Wtitten By Emilia Salvanou (Hellenic Open University)

1. Introduction

In 2023–2024 mass protests erupted across Europe and North America not in the name of humanitarian neutrality, but in direct opposition to what thousands of demonstrators called a genocidal war waged by the Israeli state against Palestinians in Gaza.¹ The brutality of the images—hospitals bombed, families buried alive, bodies retrieved from rubble, and a relentlessly rising death toll—shattered long-standing taboos around how the Israeli–Palestinian conflict could be named, narrated, and historicized. At the same time, the charge of antisemitism re-emerged as a powerful instrument for disciplining this emergent discourse.² In the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza, accusations of antisemitism have been increasingly deployed to delegitimize and suppress opposition to Israeli state violence. While antisemitism is a real and ongoing threat that demands attention, the current moment reveals a strategic instrumentalization of the term that transforms it from a category of historical and ethical urgency into a tool of silencing and disarticulation. Beyond the immediate humanitarian catastrophe lies a deeper struggle: not just over competing narratives, but over the very politics of grief—over whose deaths are grievable, whose pain is legible, and whose history can be invoked in the present.³

Rather than seeking a diagnostic of antisemitism per se, I interrogate memory as a political form—both as a regime that disciplines public speech and as a site of contestation through which the ethics of grief may be reimagined. The essay asks what forms of memory and political responsibility are foreclosed when the accusation of antisemitism is deployed to silence critique of Israel’s war in Gaza. How did we arrive at a point where Jewish identity is conflated with state violence, and mourning Palestinian lives is cast as suspect—or even as hate speech? Can we imagine a reconfiguration of historical memory that does not pit the trauma of one people against the suffering of another?⁴

In the current situation we find ourselves not in front of an absence of memory, but rather in front of the formation of a certain kind of memory—what I propose to call a memory-shell: a hard, sealed structure that preserves traces of past suffering while rendering them politically intransigent and epistemically non-negotiable. Drawing on recent historical debates, memory studies, and social movement theory, this essay proposes to treat memory not as a container of facts, but as a shell—a political form that both preserves and protects, hardens and hollows, shaping what can be said, felt, and remembered in public space. Through this lens, I suggest that European discourse around antisemitism is not simply about historical truth or falsehood, but about managing moral authority in a time of colonial reckoning.

2. From “Never Again” to “Again and Again”: The Rhetorical Capture of Holocaust Memory

While Holocaust memory has served as a pillar of European post-war ethics, it has also, from the beginning, been marked by exclusions—chiefly, the exclusion of Europe’s own colonial crimes. Scholars such as Michael Rothberg and Enzo Traverso have argued that the promise “Never Again” has always been unstable. The transformation of Holocaust memory into a kind of civil religion of the West has often come at the expense of other histories of violence—particularly those that Europe itself perpetrated through colonial conquest, racial domination, and imperial war.⁵ As Peter Novick has argued, the emergence of Holocaust consciousness in the United States was not a continuous act of mourning, but a historically contingent process shaped by Cold War politics, American exceptionalism, and shifting geostrategic interests.⁶ In this sense, Holocaust memory became not only a site of moral instruction but also a symbolic resource—one increasingly detached from the material history of Jewish suffering and repurposed to frame Western identity as morally redemptive.⁷ The result has been what Levy and Sznaider call “cosmopolitan memory,” a moral lingua franca that can universalize particular trauma while eliding others.⁸ Building on such insights, Gil Z. Hochberg’s scholarship further illuminates how memory operates not only as a repository of past suffering but also as an active site of political contestation and embodied resistance in contexts of settler colonialism. Hochberg’s analysis foregrounds the lived experience of trauma and the ways in which Palestinian memory challenges dominant narratives that seek to contain or delegitimize their claims to justice.⁹

