells him her price. This is prostitution with a feminist twist, if ever there was one – even if, as is often the case, the feminist twist is paid for by a class limitation: both prostitutes and clients come from the upper or at least upper-middle classes. So I humbly dedicate this book to the prostitutes of the Café Photo in Sao Paolo.

With many provisos, one can roughly accept the data to which these ‘rationalists’ refer. Yes, today we definitely live better than our ancestors did 10,000 years ago in the Stone Age, and even an average prisoner in Dachau (the Nazi working camp, not Auschwitz, the killing camp) was living at least marginally better, probably, than a slave prisoner of the Mongols. And so on and so forth. But there is something that this story misses.

First – we should restrain our anti-colonialist joy here – the question to be raised is: if Europe is in gradual decay, what is replacing its hegemony? The answer is: ‘capitalism with Asian values’ (which, of course, has nothing to do with Asian people and everything to do with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism as such to suspend democracy). From Marx on, the truly radical Left was never simply ‘progressist’. It was always obsessed by the question: what is the price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed; it was just that he insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms. And we should do the same with the progress of global capitalism today: keep in view its dark underside, which is fomenting revolts.

Here, one should remain shamelessly orthodox Marxist: Wang Hui underestimates the immanent logic of market relations, which tends towards exploitation and destabilizing excesses. Are we substantializing economy too much here? It would be easy to perform the standard deconstructionist operation on ‘economy’ and claim that there is no Economy as a substantial unified field, that what we designate as ‘economy’ is an inconsistent space traversed by a multitude of practices and discourses: material production from primitive hand labour to automated production, money operations, publicity machines, interventions of state apparatuses, legal regulations and obligations, ideological dreams, religious myths, tales of domination, suffering and humiliation, private obsessions with wealth and pleasures, and so on. While this is undoubtedly true, there is nonetheless not a deeper ‘essence’ of Economy, but rather something like a ‘mathem’ of capital, a formal matrix of the self-reproduction of capital, like that which Marx was trying to elaborate in his Capital. This mathem, this trans-historical and trans-cultural formal matrix, is the ‘real’ of capital: the thing that stays the same through the entire process of global capitalism, the madness of which becomes palpable in moments of crisis. Marx describes the contours of this madness when he talks about the traditional miser as ‘a capitalist gone mad’, hoarding his treasure in a secret hide-out, in contrast to the ‘normal’ capitalist, who augments his treasure by throwing it into circulation:

The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser strives after, by seeking to save his money from circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by constantly throwing it afresh into circulation.15

First, such elementary wisdom is simply wrong – the United States was doing quite well for decades by spending much more than it produced. At a more fundamental level, we should clearly perceive the paradox of debt. The problem with the slogan ‘You cannot spend more than you produce!’ is that, taken universally, it is a tautological platitude, a fact and not a norm (of course humanity cannot consume more than it produces, like you cannot eat more food than you have on the plate), but the moment one moves to a particular level, things get problematic and ambiguous. At the direct material level of social totality, debts are in a way irrelevant, inexistent even, since humanity as a whole consumes what it produces – by definition one cannot consume more. One can reasonably speak of debt only with regard to natural resources (destroying the material conditions for the survival of future generations), where we are indebted to future generations which, precisely, do not yet exist and which, not without irony, will come to exist only through – and thus be indebted for their existence to – ourselves. So here, also, the term ‘debt’ has no literal sense, it cannot be ‘financialized’, quantified into an amount of money. The debt we can talk about occurs when, within a global society, some group (nation or whatever) consumes more than it produces, which means that another group has to consume less than it produces – but here, relations are by no means as simple and clear as they may appear. Relations would be clear if, in a situation of debt, money was a neutral instrument measuring how much more one group consumed with regard to what it produced, and at whose expense – but the actual situation is far from this. According to public data, around 90 per cent of money circulating is ‘virtual’ credit money, so if ‘real’ producers find themselves indebted to financial institutions, one has good reasons to doubt the status of their debt: how much of this debt is the result of speculations which happened in a sphere without any link to the reality of a local unit of production?

So when a country finds itself under the pressure of international financial institutions, be it the IMF or private banks, one should always bear in mind that their pressure (translated into concrete demands: reduce public spending by dismantling parts of the welfare state, privatize, open up your market, deregulate your banks …) is not the expression of some neutral objective logic or knowledge, but of a doubly partial (‘interested’) knowledge. At the formal level, it is a knowledge which embodies a series of neoliberal presuppositions, while at the level of content, it privileges the interests of certain states or institutions (banks etc.).

When the Romanian Communist writer Panait Istrati visited the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, the time of the first purges and show trials, a Soviet apologist trying to convince him about the need for violence against the enemies of the Soviet Union invoked the proverb, ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ to which Istrati tersely replied: ‘All right. I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelette of yours?’ We should say the same about the austerity measures imposed by the IMF, about which the Greeks would be fully justified in saying: ‘OK, we are breaking our eggs for all of Europe, but where’s the omelet you are promising us?’

If the ideal of financial speculation is to get an omelette without breaking any eggs, in a financial meltdown we end up with just broken eggs, as was the case in Cyprus. Recall the classic cartoon scene of a cat which simply continues to walk over the edge of the precipice, ignoring the fact that she no longer has ground under her feet – she falls only when she looks down and notices she is hanging over the abyss. Is this not how ordinary people in Cyprus must feel these days? They are aware that Cyprus will never be the same, that ahead lies a catastrophic fall in living standards, but the full impact of this fall is not yet properly felt, so for a short period they can afford to go on with their normal daily lives, like the cat who calmly walks in the empty air. And we should not condemn them. Such delaying of the full impact of the crash is also a survival strategy: the real impact will come silently, when the panic is over. This is why it is now, when the Cyprus crisis has largely disappeared from the media, that one should think and write about it.

Back to the joke about Rabinovitch, it is easy to imagine a similar conversation between a European Union financial administrator and a Cypriot Rabinovitch today. Rabinovitch complains: ‘There are two reasons we are in a panic here. First, we are afraid that the EU will simply abandon Cyprus and let our economy collapse …’ The EU administrator interrupts him: ‘But you can trust us, we will not abandon you, we will tightly control you and advise you what to do!’ ‘Well,’ responds Rabinovitch calmly, ‘that’s my second reason.’ Such a deadlock is at the core of Cyprus’s sad predicament: it cannot survive in prosperity without Europe, but nor can it do so with Europe. Both options are worse, as Stalin would have put it. Recall the cruel joke from Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be: when asked about the German concentration camps in the occupied Poland, the responsible Nazi officer, ‘concentration-camp Erhardt’, replies: ‘We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping.’ Does the same not hold true for the ongoing financial crisis in Europe? The strong Northern Europe, centred on Germany, does the concentrating, while the weakened and vulnerable South does the camping. Visible on the horizon are thus the contours of a divided Europe: its Southern part will be more and more reduced to a zone with a cheap labour force, outside the safety network of the welfare state, a domain appropriate for outsourcing and tourism. In short, the gap between the developed world and those lagging behind is now opening within Europe itself.

But there is a fatal trap to be avoided here: the socialization of banks that is needed is not a compromise between wage labour and productive capital against the power of finance. Financial meltdowns and crises are obvious reminders that the circulation of Capital is not a closed loop which can fully sustain itself – i.e. that this circulation points towards the reality of producing and selling actual goods that satisfy actual people’s needs. However, the more subtle lesson of crises and meltdowns is that there is no return to this reality – all the rhetoric of ‘let us move from the virtual space of financial speculation back to real people who produce and consume’ is deeply misleading; it is ideology at its purest. The paradox of capitalism is that you cannot throw out the dirty water of financial speculations and keep the healthy baby of real economy: the dirty water effectively is the ‘bloodline’ of the healthy baby.

Some of us remember the old infamous Communist tirades against the bourgeois ‘formal’ freedom – ridiculous as they are, there is an element of truth in this distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom. A manager in a company in crisis has the ‘freedom’ to fire worker A or B, but not the freedom to change the situation which imposes on him this choice. The moment we approach the US healthcare debate in this way, the ‘freedom to choose’ appears in a different way. True, a large part of the population will be effectively delivered of the dubious ‘freedom’ to worry about who will cover their illness, to find a way through the intricate network of financial and other decisions. Being able to take basic healthcare for granted, to count on it like one counts on a water supply without worrying about having to choose the water company, people will simply gain more time and energy to dedicate to other things. The lesson to be learned is that freedom of choice is something which actually functions only if a complex network of legal, educational, ethical, economic and other conditions exists as the invisible thick background of the exercise of our freedom. This is why, as an antidote to the ideology of choice, countries like Norway should be held as a model: although all main agents respect a basic social agreement and large social projects are enacted in solidarity, social productivity and dynamics are at an extraordinary level, flatly denying the common wisdom that such a society should be stagnating.

Not many people know – and even fewer appreciate the irony of the fact – that ‘My Way’, Frank Sinatra’s iconic song that supposedly expresses American individualism, is an Americanized version of the French song ‘Comme d’habitude’, which means ‘as usual’, or ‘as is customary’. It is all too easy to see this couple – the French original and its American version – as yet another example of the opposition between sterile French manners and American inventiveness (the French follow established customs, while Americans look for new solutions) – but what if we drop the false appearance of opposition and discern in the habit of ‘comme d’habitude’ the hidden sad truth of the much-praised search for new ways? In order to be able to do it ‘my way’, each of us has to rely on quite a lot of things going on comme d’habitude. Quite a lot of things, in other words, have to be regulated if we are to enjoy our non-regulated freedom.17

One of the weird consequences of the 2008 financial meltdown and the measures taken to counteract it (enormous sums of money to help banks) was the revival in the work of Ayn Rand, the fullest ideological expression of radical ‘greed is good’ capitalism: the sales of her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged exploded. According to some, there are already signs that the scenario described in Atlas Shrugged – the ‘creative capitalists’ themselves going on strike – is now being enacted. Yet this reaction almost totally misreads the situation: most of the gigantic sums of bail-out money went precisely to those deregulated Randian ‘titans’ who failed in their ‘creative’ schemes and in doing so brought about the meltdown. It is not the great creative geniuses who are now helping lazy ordinary people; rather, it is the ordinary taxpayers who are helping the failed ‘creative geniuses’. One should simply recall that the ideologico-political father of the long economic process which ended up in the 2008 meltdown was Alan Greenspan, a card-carrying Randian ‘objectivist’. So now we finally know who John Galt is – the idiot responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown and, consequentially, for the threat of the shutdown of state apparatuses.

In order truly to awaken from the Randian capitalist ‘dogmatic dream’ (as Kant would have put it), we should apply to our situation Brecht’s old quip from his Beggars’ Opera: ‘What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?’ What is the stealing of a couple of thousand dollars, for which one goes to prison, compared to financial speculations which deprive tens of millions of their homes and savings, and are then rewarded by state help of sublime grandeur? Maybe Jose Saramago was right when he proposed treating the big bank managers and others responsible for the meltdown as perpetrators of crimes against humanity, whose place is in the Hague Tribunal; maybe one should not treat this proposal just as a poetic exaggeration in the style of Jonathan Swift, but take it seriously. This, however, will never happen since, after the doctrine of the bank too big to fail (the logic being that its bankruptcy would have catastrophic consequences for the entire economy), we now have the doctrine of the bank too big to indict18 (since, one can argue, its indictment would have catastrophic consequences for the financial and moral status of the ruling elites).

These elites, the main culprits for the 2008 financial meltdown, now impose themselves as experts, the only ones who can lead us on the painful path of financial recovery, and whose advice should therefore trump parliamentary politics, or, as Mario Monti put it: ‘Those who govern must not allow themselves to be completely bound by parliamentarians.’19 What, then, is this higher force whose authority can suspend the decisions of the democratically elected representatives of the people? The answer was provided back in 1998 by Hans Tietmeyer, then governor of the Deutsches Bundesbank, who praised national governments for preferring ‘the permanent plebiscite of global markets’ to the ‘plebiscite of the ballot box’.20 Note the democratic rhetoric of this obscene statement: global markets are more democratic than parliamentary elections since the process of voting goes on in them permanently (and is permanently reflected in market fluctuations) and at a global level – not only every four years, and within the confines of a nation-state. The underlying idea is that, freed from this higher control of markets (and experts), parliamentary-democratic decisions are ‘irresponsible’.

