Václav Bělohradský

Umělec 1/2010 / cz en de. Ilustrated by Daniel G. Andújar. Umelec magazine. p 76-109

MECHANISMS

There are no facts in front of which we would be silenced in the same way as in front of a reality that appeared on its own, such that „there is nothing to talk about“. Builders of universal empires require an agreement between them to be announced as an agreement with reality itself. If they succeed, there will be a worldwide universal empire, which won‘t stand anything but „willing helpers“. …

The greatest contradiction of industrial society is the rational nature of its irrationality, its rational foolishness. The system’s ever-increasing level of productivity is accompanied by the ever more rapid destruction of ancient worlds; sovereign political power rests on the threat of nuclear holocaust; our thoughts and emotions are subjugated to the power strategies of large corporations; the helplessness of the majority increases in direct proportion to the enormous and unprecedented power of the privileged minority. A society filled with such contradictions can survive only because of the immense effectiveness of its controlling mechanisms, which rob us of the ability to perceive the system’s objectives and our role within it as an offense to human reason and feeling. “The mechanism by which the individual is bound to his society has itself been altered. Social control is grounded in the new needs which it has created.” We become the chief editor of a newspaper, we have a high salary, a person with a high salary must live in a house outside of Prague, we take out a loan on our high salary,
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Democracy as a public debate over what is relevant in different situations is just an illusion – each situation is defined in advance, like the canned laughter in American sitcoms.
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Democracy is in a stage of decline, it is slowly fading away; in its place we are seeing the emergence of Crouch’s “post-democracy,” whose main characteristic is the gradual replacement of the rule of law and parliamentary democracy with a network of efficient lobbying power structures whose aim is the implementation, through opportunistic bargaining, of rules of the game advantageous to the most powerful economic groups.
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The efficiency of technology is increasing so rapidly that is rendering the very difference between the realm of means and the realm of ends an archaism: Are not the ends in themselves merely the means for the further expansion of technology?
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Democracy is that form of social organization in which questions of frame are constantly left open; people are interested in them. Public space has its own unique tension, its effervescence, because it is here that opposing great truths are constantly encountering and controverting one another. Disputes about great truths are useful: they render us better and more open; they make our decisions more legitimate and superior in quality. In fact, the general availability of questions of frame and the public’s interest in them form a basic pillar of democracy.

UNEASINESS

There are many reasons for the sense of uneasiness in modern society. Above all, (…) there are the dizzying proliferation of signs, images, expressions and declarations, as a result of which there has been a sharp decline in reality. Many signs, little that is signified, many meanings, little that is meaningful, many parts, few wholes, many facts, little context, many copies, few originals, many images, little that is depicted, much talk, little agreement, many goals, little purpose, many representatives, little that is represented, many answers, few questions.
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The sense of uneasiness is ever-present; it may not be strong, but it is persistent. No, we do not feel ill; there is just too much – information, food, garbage, people, packaging, books, signs, political programs, places to fly to on holiday, loan offers, excessively hot days in the year. There must be some kind of limit, some boundary beyond which the things of this world can no longer be used and consumed, but just venerated. We do not know where this boundary is; we just feel a little uneasy.
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During the bird flu epidemic, shop sellers in Hong Kong wore sterile masks on their faces with a smile drawn on them. In late modern society, criticism is merely a “reproachful expression” drawn on invisible masks worn in public by the protagonists of sponsored cultural events. How to revive the fundamental virtue of liberal society – not being indifferent to critical images of itself? I do not know, and the fact that I do not know how to answer this question makes me uneasy. What good is an intellectual if he doesn’t know how?

THE WEST

(…) – those who wish to remain Europeans must never allow themselves to be controlled by the force emanating from everything that we unreservedly accept as “natural.” Understand well: liberally educated Europeans do not wish to deny their own prejudices, they merely wish to understand them in relation to time and place, to the problems that these prejudices were once meant to solve. Understanding liberates us from the power held over us by the perspective of the whole, in which the experience of historical conditionality has extinguished any notion of the whole.
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The deepening environmental crisis, the scandalous helplessness of the industrial democratic countries in the face of extreme events – whether caused by anthropogenic climate change or natural climatic developments – the horrible state of the Third World, the hypocritical newspeak that calls aggression “preventive war” and the occupation of a foreign country “liberating a people from tyranny,” the restriction of civil rights through the “Patriot Act,” the ever closer alliance between entertainers and politicians in order to mobilize the masses for the further consumption of unnecessary things, the building of a “majority consensus” through the strategic control of the media – all this is a sign that wartime mobilization is the most intrinsic tendency of the system.
The Western political and economic system is extremist in its normality: the “peaceful days” enjoyed by the inhabitants of the West consist primarily in a war against nature and other forms of life.
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NATO expansion is merely an attempt at masking the saber rattling of our civilizational crisis.
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What strange victors, who have not resolved any of the issues the more effective resolution of which was at the heart of the East-West conflict: inequality among people is an ever-greater scandal for the “Christian West,” democracy is increasingly absent from the adoption of strategic decisions, loyalty questionnaires are a hundred pages long, capital exerts an ever more total control over public space, the atom bomb and technologically managed force continue to form the foundation of political sovereignty, NATO is expanding, the Schengen Agreement has fractured Europe into first-class Europeans, second-class Europeans, and the peons in the Balkans and Ukraine; all around us new invisible walls are springing up, and the Third World gets dirtier and hungrier, as do the peripheries of our affluent cities; ministry of defense budgets are growing, ministry of education budgets shrinking.
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Is not the hatred of the “white us” in this historical world a normal answer to the way in which it has been invaded by this tolerant “white us”? The ruined, historical worlds that remain in the wake of his rule, collectively labeled the Third World – most of Africa, much of Asia and possibly Latin America as well – are nothing more than subjugated and exploited peripheries of the empire of global economic growth, whose shaken and rapidly weakening center is this “white us.”
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The Global South is not just the Third World; anyone may find himself there who refuses to convert to the †bercivilization and who thus offers resistance to the empire of the growth of Growth.
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Consumerism is a democratically uncontrollable automatism resulting from an uncontrolled demonic element of Western civilization: it is a type of rapture, a seductive shadow-world into which man throws himself in order to escape the contradictory world shown him by his reason.
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“What is reason?” we ask when watching a long, motionless line of cars on the blocked highways when our cities declare a smog emergency, when our limited resources have been destroyed in order to produce superfluous things, when we discuss climate change caused by the greenhouse effect, when the front pages of all Czech newspapers announce the search for the next Czech Idol, when we see television images of long lines of people at exchange offices in South Korea, Argentina, or Moscow during various financial crises, when we watch reports from Malaysian cities where disappointed candidates for affluence are looting stores, or scenes from President Clinton’s Sexgate proceedings with Ken Starr trying to find the legal definition of sex..
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The tyranny of values in industrial society necessarily leads to colonialism, concentration camps, the genetic manipulation of everything living, the reduction of nature to natural resources or its transformation into a laboratory filled with laboratory animals such as OncoMouseTM, a mouse that has been genetically engineered to be born with cancer so that it can be used for experiments. The ends must be bigger and bigger, so that the realm of means for their attainment – techno-scientific power – can continue to grow.
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The most serious form of criticism is criticism of false consciousness. The most important feature of modern industrial society is alienation, in the sense that man does not know the laws of the world that he has created and thus enslaves himself through his products. Just as pre-modern man did not recognize that the gods were his imagination, so does modern man fail to see that the world of goods represents “his essential forces, transformed into objects, and a world that… enslaves him” (Marx).

TEXT

Is reading the art of identifying the meaning of a text as inserted by its author, or does a text receive its meaning from its readers, who try to come to some kind of mutual agreement as to a “meaningful” reading of texts?
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In an era characterized by such a colossal overproduction of texts, we should be learning creative reading instead of creative writing. There has been a sharp decline in meaning and a sharp increase in the number of texts. If we do not learn to read them creatively, they will swirl around us like a dark shroud of whirling dust.
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The theory of the implied reader is generally applicable. Every person is a text in search of its implied reader, everyone hopes that someone will read him just as he has written himself, as he has imagined the acts and ideas that he has encoded into his life. It is true that often this does not happen, and the cities are full of drunks mumbling: “Joe, you can ask anyone; I’ve never been a coward, that’s just Wendy talking trash about me!”
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Today, networks of computers are capable of spewing forth all possible combinations of symbols and letters in a matter of seconds. I am sure that even such texts long for their implied reader. But how to become one? Let us conclude a new agreement on the reading of texts during the era of globalization! Yes, but with whom, where, and what about?
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People are made up of statements; they are surrounded by them. All that they have said and heard whirls around in a jumbled mixture consisting of their truths and the truths about them. Each statement belongs in some landscape of statements and has meaning only if it can be used for something within this landscape. Statements that are of use within a landscape are called truths; those that stand in the way are called mistakes or lies. Some statements can act as bridges in the landscape, others as levers, shortcuts, artificial lakes, or shelters. These landscapes of statements also contain many ruined truths, some of which have been wasting away for ages, while others have collapsed suddenly, people fleeing their ruins in panic. They are also home to many truths that entangle people like spider webs, the spider patiently waiting; some truths – such as the belief in hell – are traps laid eons ago; others are new, designed using computers – economic growth, nuclear energy, financial flows.
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We learn to navigate the overgrown corners of our landscapes of statements under the supervision of our teachers, for these corners are inhabited by ill-fated poets and delirious thinkers, angry young men, long-haired rockers, and eccentric scholars who look after all the weeds and shrubbery but who have not managed to avoid expressing doubts and making heretical statements. Sometimes the voice of our conscience chases us into these corners, we take a liking to them, and remain.
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Over the past millennia we have combined a desert biblical landscape full of shepherds, farmers, and seedsmen with extravagant statements made by participants of Greek gay parties and homosexual libations – thus was born Christian philosophy; in the name of the Renaissance, we smuggled the Greek concept of beauty into our Christian landscape, constructed bridges of statements between the claims made by the crucified prophet from Palestine and the Englishman Darwin, or between the vocabulary of stockbrokers and the verses of Otokar Březina. They are flimsy bridges, but they can be crossed. Without interpretations, the West’s landscapes of statements would not hold together, they would be contradictory and filled with garbage, their boundaries would be unclear, we would not understand relationships and contexts.
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Pilate’s famous question (the only sentence in the Gospels that makes sense, wrote Nietzsche) has long changed its addressee. What is truth? we today ask the scientist adding meal from dead cows to the feed of live cows, and what we mean to say is: Do you know the boundaries of the landscape to which your statements belong?

GROWTH

Industrial growth is war.
Will the century of extremes ever end?
American author Don DeLillo wrote:
“While watching the first day of the attack on Iraq on television, with the smart bombs exploding in the center of Baghdad, I got the sense that technology itself forces us into war, that it has the need to realize everything that can be realized. Our Progress needed to blow off steam in that attack, with unprecedented precision.”
The drive for war is encoded in the products that shape our daily life; everything that we take into our hands contains the need to “blow off steam.” After 1989, there was a brief period of hope that the drive for war inscribed into technological and economic growth could be overcome.
We were mistaken.
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A civilization of economic growth reduces all meaning to nothing more than a Great Objective; the greater the objective, the more capital (accumulated energy, work, resources, and the efficient use thereof) is required. Today, meaning has become hopelessly merged with the great objectives of Euro-Atlantic technological civilization – economic globalization, star wars, space travel, living to be a hundred illness-free.
Everything must contribute to the growth of capital – even protests against its absurdity. Are you protesting? That is your right, but you will have to purchase your means of protest from us! How to resist capital without promoting its growth? How to express and implement the difference between meaning and mere objective?
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What is the point of freedom, reason, and education if, no matter what, we are all dragged along by the relentless automatism of the economic growth of Growth, which nobody is capable of giving human meaning?
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Is there any meaning to the endless devastation of the planet, the world’s transformation into a pile of garbage, the tyranny to which the Third World is subjected in the name of controlling raw materials? Growth is not a universal good, as claimed by the council of globalization that meets in Brussels or Washington.