This tension is not new, but in recent years it has deepened. As the realities of Palestinian displacement, occupation, and death have become more visible—especially through digital media and transnational activism—new generations shaped by intersectional politics and postcolonial critique have begun to challenge the monopoly of Holocaust memory as the sole or supreme site of moral authority. Within this shifting field, Holocaust memory has in many official and public discourses been recast not as a warning against the dangers of state violence per se, but as a symbolic shield for a particular state—Israel—even when that state engages in what many describe as apartheid or colonial war.¹⁰

This rhetorical shift has deep implications. As Enzo Traverso has shown, the exceptionalization of the Holocaust risks producing a form of moral insulation: a past that is so singular it cannot illuminate present forms of domination.¹¹ This “de-historicized memory,” he argues, cuts the Holocaust off from other histories of political violence and thereby weakens its critical power. Similarly, Israeli philosopher Yehuda Elkana warned as early as 1988 that the obsessive institutionalization of Holocaust memory in Israel—and by extension in the West—risked turning a collective trauma into a permanent lens of victimhood, rendering others’ suffering invisible and undermining the process of building a peaceful future.¹²

The point is not to diminish the significance of the Holocaust or to relativize its horror. On the contrary: to preserve its ethical force, we must resist its rhetorical capture. When “Never Again” is invoked to shield acts of ethnic cleansing, occupation, or military terror from critique, it becomes a reversal of its own moral intention. As Rothberg argues in Multidirectional Memory, the memory of different traumas does not inherently compete; they become rivals only within political structures that impose a zero-sum logic. In the case of Gaza, this logic has become brutally evident: expressions of solidarity with Palestinians are framed as denials of Jewish suffering, while Jewish grief is selectively mobilized to legitimize violence against a stateless people.

This logic is not without precedent. Already in 1955, Aimé Césaire warned that European humanism had turned inward against itself. In Discourse on Colonialism, he argued that the crimes of fascism were not an aberration but the return of colonial violence to the metropole—what had been rehearsed abroad now enacted at home.¹³ Today, the colonial scaffolding of Holocaust memory in European discourse risks producing a similar effect: a historical rupture instrumentalized to disavow present forms of racialized domination, even as the language of anti-fascism is invoked to justify them.

In addition to the voices analyzed above, it is crucial to acknowledge Palestinian intellectuals such as Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, who have long emphasized the ethical imperative to remember trauma in ways that challenge dominant narratives and foster a politics of responsibility. Said’s reflections on exile and the role of the intellectual exemplify a memory that is at once disruptive and dialogical. In Representations of the Intellectual and elsewhere, he insists that the task of the intellectual is not to consolidate consensus but to “speak truth to power”—to inhabit a position of principled disobedience, even (or especially) when it entails marginality or estrangement. For Said, exile is not only a physical condition but an epistemological stance: to remember, from exile, is to contest the authorized versions of history and to reinsert the silenced, the excluded, and the ungrievable into the historical record. Memory here becomes a political force: it interrupts, unsettles, and demands reparation. It is not a duty to the past alone but a responsibility toward the future.¹⁴

Similarly, Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry and prose evoke the pain of loss and the disarticulation of homeland—but not as a static lament. Rather, his work affirms the necessity of bearing witness across boundaries of nation, confession, or language. In his hands, memory is both elegiac and insurgent: it recovers fragments of a shattered world not to restore them intact, but to expose the violence of their destruction and to imagine new forms of collective life. His verse performs the impossible simultaneity of love and rage, intimacy and defiance, absence and presence. As such, it marks a refusal to let historical trauma be domesticated by abstract humanism or geopolitical cynicism. Instead, it situates Palestinian grief within a broader, decolonial poetics of survival and historical reckoning. Darwish’s poetry resists the teleological loop of trauma that locks the subject into binary positions of either perpetrator or victim. As Ella Shohat observes, Darwish “provincializes” the Holocaust not by denying its magnitude, but by returning it to a historical and political terrain—a terrain marked by colonial displacements, Mediterranean crossings, and shared griefs. In this way, he breaks the singularity of Holocaust memory as the limit-case of suffering and repositions it within a relational field of loss.¹⁵

In State of Siege, written during the Israeli siege of Ramallah in 2002, Darwish writes:

“We do what prisoners do, // what the unemployed do: // we cultivate hope.”