The consequences of such thinking have been – and are being – felt all around Europe. In one of his last interviews before his fall, Nicolae Ceaus¸escu was asked by a Western journalist how he justified the fact that Romanian citizens could not travel freely abroad even though freedom of movement was guaranteed by the Romanian constitution. Ceaus¸escu’s answer followed the best of Stalinist sophistry: true, the constitution guaranteed the freedom of movement, but it also guaranteed the right of the people to a safe and prosperous home. So we have here a potential conflict of rights: if Romanian citizens were to be allowed to leave the country freely, the prosperity of the homeland would be threatened and they would have put in danger their right to the homeland. In this conflict of right, one has to make a choice, and the right to a prosperous and safe homeland enjoys a clear priority.

It seems that this same spirit of Stalinist sophistry is alive and well in today’s Slovenia where, on 19 December 2012, the Constitutional Court found that a proposed referendum on the legislation to set up a ‘bad bank’ and a sovereign holding would be unconstitutional – thus in effect banning a popular vote on the matter. The referendum had been mooted by trade unions, against the government’s neoliberal economic politics, and the proposal attracted enough signatures to make it constitutionally obligatory. The government’s idea was to transfer all bad credits from the main banks onto a new ‘bad bank’, which would then be salvaged by state money (i.e., at the taxpayers’ expense), preventing any serious inquiry into who was responsible for the financial fiasco. This measure, a matter of financial and economic policy, was debated for months and was far from being generally accepted even by financial specialists. So why prohibit the referendum? In 2011, when Papandreou’s government in Greece proposed a referendum on austerity measures, there was panic in Brussels, but even there no one dared directly to prohibit it.

According to the Slovene Constitutional Court, the referendum ‘would have caused unconstitutional consequences’ – but how? The Constitutional Court conceded that the referendum was a constitutional right, but claimed that its execution would endanger other constitutional values which should be given priority in a situation of economic crisis: the efficient functioning of the state apparatus, especially in creating conditions for economic growth; the realization of human rights, especially the rights to social security and to free economic initiative. In short, in its assessment of the consequences of the referendum, the Constitutional Court simply accepted as an undisputed fact the reasoning of international financial authorities which are exerting pressure on Slovenia to enact more austerity measures: failing to obey the dictates of international financial institutions (or to meet their expectations) can lead to political and economic crisis and is thus unconstitutional. To put it bluntly: since meeting these financial dictates/expectations is the condition of maintaining the constitutional order, they have priority over the constitution (and eo ipso state sovereignty).

No wonder, then, that the Court’s decision shocked many legal specialists. Dr France Bucar, an old dissident and one of the fathers of Slovene independence, pointed out that, following the logic the Constitutional Court used in this case, the Court can prohibit any referendum, since every such act has social consequences: ‘With this decision, the constitutional judges issued to themselves a blank cheque allowing them to prohibit anything anyone can concoct. From when does the Constitutional Court have the right to assess the state of economy or bank institutions? It can assess only if a certain legal regulation is in accord with the constitution or not. That’s it!’

A rumour circulated in 1990s Germany (se non è vero, è ben trovato) that, on a visit to Berlin after he lost power, Gorbachev paid a surprise call on the ex-Chancellor Willy Brandt. However, when he (with his guards) approached Brandt’s house and rang the doorbell, Brandt refused to see him. Later, he explained to a friend why: he had never forgiven Gorbachev for allowing the dissolution of the Communist bloc – not because Brandt was a secret believer in Soviet Communism, but because he was well aware that the disappearance of the Communist bloc would also entail the disappearance of the West European Social Democratic welfare state. That is to say, Brandt knew that the capitalist system is ready to make considerable concessions to the workers and the poor only if there is a serious threat of an alternative, of a different mode of production which promises workers their rights. To retain its legitimacy, capitalism has to demonstrate how it works better even for the workers and the poor – and the moment this alternative vanishes, one can proceed to dismantle the welfare state.

It is hardly surprising that there is today, among some Russian nationalists, a nostalgia for Yuri Andropov, the KGB head who became CPSU General Secretary in 1982 but died after only sixteen months of power. This longing is for a kind of alternative history: if Andropov were to have lived longer, the USSR would have survived in a Chinese way. Andropov wanted to introduce radical economic reforms, and his programme, on which he was working from 1965, was like that of Pinochet in Chile: authoritarian and centralized state power introduces by non-democratic means and without public discussion a complex of unpopular modernizing transformations directed at the Westernization of the country. Andropov was well aware that, for several years, a harsh, almost Stalinist dictatorship would be needed because of the opposition these liberal reforms would generate. He also wanted to abolish the ethno-territorial divisions of the USSR, since in his view dispensing with the non-Russian republics would have been to destroy much of the party nomenklatura. Consequently, he considered banning the activity of all parties in the country (which meant the banning of the CPSU). In place of the republics, Andropov wanted to create ten competing economic zones, the best of which would guide the country as a whole and overcome the degradation of the system more generally, much as the Chinese have done. To run these zones, Andropov knew he had to find new professionals, and for that he looked to certain officers in the KGB and others who were prepared to work with the KGB in this direction. Andropov’s decision to pursue ultra-liberal policies by authoritarian means reflected the Reagan–Thatcher spirit of the 1980s – for Russia, the alternative of Swedish socialism was considered inappropriate.21

Another example of such magic thinking (and a true model of what Hegel called abstract thinking) is the so-called ‘Laffer curve’, evoked by free-market advocates as a reason against excessive taxation. The Laffer curve is a representation of the relationship between possible rates of taxation and the resulting levels of government revenue, illustrating how taxable income will change in response to changes in the rate of taxation. It postulates that no tax revenue will be raised at the extreme tax rates of 0 per cent and 100 per cent, and that there must be at least one rate where tax revenue would be a non-zero maximum: even from the standpoint of the government which taxes business, the highest revenue is not gained by the highest taxes. There is a point at which higher taxes start to work as a disincentive, causing capital flight and consequently lower tax revenues. The implicit premise of this reasoning is that today the tax rate is already too high, and that lowering the tax rate would therefore not only help business but also raise tax revenues. The problem with this reasoning is that, while in some abstract sense it is true, things get more complex the moment we locate taxation into the totality of economic reproduction. A great part of the money collected by taxation is again spent on the products of private business, thereby giving incentive to it. More important even, the proceeds of taxation are also spent on creating the appropriate conditions for business. Let us take two comparable cities, one with lower and the other with a higher business tax rate. In the first city public education and healthcare are in a bad condition, crime is exploding, and so on; the second city, meanwhile, spends higher revenues on better education, better energy supply, better transport, etc.

Is it not reasonable to suppose that many businesses would find the second city more attractive for investment? So, paradoxically, if the first city decides to follow the second in its tax policy, raising taxes may give more incentive to private business. (And, incidentally, many half-developed ex-Communist countries to which developed countries are outsourcing their industries are exploited, in the sense that Western business gains access to a cheaper skilled workforce that has benefited from public education: thus, the socialist state provides free education for the workforces of Western companies.)22

A spectre is haunting capitalism today – the spectre of debt. All the powers of capitalism have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre, but do they really want to get rid of it? Maurizio Lazzarato23 provides a detailed analysis of how, in today’s global capitalism, debt works across a whole range of social practices and levels, from nation states down to individuals. The hegemonic neoliberal ideology endeavours to extend the logic of market competition to all areas of social life so that, for example, health and education – or even political decisions (voting) themselves – are perceived as investments made by the individual in his or her individual capital. In this way, the worker is no longer conceived merely as labour power, but as personal capital making good or bad ‘investment’ decisions as s/he moves from job to job and increases or decreases his/ her capital value. This reconceptualization of the individual as an ‘entrepreneur-of-the-self’ means a significant change in the nature of governance: a move away from the relative passivity and enclosure of disciplinary regimes (the school, the factory, the prison), as well as from the biopolitical treatment of the population (by the welfare state). How can one govern individuals who are conceived of as autonomous agents of free market choices, i.e., as ‘entrepreneurs-of-the-self’? Governance is now exercised at the level of the environment in which people make their apparently autonomous decisions: risks are outsourced from companies and states to individuals. Through this individualization of social policy and privatization of social protection through its alignment with market norms, protection becomes conditional (no longer a right), and is tied to individuals whose behaviours are thus opened up for evaluation. For the majority of people, being an ‘entrepreneur-of-the-self’ refers to the individual’s ability to deal with outsourced risks without having the necessary resources or power to do so adequately:

contemporary neoliberal policies produce a human capital or ‘entrepreneur-of-the-self’ more or less indebted and more or less poor but always precarious. For the majority of the population, becoming an entrepreneur-of-the-self is limited to managing one’s employability, one’s debts, the drop in one’s salary and income and the reduction in social services according to business and competitive norms.24

As individuals become poorer through the shrinkage of their salaries and the removal of social provision, neoliberalism offers them compensation through debt and by the promotion of shareholding. In this way, wages or deferred salaries (pensions) don’t rise, but people have access to consumer credit and are encouraged to provide for retirement through personal share portfolios; people no longer have a right to housing but have access to housing/mortgage credit; people no longer have a right to higher education, but can take out student loans; mutual and collective protection against risks are dismantled, but people are encouraged to take out private insurance. In this way, without replacing all existing social relationships, the creditor–debt nexus comes to overlay them: workers become indebted workers (having to pay back their company shareholders for employing them); consumers become indebted consumers; citizens become indebted citizens, having to take responsibility for their share of their country’s debt.

Lazzarato relies here on Nietzsche’s idea, developed in his A Genealogy of Morals, that what distinguished human societies, as they moved away from their primitive origins, was their capacity to produce a human able to promise to pay others back and to recognize their debt towards the group. This promise grounds a particular type of memory oriented to the future (‘I remember I owe you, so I will behave in ways that will allow me to pay you back’), and so becomes a way of governing future conducts. In more primitive social groups, debts to others were limited and could be discharged, while with the coming of empires and monotheisms, one’s social or divine debt become effectively unpayable. Christianity perfected this mechanism: its all-powerful God meant a debt that was infinite; at the same time, one’s guilt for non-payment was internalized. The only way one could possibly repay in any way was through obedience: to the will of God, to the church. Debt, with its grip on past and future behaviours and with its moral reach, was a formidable governmental tool. All that remained was for it to be secularized.

This constellation gives rise to a type of subjectivity characterized by moralization and specific temporalization. The indebted subject practises two kinds of work: salaried labour, and the work upon the self that is needed to produce a subject who is able to promise, to repay debts, and who is ready to assume guilt for being an indebted subject. A particular set of temporalities are associated with indebtedness: to be able to repay (to remember one’s promise), one has to make one’s behaviour predictable, regular and calculating. This not only militates against any future revolt, with its inevitable disruption of the capacity to repay; it also implies an erasure of the memory of past rebellions and acts of collective resistance which disrupted the normal flow of time and led to unpredictable behaviours. This indebted subject is constantly opened up to the evaluating inspection of others: individualized appraisals and targets at work, credit ratings, individual interviews for those in receipt of benefits or public credits. The subject is thus compelled not only to show that he or she will be able to repay debt (and to repay society through the right behaviours), but also to show the right attitudes and assume individual guilt for any failings. This is where the asymmetry between creditor and debtor becomes palpable: the indebted ‘entrepreneur-of-the-self’ is more active than the subject of the previous, more disciplinary modes of governance; however, deprived as he or she is of the ability to govern his or her time, or to evaluate his or her own behaviours, his or her capacity for autonomous action is strictly curtailed.

It is as if the providers and caretakers of debt accuse the indebted countries of not feeling enough guilt: they are accused of feeling innocent. Recall the ongoing EU pressure on Greece to implement austerity measures, a pressure that fits perfectly what psychoanalysis calls ‘superego’. Superego is not an ethical agency proper, but a sadistic agent which bombards the subject with impossible demands, obscenely enjoying the subject’s failure to comply with them. The paradox of the superego is that, as Freud saw it clearly, the more we obey its demands, the more we feel guilty. Imagine a vicious teacher who gives to his pupils impossible tasks, and then sadistically jeers when he sees their anxiety and panic. This is what is so terribly wrong with the EU demands/commands: they don’t even give Greece a chance. The Greek failure is part of the game. Here, the goal of politico-economic analysis is to deploy strategies of how to step out of this infernal circle of debt and guilt.

A similar paradox was operative from the very beginning, of course, since a promise/obligation which cannot ever be fully met is at the very base of the banking system. When one puts money into a bank, the bank is obliged to return the money on demand – but we all know that, while the bank can do this to some of the people who deposited money, it by definition cannot do it for all of them. However, this paradox, which originally held for the relationship between individual depositors and their bank, now also holds for the relationship between the bank and (legal or physical) persons who borrowed money from it. What this implies is that the true aim of lending money to the debtor is not to get the debt reimbursed with a profit, but the indefinite continuation of the debt which keeps the debtor in permanent dependency and subordination. A decade or so ago, Argentina decided to repay its debt to the IMF ahead of time (with financial help from Venezuela). The IMF’s reaction was on the face of it surprising: instead of being glad that it was getting its money back, the IMF (or, rather, its top representatives) expressed their concern that Argentina would use this new freedom and financial independence from international institutions to abandon tight financial politics and engage in careless spending. This uneasiness made palpable the true stakes of the debtor/creditor relationship: debt is an instrument with which to control and regulate the debtor, and, as such, it strives for its own expanded reproduction.