COMMUNISM AND CAPITALISM

Is capitalist globalization a new “grand narrative” that we tell ourselves at the end of the era of nation-states, whose expansion had been the subject of all the grand narratives of the past two centuries? Is it a new “recognized necessity,” the only resistance to which comes from irresponsible extremists or the classes marked for extinction?
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A system founded on private ownership has a “big dirty secret” – capitalists never pay the full costs of their “private” business. A large share of the costs is paid by people who in some way are affected by what the capitalist does with his property but who lack the legal means to influence his activities. A company uses water from a river, but its production costs do not include expenditures caused by the fact that other people have to adapt to the impacts of its business activities – changes in water quality, for instance. This is the vicious circle of democratic policy: the oligarchies that have achieved a hegemony in society support the governments, who in exchange for this support happily allow them to transfer their private costs onto society at large. Through the use of state and police control, governments preventively take away their citizens’ rights to legally protest the capitalists’ unpaid accounts.
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I called my first book of reflections from the nineties Capitalism and Civic Virtues. The “and” between the market and virtues is a very fragile bond, one that is constantly threatening to come apart. In the second half of the 1990s, to cries of “Globalization, globalization!”, several fanged monsters began gnawing away at this bond – successfully, as the “global financial crisis” has shown.
Communism was not disarmed by capitalism; it collapsed because the bond between politics and civic virtues was severed. In Plato’s Apology, we read that “virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private (…)”. Renewing the bond between “virtue and money” may be a long process, but it is the only possible solution to the current “global crisis” and future crises as well.
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And now the same, but in a more erudite manner. We use the word “externality” to label various ways in which costs are transferred onto others and the word “internality” to describe ways of rectifying such forms of inequality. The expression “legitimate disregard” is used to describe the fact that people do not have the legal right to fight business activities whose externalities are causing them harm.
Right-wing ideology and politics then take up the struggle for the greatest possible level of legitimate disregard. Through their ideological apparatuses, right-wing parties work to create a majority consensus for those governments that allow the oligarchy in whose interests they govern to transfer as much of their costs as possible onto all of society.
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In right-wing discourse, the word “freedom” means the right of private owners to use their property with the greatest possible level of disregard towards others.
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“If we limit the right of the owners of private property to transfer a part of their costs onto all of society, this restricts the rights of all because free enterprise is the most important form of freedom in society!” – cries the Right. And the Left answers: “We are constantly expanding the right of “citizens” to protest against the failure by the owners of private property to pay their bills. One day you, too, will be affected by the impacts of some “capitalist’s” business activities, and not being a helpless victim is the most important form of freedom in society.”
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hyper-bourgeoisie
This word, which is borrowed from French sociologist Denis Duclos, describes a “transnational” elite working to abolish first the democratic welfare state, and subsequently all restrictions by which the nation-states have fettered economic rationality over the past two centuries. The hyper-bourgeoisie is “anti-cultural”: it delegitimizes traditions, national memory and shared lifestyles, it censors all that is capable of resisting financial capital, which redefines in its own interest the plus and minus values historically assigned to things, words, landscapes, and interpersonal relationships.
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The bourgeoisie was a part of a nation and acted within the history of that nation; it was bound, morally and historically, by the solidarity that brings together societies of a national language. The hyper-bourgeoisie, on the other hand, attacks all historical societies from the outside. Its global power is a lightning-fast “raid, plunder, and run;” the obligations arising from a shared language or national solidarity would only serve to restrict it. Investments managed by the global nomenklatura can quickly and inexorably change the value which human societies have assigned to landscapes, things, symbols, interpersonal relationships – nothing and no-one may restrict them in the name of solidarity among people or earthlings within the broadest meaning of the word. The hyper-bourgeoisie and its paid hyper-nomenklatura (employees of the EU, NATO, WTO, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, PR hyper-corporations, and certain research institutes) form a “transnational class” – they do not acknowledge any obligations towards the nation whose language they are currently using and on whose territory they are enforcing their strategic interests.
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The phrase “an irrational society of rational individuals” captures the fact that in late industrial society, the whole of all individuals acting rationally or working to maximize their own success forms an insane society; rational individuals work to maximize their profits, but taken together they form an insane society, one example being global warming.
Put differently: the more rational people are as individuals, they more insane they are as a society. One convincing example of collective stupidity is the private automobile: for each individual, it is advantageous to drive to work in his own car; traffic jams and highway accidents are the irrational result of this individual rationality.
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total market
I use this term to define the expansion of market rationality beyond all national, ethical, and social boundaries. Technological environment lowers the cost of moving anything – information, knowledge, materials, companies and their manufacturing output. There exist thousands of individuals capable of performing my job better and for much lower pay, and in a technological environment it is cheap to send my job to them.
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The total market insists that everything that is “technologically possible” be “for sale” as quickly as possible, because it will not tolerate any rational goal for man other than the “maximum consumption of what is sold.” First of all, the total market conceals the actual price of the consumed good – mineral water or fruits produced thousands of miles away and transported to your local hypermarket have intolerably higher environmental costs than locally produced water or fruits. And secondly, it requires censoring all questions regarding the biological, moral, and social sustainability of technologically realised (realisable) human choice.
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Our century of extremes has been most deeply marked by the bloody conflict between dead capital and live human work, between the meaning and price of work. This conflict has not been resolved; the entertainment industry has merely postponed it indefinitely.
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In the age of globalization, a new Marx will have to slightly alter the introductory sentence to his critique of political economy: “The wealth of global bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense accumulation of worlds. Everyone can choose into which world he wants to be lulled to sleep, and by whom.”
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I believe that the historical catastrophe of communism was the result of a lack of diligence in the face of reality, in the face of the structure of human existence; it resulted from a terrible overestimation of the “revolutionary act” of forcing a form of existence on people that they could only feign in an artificial world – a world in which they cannot live without a vast coercive apparatus.
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Communism was not the same as Nazism, as the dogmatic warriors for the capitalist system claim. It was a grand project of modernism whose promises came to naught because of the resistance of the historical world in which these ideas were to be implemented; the communists lacked the necessary patience and so they declared the representatives of this resistance to be “enemies of mankind” and eradicated them. As a result, they found themselves in a terrible contradiction with the ideas that had been the source of their historical legitimacy.
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As the discrepancy between democratic ideal and oligarchic reality grows, current global capitalism increasingly resembles communism..

GLOBALIZATION

The earth is sown with wonders of technology, into which it is slowly sliding.
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Today, we describe the planet-wide expansion of industrial modernity using the already devalued word “globalization.” That aspect of globalization that, in terms of its radicalism, we view as a threat like no other before is the detachment of techno-scientific-economic growth from the right of the public to ask, “what meaning is there to it?” This demand for meaning stands in the way of the automatic cumulative growth of knowledge and power, and is thus suppressed from the public realm as illegitimate, extremist, or proto-terrorist.
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Since the early 1990s, capitalism has been undergoing a dangerous mutation – it is globalizing, becoming, in the words of Karel Kosík, a “supercapitalism.” Democracy is too closely bound to the values that form the foundation of the nation-state; supercapitalism drains democracy by draining it of its sovereignty: free public space, civic independence, a natural shared language, and anti-conformist and transversal communication are beginning to stand in the way of the growth of global uniformity, which cannot abide any limitations or boundaries. Ralf Dahrendorf speaks of the “Singapore Syndrome,” the danger of the emergence of an authoritarian capitalism controlled by a “globalized nomenklatura” composed of the largest financial institutions, the arms industry, Eurobureaucracy, multinational corporations, and the managers of the media elite.
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Is there such a thing as a global culture capable of giving globalization a humanly comprehensible objective? Globalization has three central symbols – the atom bomb, the environmental crisis, and a planetary media network. All national cultures are trapped in this triangle, while the technocratic spider sucks them dry. The philosophical question of the time is whether there is any civilizational competence. By this, I mean the ability to respond to the abrupt relativization of all national cultural models by finding some kind of shared “grammar.”
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The post-bipolar world is controlled by structures whose focus is not on the meaning of the exercise of power, but on the growth of power.
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(…) in a society of global growth, there is a growing community of people brought together by a “shared sense of absurdity.”

FROM THE HISTORY OF MODERNITY

Being an individual is nothing natural. It is the result of a long educational process that began in Greece, when man broke free from the world of myth he had taken for granted; this process strengthened under the pastoral power of Christianity, which taught each person to examine himself, to have a conscience, to struggle with his body, to see himself as a unique and unreproducible individual. The strict maxim of cogito ergo sum commanded man to always start from his awareness/self-confidence, which raises him not only above other living creatures, but also above the infinity of the cosmos. Then the Earth began to turn and man was spun off from the center of the universe to the periphery of the Milky Way, but his self-confidence grew; then came the era of progress and Enlightenment, which taught man to trust his own experiences and not allow himself to be confounded by holy authority or the power of the majority.
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(…) the word “globalization” is connected to the word “postmodernity,” which we use to describe the time between the first and the second modernity. The first modernity was a massive hoax perpetrated by a powerful discursive machinery controlled by the officials of modern pastoral power – educators, teachers, poets, psychiatrists, experts in the human sciences, engaged intellectuals, ideologists – all of whom worked to make sure that the phrase “industrial growth” and all sub-phrases derived therefrom would have a higher, inner, figurative meaning in addition to its literal, material, outer meaning: the development of production tools and the accumulation of products in the form of goods. Their work ensured that the metaphor inscribed within this word in booming verse and ornamental lettering was kept alive, and that the figurative meaning of the word “growth” would rule over its literal meaning (the higher controlled the lower, the spiritual the material).
The emergence of the society of communications overload, in which an ever larger number of subcultures has their say, made the omnipresent hypocrisy of this hoax readily apparent. The powerful representatives of the “demands of the spirit against the demands of the material base” reduced themselves to a grotesque preaching mafia, and the first modernity came to an end.
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The era of postmodernity between the first and second modernity is characterized by a preoccupied lack of awareness of the fact that the metaphors that had previously given all events a higher meaning are fading away. We do not dare see our new “grand narrative” within the permanent darkness; the recently declared “end of grand narratives” still applies.
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In the period between the first and second modernity there are landfills containing the waste of the first modernity everywhere. This waste has its beauty: in the random interplay of shapes, sounds, and images we can often glimpse the old “figurative meaning”, distorted, out of place, superfluous. Yes, the instability of events abandoned by the grand metaphors of the first modernity – this is the aesthetic of postmodernity. This installation of extinguished meaning reveals not only the unyielding prosaism of global circumstances, but also the mass nostalgia for the metaphoric world that once glittered in the word “Enlightenment.” In Petr Zelenka’s film Wrong Side Up, a sculptor installs a work at a gallery belonging to a man who used to narrate newsreels under communism. The audience is fascinated by the words that are the residue of those images, she repeats, taken by his words. An allegory of our relationship to the loss of meaning between the first and second modernity.
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The culture of the second modernity is being formed during a time defined by the motto “There is no culture,” and the new grand narrative is being shaped during a time defined by the motto “There is no grand narrative.” The second modernity will begin once the fading of metaphors, the sudden dusk of grand slogans, the proliferation of boundless peripheries, and the unexpected fluctuations and mixing of codes, places, and things become our new grand narrative.
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The bipolar world of the Cold War was simple: there is plenty of time for peace and democracy, but first we have to defeat their enemies. The two systems did not differ from each other in anything essential, both were the largest global protagonists of the world’s transformation into a pile of resources at our disposal, even if the “capitalist” pile was more diverse and its consumers freer in digging around in it as they wished.
The Cold War is over, but the need to postpone peace, democracy, and the question of the meaning of this constantly growing mass of phenomena and things at our disposal endures. The question of the growing absurdity of the civilization of the growth of Growth does not fit into the global players’ strategies; what they need is another more or less cold war so that they may again put off, until some distant “later,” answering the question of the overall framework of the world in which we are imprisoned; what applies now are wartime priorities, people must be a priori suspected, inspected, monitored – the enemy lurks everywhere.
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We live on the edge of giant landfills of used information and images, discharged contexts and worn-out clichés, semiotic wrecks and dilapidated linguistic traditions.