Here, hope is not redemptive; it is neither messianic nor compensatory. It is a minor practice, a labor of dailiness that works against the suspended temporality of siege and trauma. As Ariella Azoulay and Gil Hochberg have argued, this kind of aesthetic labor—particularly in Palestinian poetics—reclaims futurity not as promise, but as unfinished inheritance: a way of inhabiting memory without enclosing it.¹⁶

Together, Said and Darwish articulate a form of memory that is unhomed yet generative, one that confronts power without mirroring its exclusions. Their interventions push us to imagine a politics of grief and recognition that is capacious enough to hold multiple histories of violence, without flattening their specificities or reinscribing new hierarchies of suffering.¹⁷ Against the backdrop of a Western memory regime that often instrumentalizes the Holocaust as a civil religion while obscuring the colonial and imperial violences in which Europe remains complicit, their work insists on the right to narrate and the imperative to remember otherwise. 

Alongside these perspectives, diasporic Jewish activist groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), IfNotNow, and the former Not In Our Name offer a critical intervention into the politics of Holocaust memory. Refusing the instrumentalization of Jewish suffering to justify the oppression of others, they reclaim a Jewish ethical tradition rooted in justice, solidarity, and anti-colonial resistance.¹⁸ Their actions and writings challenge both the ethno-nationalist appropriation of the Shoah and the silencing of Palestinian grief, asserting instead a memory that is relational and emancipatory. By organizing protests, issuing public statements, and engaging in civil disobedience—often at great personal and communal cost—these groups articulate a diasporic Jewishness not defined by state power or military force but by historical conscience and political refusal. In their hands, Holocaust memory becomes not a license for exceptionalism but a moral and historical imperative to stand against apartheid, occupation, and genocide in all their forms. Recent interventions—such as the mass protest at the U.S. Capitol on October 18, 2023,¹⁹ and the disruption of Grand Central Terminal in New York on October 27, 2023,²⁰ demonstrate how these activists seek to reclaim Jewish memory as a tool of decolonial solidarity. This refusal to be confined within the dominant “memory-shell” enables a different temporality and ethics: one in which Jewish and Palestinian histories of dispossession need not be mutually exclusive, but can become the basis for shared mourning and collective responsibility. Their activism thus disrupts hegemonic memory regimes and gestures toward a horizon of justice where grief is unbounded by ethnic, national, or religious divisions. The interventions examined above—Palestinian, diasporic Jewish, and decolonial—challenge this closure and reopen the possibility of a memory otherwise: one that is committed to justice, multiplicity, and shared vulnerability.²¹

3. Memory-Shells and the Floating Signifier: A Theoretical Framing

In this sense, the appropriation of Holocaust memory as a hegemonic moral grammar—mobilized to justify ongoing colonial violence while silencing other histories of grief—illustrates how memory regimes operate through exclusion as much as through commemoration. Rather than serving as a space of ethical confrontation, Holocaust memory increasingly functions as a memory shell. In what follows, I propose the concept of the memory-shell as a heuristic device to understand the transformation of memory from a site of historical and affective disturbance into a hardened vessel of moral authority. The memory shell should be understood as a political form that preserves the outer layer of historical trauma while hollowing out its disruptive, universalist potential. The notion refers to a dynamic formation in which memory does not function as a straightforward recollection of the past but as a flexible container for resemanticization. It is neither true nor false; rather, it is contingent — open to reactivation, ideological reframing, and symbolic contestation depending on the political conjuncture and the struggle for moral authority. As such, memory is not merely selective; it is actively negotiated and often antagonistic. A memory-shell preserves the symbolic imprint of past trauma while increasingly detaching it from the contexts that made it politically and ethically disruptive. In this sense, memory-shells resemble sealed containers: they protect, encapsulate, and abstract memory from lived histories and struggles, thus regulating what can be said, grieved, or imagined in public discourse.