Peter Buffett (Warren’s son) recently published a New York Times op-ed in which he explained ‘Philanthropic Colonialism’:

Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left … Philanthropy has become the ‘it’ vehicle to level the playing field and has generated a growing number of gatherings, workshops and affinity groups.

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to ‘give back’. It’s what I would call ‘conscience laundering’ – feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over.

And with more business-minded folks getting into the act, business principles are trumpeted as an important element to add to the philanthropic sector … Micro-lending and financial literacy (now I’m going to upset people who are wonderful folks and a few dear friends) – what is this really about? People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast?29

What Sloterdijk’s idea amounts to is nothing less than the elevation of figures like George Soros or Bill Gates into personifications of the inherent self-negation of the capitalist process itself: their work of charity, their immense donations to public welfare, is not just a personal idiosyncrasy, whether sincere or hypocritical, it is the logical concluding point of capitalist circulation, necessary from the strictly economic standpoint since it allows the capitalist system to postpone its crisis. It re-establishes balance – a kind of redistribution of wealth to the truly needy – without falling into a fateful trap: the destructive logic of resentment and enforced statist redistribution of wealth which can only end in generalized misery. (It also avoids, one might add, the other mode of re-establishing a kind of balance and asserting thymos through sovereign expenditure, namely wars.) Or, to quote the old Latin saying, velle bonum alicui: charity (doing good deeds) is the pastime (amusement, distraction) of those who are indifferent (who don’t really care).

When we are buying products like toothpaste or soft drinks, the top of the container or bottle is often in a different colour, with big letters telling us, ‘20 per cent free!’: you buy the product, and you get a surplus gratis. Maybe, we could say that the entire capitalist system addresses us in a similar way: ‘Buy global capitalism, participate in it, and you will get 20 per cent of it back for free in the form of charity and philanthropic donations!’ However, in the case of capitalism, the Godfather is making us an offer we can and should refuse.

So how come the British state employs almost fifty people full time to guard Assange under the legal pretence that he refuses to go to Sweden and be questioned about a minor sexual misconduct (there are no charges against him!)? One is tempted to become a Thatcherite and ask: how does this fit in with austerity politics? If a nobody like myself were wanted by the Swedish police for a similar interrogation, would the UK also employ fifty people to guard me? The serious question is this: where does such a ridiculously excessive desire for revenge stem from? What did Assange, his colleagues and whistle-blowing sources do to deserve this? In a way, one can understand the authorities. Assange and his colleagues are often accused of being traitors, but they are something much worse (in the eyes of the authorities):

Even if Snowden were to sell his information discreetly to another intelligence service, this act would still count as part of the ‘patriotic games’, and if needed he would have been liquidated as a ‘traitor’. However, in Snowden’s case, we are dealing with something entirely different. We are dealing with a gesture which questions the very logic, the very status quo, which for quite some time serves as the only foundation of all ‘Western’ (non)politics. With a gesture which, as it were, risks everything, with no consideration of profit and without its own stakes: it takes the risk because it is based on the conclusion that what is going on is simply wrong. Snowden didn’t propose any alternative. Snowden – or, rather, the logic of his gesture, like, say, before him, the gesture of Chelsea Manning – is the alternative.1

This is why it is not enough to see WikiLeaks as an anti-American phenomenon. That is to say, how do President Obama’s acts fit into the constellation formed through WikiLeaks’ disclosures? While the Republicans are denouncing Obama as a dangerous Leftist dividing American people and posing a threat to the American way of life, some Leftists denounce him as ‘worse than Bush’ in his pursuit of imperialist foreign policy. When, back in 2009, Obama got the Nobel peace prize, we all knew this was not a prize for his achievements, but a gesture of hope, a desperate attempt to put additional pressure on Obama so that he would keep his electoral promises and work as the anti-Bush president. The idea of giving the Nobel peace prize to Chelsea Manning should be embraced as a justified reaction to the fact that Obama failed to meet these expectations. To account for this disappointment, one should bear in mind the way Obama won re-election in 2012. Jean-Claude Milner recently proposed the notion of a ‘stabilizing class’: not the old ruling class, but the broad class of all those who are fully committed to the stability and continuity of the existing social, economic and political order, the class of those who, even when they call for a change, do so only to enforce changes that will make the system more efficient and ensure that nothing will really change.3 This is the key to the interpretation of electoral results in today’s developed Western states: who succeeded in winning over this class? Far from truly being perceived as a radical transformer, Obama won them over, and that’s why he was re-elected. The majority that voted for him were put off by the radical changes advocated by the Republican market and religious fundamentalists.

When confronted with such facts, should every decent American citizen not feel like a baboon suddenly overwhelmed by the shame of his or her protruding red butt? Back in 1843, the young Karl Marx claimed that the German ancien régime ‘only imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing’.6 In such a situation, shaming those in power becomes a weapon – or, as Marx explains, ‘The actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicizing it.’7 And this is exactly our situation today: we are facing the shameless cynicism of the existing global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on, and, thanks to WikiLeaks, the shame (our shame for tolerating such power over us) is made more shameful by publicizing it. What we should be ashamed of is the worldwide process of the gradual narrowing of the public use of reason. When Paul says that, from a Christian standpoint, ‘there are no men and women, no Jews and Greeks,’ he claims that ethnic roots, national identity and gender are not categories of truth; or, to put it in precise Kantian terms, when we reflect upon our ethnic roots, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions, i.e., we act as ‘immature’ individuals, not as free human beings who believe in the universality of reason. The public space of the ‘world civil society’ designates the paradox of universal singularity, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, bypasses the mediation of the particular and directly participates in the Universal. This is what Kant, in the famous passage of his ‘What is Enlightenment?’, means by ‘public’ as opposed to ‘private’: ‘private’ does not mean one’s individual as opposed to communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one’s particular identification; while ‘public’ is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one’s Reason. We see where Kant parts with our liberal common sense: the domain of state itself is in its own way ‘private’, private in the precise Kantian sense of the ‘private use of Reason’ in state administrative and ideological apparatuses, while individuals reflecting on general issues use reason in a ‘public’ way.

This Kantian distinction is especially pertinent in the case of the internet and other new media torn between their free ‘public use’ and their growing ‘private’ control. Our struggle should thus focus on the threats to the trans-national public sphere, like the recent trend for organizing cyberspace into ‘clouds’: in this way, details are abstracted from consumers, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure ‘in the cloud’ that supports their activity. Two words are revealing here: abstracted and control – in order to manage a cloud, there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning, and this system is by definition hidden from users. The paradox is that, the more the small item (smartphone or iPod) I hold in my hand is personalized, easy to use, ‘transparent’ in its functioning, the more the entire set-up has to rely on the work being done elsewhere, in a vast circuit of machines which coordinate the user’s experience. The more our experience is non-alienated, spontaneous, transparent, the more it is regulated and controlled by the invisible network of state agencies and large private companies that follow their secret agendas.

This feature is not limited to digital space. It thoroughly pervades the form of subjectivity that characterizes ‘permissive’ liberal society. Since free choice is elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing the subject’s freedom; it has to appear as (and be sustained by) the very self-experience of individuals as free. This unfreedom often appears in the guise of its opposite: when we are deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious job every couple of years or maybe even every couple of weeks, we are told that we are given the opportunity to re-invent ourselves and discover our unexpected creative potential; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become ‘entrepreneurs-of-the-self’, acting like a capitalist who has to choose freely how he will invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed) – in education, health, travel. Constantly bombarded by such imposed ‘free choices’, forced to make decisions for which we are not even properly qualified (or do not possess enough information about), we increasingly experience our freedom as a burden that causes unbearable anxiety. Unable to break out of this vicious cycle alone, as isolated individuals, since the more we act freely, the more we get enslaved by the system, we need to be awakened from this dogmatic slumber of fake freedom by the push of a Master figure.

Peter Sloterdijk in his In the World Interior of Capital, a shameless assertion of the grand narrative of our global-capitalist modernity.12 Sloterdijk explains that, in the end phase of globalization, the world system completed its development and, as a capitalist system, came to determine all conditions of life. The first sign of this development was the Crystal Palace in London, the site of the first world exhibition in 1851: it captured the inevitable exclusivity of globalization as the construction and expansion of a world interior whose boundaries are invisible yet virtually insurmountable from without, and which is inhabited by one and a half billion winners of globalization. Three times this number are left standing outside the door. Consequently, ‘the world interior of capital is not an agora or a trade fair beneath the open sky, but rather a hothouse that has drawn inwards everything that was once on the outside.’13 This interior, built on capitalist excesses, determines everything: ‘The primary fact of the Modern Age was not that the earth goes around the sun, but that money goes around the earth.’14 After the process that transformed the world into the globe, ‘social life could only take place in an expanded interior, a domestically organized and artificially climatized inner space.’15 As cultural capitalism rules, all world-forming upheavals are contained: ‘No more historic events could take place under such conditions – at most, domestic accidents.’16

Recall the liberal appropriation of Martin Luther King, in itself an exemplary case of un-learning. Henry Louis Taylor recently remarked:

Everyone knows, even the smallest kid knows about Martin Luther King, can say his most famous moment was that ‘I have a dream’ speech. No one can go further than one sentence. All we know is that this guy had a dream. We don’t know what that dream was.27

King had come a long way from the crowds who cheered him at the 1963 March on Washington, when he was introduced as ‘the moral leader of our nation’: by taking on issues outside segregation, he had lost much of his public support and was beginning to be seen as a pariah. As Harvard Sitkoff put it, he took on issues of poverty and militarism because he considered them vital ‘to mak[ing] equality something real and not just racial brotherhood but equality in fact’.28 To put it in Badiou’s terms, King followed the ‘axiom of equality’ well beyond the topic of racial segregation: he was working on anti-poverty and anti-war issues at the time of his death. He had spoken out against the Vietnam War and was in Memphis in support of striking sanitation workers when he was killed in April 1968. ‘Following King meant following the unpopular road, not the popular one.’29 In short, elevating King into a moral icon involved a lot of systematic erasure of what was known about him.

The notion of sacrifice usually associated with Lacanian psychoanalysis is that of a gesture that enacts the disavowal of the impotence of the big Other. At its most elementary, the subject does not offer his sacrifice to profit from it himself, but to fill in the lack in the Other, to sustain the appearance of the Other’s omnipotence or, at least, consistency. In the film Beau Geste (1939), Gary Cooper, who plays the oldest of the three brothers living with their benevolent aunt, steals an enormously expensive diamond necklace, which is the pride of the aunt’s family, in what seems to be a gesture of excessive, ungrateful cruelty. He disappears with it, knowing that his reputation is ruined, that he will be for ever known as the ungracious embezzler of his benefactress. So, why did he do it? At the end of the film, we learn that he did it in order to prevent the embarrassing disclosure that the necklace was a fake: unbeknownst to everyone else, some time ago the aunt had had to sell the necklace to a rich maharaja in order to save the family from bankruptcy, replacing it with a worthless imitation. Just prior to his ‘theft’, he learned that a distant uncle who co-owned the necklace wanted it sold for financial gain; if the necklace were to be sold, the fact that it was a fake would undoubtedly have been discovered. Consequently, the only way to retain the aunt’s (and, thus, the family’s) honour was to stage its theft. This is the proper deception of the crime of stealing: to occlude the fact that, ultimately, there is nothing to steal – in this way, the constitutive lack of the Other is concealed (i.e., the illusion is maintained that the Other possessed what was stolen from it). If, in love, one gives what one doesn’t possess, in a crime of love, one steals from the beloved Other what the Other doesn’t possess. This is what the beau geste of the film’s title alludes to. And, therein also resides the meaning of sacrifice: one sacrifices oneself (one’s honour and future) to maintain the appearance of the Other’s honour, to save the beloved Other from shame.