FROM ACTUALITY TO THE END

The difference between modernity and tradition has been a central theme of the past three centuries: historians tell the history of the world as a sequence of stories about when, where, and why the old world came to an end and “modernization” took off – the victory of reason, the rule of scientists of managers. In some places, this end came earlier, in some, later; in some places, people resisted it; many were murdered. All these stories lie about the most fundamental aspect of the matter. Modernity is not a new thing. It is merely a new name for the old religion of the West, which we call the “Cult of the Actual” – Christianity and modernity are its two main forms.
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The end of the old times is coming at an ever faster pace, an everlarger number of people are liberating themselves from the darknesses of the past, say the chroniclers of the modern era. And with them, Siemens, Ford, General Motors, Boeing, IBM, NASA, and their (all) newspapers. Believers of the Actual are doomsayers prophesizing various ends of the world; they point at one thing or another in our world – scientific knowledge, for instance – and cry, “through this, the old world will end forever.”
The dogma of the Believers of the Actual is well-known: The present is different from the past, time is not cyclical like the time of plants and animals, but it is rolling inexorably forward to its end, beyond which lies the new world. Anything that repeats itself is without meaning – the stars circling above our heads according to their unyielding laws, the seasons of the year. The cogito-subject wanders aimlessly through his history, but it is an exalted wandering with a glorious end – death (misery, lack of education, sickness) will be defeated. The word “actual” describes the chasm between the past and the mesmeric NOW, where everything is new, including man. Christians are the most dangerous Believers of the Actual, the accelerated end of the world is their genetic disorder, their heretical euphoria, their effervescence that prevents them from awaiting the end of the world in peace.
Actuality is merely another name for Paul’s “death has been vanquished.”
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Jan Patočka wrote that the Christian faith is not the meaning sought for and found by man, but the meaning “dictated from the hereafter.” This concept of meaning as a dictate from “the hereafter,” as a revealed truth that triumphs over the “temporal world of shadows, mortality, and insecurity,” unites all Believers of the Actual within one large tribe. Even venerated Western science in its temples – laboratories, universities, multinational corporations – glorifies its statements as being “objective” (i.e., dictated) facts, and thus it, too, is just one of several ways of worshipping the religion of the Actual. Only that can be actual which hails from world other than the one that we see with our eyes, the one in which we die and in which we are constantly erring and in fear: only that is objective which is guaranteed, like a message from the hereafter, with a firm foundation in a netherworld accessible only to scientists dressed in their white coats. The modern Believers of the Actual replace the good word of the Almighty Father with the dictate of scientific empiricism.
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The Cult of the Actual has its origins in Greek philosophy; it is the legacy of the fable of the “true world” that a delusional Plato once told his tribe. … Plato saw “pure spirits” behind all things, and the elders of the tribe of Greeks were unable to convince him otherwise. Not only that, but they succumbed to this delusional belief themselves, and so Plato triumphed and founded the dreadful religion of the Actual, whose believers did not celebrate as real the visible and transient things around us, but the invisible ideas behind them, things we do not see with our eyes but with our reason. For the crackpot Plato, reason is something like an eye through which we see the true world behind the shadows of this one.
As we know from various sources, plenty of people tried to talk Plato out of his delusion. They pointed out that they could see tables, trees, and people, but not the idea of a table or of a person. Plato arrogantly retorted: “No wonder, for you have eyes, but no intellect.” He would probably have lost his arguments had the tribe of Greeks not succumbed to the Romans and the Romans to Christianity, which packaged Plato’s delusional world into their popular fable about a good Father who sacrifices his own son out of love for Man and then celebrates victory over death in the hereafter; this is the “Good News” (evangelium) that the Almighty Father sends us through his Son, incarnated as a mortal.
Nietzsche’s statement that “Christianity is Platonism for the people or for the poor” reminds us of the reason why the fable of the true world was victorious – there were more poor people, they were hungry and impatient and afraid of death. … the tribe of white men believed in Plato’s netherworld and began to destroy this one. Not a Greek was found who would put his hand on Plato’s shoulder and kindly tell him – that’s just your delirium talking, seeing eternal ideas behind everything. And so this delirium has been the normal state of white men for two thousand years as they summon the end of the world. Their world.
…

The Believers of the Actual have summoned the age of desperation, the Earth is going to waste, all that is around us becomes a trap, and our much-vaunted reason builds factory farms. We have succumbed to our Plato and associated the meaning of life with the end of the world. And the end is near. Our cities reek, the French coast – Cézanne, van Gogh, Utrillo, Picasso! – is covered in a black mass, more and more seabirds are dying encased in a shell of oil, there are Temelíns on every horizon. The sectarian Believers of the Actual firmly shut their eyes before these ends.
What a strange story it was! Plato left the cave, followed by the entire Academy, St. Paul exhorted the impatient Thessalonians – first in good will, but later the borders burned and the stench of scorched human flesh was everywhere – later still, Galileo turned the Earth under our feet, Newton calculated how things move, where they are moving, and the effect of this motion, Einstein ordered parallel lines to intersect, the cyborg beckons with its virtual arm, hearts are transplanted from one body to another, the globalizers have firmly bound us with an invisible fiber, a butterfly flapping its wings in our valley causes hurricanes on the other side of the world, there is a hole in the ozone layer through which the Sun fries us like the millionaire in Wolker’s unforgettable fairytale.
Hell hasn’t frozen over; instead, the ice is melting. The unhappy end is near.
…

WOMAN AND MAN

Philosophers have spent millennia arguing about the sex of angels, but what about the sex of reason? For more than two thousand years, reason was a primary male sexual characteristic, but today it passes as neuter. God is father and mother, Pope John Paul II once said. Reason has its male and female side, the philosophers say conciliatorily. But the French flag is not neuter, nor are generals, managers, judges, or the architect of Temelín. These are male roles. Like the African in Sartre’s example, woman must speak in her own voice and say roughly this: Male civilization is a catastrophe; it is missing a large piece of reality, it is narcissist and hurtling into an abyss.
Women in Central Europe have not spoken with their own voice; it was too bloody and cruel here. There was fear. But many men here taught us to identify the voice of women within the clamor of the male world. For instance, Karl Kraus saw woman as an anti-Platonic being, rebelling irrepressibly against the male world of pure ideas that subjugated the real world with insatiate abstractions such as Law and Order. He studied the trials of women who had rebelled against their families, and in the “sinfulness” which the court of respectable men ascribed to these women he saw a liberating primal force that rejected the recent era of manipulation and prostitution. In 1929 he wrote: “You know that all my life I have persecuted spiritual prostitutes, but never the prostitution of the female body. Towards the end of the time that I have been allotted in order to learn the things of this world, I assert that sex is probably the only activity that does not prostitute itself in this world, and that we have affixed the stigma of prostitution onto women in order to distract attention from male prostitution in all vocations.” At the pinnacle of male prostitution is the Media, which robs us of our imagination and empties our hearts. Kraus believed that in their fight against the Media’s emptying of the heart, women use their bodies, all their instincts, and their most individual voice.
…

I imagine that women’s voice will help us avoid two traps of reason. The first trap is reason in the singular, which alone can discover eternal and universal truths, and which therefore must be codified by the state and professed by all citizens. Truths of reason in the singular raise man above all other living beings with which we share the planet. I believe that, through their touch, women teach us from childhood (even when their lessons are censured) that reason is just one of the human senses, and not lord over them. Reason is a piece of our body. When we watch a landscape tortured by poisonous vapors, reason protests within our body. “That is but feminine reason,” people used to say. Yes, feminine reason! There are as many reasons as there are reasons for the living bodies of all species to rise up against Law, Order, Structures.
…

▵ [12]

thanks to Shuddhabrata Sengupta

[pdf] Tiqqun 1 – Intégralité scannée

Eh bien, la guerre !

Qu’est-ce que la Métaphysique Critique ?

Théorie du Bloom
[pdf] version augmentée, La Fabrique.[de] [es] [it]

Phénoménologie de la vie quotidienne

Thèses sur le Parti Imaginaire

Le silence et son au-delà

De l’économie considérée comme magie noire

Premiers matériaux pour une théorie de la Jeune-Fille
[pdf] version augmentée, vlcp. [it]

Hommes-machines, mode d’emploi
[pdf] version augmentée, Michel Baverey éditeur

Les métaphysiciens-critiques sous le «mouvement des chômeurs»

Quelques actions d’éclat du Parti Imaginaire

[pdf] Tiqqun 2 -Intégralité scannée

Introduction à la Guerre Civile
[pdf] version vlcp [en] [de] [es]

L’hypothèse cybernétique
[de]

Thèses sur la communauté terrible
[por] [it]

Le problème de la tête

“Une métaphysique critique pourrait naître comme science des dispositifs…”
[pdf] La Fabrique, 2009

Rapport à la S.A.S.C. concernant un dispositif impérial

Le petit jeu de l’homme d’Ancien Régime

Echographie d’une puissance

Ceci n’est pas un programme
[pdf] version augmentée, vlcp.

Comment Faire?
[pdf] - [en][es]

links to other translations from the same group:
Bloom Theory
Theses on the Terrible Community
The Cybernetic Hypothesis
Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl
The Coming Insurrection

a ‘critical study guide’:
Avant Garde and Mission

• final warning to the imaginary party
• marginal considerations on the present movement
• phenomenology of everyday life
• the great game of civil war
• untitled notes on citizenship papers
• you’re never to old to ditch out

Jacques Rancière

March 7, 2008 CCFI Noted Scholars Lecture Series

Jacques Rancière is the Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Paris VIII where he taught from 1969 to 2000. He continues to teach, as a visiting professor, in a number of Universities, including Rutgers, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley. His work has been translated into 14 languages, and has been subject to numerous special issues, symposia and critical commentaries. His latest titles to appear in English translation are: Disagreement, Politics, and Philosophy (1998), Short Voyages to the Land of the People (2003), The Philosopher and his Poor (2004), The Flesh of Words (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics (2005), Film Fables (2006), and The Hatred of Democracy (2007).

The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking Introduction 1

The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking Introduction 2

The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking Video

Questions & Discussion Video

The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking Podcast

The Slovak author and journalist Martin M. Simecka and Hungarian architect and former samizdat publisher László Rajk are not only former dissidents of the younger generation, but also the sons of well-known persecuted communists. László Rajk sr. was the most prominent victim of the Rákosi show trials of 1949; the writer Milan Simecka sr. began his career in the Czechoslovak Communist Party and became a dissident after 1968. In the first debate in the Eurozine series “Europe talks to Europe”, held in Budapest, they discussed the still unanswered questions surrounding the involvement of their father’s generation in post-war communism, and the failings of today’s debate about the past in the former communist countries. Moderated by Eva Karadi, editor of Magyar Lettre Internationale.

Eva Karadi: There is an interesting common feature in both your biographies that has provided us with the title of our conversation: “Dilemma ’89: My father was a communist”. Martin Simecka, how well do you know the circumstances in which your father became a communist?

Martin Simecka: I know them very well because I spoke to him about it all. After my father was expelled from the party in ’68 he became a dissident, and so he had time to reflect on his past. He became a member of the party as early as ’48, as an eighteen-year-old. His personal motivation was very typical for the younger generation in Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s. The Czechoslovak First Republic was extremely leftwing: there was a strong social-democratic party, a communist party and powerful leftwing intellectual movements. Many members of the intellectual elite – the writers and artists – were either communist or very leftist; it wasn’t unusual to be intellectual and leftist, or even communist. In this respect, Czechoslovakia was different to Hungary or Poland. In the ’48 elections the communist party won about 60 per cent in the Czech Republic and about 30 per cent in Slovakia, which was still a lot.

There were two profound reasons behind being a communist. One was the very common feeling that the Red Army had liberated Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War, and that it was the Russians who had brought liberty. The second was that Edvard Benes, who was president from late ’38 and then in exile in London, himself supported the idea that the Soviet Union is our friend, after Great Britain and others had betrayed Czechoslovakia with the Munich Agreement in ’38.

My father’s mother was killed by an American bomb and his father died before the war, so he was an orphan. The state took care of him, gave him a grant to attend university. “Look,” he told me, “I thought the communists were good people because they helped me.” That was a personal reason, perhaps the main reason, for him joining the Party, alongside the typical conviction of Czechoslovakian intellectuals. He was from a social-democratic family, not communist but social democratic. That was the classical step towards joining the party in ’48.

So I know very well how and why he joined the party. However I don’t know very much about the 1950s, when he was already a member of the party. He wasn’t high up, but nor was he just an ordinary member: he was at the university. There’s a gap here where I’m not sure what happened, because I didn’t ask him much. I now regret that.

EK: László Rajk, your father became a communist earlier: he participated in the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Were there other arguments for becoming a communist at that time?