The concept draws on Ernesto Laclau’s notion of the floating signifier, a signifier emptied of fixed meaning that becomes hegemonically rearticulated within different political contexts.²² In other words, a term that condenses historical trauma into a point of moral certainty, while allowing it to be rearticulated across divergent political projects. Like the floating signifier, the memory-shell is not bound to one content but gains force precisely through its ambiguity and moral overdetermination. We may approach shell-memory as a nodal point emptied of fixed referent but capable of being invested with divergent political meanings. It can stand for “never again,” for trauma, for justice, or for exceptionalism—depending on who invokes it, and when. Like “democracy” or “freedom,” memory — and particularly Holocaust memory — can be appropriated across ideological divides, charged with contradictory emotions, and mobilized for competing claims to victimhood. In this sense, the memory of the Holocaust has become a site of articulation, simultaneously enabling resistance to injustice and functioning as a tool for discrediting criticism of Israeli state violence. This is not a symptom of forgetting. On the contrary – memories that turn into memory shells are usually those that are so securely embedded in historical culture and identity, that is impossible to bypass. Therefore, resignification and even contestation is rather a symptom of political appropriation: memory as a vessel for hegemonic realignment. Memory shells are, in this sense, not merely a mode of historical recall but a technique of governance, echoing Michel Foucault’s insight that regimes of truth function through what is rendered sayable, thinkable, and grievable.²³ Memory here becomes a terrain of political struggle: a contested medium through which hierarchies are encoded, disrupted, or suppressed. 

Yet the memory-shell does not merely float; it shields. It becomes an ethical armor that protects hegemonic narratives while repelling interpretations that might link past and present forms of violence. Shell-memory thus reveals memory as a terrain of contestation rather than a stable referent. This is particularly evident in the case of Holocaust memory in the post-1945 West, which has undergone a transformation from traumatic rupture to moral consensus. The memory of Auschwitz, once disruptive and historically embedded, now circulates as a normative grammar of recognition and punishment, deployed to name and shame certain actors while exonerating others. Such deployments, while not new, have intensified in the wake of global protest against the genocide in Gaza. In the case of Gaza, the struggle for remembrance is not simply historiographical or humanitarian; it is a battle over who can legitimately invoke trauma, define victimhood, and occupy the moral register of History. The very act of linking Gaza to Auschwitz becomes unspeakable—not because of historical inaccuracy, but because the memory shell has become performative, disciplinary, and sacrosanct. What is at stake, then, is not the truth-value of memory, but its instrumental function: to govern grief, regulate dissent, and secure geopolitical alliances.

As Donatella della Porta argues, memory is never politically neutral. In moments of political contestation, memories of past violence can become central to the framing strategies of both protest movements and hegemonic actors. Memory does not merely recall the past; it reconfigures the present by legitimizing certain claims and delegitimizing others. In her work on social movements and contentious politics, she highlights how symbolic references to historical traumas—whether of war, fascism, or genocide—are mobilized to shape collective identities and to justify political action or repression.²⁴ The memory shell, then, is not only a metaphor for historical closure, but also a political instrument—a site where affect, legitimacy, and power intersect. 

In the current conjuncture, the sacralization of Holocaust memory often serves not to expand the democratic horizon of solidarity, but to shield specific state actors from critique, transforming memory into a disciplinary tool that regulates the limits of political imagination. Affectively, memory shells operate as technologies of emotional capture. They command reverence and impose silence; they channel sorrow into specific, allowable directions. This memory shell enshrines the Holocaust. But it does so by detaching it from the plural and contested terrains of historical remembrance and by repositioning it within a moral grammar that demands loyalty, not inquiry. Here, memory becomes a surface rather than a depth—a performative invocation rather than a space for reflexive engagement. As such, the memory of the Holocaust is reified: placed behind a transparent barrier through which it can be seen, reverently cited, but not recontextualized. In this context, “antisemitism” is increasingly unmoored from the specific genealogies of hate, exclusion, and extermination that gave rise to it, and becomes instead a floating moral charge: one that can be affixed to anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinian activists, human rights NGOs, and even ceasefire protesters.