Then, there is the virtual guilt of the innocent bystanders, of the collective who profit from a (necessary) crime. The Freudian paradox ‘The more you are innocent, the more you are guilty,’ holds for them: the more they are innocent of the actual crime, the more they are guilty for enjoying its fruits without paying the price for them. Superego-pressure enters here, capitalizing on this guilt in a very specific way: the superego-pressure does not squash the subject’s individuality, its effect is not to immerse the subject into a crowd where his or her individuality is dissolved; on the contrary, the superego-pressure individualizes the subject, or, to quote Balibar’s wonderful reversal of Althusser’s classic formula, the superego interpellates subjects into individuals. The superego addresses me as a unique individual, confronting me with my guilt and responsibility: ‘Don’t escape into generalities, don’t resort to objective circumstances, look deep into your heart and ask yourself where you failed with regard to your duties!’ This is why superego-pressure gives rise to anxiety: in the eyes of the superego, I am alone, there is no big Other behind which I can hide, and I am ‘guilty as charged’ because the very position of being charged makes me formally guilty – if I plead my innocence, it only signals my additional guilt for denying guilt.

A series of situations that characterize today’s society perfectly exemplify this type of superego-individualization: ecology, political correctness and poverty. The predominant ecological discourse which addresses us as a priori guilty, indebted to mother nature, under the constant pressure of the ecological superego-agency, addresses us as individuals: What did you do today to repay your debt to nature? Did you put all newspapers into the proper recycling bin? And all the bottles of beer or cans of Coke? Did you use your car when you could have used a bike or public transport? Did you use air conditioning instead of just opening the windows?49 The ideological stakes of such individualization are easily discernible: I get lost in my own self-examination instead of raising much more pertinent global questions about our entire industrial civilization.

The same goes for the endless politically correct self-examination: was my look at the female flight attendant too intrusive and sexually offensive? Did I use any words with a possible sexist undertone while addressing her? The pleasure, thrill even, provided by such self-probing is evident – recall how self-critical regret is mixed with joy when you discover that your innocent joke was not so innocent after all, that it had a racist undertone. As for charity, recall how we are all the time bombarded by messages destined to make us feel guilty for our comfortable way of life while children are starving in Somalia or dying unnecessarily from easily curable diseases – messages which simultaneously offer an easy way out (‘You can make a difference! Give $10 monthly and you will make a black orphan happy!’). Again, the ideological underpinning is easily discernible here. Lazzarato’s notion of ‘the indebted man’ provides the general structure of such subjectivity for which the superego-pressure of being indebted is constitutive – to paraphrase Descartes, I am in debt, therefore I exist as a subject integrated into the social order.

And does the same not hold even for the pathological fear of some Western liberal Leftists that they may be guilty of Islamophobia? Any critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western Islamophobia, Salman Rushdie is denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and being (partially, at least) responsible for the fatwa condemning him to death, and so on. The result of such stances is what one should expect in such cases: the more the Western liberal Leftists probe into their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. Again, this constellation perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be. What this implies is that terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, are not really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term – what they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. The passionate intensity of a fundamentalist mob bears witness to the lack of true conviction; deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction – their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim would be if he felt threatened by, say, a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper? Fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite: the fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true ‘racist’ conviction of one’s own superiority.

A more radical strategy for escaping from unbearable reality is that of ‘de-realization’. In his analysis of the big trench battles of the First World War, such as Ypres and the Somme, where hundreds of thousands died to gain a few yards of land, Paul Fussell pointed out how the hellish nature of what went on made the participants experience their situation as theatrical: it was impossible for them to believe that they were taking part in such a murderous endeavour in person, as ‘themselves’. The whole affair was all too farcical, perverse, cruel and absurd to be perceived as being part of their ‘real lives’. In other words, the experience of the war as a theatrical performance enabled the participants to escape from the reality of what went on. It allowed them to follow their orders and perform their military duties without making it part of their ‘true self’ and, in this way, without having to abandon their innermost conviction that the real world was still a rational place and not a madhouse.3

The predominant interpretation, attuned to hegemonic ideology, was proposed by, among others, Fukuyama: the protest movement that toppled Mubarak was predominantly the revolt of the educated middle class, with the poor workers and farmers reduced to the role of (sympathetic) observers. But once the gates of democracy were open, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose social base is the poor majority, won democratic elections and formed a government dominated by Muslim fundamentalists, so that, understandably, the original core of secular protesters turned against them and was ready to endorse even a military coup as a way to stop them. However, such a simplified vision ignores a key feature of the protest movement: the explosion of heterogeneous organizations (of students, women workers, etc.) in the guise of which civil society began to articulate its interests outside the scope of state and religious institutions. This vast network of new social forms, much more than the overthrow of Mubarak, is the principal gain of the Arab Spring. It is an ongoing process, independent of big political changes like the army’s coup against the Muslim Brotherhood government; it goes deeper than the religious/liberal divide.

The ongoing events in Egypt provide yet another example of the basic dynamics of social revolts, which consists of two main steps traditionally designated by pairings like ‘1789/1793’ (in the case of the French Revolution) or ‘February/October’ (in the case of the Russian Revolution). The first step, what Badiou recently called the ‘rebirth of history’, culminates in an all-popular uprising against a hated figure of power (Mubarak, in the case of Egypt, or the Shah, in the case of Iran three decades ago). People across all social strata assert themselves as a collective agent against the system of power which quickly loses its legitimacy, and all around the world we can follow on our TV screens those magic moments of ecstatic unity when hundreds of thousands of people gather on public squares for days on end and promise not to go anywhere until the tyrant steps down. Such moments stand for an imaginary unity at its most sublime: all differences, all conflicts of interest are forgotten as the whole society seems united in its opposition to the hated tyrant. In the late 1980s, something similar took place in the disintegrating Communist regimes, where all groups were united in their rejection of the Communist Party, although for different and ultimately even incompatible reasons: religious people hated it for its atheism, secular liberals for its ideological dogmatism, ordinary workers for causing them to live in poverty, potential capitalists for inhibitions on private property, intellectuals for the lack of personal freedom, nationalists for the betrayal of ethnic roots on behalf of proletarian internationalism, cosmopolitans for closed borders and the lack of intellectual contact with other countries, the youth for the regime’s rejection of Western pop culture, artists for the limitations imposed on creative expression, and so on. However, once the old regime disintegrates, this imaginary unity is soon broken, and new (or, rather, old but oppressed) conflicts reappear with a vengeance: religious fundamentalists and nationalists versus secular modernizers, one ethnic group against the other, rabid anti-Communists against those suspected of sympathies with the old regime. This series of antagonisms tends to crystallize in one main political antagonism, in most cases along the axis of religious traditionalists versus secular pro-Western, multi-cultural, liberal-democratic capitalists, although the content of this dominant antagonism may vary (in Turkey, Islamists are more for the inclusion of Turkey into global capitalism than secular-nationalist Kemalists; ex-Communists can be allied with secular ‘progressists’ – as in Hungary or Poland – or with religious nationalists – as in Russia). Let us try to clarify this key point through a perhaps unexpected parallel with the Paulinian idea of passing from Law to love. In both cases (in Law and in love), we are dealing with division, with a ‘divided subject’; however, the modality of the division is thoroughly different. The subject of Law is ‘decentred’, in the sense that it is caught in the self-destructive vicious cycle of sin and Law in which one pole engenders its opposite. Paul provided an unsurpassable description of this entanglement in Romans 7:

This is the truly ominous lesson of the Egyptian revolt: if moderate liberal forces continue to ignore the radical Left, they will generate an insurmountable fundamentalist wave. In order for the key liberal legacy to survive, liberals need the fraternal help of the radical Left. Although (almost) everyone enthusiastically supported these democratic explosions, there is a hidden struggle for their appropriation. Official circles and most of the media in the West celebrate them as the same thing as the ‘pro-democracy’ velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe: a desire for Western liberal democracy, a desire to become like the West. This is why uneasiness arises when one sees that there is something else at work in these protests: a demand for social justice. This struggle for re-appropriation is not only a question of interpretation, but has crucial practical consequences. We shouldn’t be too fascinated by the sublime moments of national unity. The key question is: what happens the day after? How will this emancipatory explosion be translated into a new social order? As we have noted, in the last decades we witnessed a whole series of emancipatory popular explosions which were re-appropriated by the global capitalist order, either in its liberal form (from South Africa to Philippines) or in its fundamentalist form (Iran). We should not forget that none of the Arab countries where popular uprisings have happened is formally democratic: they were all more or less authoritarian, so that the demand for social and economic justice was spontaneously integrated into the demand for democracy, as if poverty was the result of the greed and corruption of those in power, and it was enough to get rid of them. What happens is that we get democracy, but poverty remains – what to do then?

This brings us back to the basic question: was the ecstatic unity of the people on Tahrir Square just an imaginary illusion mercilessly dispelled in the aftermath? Do the events in Egypt not confirm Hegel’s claim that, when a political movement wins, the price of victory is that the movement splits into antagonistic factions? Was the anti-Mubarak unity a fiction that concealed the underlying true antagonism between pro-Western secular modernizers (members of the growing middle class) and Islamic fundamentalists with support mostly from the lower classes? In other words, are we seeing a class struggle with a twist?

It is true that there is something of an imaginary unity in the first climax of the revolt, when all groups are united in the rejection of the tyrant. However, there is more in this unity than imaginary ideological illusion – every radical revolt by definition contains a Communist dimension, a dream of solidarity and egalitarian justice that reaches beyond the narrow sphere of politics into economy, private life and culture, permeating the entire social edifice. There is a properly dialectical movement of reversals at work here. In the initial revolt, we have the all-encompassing unity of the people, and here already unity coincides with division (the division between the people and those who still work for the tyrant). Only when the tyrant is overthrown does the true work begin, the work of radical social transformation. In this period, everyone is formally for the revolution, but the efforts of those who want ‘revolution without revolution’ (Robespierre) are aimed at convincing people that the revolution is over, that, once the tyrant has fallen, life can return to normal (this is what the army in Egypt stands for today). At this moment, when everyone is for the revolution, one has to insist on the harsh division between those who really want a revolution and those who want a ‘revolution without revolution’. Let us return to Martin Luther King: to put it in Badiou’s terms, King followed the ‘axiom of equality’ well beyond the topic of racial segregation, and his readiness to pursue that work makes him a true fighter for emancipation. This is what Badiou means by his statement that a true Idea is something that divides, that permits us to draw a line of division: in a true Idea, universality and division are two sides of the same coin.

This is why every revolution has to be repeated. It is only after the first enthusiastic unity disintegrates that true universality can be formulated, a universality no longer sustained by imaginary illusions. It is only after the initial unity of the people falls apart that the real work begins, the hard work of assuming all the implications of the struggle for an egalitarian and just society. It is not enough simply to get rid of the tyrant; the society which gave birth to the tyrant has to be thoroughly transformed. Only those who are ready to engage in this hard work remain faithful to the radical core of the initial enthusiastic unity. This hard work of fidelity is the process of dividing, of drawing the line that separates the Idea of Communism from those imaginary illusions about solidarity and unity that remain within the ideological confines of the existing order. Such patient clarification is the proper revolutionary work. While, for its opponents, such activity is an attempt to ‘manipulate’ people, to seduce well-meaning protesters into a dangerous violent radicalization, imputing to them what they never really wanted, for a proper revolutionary it is nothing more than the bringing out of the consequences and implications of the original ecstatic event: you want real justice and solidarity? Here is what you will have to do. No wonder that genuine revolutionary moments are so rare: no teleology guarantees them; they hinge on whether there is a political agent able to seize a (contingent, unpredictable) opening.

 Beneath the profusion of (often confused) statements, the Occupy movement has had two basic insights: (1) the discontent with capitalism as a system – the problem is the capitalist system as such, not its particular corruption; (2) the awareness that the institutionalized form of representative multiparty democracy is not enough to fight capitalist excesses, i.e., that democracy has to be reinvented.

BINGO:

Today’s protests and revolts are sustained by the overlapping of different levels, and this accounts for their strength: they fight for ‘normal’, parliamentary democracy against authoritarian regimes; against racism and sexism, especially against the hatred directed at immigrants and refugees; for the welfare state and against neoliberalism; against corruption in politics and economy (companies polluting the environment, for instance); and for new forms of democracy that reach beyond multi-party rituals. They question the global capitalist system as such and try to keep alive the idea of a non-capitalist society. Two traps are to be avoided here: false radicalism (‘What really matters is the abolition of liberal-parliamentary capitalism, all other fights are secondary’), as well as false gradualism (‘Now we fight against military dictatorship and for simple democracy, forget your socialist dreams, this comes later – maybe’).

...