László Rajk: My father would have been exactly one hundred years old this week. You could say that in terms of generations, my father was the one who took care of Martin’s. My father was very active in colleges and education for young people, which was a common idea in different communist parties. But naturally the story starts much earlier and is almost the mirror of Czechoslovakia. In Hungary, Social Democrats were only semi-free. It was an official party but was not favoured, as it was in Czechoslovakia. Anyone who subscribed to any kind of leftist idea, especially communism, had to be prepared to be arrested, imprisoned or even tortured. In Hungary it was not a career choice.

It is also important to remember that while the birth of Czechoslovakia provided an impetus for the nations of Czechoslovakia, for Hungary the Treaty of Versailles was an absolute shock. Hungary lost two thirds of its territory and of two thirds of its population to the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Slovakia and Austria, and to a lesser extent Slovenia and Croatia. My father was born before the First World War, in other words before the Treaty of Versailles, in Romanian Hungary, in Transylvania. That was a very different start in life. It now seems that that people who came to Hungary from Transylvania before the Versailles Treaty were drifting towards nationalism, towards a kind of social consciousness on a national basis, whereas those who came over after the Versailles Treaty, in the 1920s, were drifting towards a leftist ideology, again because of a social consciousness. Very little research has been done on this, but it seems to be a phenomenon that holds true for my family. My father’s elder brother became a fascist, and not only that, an Arrow Cross member. This was at the time that my father was fighting in the Spanish Civil War, in the International Brigades. So it is a typical eastern European family. From university onwards, my father was connected to, and actually a member of, the communist party.

EK: Where did he study?

LR: Again, this is a typical Transylvanian family story. There were eleven siblings (eight brothers and three sisters). In the traditional Transylvanian family, the eldest brother comes over to Hungary, never marries, stays a bachelor and pays for the younger brothers to come over. The eldest brother died and the next one took over, so in fact it was the Arrow Cross brother who paid for my father’s studies! He went to university, then to Paris, then back. He became a typical cosmopolitan communist, a professional revolutionary. He was well known internationally, especially after the end of the Second World War and the liberation. My father immediately became a VIP within the nomenklatura. He was a real communist hero, one of the very few Hungarians who actively resisted the German invasion and Hitlerism. Immediately after the war one could see not so much a dividing line within the communist party, but a line of composition. On the one side were the communists who had returned from Moscow, the Muscovites, and on the other the very few who had been active at home and risking a lot. Let’s call them the national wing of the communist party.

EK: And also some with western background?

LR: Yes, that’s right, some with western backgrounds as youngsters. The two types were deeply different, even their personalities and their attitudes were different. Also, as an artist I have to tell you that my father really was a very handsome man: tall, with a deep voice, with beautiful spoken Hungarian, that special Hungarian from Transylvania. He was the real stuff of the communist party. And there was a lack of “stuff” at the time. He was the most popular person in the communist party. And then came the enigma, the show trial in 1949. It was the first show trial in the Soviet bloc. Then came the Slánsky trial a year later, then the Kostov trial in Sofia, the trials in Romania, everywhere… To cut a long story short, it started with the usual paranoia of the Muscovites, about spies and the Cold War and so on, and ended up in the second half of ’49 as a very simple but dirty power game against Tito, with my father being hanged as a spy for Tito.

EK: You both have the same name as your father. In your case, László, it had a special meaning during the dissident period, when you were a Samizdat publisher. János Kádár, who had a particular role in the liquidation of your father, was quoted as saying that the only reason you could oppose the system openly was that he wasn’t prepared to arrest someone with the same name twice. But I know that you, Martin, also share the same name as your father. You are actually called Milan. This must mean something.

MS No, it was actually very prosaic. My mother decided that I should be called Milan, after my father. Then, when I began to write in the early 1980s, my father said that it sounded pretty stupid to be called Milan Simecka Jr. and that I should come up with something else. My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, is called Marta. So that was it, very prosaic, it had nothing to do with politics.

EK: Could you tell us something about your relationship with your father. Young men usually fight with their fathers and go other ways.

MS: My father was also tall, very handsome, very charming and popular. He died in 1990 of a heart attack, after the revolution, by which time he was an advisor for Vaclav Havel. When I was 14, my father was expelled from the party. He lost his job at the university and became a dissident. Because of my father, I was banned from studying at grammar school and university. There was no chance; I was just not allowed to study at all. We had long talks about who was guilty for the fact that I couldn’t study. My father tried to explain, but he didn’t need to try very much. It was clear that it wasn’t my father’s fault but the system’s. The communists told my father that if he would just stop writing or stop talking, if he at least changed his mind…

EK: They were blackmailing you…

MS: They even said to me that if I announced that I didn’t share my father’s opinions – I didn’t even need to do it openly or publicly – then I could study. As children we knew that this blackmailing was going on. In a case like that you can’t fight with your father much because there is such a common experience, such pressure from outside. On the other hand I was lucky, because my father did feel guilty that his child couldn’t study. So he took me to the meetings of the group of Czech and Slovakian intellectuals and writers who in the late ’70s had formed around people like Ludvík Vaculík, Ivan Klíma, Vaclav Havel. There were about twenty writers, all of whom were banned but published abroad. I was the youngest, 22 years old, in this circle of writers whom I loved. I later became a member. We had meetings every few months, debating all day and publishing samizdat. It was my private university, much better than any communist school.

However there’s another story. Almost all of these writers and intellectuals except Vaclav Havel and Karel Pecka were former communists who had become dissidents after ’68. So there were huge debates about the past. It wasn’t easy. There were people like Karel Pecka and Zdenek Rotrekl who had both spent ten years in prison in the 1950s. After ’68 they became colleagues and friends with people who were actually in power in the 1950s – or at least people who were leading intellectuals at the time, a younger generation that didn’t know or even think that there were dissidents in prison then. So there were some hard discussions, where these older prisoners debated with the new prisoners – in 1981 my father was in prison for one year, Vaclav Havel was in prison for five years – about who was guilty and who bore greater responsibility. It was pretty hard. There were some who tried to defend themselves, who argued that they didn’t know and that they were young, that they meant well and that it was just the time. My father never said that. He tried to understand, maybe not apologize, but to understand and explain. But still…

When I return to that time and remember those debates, my conclusion is that friendships were in a way too close. You can’t tell your friend that he is responsible for your imprisonment. I had to live another twenty years to understand that I did not understand very well what was going on in the 1950s; that I had false impressions of that time. Even of my father. He explained how it was during the Slánsky trial in ’52. He was 22 at the time and listened to the trial on the radio. “I wondered what was going on,” he told me, “but I didn’t realize that it wasn’t true. I believed that what was on the radio was true.” He first started have doubts in about ’53, when Khrushchev held his “secret speech” after Stalin’s death, and after the death of Gottwald in Czechoslovakia. That’s when the first doubts started appearing. But until then… no.

LR: At the same time I experienced several… not metamorphoses, but auto-da-fés of communism. The first was after the rehabilitation of my father from ’53. Other communists visited my mother and confessed that they believed he had been betrayed. The next wave was after ’56, when people came out of prison, and when my mother and other people returned to Hungary having been deported to Romania. That was in ’58. Another auto-da-fé occurred in ’60 when people started to say that, yes, those people who fought in the streets against the Stalinist regime in ’56 were right and we were wrong. Then again after ’68 in Prague, when communists became disillusioned and admitted that things couldn’t go on as they were. So my life was a kind of pilgrimage from one auto-da-fé to another.

Later I realized that people in the leftist or quasi-communist hemisphere had a really tough time. Starting with the Spanish Civil war, when the leftist French government withdrew the International Brigades from Spain and arrested people who had been fighting for the Republic at the French border. But I think the major shock was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. For a communist this must have been an utter shock. To remain a communist in such circumstances must have been very, very difficult. Not only to remain a communist, but to believe and convince yourself that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a good thing. So at the same time as all these auto-da-fés, these people had a habit of convincing themselves that they were wrong as individuals, that the others were right and that they were wrong. This is certainly the road to complete disaster and frustration.

Another important thing to know is that in my family, and in a lot of families around mine, imprisonment brought with it a kind of status. Those who were imprisoned during the Horthy period before the war, and then during the Stalin period, were the really high-ranking ones; they really showed morality. Those who were imprisoned after ’56 and received sentences of only 10 months were called small-timers; they were the low-ranking heroes. In Hungarian families, prison of course meant something bad, but it wasn’t something to be ashamed of. On the contrary: it showed that one’s family was really good. This distortion of morality is a very important phenomenon in human life. When democracy arrives, it’s very hard to adjust back. To start believing that one should be ashamed of having been in prison. I would say that this partially destroyed my soul, my way thinking.

MS: In Czechoslovakia after ’68, many young intellectuals were in prison or had been punished in some other way. And as you say, this is a source of enormous satisfaction. But I think it creates another even greater problem, because it becomes much more difficult to ask questions. This was also the case with my father. I felt sorry for him: he came home from prison very ill, and in died a result of that illness. It was difficult to say to him, “Well, yes, you were in prison, you were a dissident, but still, how was communism in the 1950s? After all, you were a high-ranking party member, you belonged to a special class.” After ’68, many who belonged to this generation felt they had suffered enough. The dissidents around Vaclav Havel – he was the exception in that he had not been a communist – enjoyed great credibility and became a powerful voice in society. But precisely because they were dissidents who had been fighting against communism after ’68, their past was almost forgotten.

In a debate of the past there is no place for morals. It’s not about apologizing, it’s about knowing the truth. It is difficult to talk about the 1950s and the communist past with former communists, because many have suffered enough. They don’t feel a responsibility to tell the truth. Somehow they think that they have the right to be silent, or to explain that they are good people, or used to be, just sometimes in the wrong way. I have a problem now that I didn’t have with my father until 89. But then he died. If my father were alive I would ask him what it was really like when he was a young communist in the 1950s. Was he responsible for students who were expelled from university? What really happened when he was a member of the Party? Did he vote for something, perhaps not the death penalty, but something that destroyed other people’s lives? How was it? I have to say that I don’t know.

My father taught philosophy at the Art School in the late 1960s. Students of his, who are now famous artists in Slovakia, have told me that my father pressed them to join the party and that they refused. It wasn’t pleasant to hear that. It was a picture of my father that I didn’t know. It’s very rare that former communists, especially in Czechoslovakia, talk honestly about the past. Pavel Kohout has written a huge memoir that’s mostly about apologizing or explaining how stupid he was. But there’s nothing much about the real impact he had on other people’s lives as a young and fairly high-ranking communist. Ivan Klimá’s memoir is the first book I have read that is really honest about the past.

LR: What you’re describing is a fascinating phenomenon, which exists beyond our little post-Soviet island. I mean waving the Little Red Book and so on. It seems to me that there’s a reluctance to face the immediate past that brushes over almost everything: stupidity, cruelty, awfulness. It is a general European phenomenon. I never heard, for example, Daniel Cohn-Bendit saying, “I was a bastard, a stupid, narrow-minded, short-sighted idiot.” In fact he says the opposite.

This is becoming a generational problem. I would say that your father’s generation and the ’68 generation in the West overlap. One could argue that in eastern Europe we didn’t have the generation that posed the famous question to their parents about their role in the Third Reich. We don’t really hear these questions from our own children, and probably that’s the problem. There is no catalyst for us to face the past. In any case this isn’t only a socialist problem – it’s a European problem.

MS: The one big difference between Cohn-Bendit and my father is that Cohn-Bendit did no harm to anybody because he never had the chance. That’s the difference between communists in eastern Europe and communists in Western Europe. In the West, of course it’s disgusting, but it’s not about being guilty or responsible, but just about your own stupidity. The debate in Europe is still not clear. This bias towards communism still exists. At a Eurozine conference in Vilnius in May 2009, Timothy Snyder gave an amazing lecture comparing Communism and Nazism. Some steps are slowly being taken at the political level, for example the OSCE resolution in July 2009. In western Europe, it would have been impossible ten years ago to put Communism and Nazism on the same level. Now that is slowly happening. It is not about judgment, but about the responsibility of the generation that still has some memory of the period to explain how it was. Especially the 1950s. We can talk about Kádárism or how it was after ’68, but it’s nothing compared to Stalinism, although the roots are the same. One can only discover the real substance of communism through Stalinism, and not through Kádárism or the normalization of Czechoslovakia, not even Poland in the 1980s.