The functionalization of antisemitism as a mode of accusation has a long genealogy, but it has intensified in the wake of 7 October 2023. In the months that followed, institutions across Europe and North America adopted punitive measures against individuals and groups opposing Israel’s assault on Gaza. Humanitarian workers were suspended or investigated for public expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. University presidents in the United States were summoned to Congressional hearings and forced to resign under the pressure of donor campaigns and orchestrated outrage. Protesters in cities from Berlin to Paris to London faced bans, arrests, or police violence, justified by the claim that any public dissent against the war amounted to an incitement to hatred or a threat to Jewish safety.²⁵ In such cases, the invocation of antisemitism operates not as a means of protecting Jewish communities, but as a mechanism of anticipatory repression—a form of delegitimization of actors, practices, and narratives before they can generate political traction.²⁶ Memory, in this schema, becomes the moral substrate for a new regime of securitized speech. One must not only avoid antisemitism; one must not appear to contest the state’s definition of what antisemitism is. 

4. Definitions and the Politics of Memory

This process is most evident in the strategic adoption and dissemination of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) working definition of antisemitism, which blurs the line between anti-Jewish hatred and criticism of the Israeli state.²⁷ By contrast, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, authored by a group of Jewish scholars and public intellectuals, insists on the distinction between antisemitism as a form of racialized hatred and legitimate critique of Zionism or Israeli policies.²⁸ Yet in the institutional field, it is the IHRA definition that has prevailed—endorsed by governments, universities, and cultural organizations across the West, often as a condition for funding or partnership. Here, the memory-shell operates as a shield and a filter: it shields a particular narrative of Jewish victimhood from scrutiny and filters out alternative forms of remembrance—especially those that foreground Palestinian dispossession as part of the same historical arc. The memory-shell does not deny the Holocaust; it monopolizes its meaning. It demands that Holocaust memory serve as the ground for identification with Israeli state violence and casts any deviation from this moral script as a betrayal of Jewish suffering itself. As Sara Ahmed has argued, emotions are not private states but forms of contact and orientation: they stick to certain bodies and histories more than others. The memory shell ensures that grief over Jewish loss remains politically permissible, even compulsory, while grief over Palestinian death becomes suspect, antisemitic, or uncivil. This is not a failure of memory, but a political use of memory as moral governance. 

This logic of exclusive mourning produces a condition I describe as a memory impasse: a blockage in the field of public memory, where the imperative to remember is transformed into a prohibition on historical analogies. One cannot remember the Nakba alongside the Shoah. One cannot recall Gaza’s destruction in the same breath as Auschwitz. One cannot draw the analogies between antisemitism of the past and islamophobia of the present. The charge of antisemitism thus becomes not only a political weapon, but also an epistemic veto: it forbids certain associations, disqualifies certain comparisons, and discredits alternative genealogies of violence and resistance.²⁹ What is at stake here is not only the distortion of a term, but the foreclosure of a political horizon. The memory shell is not simply an inert object; it is a technology of governance. It shapes what can be said, who can speak, and which memories are allowed to co-exist in public discourse. It organizes affect, affiliation, and recognition. It institutes a hierarchy of grief—where some lives are legible as victims and others are not.³⁰ Thus, the memory-shell functions not merely as rhetorical armor, but as a form of mnemonic power—shaping not only discourse but the affective contours of grief itself.³¹

5. Toward a Decolonized Memory

The current regime of Holocaust memory, while deeply entrenched in Western political and cultural institutions, remains profoundly unstable. As with all hegemonic formations, it is continually contested from within and without, by diverse actors including Jewish and Palestinian intellectuals, activists, artists, and survivors. These contestations do not advocate for the rejection of Holocaust memory itself, but rather call for its decolonization—a reconfiguration that acknowledges Jewish historical suffering while simultaneously opening space for solidarities that refuse to erase or marginalize other histories of violence and dispossession. In the sense Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o articulated, decolonization entails not simply political realignment but a radical transformation of the epistemic and representational order—a refusal to let dominant narratives foreclose the complexity of human suffering.³²

Decolonizing memory means disrupting the monolithic narratives that function as what I have termed the “memory-shell”—a protective and restrictive framework that preserves a singular understanding of trauma, while foreclosing alternative or conflicting memories. This memory-shell often operates to shield a particular political agenda, conflating Jewish victimhood with uncritical support for the Israeli state, and thus excluding Palestinian experiences of displacement and ongoing violence from the collective mnemonic landscape.