Only a politics which fully takes into account the whole complexity of overdetermination deserves the name of political strategy. When we have to deal with a specific struggle, the key question is: how will our engagement in it or disengagement from it affect other struggles? The general rule is that, when a revolt begins against an oppressive, half-democratic regime, as was the case in the Middle East in 2011, it is easy to mobilize large crowds with slogans which one cannot but characterize as crowd-pleasers – for democracy, against corruption, and so on. But then we gradually approach more difficult choices, when our revolt succeeds in its direct goal, we come to realize that what really bothered us (our unfreedom, humiliation, social corruption, lack of the prospect of a decent life) goes on in a new guise. In Egypt, protesters got rid of the oppressive Mubarak regime, but corruption did not disappear, and the prospect of a decent life moved even further away. After the overthrow of an authoritarian regime, the last vestiges of patriarchal care for the poor can fall away, so that the newly gained freedom is de facto reduced to the freedom to choose the preferred form of one’s misery – the majority not only remain poor, but, to add insult to injury, they are told that, since they are now free, poverty is their own responsibility. In such a predicament, we have to admit that there was a flaw in the goal itself, that this goal was not specific enough – say, that standard political democracy can also serve as the very form of unfreedom: political freedom can easily provide the legal frame for economic slavery, with the underprivileged ‘freely’ selling themselves into servitude. We are thus brought to demand more than just political democracy: we need a democratization of social and economic life. In short, we have to admit that what we first took as the failure fully to realize a noble principle of democratic freedom is a failure inherent to this principle itself. Learning how the distortion of a notion, its incomplete realization, is grounded in the distortion immanent to this notion is a big step in political education.

The ruling ideology mobilizes its entire arsenal to prevent us from reaching this radical insight. Our rulers tell us that democratic freedom brings its own responsibility, that it comes at a price, that we are not yet mature if we expect too much from democracy. In this way, they blame us for our predicament: in a free society, so we are told, we are all capitalists investing in our lives, deciding to put more into our education than into having fun if we want to succeed. At a more directly political level, US foreign policy elaborated a detailed strategy of how to exert damage-control by way of re-channelling a popular uprising into acceptable parliamentary-capitalist constraints, as was done successfully in South Africa after apartheid, in the Philippines after the fall of Marcos, in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto, and so on. At this precise conjuncture emancipatory politics faces its greatest challenge: how to push things further after the first enthusiastic stage is over, how to take the next step without succumbing to the catastrophe of ‘totalitarian’ temptation – in short, how to move further from Mandela without becoming Mugabe.

 It is easy to ridicule Ayn Rand, but there is a grain of truth in the famous ‘hymn to money’ from her Atlas Shrugged: ‘Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other.’22 Did Marx not say something similar when he noted that relations between people assume the guise of relations between things?23 In the market economy, relations between people can appear as relations of mutually recognized freedom and equality: domination is no longer directly enacted and visible as such. What is problematic is Rand’s underlying premise: that the only choice is between direct and indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian. However, one should nonetheless bear in mind the moment of truth in Rand’s otherwise ridiculously ideological claim: the great lesson of state socialism is that the direct abolition of private property and market-regulated exchange without concrete forms of social regulation of the process of production necessarily resuscitates relations of servitude and domination. If we merely abolish the market (inclusive of market exploitation) without replacing it with a proper form of Communist organization of production and exchange, domination returns with a vengeance, and with it direct exploitation.

Now we can see why Jantjie’s gesticulations had such an uncanny effect once it became clear that they were meaningless: what he confronted us with was the truth of sign-language translation – it doesn’t really matter if there are any deaf people watching; the translator is here to make those of us who do not understand sign language feel good. And was this also not the truth about the Mandela funeral ceremony? All the crocodile tears of the dignitaries were a self-congratulatory exercise, and Jantjie translated them into what they actually were: nonsense. What world leaders celebrated was the successful postponement of the true crisis which will explode when the black South Africans who continue to be deprived become a collective political agent. These poor black crowds were the Absent One to whom Jantjie was signalling, and his message was: the dignitaries really don’t care about you. Through his fake translation, Jantjie rendered palpable the deceptiveness of the entire ceremony.

Here again, the problem is to know what, precisely, this ‘much more’ (to change society more than just by making it a liberal democracy) means. Everyone knows Winston Churchill’s quip about democracy, usually rendered: ‘Democracy is the worst possible system, except for all others.’ What Churchill actually said (in the House of Commons on 11 November 1947) was slightly less paradoxical and scintillating: ‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’24 The underlying logic is most clearly expressed if one applies to Churchill’s dictum Lacan’s ‘formulae of sexuation’ and rephrases it as follows: ‘Democracy is the worst of all systems; however, compared to it, any other system is worse.’ If one takes all possible systems as a whole and ranges them with regard to their worth, democracy is the worst and finishes at the bottom; if, however, one compares democracy one to one with all other systems, it is better than any of them.25 Does something similar not hold (or seem to hold) for capitalism? If one analyses it in an abstract way, trying to locate it in the hierarchy of all possible systems, it appears to be the worst – chaotic, unjust, destructive. However, if one compares it in a concrete, pragmatic way to every alternative, it is still better than any of them.

In such a messy situation, military intervention can only be justified by short-term, self-destructive opportunism. The moral outrage that could provide a rational cover for the compulsion to intervene (‘We cannot allow the use of poisonous gases on civilians!’) is fake and obviously doesn’t even take itself seriously. (As we now know, the US more than tolerated the use of poisonous gases against the Iranian army by Saddam Hussein, providing him with satellite shots of the enemies to help him – where were moral concerns then?) Faced with the weird ethics that justifies taking the side of one fundamentalist criminal group against another, one cannot but sympathize with Ron Paul’s reaction to John McCain’s advocacy of strong intervention: ‘With politicians like these, who needs terrorists?’27

Look at the European crisis. Never in our life have we faced a situation so charged with revolutionary opportunities. Never in our life have we been so impotent. Never have intellectuals and militants been so silent, so unable to find a way to show a new possible direction.30

Berardi locates the origin of this impotence in the exploding speed of the functioning of the big Other (the symbolic substance of our lives) and the slowness of human reactivity (due to culture, corporeality, diseases, and so on): ‘the long-lasting neoliberal rule has eroded the cultural bases of social civilization, which was the progressive core of modernity. And this is irreversible. We have to face it.’31 Outbursts of impotent rage bear witness to the devastating effects of a global capitalist ideology that combines individualist hedonism with frantic, competitive work, thereby closing the space for coordinated collective action. Recall the great wave of protests that erupted all over Europe in 2011, from Greece and Spain to London and Paris. Even if there was hardly any consistent political programme mobilizing the protesters, these demonstrations did function as part of a large-scale educational process: the protesters’ misery and discontent were transformed into a great collective act of mobilization – hundreds of thousands gathered in public squares, proclaiming that they had had enough, that things could not go on like that. However, although such protests constitute as universal political subjects the individuals who participate in them, they remain at the level of purely formal universality. What these protests stage is a purely negative gesture of angry rejection and an equally abstract demand for justice, lacking the ability to translate this demand into a concrete political programme. In short, these protests were not yet proper political acts, but rather abstract demands addressed at an Other who is expected to act. What can be done in such a situation, where demonstrations and even democratic elections are of no use? Only withdrawal, passivity, and abandonment of illusions can open a new way: ‘Only self-reliant communities leaving the field of social competition can open a way to a new hope.’32

The illusion at work here was succinctly formulated by Althusser when he noted how Marx never managed to relinquish the ‘mythical idea of Communism as a mode of production without relations of production; in Communism, the free development of individuals takes the place of social relations in the mode of production.’35 Is this idea of Communism ‘as a mode of production without relations of production’ also not what motivates Negri and Hardt? When social relations (inclusive of relations of production) are directly produced by social production, they are no longer social relations proper (i.e., a structural frame, given in advance, within which social production takes place), but become directly planned and produced and, as such, totally transparent. This stance finds its clearest expression in the accelerationist movement based on the premise that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt or critique it, not to resist it on behalf of ancient forms of communal life threatened by the capitalist disruptive power, not to await its demise at the hands of its own contradictions, but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.36

Berardi’s conclusion is exactly the opposite: far from bringing out the potential transparency of social life, today’s ‘cognitive capitalism’ makes it more impenetrable than ever, undermining the very subjective conditions of any form of collective solidarity of the ‘cognitariat’.37 What is symptomatic here is the way the same conceptual apparatus leads to two radically opposed conclusions. Berardi warns us against what he calls the Deleuzian ‘gospel of hyper-dynamic deterritorialization’ – for him, if we are not able to step outside the compulsion of the system, the gap between the frantic dynamics imposed by the system and our corporeal and cognitive limitations sooner or later can lead to depression. Berardi makes this point apropos Felix Guattari, his friend who preached the theoretical gospel of hyper-dynamic deterritorialization while personally suffering long bouts of depression:

Actually the problem of depression and of exhaustion is never elaborated in an explicit way by Guattari. I see here a crucial problem of the theory of desire: the denial of the problem of limits in the organic sphere … The notion of the ‘body without organs’ hints at the idea that the organism isn’t something that you can define, that the organism is a process of exceeding, of going beyond a threshold, of ‘becoming other’. This is a crucial point, but it’s also a dangerous point … What body, what mind is going through transformation and becoming? Which invariant lies under the process of becoming other? If you want to answer this question you have to acknowledge death, finitude, and depression.38

– when we effectively get a mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people self-organizing themselves horizontally (Tahrir Square, Gezi Park …), we should never forget that they remain a minority, and that the silent majority remains outside, non-represented (This is how, in Egypt, this silent majority defeated the Tahrir Square crowd and elected the Muslim Brotherhood);

– permanent political engagement has a limited time-span: after a couple of weeks or, rarely, months, the majority disengages, and the problem is to safeguard the results of the uprising at this moment, when things return to normal.

Does this imply a resigned surrender to the hegemonic power structure? No. There is nothing inherently ‘conservative’ in being tired of the usual radical Leftist demands for permanent mobilization and active participation, demands which follow the superego logic – the more we obey them, the more we are guilty. The battle has to be won here, in the domain of citizens’ passivity, when things return back to normal the morning after ecstatic revolts; it is (relatively) easy to have a big ecstatic spectacle of sublime unity, but how will ordinary people feel the difference in their daily lives? No wonder conservatives like to see sublime explosions from time to time – they remind people that nothing can really change, that things return to normal the day after.

Miller claims that the pure lawless Real resists symbolic grasp, so that we should always be aware that our attempts to conceptualize it are mere semblances, defensive elucubrations – but what if there is still an underlying order that generates this disorder, a matrix that provides its coordinates? This is what also accounts for the repetitive sameness of the capitalist dynamics: the more things change, the more they stay the same. And this is also why the obverse of breathtaking capitalist dynamics is a clearly recognizable order of hierarchic domination.

In a large opinion poll from a couple of years ago, Stalin was voted the third greatest Russian of all time, while Lenin was nowhere to be seen. Stalin is not celebrated as a Communist, but as a restorer of Russia’s greatness after Lenin’s anti-patriotic ‘deviation’. Putin has recently used the term Novorussiya (New Russia) for the south-eastern counties of Ukraine, resuscitating a term that had not been used since 1917. The Leninist undercurrent, although repressed, continued to exist in the Communist underground opposition to Stalin. Communist critics of Stalinism were certainly full of illusions but, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, long before Solzhenytsin ‘the crucial questions about the Gulag were being asked by left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C. L. R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat written out of history (they expected far worse than that, and often received it).’48 This large-scale critical movement was inherent to the Communist movement, in clear contrast to Fascism. Hitchens writes: ‘nobody can be bothered to argue much about whether fascism might have turned out better, given more propitious circumstances. And there were no dissidents in the Nazi Party, risking their lives on the proposition that the Führer had betrayed the true essence of National Socialism.’49 Precisely because of this immanent tension at the very heart of the Communist movement, the most dangerous place to be at the time of the terrible 1930s purges in the Soviet Union was at the top of the nomenklatura: within a few years, 80 per cent of the Central Committee and Red Army Headquarters members were shot.50 Furthermore, one should not underestimate the totalitarian potential, as well as the outright brutality, of the White, counter-revolutionary forces during the Civil War. If they had won, says Hitchens (repeating a point already made by Trotsky),

the common word for fascism would have been a Russian one, not an Italian one. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was brought to the West by the White emigration … Major General William Graves, who commanded the American Expeditionary Force during

The Ukrainian nationalist Right is one example of what is going on today from the Balkans to Scandinavia, from the US to Israel, from central Africa to India: a new Dark Age is looming, with ethnic and religious passions exploding, and Enlightenment values receding. These passions were lurking in the dark all the time, but what is new now is the outright shamelessness of their display. In the middle of 2013, two public protests were announced in Croatia, a country in deep economic crisis, with high unemployment rates and a deep sense of despair among the population: trade unions tried to organize a rally in support of workers’ rights, while right-wing nationalists started a protest movement against the use of Cyrillic letters on public buildings in cities with a Serb minority. Trade unions brought a couple of hundred people to a big square in Zagreb, whereas the nationalists succeeded in mobilizing hundreds of thousands, which happened again for protests against gay marriage. It is crucial to see this ethical regression as the obverse of the explosive development of global capitalism – they are the two sides of the same coin.