I miss that. Even though a discussion might now have started in the Czech Republic, especially after the Kundera affair, which, when we published it in Respekt, had an enormous impact and sparked off discussions about the 1950s.

But there is another problem. Since ’89 I have spent almost my entire life surrounded by former communists, who are always charming and nice people. My wife Marta comes from a communist family: her father was editor-in-chief of the communist paper in the 1950s and in Moscow during the Second World War. We are all from these communist families. Our families were victims of the other communists, the bad communists. Even today I have a problem saying that I am anti-communist. I don’t like the word. I had a huge quarrel with Adam Michnik about the Kundera affair, and he told me: “What’s happened to you that you now belong to the anti-communists, that’s the worst thing in the world.” So it’s still there, this leftwing intellectual mafia in Europe, if I can put it like that. There is a deep link, not only of shared experience, but a view of the world, the commitment to social equality and freedom, which of course many communists had at the beginning. It is time to debate the issue from a new perspective, especially now when the Left in Europe is starving from a lack of ideas and no longer defends freedom.

EK: I remember shortly after ’89 there was a big conference in Paris about what was going to happen to the Left in the East. Whether the dissidents who did so much to change the system were on the Left or on Right. We are still occupied with these problems. Now we are also facing the far-Right. The question is: what system are you opposing? During the dissident period there were leftists, or ’68ers in the West, who had a similar attitude, nice people you could talk to. But now their children – your children – have grown up, and they have lots of problems with this brave new world. Some sympathize with Marxism and leftist radical movements. What about the dilemma of ’89 from this point of view. Have the aspirations of the dissidents been realized, or have they also made some mistakes? What are we to make of Left and Right today?

LR: There are two fundamental elements in the political changes that are rooted in the past and which none of the post-communist countries have been able to handle. These are privatization and the nomenklatura. Each country has tried a different method of privatization or semi-privatization and none have been successful. None. I wouldn’t say all of them were unsuccessful, but I would say that none were successful. I wouldn’t leave this element out when talking about the nomenklatura and how they survived, how they parachuted themselves into the new era. These are two key questions that influence contemporary political life and will continue to do so in the future. The lustration law in the Czech Republic or the non-lustration law in Hungary, the opening of the archives in Germany or the late opening of the archives in Slovakia: all these are political issues today. None of these countries were able to draw a line under the past and say “now we are starting something new”. The past is constantly being used by campaigners and politicians, negatively or positively, it doesn’t matter. It is ridiculous that this is happening 20 years after the changes. After all, ’68 in Czechoslovakia was a little over ten years after ’56 in Hungary. Two decades is a long time.

We are still digging into these things. I don’t have an answer. I just know that these are two fundamental issues. Hopefully the response of the new generation will be not to question us, but to say “OK, you go and stand in the corner and talk about the past, we’ll deal with the present.”

MS: I think they will ask, but it won’t be very pleasant to answer. How could we create such a mess after 89?

Firstly, the dissidents weren’t prepared for the change because they had so many of their own problems finding ways to survive under communism. They were more obsessed with their own soul than with the regime. Of course this was important for the human rights agenda, which proved crucial in ’89, but now this agenda has collapsed. In Hungary, the dissidents might have thought more politically, or more deeply, but in Czechoslovakia I remember very well that although there were many debates, little thought was given to questions of how to rule the state or how to change the economy, how to change the system. Most of the debate was about how to resist the current system and not how to create a new one. So when ’89 came we were just not prepared.

Secondly, there is the question of political orientation. When we started creating a party from the revolutionary movement in Bratislava, we didn’t have a debate about whether we were on the right or on the left. We did tests – you know those tests – and according to all of them we were on the left. But we had to decide to be on the right, because to be on the left was stupid. You had to privatize, you had to transform the system, you had to distance yourself from the communist party. It was very difficult to be a rightwing politician and at the same time internally be on the left. Many former dissidents have since changed their minds completely. For example, my friend Milan Uhde became a very rightwing politician and chairman of parliament in the Czech Republic. Others became very left, like Petr Uhl. Many were somewhere in the middle, but everybody had some problem. I don’t think we can make the dissident movement entirely responsible for today’s regime. Their influence in Europe weakened very fast, until you almost didn’t see any former dissidents in politics except some exceptions like Havel.

Talking of lustration and the confrontation with the past, I still think that the Czech route – first the lustration and then the opening of the files – was the best one. Poland didn’t do this at the beginning of the 1990s and nor did Hungary – that’s why it’s a political issue now. In the Czech Republic, lustration isn’t a political issue anymore because all politicians have been lustrated. You can go into the files and you know all about their past – unless they worked for the KGB, that is, since we have no files from Moscow. In Poland it began to get political about five years ago when they started opening the files. In Hungary the real political issue has yet to come – if the files have not been completely destroyed, that is. So in my experience, the sooner the better. It is also especially good for former dissidents, because it ceases to become their issue: they don’t need to point out who the bad guys are because everybody knows. They no longer need to fight, it’s up to the public.

Adam Michnik says that if you open the files it will mean a mess. He thinks that they should be locked up for half a century until everyone is dead. Another of his arguments is that these are their files, created by the communists, the secret police. Do we really want those to form the basis of our history? This is a strong argument rhetorically, but the fact is that generally the files were not falsified: you can trust them 99 per cent. Another thing is that the situation in Poland was quite different from that in Czechoslovakia, because the Polish secret police infiltrated a huge part of Solidarnosc in preparation for the change. I suspect that that in many cases files could have been falsified in anticipation of the change. This is not the case in Czechoslovakia, because up until the very last moment the Czechoslovak secret services were completely convinced that the regime would survive another twenty years. Michnik feared that there were a lot of cases that could have been devastating for the image of Solidarnosc, with so many heroes later revealed to have been agents.

EK: Perhaps it provides and opportunity to concentrate on what politicians are doing now as opposed to thinking about things they did forty years ago.

MS: It depends on the social atmosphere. In the Czech Republic no politician can survive if he used to be an agent of the secret police, except in today’s communist party. But in Slovakia they can. It differs from society to society.

Question from the audience: Why did the majority of people not respond to the dissidents? Why did they not respond to Charter 77? You said that your father was expelled from the party and so became a dissident. The historian Zbynek Zeman has said that he feels that many of the ’68ers became dissidents not because they stood for something, but because they were purged. Therefore it was very hard for them to define themselves as dissidents. How do we define dissent if it is not a question of standing up for a particular view?

MS: The years immediately after ’68 were crucial for the whole of Czechoslovak society. Half a million members of the Czechoslovak communist party had to go through screenings. There was a quite sophisticated system were everybody was asked about their attitude to the Soviet “help” in ’68. It was a crucial existential moment. Many people said, “Well I didn’t really understand the occupation and the circumstances, but yes I think it was help.” Everybody was made to lie. The crucial question was whether or not you lied. If you did you were “theirs”. You might be expelled from the party but you kept your job and your children stayed at school. Sometimes it was enough if you just stayed silent. But those who decided to say that it was an occupation, that they were against it and still were – those people knew very well that they had made a life-altering decision. Those who later became dissidents had already decided at that moment. On one hand one can say that they were pushed into the new existential situation, after which they began to question themselves about their own communist past. My father was an expert on that, he had long hours of discussion and wrote a book about it. How could we have failed in the 1950s, how could we have become communist? He saw this failure as an existential problem of the world and society. These people were not pushed at that moment in ’69 and ’70, they decided.

Of course there were hundreds who, because of their involvement in ’68, had no chance at all. My father told me at that time that even if he had lied he wouldn’t have had a chance. But hundreds of thousands had that chance and they used it. They survived… and they became cynical. That is why they didn’t take part in Charter 77. For them, it would have been against their decision in ’69 and ’70 to take part in Charter 77. At that time Czechoslovakia wasn’t so bad for many people, they had their jobs, they had their children, everybody was cynical, nobody believed in the system. The dissidents were sometimes unbearably honest. It’s hard sometimes to share ideas with people who are prepared to go to prison – you can’t follow them, they are too exceptional. Society in general was too cynical. In ’89 it was different. It was a time of change. For many people it was much easier at that time to sign the petitions and to come to the square and to belong to the majority.

LR: A very good, very successful Hungarian painter admitted in ’91 or ’92 that he wouldn’t have become a dissident had he had the chance to exhibit. It seemed he was pushed by the regime to become a dissident. But then I asked him whether it was the nature of the regime that it did not accept progressive painters. Whether the nature of the regime, instead of cradling new talent and giving him the chance to exhibit and a make career, was instead to push a talented young painter to become a dissident. Yes, this was the nature of the regime. Many people didn’t become dissidents voluntarily but were pushed into doing so. But that is the very nature of dictatorships.

MS: The more I learn about Hungary and Poland and about the past, the more I see how deep the difference was. These decisive moments, even the character of dissent. I didn’t sign the Charter, for one reason that was for me crucial. Charter 77 tried to communicate with the regime. They pointed to the Helsinki Pact and talked about human rights, holding the regime to its agreements at the European level. Charter 77 was in favour of legitimizing the regime. For my generation, the regime was something external. I lived a completely different life – the regime was just an evil that I had to live with, but had nothing to say to. That was the difference between my father and myself. I belonged to another generation. They wanted to change the regime because they were used to changing the regime in the 1960s. I never wanted to change the regime because I never thought about it as something that I would be able to change. The only thing that I cared about was my own freedom and how I could survive… how I could live on an island of freedom. My father’s generation wanted to change it not so much because they still felt it was their own, but more because political engagement leaves such a mark on your thinking.

Question from the audience: You said there is no place for morality when it comes to dealing with the past – it’s not about saying “I was young and stupid”. So it seems that in your opinion it’s about the facts rather than reconciliation. But what would that achieve? Is there a purpose in that? Or is it just about the truth – full stop?

MS: No, otherwise I wouldn’t care so much. I think that the younger generation – my son for instance, who is 25 – has no chance of understanding history. The 1950s were exceptional, communism and Nazism were exceptional regimes. It’s still important to talk about the past, about personal experience, about how it was in detail, and not only to rely on archives. I think that it’s the responsibility of those writers and intellectuals who are still alive to talk about the past openly, as Ivan Klíma has done. Through their experience you can understand what it means to lose your freedom. That danger still exists. You can lose your freedom every day. I believe that the younger generation is not aware of the dangers. It is not systematic, it is perhaps not about life and death, but it can be. So what I am calling for is to give the younger generation at least the chance to understand the past and to prevent them from making the same mistakes.

The debate series “Europe talks to Europe” is a cooperation of Eurozine with the ERSTE foundation. The Budapest debate was co-organized by Magyar Lettre internationale and Collegium Budapest.

In Fear the Boom and Bust, John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of the 20th century, come back to life to attend an economics conference on the economic crisis. Before the conference begins, and at the insistence of Lord Keynes, they go out for a night on the town and sing about why there’s a “boom and bust” cycle in modern economies and good reason to fear it.

I generally agree with the efforts of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek to renew the idea of communism and the communist hypothesis. The concept of communism, like that of democracy, has been corrupted so that today in standard usage it has come to mean its opposite, that is, state control of economic and social life. I would like to shift the discussion slightly, however, or recenter it from Badiou’s and Zizek’s focus on the political decision to the critique of political economy and the project for the abolition of property. To realize the communist hypothesis for our times we need to move, so to speak, from Lenin to Marx. Indeed one of the reasons that the communist hypotheses of previous eras are no longer valid is that the composition of capital – as well as the conditions and products of capitalist production – have altered. Most importantly the technical composition of labor has changed. How do people produce both inside and outside the workplace? What do they produce and under what conditions? How is productive cooperation organized? And what are the divisions of labor and power that separate them along gender and racial lines and in the local, regional, and global contexts? In addition to investigating the current composition of labor, we also have to analyze the relations of property under which labor produces. Along with Marx we can say that the critique of political economy is, at its heart, a critique of property. “The theory of the Communists,” Marx and Engels write in the Manifesto, “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”1

In order to explore the relationship and struggle between property and the common, which I consider to be central to communist analysis and proposition, I want to read two passages from Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. By referring the Manuscripts I do not intend to pose the early Marx against the late, celebrate Marx’s humanism, or anything of the sort. These are arguments, in fact, that continue throughout Marx’s work. The Manuscripts provide a model for reading the common in communism and measuring the distance between Marx’s time and our own.