In this context, we must imagine forms of memory that are porous, dissonant, and dialogical—memories that resist closure and instead keep the past open as a contested site of ethical struggle and political connection. Such memories defy attempts at monopolization or instrumentalization and refuse to allow trauma to become the exclusive property of any state or political entity.³³ A radical, decolonial ethics of memory must not only open to the possibility of plural and conflictual histories; it must refuse the confiscation of mourning, the closure of the past, and the foreclosure of the present. This gesture resonates with Ariella Azoulay’s call to treat the archive not as a repository of state-sanctioned facts, but as a site of violence, exclusion, and imperial governance. In her account, the logic of imperialism does not only destroy lives and lands—it destroys the very conditions of co-seeing and co-witnessing. Against this regime, Azoulay proposes a radical civil contract of photography and memory, one that decenters the sovereign gaze and instead reclaims the right to narrate, to mourn, and to remember without prior authorization. In this sense, a decolonial ethics of memory requires not only a critique of mnemonic violence but an insurgent stance toward the monopolization of memory, archival closure, and historical legitimization. This vision draws on decolonial thought, which insists on the necessity of unsettling hegemonic narratives and restoring multiplicity and relationality in historical consciousness.³⁴

To decolonize memory is not to deny or diminish the Holocaust’s significance but to reclaim its ethical force—its capacity to unsettle settled narratives, to challenge complicity, and to demand ongoing responsibility and justice. Memory might as well function as a rupture: a deliberate break in the circuits of power that govern public discourse, opening space for solidarity across difference and for political horizons beyond exclusion and erasure.³⁵ Such a reframing also aligns with Edward Said’s call for the intellectual to embrace a memory that resists closure and demands critical engagement beyond nationalist or sectarian frameworks.³⁶ Similarly, Mahmoud Darwish’s poetic work exemplifies the necessity of bearing witness to multiple, intersecting histories of loss and displacement. In this way, decolonized memory becomes a transformative practice: one that reconfigures affect, recognition, and belonging in ways that resist closure and demand accountability.

6. Mourning, Solidarity, and the Ethical Risk of Historical Comparison

In the face of institutional repression and widespread political censorship, recent mass mobilizations across Europe and beyond have articulated new forms of political mourning. Led by coalitions of Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Black and brown communities, and younger generations of activists, these movements reject the binary logic of competing victimhoods and insist instead on entangled solidarities: a right to remember without erasure, and to grieve without state sanction.³⁷ This emerging counter-memory does not signify an erosion of Holocaust remembrance but rather a radical refusal to prioritize past trauma over present atrocity. To affirm that Palestinian life matters, to name apartheid or to mourn children killed in their beds is not antisemitic. What becomes antisemitic, however, is the conflation of all Jews with the actions of a state, instrumentalizing Jewish identity to shield state violence from accountability. This moment demands a reimagined Jewish voice—one that breaks with ethno-nationalist paradigms and reclaims diasporic, anti-colonial, and ethical traditions within Judaism.³⁸ Jewish scholars, artists, and activists have been among the most vocal critics of Israeli policies, not despite their Jewishness but precisely because of it.³⁹ To silence these voices under the guise of combating antisemitism risks erasing the very dissent crucial for a pluralistic political discourse.⁴⁰