How, then, are we to proceed? We don’t have to look far from Croatia. In February 2014, cities were burning in the Bosnian Federation. It all began in Tuzla, a city with a Muslim majority; the protests then spread to Sarajevo, Zenica, Mostar (with a large segment of Croat population) and Banja Luka (the capital of the Serb part of Bosnia). Thousands of enraged protesters occupied, devastated and set fire to government buildings, including the Presidency of the Bosnian Federation. The events immediately gave rise to conspiracy theories (according to one scenario, the Serb government had organized the protests to topple the Bosnian leadership), but one should safely ignore them, since it is clear that whatever lurks ‘behind’ the protesters’ despair is authentic. Here, again, one is tempted to paraphrase Mao Zedong’s famous phrase: there is chaos in Bosnia, the situation is excellent! Why? The protesters’ demands were as simple as they can be: we want jobs, the chance of a decent life, an end to corruption. But they mobilized people in Bosnia, a country which, in the last decades, came to symbolize ferocious ethnic cleansing, leading to hundreds of thousands of dead. In one of the photos from the protests, we see the demonstrators waving three flags side by side: Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian – expressing the will to ignore ethnic differences. In short, we are dealing with a rebellion against nationalist elites. The people of Bosnia finally understand who their true enemy is: not other ethnic groups but their own nationalist elites pretending to protect them from the others. It is as if the old and much abused Titoist motto of the ‘brotherhood and unity’ of Yugoslav nations has now become relevant.

What the Bosnian outburst confirms is that one cannot really overcome ethnic passions by imposing the liberal agenda. What brought the protesters together is a radical programme of justice. The next and most difficult step would have been to organize the protests into a new social movement that ignored ethnic divisions and to stage further protests – can we imagine enraged Bosnians and Serbs manifesting together in Sarajevo? Even if the protests gradually lose their power, they will remain a brief spark of hope, something like the enemy soldiers fraternizing across the trenches in the First World War. Authentic emancipatory events always involve ignoring particular identities as irrelevant. And the same holds for the recent visit of the two Pussy Riot members to New York: in a big gala show, they were introduced by Madonna in the presence of Bob Geldof, Richard Gere and other celebrities – the usual human rights gang. What they should have done there was just one thing: to express their solidarity with Edward Snowden, to assert that Pussy Riot and Snowden are part of the same global movement. Without such gestures, bringing together groups that seem incompatible (Muslims, Serbs and Croats in Bosnia; Turkish secularists and anti-capitalist Muslims in Turkey, and so on), protest movements will always be manipulated by one superpower in its struggle against the other.

When you rule, nothing is worse than losing hold. Once the Thing came to me, it was a strange discovery to realize that this was the only way to hold on to Orsenna. Everything that focused on Syrtes again, everything that led to the renewal of your … episode made the old gears turn with almost phantasmagorical ease, everything that failed to concern it met with a wall of inertia and unconcern. The Thing took advantage of every instance – the gestures to accelerate it and the gestures to slow it down – like a man sliding down the slope of a roof. Once the question was raised – how can I put this to you? – everything was mobilized of its own accord.1

(Note how the first sentence – ‘When you rule, nothing is worse than losing hold’ – echoes Mao’s warning to the revolutionary power: ‘Above all, hold on to [state] power, never allow [state] power to slide out of your hands.’) However, beyond the obvious reproach that Gracq is depicting a descent of Orsenna into Fascism (evoking an external threat to create a state of emergency, and so on), one should discern here a deeper existential dilemma: what is more desirable, a still, inert life of small satisfactions, not a true life at all, or taking a risk that may well end in a catastrophe? This choice is the core of what Badiou is aiming at with his formula mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre: better a disaster (the catastrophic outcome of an event) than a non-eventful survival in a hedonist-utilitarian universe – or, to put it in brutal political terms, better the worst of Stalinism than the best of the liberal-capitalist welfare state. Why?

Since, today, capitalism defines and structures the totality of the human civilization, every ‘Communist’ territory was and is – again, in spite of its horrors and failures – a kind of ‘liberated territory’, as Fred Jameson put it apropos of Cuba. What we are dealing with here is the old structural notion of the gap between the Space and the positive content that fills it. Although, as far as their positive content was concerned, the Communist regimes were mostly a dismal failure, generating terror and misery, they at the same time opened up a certain space, the space of utopian expectations, which among other things enabled us to measure the failure of the ‘really existing socialism’ itself. (What the anti-Communist dissidents as a rule tend to overlook is that the very space from which they themselves criticized and denounced the everyday terror and misery was opened and sustained by the Communist breakthrough, by its attempt to escape the logic of capital.) This, again, is how one should understand Badiou’s mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre, an idea so shocking to liberal sensitivities: better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy. Of course, the moment one compares the positive content of the two, the welfare state-driven capitalist democracy is incomparably better, but what redeems Stalinist ‘totalitarianism’ is the formal aspect, the space it opens up. Can one imagine a utopian point at which this subterranean level of the utopian Other Space unites with the positive space of ‘normal’ social life? The key political question is this: is there in our ‘postmodern’ time still a space for such communities? Are they limited to the undeveloped outskirts (favelas, ghettos), or is a space for them emerging in the very heart of the ‘postindustrial’ landscape? Can one make a wild wager that the dynamics of ‘postmodern’ capitalism, with its rise of new eccentric geek communities, provide a new chance here? That, perhaps for the first time in history, the logic of alternative communities can be grafted onto the latest state of technology?

It is at this level that we should also discern a mistake of Marx. He perceived how capitalism unleashed the breathtaking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity – witness his fascinated descriptions of how, in capitalism, ‘all things solid melt into thin air’, of how capitalism is the greatest revolutionizer in the entire history of humanity. He also clearly perceived how this capitalist dynamics is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism; that the ultimate limit of capitalism (of capitalism’s self-propelling productivity) is Capital itself – the incessant capitalist development and revolutionizing of its own material conditions, the mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity. Capital is ultimately engaged in nothing but a desperate flight forwards in an attempt to escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction. Marx’s fundamental mistake was to conclude from these insights that a new, higher social order (Communism) is possible that would not only maintain, but even raise to a higher degree and effectively fully release, the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism – on account of its inherent obstacle (contradiction) – is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises.

In short, what Marx overlooked is, to put it in standard Derridean terms, that this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the ‘condition of impossibility’ of the full deployment of the productive forces is simultaneously its ‘condition of possibility’: if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism. If we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates (herein resides Lacan’s critique of Marx, which focuses on the ambiguous overlapping of surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment). So the critics of Communism were in a way right when they claimed that Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy. What they did not perceive is that Marxian Communism, this notion of a society of pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of Capital, was a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself, the capitalist inherent transgression at its purest, a strictly ideological fantasy of maintaining the thrust to productivity generated by capitalism, while getting rid of the ‘obstacles’ and antagonisms that were – as the sad experience of ‘really existing capitalism’ demonstrates – the only possible framework for the effective material existence of a society of permanently self-enhancing productivity. This is why a revolution has to be repeated: only the catastrophic experience can make the revolutionary agent aware of the fateful limitation of the first attempt. Marx (especially in his youthful texts) provides the basic formula of the illusion on which this fatal limitation is based, in a series of ‘instead of’ theses: their implicit (sometimes explicit) line of reasoning begins with ‘instead of’ (which stands for the alleged ‘normal’ state of things), and goes on to describe the alienated inversion of this ‘normal’ state. Here is a long passage from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:

So much does labour’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death.

So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.

All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labour as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself.

So, again, how are we to break out of this trap, if we have to renounce the expectation of a Great Rupture which will actualize the innermost tendency of our epoch and bring about the reversal of which we dream? One possible path is outlined by Kojin Karatani, whose basic premise is the use of modes of exchange (instead of modes of production, as in Marxism) as the tool with which to analyse the history of humanity.5 Karatani distinguishes four progressive modes of exchange: (A) gift exchange, which predominates in pre-state societies (clans or tribes exchanging gifts); (B) domination and protection, which predominates in slave and feudal societies (here, exploitation is based on direct domination, plus the dominating class has to offer something in exchange, say protecting its subjects from danger); (C) commodity exchange of objects, which predominates in capitalism (free individuals exchange not only their products but also their own labour power); (X) a further stage to come, a return to the gift-exchange at a higher level. This X is a Kantian regulative idea, a vision that has assumed different guises in the history of humanity, from egalitarian religious communities reliant on communal solidarity to anarchist cooperatives and Communist projects. Karatani introduces here two further complications. (1) There is a crucial rupture, the so-called ‘sedentary revolution’, which takes place in pre-state early societies: the passage from nomadic hunter-groups to permanently settled groups organized in tribes or clans. At the level of exchange, we pass from ‘pure’ gift to the complex web of gift and counter-gift. This distinction is crucial insofar as the forthcoming passage to X will enact at a higher level the return to the nomadic mode of social existence. (2) In the passage from A to B and so on, the previous stage does not disappear; although it is ‘repressed’, the repressed returns in a new form. With the passage from A to B, gift-exchange survives as the spirit of religious reconciliation and solidarity; with the passage from B to C, A survives as nation, national community, and B (domination) survives as the state power. For this reason, capitalism is for Karatani not a ‘pure’ reign of B, but a triad (or, rather, a Borromean knot) of Nation–State–Capital: nation as the form of communal solidarity, state as the form of direct domination, capital as the form of economic exchange. All three of them are necessary for the reproduction of capitalist society.

Maybe, we should also turn around the old logic of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) that helped us survive the Cold War: today, it is no longer that there will not be a global war except for some unforeseen accident – it is rather that we are condemned to catastrophe except for some unforeseen miracle that can save us.

Aid serves to generate further accumulation of capital in the advanced countries. In this, the aid resembles the case of domestic social-welfare policies within those countries: in both cases, redistribution simply functions as another link in the process of capitalist accumulation. Far from eliminating inequality, redistributive justice actually proliferates inequality.8

One should thus learn, Sloterdijk continues, to treat those who are productive of wealth not as a group which is a priori suspicious for refusing to pay its debt to society, but as the true givers whose contribution should be fully recognized, so that they can be proud of their generosity. The first step is the shift from proletariat to voluntariat: instead of taxing the rich excessively, one should give them the (legal) right to decide voluntarily what part of their wealth they will donate to common welfare. To begin with, one should, of course, not radically lower taxes, but open up at least a small domain in which the freedom is given to givers to decide how much and for what they will donate. Such a beginning, modest as it is, would gradually change the entire ethics on which social cohesion is based. Do we not get caught here into the old paradox of freely choosing what we are anyway obliged to do? That is to say, is it not that the freedom of choice accorded to the ‘voluntariat’ of ‘achievers’ is a false freedom which relies on a forced choice? If society is to function normally, the ‘achievers’ are free to choose (to give money to society or not) only if they make the right choice (to give it)?

There is a series of problems with this idea, but the fundamental retort to Sloterdijk should be: why does he assert generosity only within the constraints of capitalism, which is the order of possessive competition? Within these constraints, every generosity is a priori reduced to the obverse of this brutal possessiveness, a benevolent Dr Jekyll to the capitalist Mr Hyde. Here, just recall the first model of generosity mentioned by Sloterdijk: Carnegie, the man of steel with a heart of gold, as they say. First, Carnegie used Pinkerton detective agents and a private army to crush workers’ resistance, and then displayed generosity by way of (partially) giving back what he had (not created but) grabbed. Even with Bill Gates, how can one forget his brutal tactics to crush competitors and gain monopoly (tactics which made US authorities set in motion multiple legal proceedings against Microsoft)? The key question is therefore: is there no place for generosity outside the capitalist frame? Is each and every such project a case of sentimental moralist ideology?