In the first passage, titled “The Relation of Private Property,” Marx proposes a periodization that highlights the dominant form of property in each era. By the mid-19th century, he claims, European societies are no longer primarily dominated by immobile property, such as land, but instead by mobile forms of property, generally the results of industrial production. The period of transition is characterized by a bitter battle between the two forms of property. In typical fashion Marx mocks the claims to social good of both property owners. The land-owner emphasizes the productivity of agriculture and its vital importance for society as well as “the noble lineage of his property, the feudal reminiscences, the poetry of remembrance, his high-flown nature, his political importance, etc.”2 The owner of movable property, in contrast, attacks the parochialism and stasis of the world of immobile property while singing his own praises. “Movable property itself, “ Marx writes, “claims to have won political freedom for the world, to have loosed the chains of civil society, to have linked together different worlds, to have given rise to trade, which encourages friendship between peoples and to have created a pure morality and a pleasing culture” (339). Marx considers it inevitable that mobile property would achieve economic dominance from immobile property. “Movement inevitably triumphs over immobility, open and self-conscious baseness over hidden and unconscious baseness, greed over self-indulgence, the avowedly restless and versatile self-interest of enlightenment, over the parochial, worldy-wise, artless, lazy and deluded self-interest of superstition, just as money must triumph over the other forms of private property” (340) – and, I will add soon to this list, profit over rent. Marx, of course, mocks both of these property owners, but he does recognize that movable property, however despicable, does have the advantage of revealing “the idea of labor as the sole essence of wealth” (343). His periodization, in other words, highlights the increased potential for a communist project.

I want to analyze a parallel struggle between two forms of property today, but before doing that I should note that the triumph of movable over immobile property corresponds to the victory of profit over rent as the dominant mode of expropriation. In the collection of rent, the capitalist is deemed to be relatively external to the process of the production of value, merely extracting value produced by other means. The generation of profit, in contrast, requires the engagement of the capitalist in the production process, imposing forms of cooperation, disciplinary regimes, etc. By the time of John Maynard Keynes profit has such dignity with respect to rent that Keynes can predict (or prescribe) the euthanasia of the rentier. This conception of an historical movement within capital from rent to profit also corresponds to the purported passage in many analyses from primitive accumulation to capitalist production proper. Primitive accumulation might be considered, in this context, an absolute rent, expropriating entirely wealth produced elsewhere.

The passages from rent to profit and from the dominance of immobile to that of mobile property are both part of a more general claim by Marx that by the mid-19th century large-scale industry has replaced agriculture as the hegemonic form of economic production. He does not make this claim, of course, in quantitative terms. Industrial production at the time made up a small fraction of the economy even in England, the most industrialized country. And the majority of workers toiled not in the factories but in the field. Marx’s claim instead is qualitative: all other forms of production will be forced to adopt the qualities of industrial production. Agriculture, mining, even society itself will have to adopt its regimes of mechanization, its labor discipline, its temporalities and rhythms, its working day, and so forth. E. P. Thompson’s classic essay on clocks and work-discipline in England is a wonderful demonstration of the progressive imposition of industrial temporality over society as a whole.3 In the century and a half since Marx’s time this tendency for industry to impose its qualities has proceeded in extraordinary ways.

Today, however, it is clear that industry no longer holds the hegemonic position within the economy. This is not to say that fewer people work in factories today than 10 or 20 or 50 years ago – although, in certain respects, their locations have shifted, moving to the other side of the global divisions of labor and power. The claim, once again, is not primarily quantitative but qualitative. Industry no longer imposes its qualities over other sectors of the economy and over social relations more generally. That seems to me a relatively uncontroversial claim.
More disagreement arises when one proposes another form of production as successor to industry as hegemonic in this way. Toni Negri and I argue that immaterial or biopolitical production is emerging in that hegemonic position. By immaterial and biopolitical we try to grasp together the production of ideas, information, images, knowledges, code, languages, social relationships, affects, and the like. This designates occupations throughout the economy, from the high end to the low, from health care workers, flight attendants, and educators to software programmers and from fast food and call center workers to designers and advertisers. Most of these forms of production are not new, of course, but the coherence among them is perhaps more recognizable and, more important, their qualities tend today to be imposed over other sectors of the economy and over society as a whole. Industry has to informationalize; knowledge, code, and images are becoming ever more important throughout the traditional sectors of production; and the production of affects and care is becoming increasingly essential in the valorization process. This hypothesis of a tendency for immaterial or biopolitical production to emerge in the hegemonic position, which industry used to hold, has all kinds of immediate implications for gender divisions of labor and various international and other geographical divisions of labor, but I’ll have to leave those for another occasion.

What I want to focus on here is the new struggle between two forms of property implied by this transition, which takes us back to Marx’s formulations. Whereas in Marx’s time the struggle was between immobile property (such as land) and moveable property (such as material commodities), today the struggle is between material property and immaterial property – or, to put it another way, whereas Marx focused on the mobility of property today at issue is centrally scarcity and reproducibility, such that the struggle can be posed as being between unreproducible versus reproducible property or, rather, property that is easily shared. The contemporary focus on immaterial and reproducible property in the capitalist economy can be recognized easily from even a cursory glance at the field of property law. Patents, copyrights, indigenous knowledges, genetic codes, the information in the germplasm of seeds, and similar issues are the most actively topics debated in the field. The fact that the logic of scarcity does not hold in this domain poses new problems for property. Just as Marx saw that movement necessarily triumphs over immobility, so too today the immaterial triumphs over the material, the reproducible over the unreproducible, and the shared over the exclusive.

The emerging dominance of this form of property is significant, in part, because it demonstrates and returns to center stage of the conflict between the common and property as such. Ideas, images, knowledges, code, languages, and even affects can be privatized and controlled as property, but it is more difficult to police ownership because they are so easily shared or reproduced. There is a constant pressure for such goods to escape the boundaries of property and become common. If you have an idea, sharing it with me does not reduce its utility to you, but usually increases it. In fact, in order to realize their maximum productivity, ideas, images, and affects must be common and shared. When they are privatized their productivity reduces dramatically – and, I would add, making the common into public property, that is, subjecting it to state control or management, similarly reduces productivity. Property is becoming a fetter on the capitalist mode of production. Here is an emerging contradiction internal to capital: the more the common is corralled as property, the more its productivity is reduced; and yet expansion of the common undermines the relations of property in a fundamental and general way.

This contradiction is clearly evident in terms of scientific knowledges and code: free access to information and free exchange of ideas – in other words, the autonomy of the common – is necessary for future creation. The same is true, I argue, for all forms of biopolitical production, such as linguistic or affective production. You can produce affects and social relations on command, but productivity and creativity will be severely limited.

We could say, in rather broad terms, that neoliberalism has been defined by the battle of private property not only against public property but also and perhaps more importantly against the common. Here it is useful to distinguish between two types of the common, both of which are object of neoliberal strategies of capital. (And this can serve as an initial definition of “the common.”) On the one hand, the common names the earth and all the resources associated with it: the land, the forests, the water, the air, minerals, and so forth. This is closely related to 17th century English usage of “the commons” (with an “s”). On the other hand, the common also refers, as I have already said, to the results of human labor and creativity, such as ideas, language, affects, and so forth. You might think of the former as the “natural” common and the latter as the “artificial” common, but really such divisions between natural and artificial quickly break down. In any case, neoliberalism has aimed to privatize both these forms of the common.
One major scene of this has been the extractive industries, providing access to transnational corporations to diamonds in Sierra Leone or oil in Uganda or Lithium deposits and water rights in Bolivia. Such neoliberal privatization of the common has been described by many authors, including David Harvey and Naomi Klein, in terms that mark the renewed importance of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession. 4

The neoliberal strategies for the privatization of the “artificial” common are much more complex and contradictory. Here the conflict between property and the common is fully in play. The more the common is subject to property relations, as I said, the less productive it is; and yet capitalist valorization processes requires private accumulation. In many domains, capitalist strategies for privatizing the common through mechanisms such as patents and copyrights continue (often with difficulty) despite the contradictions. The music industry and computer industry are full of examples. This is also the case with so-called biopiracy, that is, the processes whereby transnational corporations expropriate the common in the form of indigenous knowledges or genetic information from plants, animals, and humans, usually through the use of patents. Traditional knowledges of the use of a ground seed as natural pesticide, for instance, or the healing qualities of a plant are made into private property by the corporation that patents the knowledge. Parenthetically I would insist that piracy is a misnomer for such activities. Pirates have a much more noble vocation: they steal property. These corporations instead steal the common and transform it into property.

In general, though, capital accomplishes the expropriation of the common not through privatization per se but in the form of rent. Several contemporary Italian and French economists who work on what they call cognitive capitalism, Carlo Vercellone most prominently, argue that just as in an earlier period there was a tendential movement from rent to profit as the dominant mode of capitalist expropriation, today there is a reverse movement from profit to rent.5 Patents and copyrights, for example, generate rent in the sense that they guarantee an income based on the ownership of material or immaterial property. This argument does not imply a return to the past: the income generated from a patent, for instance, is very different from that generated from land ownership. The core insight of this analysis of the emerging dominance of rent over profit, which I find very significant, is that capital remains generally external to the processes of the production of the common. Whereas in the case of industrial capital and its generation of profit, the capitalist plays a role internal to the production process, as Marx claims, particularly in designating the means of cooperation and imposing the modes of discipline, in the production of the common the capitalist must remain relatively external.6 Every intervention of the capitalist in the processes of the production of the common, just as every time the common is made property, reduces productivity. Rent is a mechanism, then, to cope with the conflicts between capital and the common. A limited autonomy is granted the processes of the production of the common with respect to the sharing of resources and the determination of the modes of cooperation, and capital is still able to exert control and expropriate value through rent. Exploitation in this context takes the form of the expropriation of the common.

This discussion of rent points, on the one hand, to the neoliberal processes of accumulation by dispossession insofar as primitive accumulation can be called form of absolute rent. On the other hand, it casts in a new light the contemporary predominance of finance, which is characterized by complex and very abstract varieties of relative rent. Christian Marazzi cautions us against conceiving of finance as fictional, in opposition to the “real economy,” a conception that misunderstands the extent to which finance and production are both increasingly dominated by immaterial forms of property. He also warns against dismissing finance as merely unproductive in contrast to an image of productivity roughly tied to industrial production. It is more useful to situate finance in the context of the general trend from profit to rent, and the correspondingly external position of capital with respect to the production of the common. Finance expropriates the common and exerts control at a distance.7

Now I can bring to a close and review the primary points of my reading of this first passage from Marx’s early manuscripts, “The Relations of Private Property,” in which he describes the struggle between two forms of property (immobile versus moveable) and the historical passage from the dominance of landed property to that of industrial capital. Today we are also experiencing a struggle between two forms of property (material versus immaterial or scarce versus reproducible). And this struggle reveals a deeper conflict between property as such and the common. Although the production of the common is increasingly central to the capitalist economy, capital cannot intervene in the production process and must instead remain external, expropriating value in the form of rent (through financial and other mechanisms). As a result the production and productivity of the common becomes an increasingly autonomous domain, still exploited and controlled, of course, but through mechanisms that are relatively external. Like Marx, I would say this development of capital is not good in itself – and the tendential dominance of immaterial or biopolitical production carries with it a series of new and more severe forms of exploitation and control. And yet it is important to recognize that capital’s own development provides the tools for liberation from capital, and specifically here it leads to the increased autonomy of the common and its productive circuits.

The brings me to the second passage from the Manuscripts that I want to consider, titled “Private Property and Communism.” The notion of the common can help us understand what Marx means by communism in this passage. “Communism,” he writes, “is the positive expression of the abolition of private property” (345-346). He includes that phrase “positive expression” in part to differentiate communism from the false or corrupt notions of the concept. Crude communism, he claims, merely perpetuates private property by generalizing it and extending it to the entire community, as universal private property. That term, of course, is an oxymoron: if property is now universal, extended to the entire community it is no longer really private. He is trying to emphasize, it seems to me, that in crude communism even though the private character has been stripped away, property remains. Communism properly conceived instead is the abolition not only of private property but property as such. “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it” (351). What would it mean for something to be ours when we do not possess it? What would it mean to regard ourselves and our world not as property? Has private property made us so stupid that we cannot see that? Marx is searching here for the common. The open access and sharing that characterize use of the common are outside of and inimical to property relations. We have been made so stupid that we can only recognize the world as private or public. We have become blind to the common.