In this context, mourning transcends affective expression to become a radical political act: a refusal to permit the state to monopolize death or history, and a form of remembering against the grain, across time, and through rupture. Where the memory-shell erects barriers around the past, preserving moral certainties, mourning fractures this enclosure, demanding that memory remain porous, responsive, and accountable. Far from being antithetical to politics, mourning becomes its very condition, transforming memory from weapon to threshold of justice.⁴¹

Yet mourning also opens the terrain of political risk, particularly the risk of historical comparison. The invocation of genocidal analogies in the context of Israel’s war on Gaza has sparked heated debate, with some perceiving such comparisons as a transgression against the singularity of the Holocaust and a moral affront to Jewish suffering. Others assert that naming the systematic targeting of civilian populations as genocide is not only justifiable but ethically necessary.⁴² The legal challenges brought before international bodies like the International Court of Justice have foregrounded the Genocide Convention as a critical framework for adjudicating contemporary crises.⁴³

Beyond juridical proceedings, the question remains epistemological and political: Are historical analogies inherently dangerous, or can they function as tools of ethical reckoning? Must the past be policed to safeguard singular traumas from appropriation, or can comparison open pathways for solidarity and critical reflection? Against the hegemonic logic of exceptionalism, comparison need not imply a flattening or erasure of difference; rather, it can serve as an ethical disruption that destabilizes hierarchies of suffering and exposes structural continuities of violence.⁴⁴ Thus, comparison can be a pedagogical and political act—not to equate atrocities but to reveal dangerous resonances that demand attention. To prohibit comparison is effectively to foreclose history as a contested and dynamic field. It treats memory as fixed and sacralized rather than as a site of ongoing negotiation and political struggle. For societies to confront contemporary crises without replicating past exclusions, they must permit historical analogies to circulate—not as incontestable truths but as critical provocations to be debated, contextualized, and when necessary, contested.⁴⁵ Criminalizing such discourse risks stifling political agency and ethical reflection.

In sum, the politics of memory today extends beyond what is remembered to encompass who is allowed to remember, under which conditions, and within what geopolitical and moral frameworks. It has turned into a truth regime. The concept of the memory shell exposes the instability and contestation inherent in memory as a field of signification and power. Recognizing this contingency does not imply relativism but calls for a responsible, situated, and politically engaged memory—one attuned to asymmetries of violence and receptive to emerging forms of suffering and injustice. At a historical moment when the genocide in Gaza is silenced beneath rhetoric of security and historical exceptionalism, insisting on a heterogeneous, critical, and emancipatory memory becomes not only an act of solidarity but one of historical justice.

This emergent politics of mourning and solidarity not only challenges dominant narratives of victimhood but also exposes the underlying structures of power that govern memory itself. The contemporary politics of memory thus encompasses not only the content of remembrance but also the power to define who may remember, under which terms, and within what geopolitical and moral frameworks. The recent genocidal violence in Gaza exposes the limits of Holocaust memory as a politically neutral foundation of Western moral order; instead, it necessitates a critical interrogation of memory as a contested and politicized instrument of power. 

Memory is inherently dynamic and pluralistic, a contested field where divergent narratives and claims to historical truth are negotiated, among others taking into account the political stakes of representation. The concept of “memory shell” captures this ambivalence: memory functions as a protective yet constraining form that preserves the outer shell of trauma while frequently neutralizing its disruptive ethical potential. Acknowledging this complexity is essential for advancing a more responsible, situated, and politically engaged memory—one attentive to structural asymmetries of violence and receptive to emerging forms of injustice. 

Historical comparisons, particularly analogies invoking genocide, remain among the most divisive and fraught dimensions of this politics. While many see such comparisons as a threat to the Holocaust’s uniqueness and a moral affront to Jewish suffering,⁴⁶ others argue that naming contemporary atrocities—such as the systematic violence against Palestinians—as genocide is both justified and ethically imperative.⁴⁷ These debates extend beyond public discourse into legal arenas, with international tribunals and courts grappling with the application of the Genocide Convention.⁴⁸ Yet the core question is epistemological and political: are comparisons inherently reductive and dangerous, or can they function as critical tools for ethical disruption and pedagogical engagement?⁴⁹

The prohibition of comparison risks freezing history into a sacralized and immutable domain, disconnected from present struggles. Conversely, ethical comparison can destabilize hierarchies of suffering, reveal the structural continuities of violence, and foster solidarities across social and political divides. As Enzo Traverso and Dirk Moses, among others, compellingly argue, the Holocaust’s significance lies not in its unique exceptionality but in its illumination of modernity’s violent rationalities.⁵⁰ In this frame, comparison serves not to equate atrocities but to provoke reflection, political responsibility, and a critical reconsideration of power.