The traps of imagining a possible change are clearly perceptible in Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century,11 a kind of ‘realist’ counterpoint to Sloterdijk’s speculations, the result of more than a decade of research into historical changes in the concentration of income and wealth. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Western European society was highly unequal: private wealth dwarfed national income and was concentrated in the hands of the rich families within a rigid class structure. This state persisted even as industrialization slowly contributed to rising wages for workers, and the trend towards higher inequality was only reversed between 1930 and 1975 on account of a series of unique circumstances. The two World Wars, the Great Depression, as well as the rise of the Communist states, prompted governments in developed capitalist states to enforce measures towards redistributing income. (Note the weirdness of this fact: egalitarianism and universal welfare were conditioned by the unimaginable catastrophes of world wars and crisis.) From 1975 onwards, and especially after the fall of Communism, the trend towards inequality returned; if the global capitalist system is allowed to follow its immanent logic, Piketty predicts a world of low economic growth, dismissing the idea that bursts of technological advances will bring growth back to the levels of the twentieth century. Only a strong political intervention can counteract the exploding inequality – Piketty proposes an annual global wealth tax of up to 2 per cent, combined with a progressive income tax reaching as high as 80 per cent. An obvious question arises here: if capitalism’s immanent logic pushes it towards growing inequality and a weakening of democracy, why should we not aim at overcoming capitalism itself? For Piketty, the problem is the no-less-obvious fact that the twentieth-century alternatives to capitalism didn’t work: capitalism has to be accepted as the only game in town. The only feasible solution is thus to allow the capitalist machinery to do its work in its proper sphere, and to impose egalitarian justice politically, by a democratic power which regulates the economic system and enforces redistribution. One should not underestimate Piketty here: in a typically French way, the naivety (of which he is fully aware) of his proposal is part of his strategy to paint the bleak picture of our situation – here is the obvious solution, and we all know it cannot happen …

Although this solution is superficially opposed to Sloterdijk’s, they share an underlying premise: the capitalist machinery should be kept since it is the only efficient way to produce wealth, and inequality should be corrected by re-distributing wealth to those underprivileged. Instead of transforming the capitalist mode of production, one should limit oneself to a change in distribution. They differ on how to achieve this: Piketty advocates direct massive state regulation through high taxes, while Sloterdijk counts on voluntary contributions of the wealthy. And both solutions are for this reason utopian in the proper sense of the term. Piketty is well aware that the model he proposes would only work if enforced globally, beyond the confines of nation states (otherwise capital would flee to the states with lower taxes); such a global measure presupposes an already existing global power with the strength and authority to enforce it. However, such a global power is unimaginable within the confines of today’s global capitalism and the political mechanisms it implies – in short, if such a power were to exist, the basic problem would already have been resolved. We can thus repeat, apropos of this notion of a global power, the same thing Freud says about psychoanalysis: in a situation in which conditions for psychoanalytic practice are fully met, psychoanalysis would no longer be needed.

We often hear that the Communist vision relies on a dangerous idealization of human beings, attributing to them a kind of ‘natural goodness’ that is simply alien to our (egotist, and so on) nature. However, in his book Drive,12 Daniel Pink refers to a body of behavioral-science research that suggests that sometimes, at least, external incentives (money reward) can be counterproductive: optimal performance comes when people find intrinsic meaning in their work. Incentives may be useful in getting people to accomplish boring routine work; but with more intellectually demanding tasks, the success of individuals and organizations increasingly depends on being nimble and innovative, so there is more and more need for people to find intrinsic value in their work. Pink identifies three elements underlying such intrinsic motivation: autonomy, the ability to choose what and how tasks are completed; mastery, the process of becoming adept at an activity; and purpose, the desire to improve the world. Here is Pink’s report on a study done at MIT:

They took a whole group of students and they gave them a set of challenges. Things like memorizing strings of digits, solving word puzzles, other kinds of spatial puzzles, even physical tasks like throwing a ball through a hoop.

To incentivize their performance they gave them three levels of rewards: if you did pretty well, you got a small monetary reward; if you did medium well, you got a medium monetary reward; if you did really well, if you were one of the top performers, you got a large cash prize. Here’s what they found out. As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better their performance. But once the task calls for even rudimentary cognitive skill a larger reward led to poorer performance. How can that possibly be? This conclusion seems contrary to what a lot of us learned in economics which is that the higher the reward, the better the performance. And they’re saying that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill it’s the other way around which seems like the idea that these rewards don’t work that way seems vaguely Left-Wing and Socialist, doesn’t it? It’s this kind of weird Socialist conspiracy. For those of you who have these conspiracy theories I want to point out the notoriously left-wing socialist group that financed the research: The Federal Reserve Bank. Maybe that 50 dollars or 60 dollars prize isn’t sufficiently motivating for an MIT student – so they went to Madurai in rural India, where 50 or 60 dollars is a significant sum of money. They replicated the experiment in India and what happened was that the people offered the medium reward did no better than the people offered the small reward but this time around, the people offered the top reward did worst of all: higher incentives led to worse performance. This experiment has been replicated over and over and over again by psychologists, by sociologists and by economists: for simple, straight-forward tasks, those kinds of incentives work, but when the task requires some conceptual, creative thinking those kind of motivators demonstrably don’t work. The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough, so they are not thinking about money and they’re thinking about the work. You get a bunch of people who are doing highly skilled work but they’re willing to do it for free and volunteer their time 20, sometimes 30 hours a week; and what they create, they give it away, rather than sell it. Why are these people, many of whom are technically sophisticated highly skilled people who have jobs, doing equally, if not more, technically sophisticated work not for their employer, but for someone else for free! That’s a strange economic behaviour.13

This is one of the reasons why the US and Israel, the two exemplary nation states obsessed with sovereignty, are natural allies, and this is why at some deep and often obfuscated level they perceive the European Union as the enemy. This perception, kept under control in the public political discourse, explodes in its underground obscene double, the extreme-Right Christian-fundamentalist political vision with its obsessive fear of the New World Order (Obama is in secret collusion with the United Nations, international forces will intervene in the US and put all true American patriots in concentration camps – a couple of years ago, there were rumours that Latin American troops were already in the Midwest plains, building concentration camps …). This vision is deployed in the hard-line Christian fundamentalism exemplified in the works of Tim laHaye et consortes. The title of one of laHaye’s novels points in this direction: The Europa Conspiracy. The true enemies of the US are not Muslim terrorists – they are merely puppets secretly manipulated by the European secularists, the true forces of the anti-Christ who want to weaken the US and establish the New World Order under the domination of the United Nations … In a way, they are right in this perception: Europe is not just another geopolitical power bloc, but a global vision which is ultimately incompatible with nation-states. This dimension of the EU provides the key to the so-called European ‘weakness’: there is a surprising correlation between European unification and its loss of global military-political power. If, however, the European Union is more and more an impotent trans-state confederacy in need of US protection, why then is the US so obviously ill at ease with it? Recall the indications that the US financially supported those forces in Ireland that organized the ‘No’ campaign in the referendum on the new European treaty.

And are the events in Ukraine that began in early 2014 not the next stage of this geopolitical struggle for control in a non-regulated, multi-centred world, something like ‘the crisis in Georgia, part two’? It is definitely time to teach the superpowers some manners – but who will do it? Obviously, only a trans-national entity can manage it. More than 200 years ago, Kant saw the need for a trans-national legal order grounded in the rise of a global society. ‘Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a law of world citizenship is no high-flown or exaggerated notion.’16 This, however, brings us to what is arguably the ‘principal contradiction’ of the New World Order: the structural impossibility of finding a global political order that corresponds to the global capitalist economy. What if, for structural reasons – and not only due to empirical limitations – there cannot be a world-wide democracy or a representative world government? The structural problem (antinomy) of global capitalism resides in the impossibility (and, simultaneously, necessity) of a socio-political order that would fit it: the global market economy cannot be directly organized as a global liberal democracy with worldwide elections and so on. In politics, the ‘repressed’ of the economy returns: archaic fixations, particular substantial (ethnic, religious, cultural) identities. This embarrassing supplement is the condition of impossibility and of possibility for the global economy. This tension defines our predicament today: the global free circulation of commodities, accompanied by the growing separations in the social sphere proper. How, then, can we pass from the globalism of commodities to a more radical political globalism?

Mignolo’s view of the anti-capitalist struggle:

As we know from history, the identification of the problem doesn’t mean that there is only one solution. Or better yet, we can coincide in the prospective of harmony as a desirable global future, but Communism is only one way to move toward it. There cannot be only one solution simply because there are many ways of being, which means of thinking and doing. Communism is an option and not an Abstract Universal … In the non-European World, Communism is part of the problem rather than the solution. Which doesn’t mean that if you are not Communist, in the non-European world, you are Capitalist … So the fact that Žižek, and other European intellectuals, are seriously rethinking Communism means that they are engaging in one option (the reorientation of the Left) among many, today, marching toward the prospect of harmony overcoming the necessity of war; overcoming success and competition which engender corruption and selfishness, and promoting the plenitude of life over development and death.24

Mignolo relies here on an all-too-naive distinction between problem and solution. If there is a thing we really know from history, it is that, while ‘the identification of the problem doesn’t mean that there is only one solution,’ there is also not just one single identification of the problem. When we encounter a problem (like a global economic crisis), we get a multitude of formulations concerning in what this problem resides and what its causes are (or, to put it in a more postmodern vein, we get a multitude of narratives): too much state regulation, not enough state regulation, moral failings, the overwhelming power of financial capital, capitalism as such, and so on. These different identifications of the problem form a dialectical unity with the proposed solutions – or, one could even say that the identification of a problem is already formulated from the standpoint of its alleged/imagined solution. Communism is therefore not just one of the solutions but, first of all, a unique formulation of the problem as it appears within the Communist horizon. Mignolo’s identification of the problem, as well as his formulation of the common goal shared by all proposed solutions, is a proof of his limitation, and as such he is worth reading carefully: the common goal – ‘marching toward the prospect of harmony, promoting the plenitude of life’; the problem – ‘the necessity of war … success and competition that engender corruption and selfishness … development and death’. His goal – harmony, plenitude of life – is a true Abstract Universal if there ever was one, an empty container that can mean many incompatible things (depending on what we understand by ‘plenitude of life’ and ‘harmony’). (One can also add in an acerbic mode that many anti-capitalist movements have achieved great results in ‘overcoming success’.) The easy equation of development and death, as well as the abstract rejection of war, corruption and selfishness, are no less meaningless abstractions. (And, incidentally, the abstract opposition of war and harmony is especially suspicious, since it can be also read as a call against aggravating social antagonisms, for a peaceful harmony of the social organism. If this is the direction taken, I much prefer to be called a ‘Left Fascist’, insisting on the emancipatory dimension of struggle.)

At a more general level, one should bear in mind that global capitalism does not automatically push all its subjects towards hedonist/permissive individualism, and also the fact that, in many countries which have recently set off on the road of rapid capitalist modernization (like India), many individuals stick to so-called traditional (pre-modern) beliefs and ethics (family values, rejection of unbridled hedonism, strong ethnic identification, giving preference to community ties over individual achievement, respect for elders and so on). This in no way proves that they are not fully ‘modern’, as if people in the liberal West can afford direct and full capitalist modernization, while those from less-developed Asian, Latin American and African countries can only survive the onslaught of capitalist dynamics through the help of the crutches of traditional ties, i.e., as if traditional values are needed when local populations are not able to survive capitalism by way of adopting its own liberal-hedonist individualist ethics. Post-colonial ‘subaltern’ theorists, who detect in the persistence of premodern traditions the resistance to global capitalism and its violent modernization, are here thoroughly wrong: on the contrary, fidelity to pre-modern (‘Asian’) values is paradoxically the very feature which allows countries like China, Singapore and India to follow the path of capitalist dynamics even more radically than Western liberal countries. Reference to traditional values enables individuals to justify their ruthless engagement in market competition in ethical terms (‘I am really doing it to help my parents, to earn enough money so that my children and cousins will be able to study,’ and so on).26

Back in 1937, Orwell deployed the ambiguity of the predominant Leftist attitude towards class difference:

We all rail against class-distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed … The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions – notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful – are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy.31

Let me quote Alain Badiou’s provocative thesis: ‘It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.’ Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities, etc.). The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active’, to ‘participate’, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, ‘do something’, while academics participate in meaningless ‘debates’, and so on, and the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from all this. Those in power often prefer even a ‘critical’ participation, an exchange of whatever kind, to silence – just in order to engage us in a ‘dialogue’, to make sure our ominous passivity is broken. This is why the title of the fourth ‘Idea of Communism’ meeting in Seoul, in September 2013, was fully justified: ‘Stop to think!’