Marx arrives at the common (as the abolition of property) about 20 years later in Chapter 32 of Capital, volume 1, on the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation. He still poses this development from property to the common in dialectical form. “The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.”8 Capitalist development inevitable results in the increasingly central role of cooperation and the common, which in turn provides the tools for overthrowing the capitalist mode of production and constitutes the bases for an alternative society and mode of production, a communism of the common.

What I find dissatisfying about this passage from Capital, though, aside from its dialectical construction, is that the common Marx refers to – “co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production” – grasps primarily the material elements in question, the immobile and moveable forms of property made common. This formulation does not grasp, in other words, the dominant forms of capitalist production today. If we look back at the passage in the early Manuscripts, however, and try to filter out Marx’s youthful humanism, we find a definition of communism and the common that does highlight the immaterial or, really, biopolitical aspects. Consider, first, this definition of communism, which Marx proposes after having set aside the crude notion: “Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e. human, being” (p. 348). What does Marx mean by “the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man”? Clearly he is working on the notion of appropriation against the grain, applying it in a context where it now seems strange. No longer appropriation of the object in the form of private property but appropriation of our own subjectivity, our human, social relations. Marx explains this communist appropriation, this non-property appropriation in terms of the human sensorium and the full range of creative and productive powers. “Man appropriates his integral essence in an integral way,” which he explains in terms of “all his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving” (351). I think the term “appropriation” here is misleading because Marx is not talking about capturing something that already exists, but rather creating something new – this is the production of subjectivity, the production of a new sensorium. Not really appropriation, then, but production. If we return to the text we can see that Marx does, in fact, pose this clearly: “Assuming the positive supersession of private property, man produces man, himself and other men” (349). On this reading Marx’s notion of communism in the early manuscripts is far from humanism, that is, far from any recourse to a pre-existing or eternal human essence. Instead the positive content of communism, which corresponds to the abolition of private property, is the autonomous human production of subjectivity, the human production of humanity – a new seeing, a new hearing, a new thinking, a new loving.

This brings us back to our analysis of the biopolitical turn in the economy that I described briefly. In the context of industrial production, Marx arrived at the important recognition that capitalist production is aimed at creating not only objects but also subjects. “Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”9 In the context of biopolitical production, however, the production of subjectivity is much more direct and intense. Consider a few examples of contemporary economists who analyze the transformations of capital in just these terms. “If we had to hazard a guess on the emerging model in the next decades,” posits Robert Boyer, “we would probably have to refer to the production of man by man and explore right away the institutional context that would permit its emergence.”10 And, Christian Marazzi explains that the current passage in capitalist production is moving toward an “anthropogenetic model.” Living beings as fixed capital are at the center of this transformation and the production of forms of life is becoming the basis of added value. This is a process in which putting to work human faculties, competences, knowledges, and affects – those acquired on the job but more importantly those accumulated outside work are directly productive of value.11 One distinctive feature of the work of head and heart, then, is that paradoxically the object of production is really a subject, defined, for example, by a social relationship or a form of life. This should make clear at least the rationale for calling this form of production biopolitical, since what are produced are forms of life.

If we return to Marx in this new light, we find that the progression of definitions of capital in his work actually give us an important clue for analyzing this biopolitical context. Although wealth in capitalist society first appears as an immense collective of commodities, Marx reveals that capital is really a process of the creation of surplus value via the production of commodities. But Marx develops this insight one step further to discover that in its essence capital is a social relation – or, even further, the ultimate object of capitalist production is not commodities but social relations. From the standpoint of biopolitical production we can see that the production of the refrigerator and the automobile are only midpoints for the creation of the labor and gender relations of the nuclear family around the refrigerator and the mass society of individuals isolated together in their cars on the freeway.

What I have been doing here is pointing out the correspondence or proximity between Marx’s definition of communism and the contemporary biopolitical turn of the capitalist economy, both of which are oriented toward the human production of humanity, social relations, and forms of life – all in the context of the common. At this point I need to explain how I regard this proximity and why it is important. But before doing so let me add one more element to the mix.

Michel Foucault appreciates all the strangeness and richness of the line of Marx’s thinking that leads to the conclusion that “l’homme produit l’homme” (using like Marx the gender defined formulation). He cautions that we should not understand Marx’s phrase as an expression of humanism. “For me, what must be produced is not man as nature designed it, or as its essence prescribes; we must produce something that does not yet exist and we cannot know what it will be.” He also warns not to understand this merely as a continuation of economic production as conventionally conceived: “I do not agree with those who would understand this production of man by man as being accomplished like the production of value, the production of wealth, or of an object of economic use; it is, on the contrary, destruction of what we are and the creation of something completely other, a total innovation.”12 We cannot understand this production, in other words, in terms of the producing subject and the produced object. Instead producer and product are both subjects: humans produce and humans are produced. Foucault clearly senses (without seeming to understand fully) the explosiveness of this situation: the biopolitical process is not limited to the reproduction of capital as a social relation but also presents the potential for an autonomous process that could destroy capital and create something entirely new. Biopolitical production obviously implies new mechanisms of exploitation and capitalist control, but we should also recognize, following Foucault’s intuition, how biopolitical production, particularly in the ways it exceeds the bounds of capitalist relations and constantly refers to the common, grants labor increasing autonomy and provides the tools or weapons that could be wielded in a project of liberation.

Now I can explain the point of recognizing the proximity between the idea of communism and contemporary capitalist production. It is not that capitalist development is creating communism or that biopolitical production immediately or directly brings liberation. Instead, through the increasing centrality of the common in capitalist production – the production of ideas, affects, social relations, and forms of life – are emerging the conditions and weapons for a communist project. Capital, in other words, is creating its own gravediggers.

It would be interesting to investigate relation between this economic discussion of the common and the way the common functions centrally in Jacques Rancière’s notion of politics. “Politics begins precisely when one stops balancing profits and looses and is concerned instead with dividing the parts of the common” (Disagreement, p. 5 ; La Mésentente, p. 24). The common is the terrain of the partage, division and sharing. “Politics is the sphere of activity of a common that can only ever be contentious, the relationship between parts that are only parties and credentials or entitlements whose sum never equals the whole” (p. 14; p. 34-35).

There are two primary points of my intervention. The first is a plea for the critique of political economy or, rather, a claim that any communist project must begin there. Such an analysis makes good on our periodizations and reveals the novelties of our present moment by conducting an investigation of not only the composition but also class composition – asking, in other words, how people produce, what they produce, and under what conditions, both in and outside the workplace, both in and outside relations of wage labor. And all this reveals, I maintain, the increased centrality of the common.

The second point extends the critique of political economy to the critique of property. And, specifically, communism is defined by not only the abolition of property but also the affirmation of the common – the affirmation of open and autonomous biopolitical production, the self-governed continuous creation of new humanity. In the most synthetic terms, what private property is to capitalism and what state property is to socialism, the common is to communism.

Putting my two points together – that capitalist production increasingly relies on the common and that the autonomy of the common is the essence of communism – indicates that the conditions and weapons of a communist project are available today more than ever. Now to us the task of organizing it.

Notes:

1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, London: Verso, 1998, p. 52.

2 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, London: Penguin, 1975, p. 338.

3 E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, vol. 38, no. 1, 1967, pp. 56-97.

4 See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; and Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. For an excellent analysis of neoliberalism’s focus on extractive industries in Africa, see James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

5 See, for example, Carlo Vercellone, “Crisi della legge del valore e divenire rendita del profitto,” forthcoming.

6 See Marx’s discussion of cooperation in Chapter 13 of Capital, volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1976, pp. 439-454.

7 See Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language, trans. Gregory Conti, New York: Semiotext(e), 2008.

8 Capital, vol. 1, p. 929.9 Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin, 1973, p. 92.

10 Robert Boyer, La croissance, début de siècle, Paris: Albin Michel, 2002, p. 192.

11 Christian Marazzi, “Capitalismo digitale e modello antropogenetico di produzione” in Jean-Louis Laville, ed., Reinventare il lavoro, Rome: Sapere 2000, 2005, pp. 107-126.

12 Michael Foucault, “Entretien” (with Duccio Tromadori), Dits et écrits, vol IV, Paris : Gallimard, 1994, pp. 41-95, quote p. 74. Published in English as Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx, New York: Semiotext(e), 1991, pp. 121-122. At this point in the interview Foucault is discussing his differences from the Frankfurt School.

Jerry Mander is an American activist best known for his book “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” (1977), and for his contribution to a book on an unrelated topic, “The Great International Paper Airplane Book” (1971).Mander worked in advertising for 15 years, including five as partner and president of Freeman, Mander & Gossage in San Francisco. In 1971 he founded the first non-profit advertising agency in the United States, Public Interest Communications, which worked on campaigns to prevent dams in the Grand Canyon, found Redwood National Park, and stop the American project to build a supersonic transport. He is currently the director of the International Forum on Globalization and the program director for Megatechnology and Globalization at the Foundation for Deep Ecology.

Deuda externa y tercer mundo – Eric Toussaint from AttacTV on Vimeo.

Entrevista realizada por AttacTV a Eric Toussaint, presidente del CADTM-Bélgica (Comité por la Anulación de la Deuda del Tercer Mundo), miembro del Consejo Científico de Attac Francia y miembro del consejo internacional del Foro Social Mundial, hablando de la deuda externa.

“Si no hay una salida anticapitalista a esta crisis, habrá una salida capitalista”

En la presentación de su libro 60 preguntas, 60 respuestas sobre la deuda, el FMI y el Banco Mundial, el historiador y economista belga Eric Toussaint nos habla de la crisis que atraviesa Occidente. Este doctor en ciencias políticas, y miembro del Consejo Internacional del Foro Social Mundial, explica algunas de las claves para entender la actual crisis económica.

D.: ¿Cómo se explica que, pese a una reducción del salario real desde el año 1982 hasta 2007, el consumo en los países del Norte haya tenido un nivel de crecimiento alto?

ERIC TOUSSAINT: Durante todo ese tiempo, el consumo de masas se ha sostenido gracias al endeudamiento privado. Los que permitieron esto son las empresas capitalistas del sector del crédito que otorgaron líneas de crédito más voluminosas. Lo hicieron a través de un montaje totalmente artificial de instrumentos de deuda e, inesperadamente, la cadena del endeudamiento privado en EE UU se rompió en el eslabón más débil, que era el sector del crédito hipotecario en un segmento del mercado que era el de las hipotecas subprime: los sectores de la población más frágiles que aceptaron endeudarse en condiciones extremas, con tasas de interés bajas los dos primeros años y pasando a 13% de interés anual los siguientes años. Este sistema de endeudamiento funcionaba mientras la burbuja inmobiliaria seguía creciendo, mientras el valor de la vivienda subía. En EE UU era posible refinanciar su deuda cada dos años basándose sobre el nuevo valor de la vivienda que había aumentado. Todo esto era sin contar con una sobreproducción de vivienda en el año 2006 y la caída en 2007 del valor de la vivienda que generó la crisis de las subprime. Para resumir, hemos asistido, con la crisis financiera de los años 2007- 2008, a una crisis de la deuda privada, que se está transformando ahora en una crisis de la deuda pública del Norte porque el Gobierno de EE UU –pero también el Gobierno británico, belga o francés– rescató a la banca privada regalando dinero. Ahí es cuando la deuda privada se transformó en deuda pública. El sector público asumió el coste del rescate.

ERIC TOUSSAINT. El activista también es presidente del Comité por la Anulación de la Deuda del Tercer Mundo (CADTM-Bélgica).

D.: ¿En qué situación nos hallamos ahora?

E.T.: Llegamos a un círculo vicioso en el cual para rescatar a la banca privada se endeudan los Estados y financian ese endeudamiento pidiendo préstamos a la misma banca. La explosión de la deuda pública obliga a los Gobiernos a disminuir el gasto público, a reducir el gasto en las universidades, reducir las subvenciones a la salud pública, limitar las inversiones en infraestructuras públicas, congelar los salarios de los funcionarios. Por eso hemos vuelto a un discurso de ajuste estructural en los países del Norte y sólo estamos empezando a enfrentarnos a la situación.