A true conservative today is the one who fully admits the antagonisms and deadlocks of global capitalism, the one who rejects simple progressivism, and is attentive to the dark obverse of progress. In this sense, only a radical Leftist can be today a true conservative. Such a stance was described long ago by John Jay Chapman (1862–1933), today a half-forgotten American political activist and essayist32 who wrote about political radicals:

The radicals are really always saying the same thing. They do not change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to the fate of their own cause, fanaticism, triviality, want of humour, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of consistent radicals. To all appearance nobody follows them, yet everyone believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honoured pitch is G flat. The community cannot get that A out of its head. Nothing can prevent an upward tendency in the popular tone so long as the real A is kept sounding.33

The motto that united the Turks who protested on Istanbul’s Taksim Square in 2013 was ‘Dignity!’ – a good but ambiguous slogan. The term ‘dignity’ is appropriate insofar as it makes it clear that protests are not just about particular material demands, but about the protesters’ freedom and emancipation. In the case of the Taksim Square protests, the call for dignity referred not only to institutional corruption and venality, but was also – crucially – directed against the patronizing ideology of the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The direct target of the Taksim Square protests was neither neoliberal capitalism nor Islamism, but the personality of Erdoğan: the demand was for him to step down – but why? What was it about him that made Erdoğan the target of secular educated protesters as well as of anti-capitalist Muslim youth, the object of a hatred that fused them together? Here is Bülent Somay’s explanation:

Everybody wanted PM Erdoğan to resign. Because, many activists explained both during and after the Resistance, he was constantly meddling with their lifestyles, telling women to have at least three children, telling them not to have C-sections, not to have abortions, telling people not to drink, not to smoke, not to hold hands in public, to be obedient and religious. He was constantly telling them what was best for them (‘shop and pray’). This was probably the best indication of the neoliberal (‘shop’) soft-Islamic (‘pray’) character of the JDP rule: PM Erdoğan’s utopia for Istanbul (and we should remember that he was the Mayor of Istanbul for four years) was a huge shopping mall and a huge mosque in Taksim Square and Gezi Park. He had become ‘Daddy Knows Best’ in all avenues of life, and tried to do this in a clumsy patronizing disguise, which was quickly discarded during Gezi events to reveal the profoundly authoritarian character behind the image.34

Is ‘shop and pray’ not a perfect late-capitalist version of the old Christian ora et labora, with the identity of a worker (toiling peasant) replaced by a consumer? The underlying wager is, of course, that praying (a codename for the fidelity to old communal traditions) makes us even better ‘shoppers’, i.e., participants in the global capitalist market. However, the call for dignity is not only a protest against such a patronizing injunction; dignity is also the appearance of dignity, and in this case the demand for dignity means that I want to be duped and controlled in such a way that proper appearances are maintained, that I don’t lose face. Is this not a key feature of our democracies? Walter Lippmann, that icon of twentieth-century American journalism, played a key role in the self-understanding of US democracy; in Public Opinion (1922),35 he wrote that a ‘governing class’ must rise to face the challenge – he saw the public as Plato did, a great beast or a bewildered herd, floundering in the ‘chaos of local opinions’. So the herd of citizens must be governed by ‘a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality’, and this elite class is to act as a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the ‘omni-competent citizen’. This is how our democracies function – with our consent. There is no mystery in what Lippmann was saying: it is an obvious fact. The mystery is that, knowing it, we nevertheless play the game. We act as if we are free and freely deciding, silently not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction (inscribed into the very form of our free speech) tells us what to do and think. As Marx realized long ago, the secret is in the form itself. In this sense, in a democracy, every ordinary citizen effectively is a king – but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king who only formally decides, whose function is to sign measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why the problem of democratic rituals is homologous to the big problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call a ‘crisis of democracy’ does not occur when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, those who are supposed to know for them and provide the guidelines, when they experience the anxiety signalling that ‘the (true) throne is empty’, that the decision is now really theirs. There is thus in ‘free elections’ always a minimal aspect of politeness: those in power politely pretend that they do not really hold power, and ask us to freely decide if we want to give them power – in a way which mirrors the logic of the offer-meant-to-be-refused, as mentioned above. So, back to Turkey, is it only this type of dignity that the protesters want, tired as they are of the primitive and openly direct way they are cheated and manipulated? Is their demand in fact, ‘We want to be cheated in a proper way – at least make an honest effort to cheat us without insulting our intelligence!’, or is it really more? If we aim at more, then we should be aware that the first step of liberation is to get rid of the appearance of false freedom and to openly proclaim our unfreedom. Say, the first step towards female liberation is to throw off the appearance of respect for women and to proclaim openly that women are oppressed – more than ever, today’s master doesn’t want to appear as a master.36

John Campbell, a Republican congressman, said in support of the Tea Party movement: ‘The achievers are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs … who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.’ The absurdity of this reaction is that it totally misreads the situation: most of the gigantic sums of bailout money went precisely to the deregulated Randian ‘titans’ who failed in their ‘creative’ schemes and thereby brought about the meltdown. It is not the great creative geniuses who are now helping lazy ordinary people but the ordinary taxpayers who are helping the failed ‘creative geniuses’.

The other aspect of Thatcher’s legacy targeted by her Leftist critics was her ‘authoritarian’ form of leadership, her lack of a sense for democratic coordination. Here, however, things are more complex than they may appear. The ongoing popular protests around Europe converge in a series of demands which, in their very spontaneity and directness, form a kind of ‘epistemological obstacle’ to any proper confrontation with the ongoing crisis of our political system. These demands effectively read as a popularized version of Deleuzian politics: people know what they want, they are able to discover and formulate this but only through their own continuous engagement and activity, so we need active participatory democracy, not just representative democracy with its electoral ritual which every four years interrupts the voters’ passivity; we need the self-organization of the multitude, not a centralized Leninist Party with its Leader.

But is this myth of non-representative direct self-organization not the last trap, the deepest illusion that is most difficult to renounce? Yes, there are, in every revolutionary process, ecstatic moments of group solidarity, when thousands, hundreds of thousands, together occupy a public place, like on Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011; yes, there are moments of intense collective participation in which local communities debate and decide, when people live in a kind of permanent emergency state, taking things into their own hands, with no Leader guiding them. But such states don’t last – and ‘tiredness’ is here not a simple psychological fact, it is a category of social ontology. The large majority – me included – wants to be passive and to rely on an efficient state apparatus to guarantee the smooth running of the entire social edifice, so that I can pursue my work in peace.

Following the spirit of today’s ideology, which demands the shift from traditional hierarchy, a pyramid-like subordination to a Master, to pluralizing rhizomatic networks, political analysts like to point out that the new anti-globalist protests all around Europe and the US, from Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to Greece and Spain, have no central agency, no Central Committee, coordinating their activity. Rather, there are just multiple groups interacting, mostly through new media like Facebook or Twitter, and coordinating their activity spontaneously. This is why, when the apparatuses of police power look for the secret organizing committees, they miss the point – in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, 10,000 protesters gathered in front of the Parliament in February 2014 and proudly proclaimed: ‘The protest is attended by 10,000 organizers.’ But is this ‘molecular’ spontaneous self-organization really the most efficient new form of ‘resistance’? Is it not that the opposite side, especially capital, already acts more and more as what Deleuzian theory calls the post-Oedipal multitude?37 Power itself has to enter a dialogue at this level, answering tweet with tweet – indeed, now Pope and prime ministers are on Twitter. We should not be afraid to pursue this line of reasoning to its conclusion: the opposition between centralized-hierarchic vertical power and horizontal multitudes is inherent in the existing social and political order; none of the two is a priori ‘better’ or more ‘progressive’.38

There is absolutely nothing inherently ‘Fascist’ in these lines. The supreme paradox of political dynamics is that a Master is needed to pull individuals out of the quagmire of their inertia and motivate them towards the self-transcending emancipatory struggle for freedom. What we need today, in this situation, is thus a Thatcher of the Left: a leader who would repeat Thatcher’s gesture in the opposite direction, transforming the entire field of presuppositions shared by today’s political elite of all main orientations. This is also why we should reject the ideology of what Saroj Giri called ‘anarchic horizontalism’, the distrust of all hierarchic structures – we should shamelessly reassert the idea of ‘vanguard’, when one part of a progressive movement assumes leadership and mobilizes other parts:

If consensus and horizontalism are not to remain stuck in nursing quasi-liberal egos, then we must be able to delineate how they can contribute towards a more substantive notion of politics – one which involves a verticalism. Perhaps this would be a better way to revive a communist politics instead of taking politically correct vows of horizontalism and consensus.43

A true Master is not an agent of discipline and prohibition. His message is not ‘You cannot!’, nor ‘You have to …!’, but a liberating ‘You can!’ But ‘can’ what? Do the impossible, i.e., what appears impossible within the coordinates of the existing constellation – and today, this means something very precise: you can think beyond capitalism and liberal democracy as the ultimate framework of our lives. A Master is a vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself, who delivers you to the abyss of your freedom: when we listen to a true leader, we discover what we want (or, rather, what we always-already wanted without knowing it). A Master is needed because we cannot accede to our freedom directly – in order to gain this access we have to be pushed from outside, since our ‘natural state’ is one of inert hedonism, of what Badiou calls the ‘human animal’. The underlying paradox is here that the more we live as ‘free individuals with no Master’, the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities: we have to be pushed/disturbed into freedom by a Master.

In Udi Aloni’s documentary Art/Violence, a tribute to Juliano Mer Khamis, the founder of the Jenin Freedom Theatre, a young Palestinian actress describes what Juliano meant to her and her colleagues: he gave them their freedom, i.e., he made them aware of what they can do, he opened up a new possibility to them, homeless kids from a refugee camp. This is the role of an authentic Master: when we are afraid of something (and fear of death is the ultimate fear that makes us slaves), a true friend will say something like: ‘Don’t be afraid, look, I’ll do it, what you’re so afraid of, and I’ll do it for free – not because I have to, but out of my love for you; I’m not afraid!’ He does it and in this way sets us free, demonstrating in actu that it can be done, that we can do it too, that we are not slaves …

There was a trace of this authentic Master’s call in Obama’s slogan from his first presidential campaign: ‘Yes, we can!’, a phrase that thereby opened a new possibility. But, one might say, did Hitler also not do something formally similar? Wasn’t his message to the German people ‘Yes, we can’ kill the Jews, squash democracy, act in a racist way, attack other nations? A closer analysis immediately brings out the difference: far from being an authentic Master, Hitler was a populist demagogue who carefully played upon people’s obscure desires. It may seem that, in doing this, Hitler followed Steve Jobs’ infamous motto: ‘A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’ However, in spite of all one has to criticize in Jobs’ activities, he was close to an authentic Master in how he understood his motto. When he was asked how much Apple inquires into what customers want, he replied: ‘None. It’s not the customers’ job to know what they want … we figure out what we want.48 Note the surprising turn of this argument: after denying that customers know what they want, Jobs doesn’t go on with the expected direct reversal – ‘It is our task (the task of creative capitalists) to figure out what customers want and then “show it to them” on the market.’ Instead, he continues: ‘we figure out what we want’. This is how a true Master works. He doesn’t try to guess what people want; he simply obeys his own desire so that it is up to the people to decide if they will follow him. In other words, his power stems from his fidelity to his desire, from not compromising it. Therein resides the difference between a true Master and, say, a Stalinist leader who pretends to know (better than the people themselves) what people really want (what is really good for them), and is then ready to enforce this on them even against their will.

Hegel’s solution to the deadlock of the Master – to have a Master (like a king) reduced to its Name, a purely symbolic authority totally dissociated of all actual qualifications for his job, a monarch whose only function is to sign his name on proposals prepared by experts – should not be confused with the cynical stance of ‘Let’s have a master who we know to be an idiot.’ One cannot cheat in this way since one has to make a choice: either we really don’t take the master figure seriously (and in this case the Master simply doesn’t function performatively), or we take the Master seriously in the way we act, in spite of our direct conscious irony (which can develop to the point of actually despising the Master). In the latter case, we are simply dealing with a case of disavowal, of ‘I know very well, but’: our ironic distance is part of the transferential relation to the master figure; it functions as a subjective illusion enabling us effectively to endure the Master – which is to say, we pretend not to take the Master seriously so that we can endure the fact that the Master really is our master.

The two meanings of ‘nota bene’ – ‘take special notice, note well’ (the correct one) and ‘good night’ (the false one, based on misreading ‘nota’ as ‘night’) – render all too accurately the fate of the critique of ideology today. In our era of cynical indifference, the message of the critique of ideology is, ‘Note well what I’m telling you, awaken to your reality!’ while the answer to this call is often: ‘You’re boring, you make me drowsy, so good night!’ How to break this dogmatic slumber, how to pass from ‘goodnight’ to ‘I hear what you’re telling me’?

Ramakrishnan Karthick raises here a perspicacious question with regard to the immense popularity of the Joker figure in the previous film: why such a harsh disposition towards Bane when the Joker was dealt with leniently in the earlier movie? The answer is simple and convincing:

The Joker, calling for anarchy in its purest form … critically underscores the hypocrisies of bourgeois civilization as it exists, [but] his views are unable to translate into mass action … Bane on the other hand poses an existential threat to the system of oppression … His strength is not just his physique but also his ability to command people and mobilize them to achieve a political goal. He represents the vanguard, the organized representative of the oppressed that wages political struggle in their name to bring about structural changes. Such a force, with the greatest subversive potential, the system cannot accommodate. It needs to be eliminated.9