D.: ¿Cómo se encuentra el sector inmobiliario?

E.T.: Respecto a la crisis inmobiliaria, sabemos que en el Estado español la vivienda está todavía sobrevalorada en un 50%. En Inglaterra lo está en un 30% y en Irlanda en un 30%. Es decir, la crisis inmobiliaria no ha terminado. Quizás en EE UU haya tocado fondo. Por otro lado, empieza ahora la crisis inmobiliaria del sector comercial con la quiebra en Dubai de un proyecto de edificios comerciales. Sabemos que la deuda contratada por el sector privado en el sector comercial es enorme y que esa crisis del sector comercial va a crecer con la crisis económica. Algunas empresas de servicios van a tener que cerrar oficinas.

D.: ¿Cuáles son las especificidades de la crisis española?

E.T.: En el Estado español no ha habido la misma crisis bancaria que en la mayoría de los países occidentales –como en Inglaterra, EE UU o Bélgica– donde el rescate ha sido masivo. Quizás se produzca en un futuro cercano cuando veamos que el BBVA o el Banco Santander, que hasta ahora no parecían tan afectados, puedan estarlo también.

D.: ¿Se está acabando el sistema capitalista?

E.T.: El sistema capitalista atraviesa una crisis muy grave. En el pasado este mismo sistema ya pasó por crisis muy severas y es importante entender que, si no hay una salida anticapitalista a esta crisis, habrá una salida capitalista. La salida capitalista a la crisis se basa solamente en aumentar la presión sobre el trabajo y pasar la factura a los asalariados. Ha sido siempre la misma solución. Incluso puede haber una salida capitalista neokeynesiana. Lo que llama la atención es que en 2008 la crisis era tan profunda que los Gobiernos de derecha y los ideólogos del capitalismo atravesaron una crisis de confianza. Temieron una salida anticapitalista porque veían que lo que se avecinaba era una auténtica crisis del capitalismo. Ellos lo saben, lo niegan en las grandes entrevistas de televisión, pero, leyendo el Financial Times o The Economist, uno puedo decir que no se equivocaban. Se imaginaron que, desde las bases de la izquierda, surgiría una denuncia del capitalismo, pero no ocurrió. La izquierda tradicional acompañó el rescate de la banca. Sarkozy, que llegó a hablar de refundar el capitalismo en algunas entrevistas, no ha vuelto a hablar del tema porque no encontró una denuncia suficientemente fuerte como para refundarlo. ¿Por qué refundar algo que la gente puede seguir aguantando?

ERIC TOUSSAINT: No comparto la idea de que las propuestas ofrecidas por las izquierdas son demasiado radicales y que son rechazadas por ese motivo. El problema fundamental es que la mayoría de los pueblos del Norte afrontan una crisis de confianza en la política. Es una crisis de credibilidad de la izquierda, una crisis del proyecto de la izquierda, pero no porque sea demasiado radical sino porque durante las campañas electorales la izquierda hace promesas de izquierda y, estando en el poder, implementa programas de derecha. La izquierda acaba ejecutando políticas sociales neoliberales y eso provoca frustración y pérdida de confianza. Además, como la izquierda tradicional no ofrece unas críticas claras del sistema, las confusiones se generalizan. Estas confusiones se deben también a la influencia de los medios de comunicación dominantes. El objetivo de estos medios es crear confusiones, maquillar los datos, dar falsas explicaciones, y la izquierda, que antes daba explicaciones claras sobre la crisis, no las está dando, e incluso ha abandonado sus propios diarios. ¿Cuántos diarios de izquierda existen en Europa comparando con hace 30 años? Para mí, el verdadero problema no es que las propuestas sean demasiado radicales. El problema real es la pérdida de credibilidad.

«L’idée de communisme» retrouverait-elle, par temps de crise, une vigueur inattendue? Alain Badiou [1], Slavoj Zizek [2], Toni Negri [3], Michael Hardt [4], Jacques Rancière [5] et plusieurs autres grands noms de la philosophie politique radicale mondiale étaient réunis, ce week-end, à Londres, pour un colloque sur cette notion. Aude Lancelin a suivi les débats

On ignore si la tombe de Marx [6], située au cimetière de Highgate à Londres, a été spécialement fleurie durant ce week-end. Il est certain en revanche qu’un hommage autrement plus stimulant vient d’être rendu au penseur au cœur même de la capitale britannique. Trois journées durant, du vendredi 13 au dimanche 15 mars 2009, les plus prestigieux noms de la philosophie politique radicale mondiale, de Slavoj Zizek à Alain Badiou, Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, Jacques Rancière et bien d’autres, se sont succédé à la tribune de la «Birkbeck university of London» [7] pour réfléchir ensemble à l’avenir de l’idée communiste. Un amphithéâtre de neuf cent places avait été mis à disposition pour ce colloque à tous égards exceptionnel, sobrement intitulé «On the idea of Communism». Il aura à peine suffi à contenir une foule spectaculairement jeune, attentive et rieuse, venue de l’Europe entière avec carnets de notes, canettes de Coca light et caméscopes high-tech pour entendre les grandes figures d’un concept politique qu’on disait salutairement mort.

Doit-on voir dans cette étonnante affluence une conséquence des convulsions que connaît actuellement l’économie capitaliste mondiale? Il est certain que la désorientation actuelle se montre suffisamment profonde pour redonner un nouveau lustre aux objections marxistes. Ce n’est du reste pas le moindre de ses dégâts collatéraux, ne manqueront pas de grincer certains penseurs médiatiques hexagonaux. Prudence toutefois. On sait que les crises de cette ampleur peuvent faire sauter certains verrous idéologiques comme elles peuvent aussi déboucher sur le pire. Les Britanniques le savent bien, qui ont récemment connu des grèves ouvrières d’une ampleur inédite contre l’embauche de travailleurs étrangers. Une agitation inquiétante, vivement condamnée par Gordon Brown. Surpris par la réussite de leur propre démonstration de force, les organisateurs de ce week-end «rouge» non loin d’une City londonienne dramatiquement sinistrée se gardaient donc de tout triomphalisme.

©Ibo/Sipa

Slavoj Zizek

[2]

Un tabou est bel et bien en train de tomber cependant. Celui qui pesait sur le mot même de «communisme», criminalisé depuis la fin des années 70, usé et définitivement ringardisé au cours de la décennie suivante. Le 7 mars dernier, une semaine avant le colloque de Londres, le «Financial Times» lui-même, peu suspiciable de complaisances gauchistes, posait sans précautions la question: «Communism: an alternative to capitalism once again?» [9]. La veille, le journal avait déjà consacré un long portait au slovène Slavoj Zizek [2], présenté en véritable rock star marxiste. De plus en plus populaire en Angleterre, désigné parmi les 25 «top leaders» intellectuels mondiaux par les lecteurs du «Foreign Policy» l’an dernier, Zizek a également été nommé directeur international dudit «Birckbek Institute», faculté ayant toujours maintenu une tradition d’accueil à l’égard des intellectuels communistes blacklistés pendant la guerre froide(1). Une fonction honorifique qui lui aura permis de lancer l’idée de ce colloque avec le philosophe Alain Badiou [1], lui aussi en voie de médiatisation accélérée au Royaume-Uni.

©Ibo/Sipa

Alain Badiou

[1]

Quelques jours avant le début de la manifestation, ce dernier apparaissait d’ailleurs à la BBC dans un célèbre talk politique pour y défendre son best-seller post-élections présidentielles, «De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?» [10], qui vient de paraître en anglais chez Verso. Détail cocasse, si le célèbre auteur de «l’Etre et l’événement» est aussi l’objet de polémiques en Grande-Bretagne, c’est pour une raison inverse aux motifs français ordinaires. Le samedi 14, une petite manifestation anti-Badiou accueillait en effet à l’entrée le public… mais celle-ci était organisée par un quarteron de vieux militants du PC britannique, reprochant au philosophe sa supposée trahison social-démocrate et sa rupture avec les objectifs révolutionnaires. Badiou go home, en somme. Un comble pour le grand platonicien d’Ulm, encore caricaturé par beaucoup de médias français en sulfureux promoteur d’un maoïsme muséifié refusant de tirer les leçons des tragédies passées. Une opinion que ne semblait pas en tout cas partager le public du week-end, dont certains étaient venus de très loin pour observer de près le dernier maître lacano-althussérien issu des années 60, comme on vient toucher un morceau de la Sainte croix.

Loin de tout folklore bolchevique cependant, l’heure n’était pas à la rumination nostalgique ni à la provocation anti-libérale grossière durant ces trois journées de haute densité conceptuelle. L’humeur n’était évidemment pas davantage à une tentative de sauvetage partiel du bilan indiscutablement calamiteux des Partis-Etats communistes du XXe siècle. Sur ce plan-là, tous les intervenants étaient d’emblée d’accord. Deux conditions sine qua non déterminaient leur présence à cette manifestation. Être disposé à envisager positivement un renouveau de l’hypothèse communiste aujourd’hui, et n’être le porte-voix d’aucune formation politique institutionnelle. Non à la militance hargneuse, place à la «patience du concept», selon l’expression du grand hégélien Gérard Lebrun citée par Zizek.

©Waechter/Caro Fotos/Sipa

Toni Negri

[3]

Moyennant quoi, et c’est en soi un événement, la totalité des personnalités conviées avaient accepté l’invitation, à l’exception de Giorgo Agamben, aux abonnés absents, et de la grande genderiste américaine Judith Butler [11], longtemps hésitante. Le philosophe Jean-Luc Nancy [12], prévu au programme, avait finalement dû renoncer la veille pour raisons médicales. Ainsi la gauche intellectuelle radicale était-elle représentée lors de ce meeting londonien dans ses multiples nuances, et ce jusqu’aux plus irréconciliablement opposées.

Rien de commun en effet entre Toni Negri [3], ancien activiste italien devenu depuis la parution d’«Empire» – une référence théorique majeure pour le mouvement altermondialiste et certains collectifs de précaires ou d’intermittents – et Slavoj Zizek [2], aux antipodes de l’acharnement negriste contre l’Etat-nation. Tous deux auront d’ailleurs une légère prise de bec au sujet de la politique menée par Lula au Brésil, défendue par Negri au détriment de Chavez. Rien de commun non plus entre son concitoyen Alessandro Russo et le même Negri, ardent promoteur du «oui» au traité constitutionnel européen.

D.R.

Bruno Bosteels

[13]

Avec son coauteur Michael Hardt, spécialement venu des Etats-Unis pour l’occasion, tous deux défendent en effet une forme de deleuzisme mutant, incarné en France par la revue «Multitudes» [14], qui tend à envisager positivement certaines formes du capitalisme avancé comme une possible production de «commun», le paradigme de cela étant fourni par Internet. Rien qui puisse donc les rapprocher des vues d’un Badiou, ni de sa garde rapprochée représentée ici par Alberto Toscano ou le jeune professeur de littérature à Cornell, USA, Bruno Bosteels, auteur le vendredi après-midi d’une remarquable intervention sur le «communisme à l’âge de la terreur», très informée de la situation passée et actuelle du gauchisme français.

Rien de commun entre eux non, hormis l’horizon communiste justement. Hormis le souhait de ne pas laisser l’adversaire continuer à proclamer l’échec et la souillure définitive de cette idée émancipatrice sans laquelle, «il n’y aurait rien dans le devenir historique et politique qui puisse être d’un quelconque intérêt pour un philosophe», selon la phrase d’Alain Badiou [1] reprise sur l’affiche pourpre du colloque de Birkbeck. Ce souci-là, «le souci de ne pas se laisser imposer l’idée d’échec par l’autre camp, c’est de Gaulle qui me l’a inspirée», glisse le philosophe français. «Nous avons perdu? Non, nous n’avons pas perdu, a-t-il dit en 1940… Il est alors parti à Londres, avec rien dans les poches, rien sous la manche. Et quelques années plus tard, c’est en vainqueur qu’il est revenu à Paris.» Ici Londres, les communistes d’hier parlent à ceux de demain.

A.L.

(1) L’historien britannique marxiste Eric Hobsbawn, auteur de «l’Âge des extrêmes», y a notamment longtemps enseigné.