This theoretical framework resonates with the emergence of counter-memories articulated by diverse coalitions who reject binary victimhood and the monopolization of suffering. Their political mourning demands the right to remember without erasure and to grieve without state sanction, challenging the instrumentalization of identity to shield violence. Mourning thus becomes a radical political act that ruptures the “memory shell,” opening memory to ethical porosity, responsiveness, and justice. In a moment when the genocide in Gaza is obscured by discourses of security and exceptionalism, advocating for a heterogeneous, critical, and emancipatory memory constitutes both an act of solidarity and a demand for historical justice.

Author Bio:

Emilia Salvanou is a historian working at the intersection of social and cultural history, with particular attention to migration, refugee movements, and historical culture. She currently teaches public history at the Hellenic Open University. Her research explores how cultural memory, historiography, and public debates about the past shape historical consciousness in the present. Email: emilia.salvanou@gmail.com

Published on July 17, 2025. 

SOURCE: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2025/07/15/haunted-pasts-and-the-politics-of-grief-memory-shells-and-the-struggle-for-ethical-grief-after-gaza/

Footnotes:

1. The term ‘genocidal’ is used here not as a legal determination but as a political charge articulated by numerous civil society organizations, scholars, and activists in reference to the scale, intent, and continuity of the assault on Gaza. See UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ (2024) https://www.un.org/unispal/document/anatomy-of-a-genocide-report-of-the-special-rapporteur-on-the-situation-of-human-rights-in-the-palestinian-territory-occupied-since-1967-to-human-rights-council-advance-unedited-version-a-hrc-55/. ︎
2. For analyses of discursive constraints around the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Western media and academia, see Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out. An everyday occupation (New York and London: W.W. Norton  2008); Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press 2012). ︎
3. On the entanglement of memory, mourning, and political legitimacy, see Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2004); and Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2009). ︎
4. Antonis Liakos, “Βγάλτε τους νεκρούς από τη ζυγαριά” [Take the dead off the scale], Chronos 8, 2013 https://www.chronosmag.eu/index.php/ls-gl-p-g.html (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
5. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; Enzo Traverso,The End of Jewish Modernity (London: Pluto Press, 2016). ︎
6. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). ︎
7. Ibid., esp. pp. 13–14, 195–205. ︎
8. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider,The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), esp. ch. 2. ︎
9. Gil. Z. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). ︎
10. Butler, Parting Ways, esp. chs. 1 and 4. See also the analysis of performative memory in Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004).  ︎
11. Traverso,The End of Jewish Modernity, pp.186–190. ︎
12. Yehuda Elkana, “The Need to Forget,” Haaretz, March 1988; republished in Haaretz Magazine, 2004. For contextual discussion, see Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir,The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). ︎
13. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), pp. 35-49. ︎
14. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). Also, Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). ︎
15. Ella Shohat, “Rethinking Jews and Muslims,” Middle East Report 178 (September/October 1992). ︎
16. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, pp 140-180; Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. (London: Verso, 2019). ︎
17. Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness. Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi (New York: Anchor Books, 2007). Also, Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). ︎
18. See Jewish Voice for Peace’s “Our Principles” https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/our-vision/ and IfNotNow’s platform https://www.ifnotnowmovement.org/principles (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
19. JVP led a sit-in at the U.S. Capitol calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/19/jewish-activists-arrested-at-us-congress-sit-in-calling-for-gaza-ceasefire (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
20. Thousands of Jews and allies gathered inside Grand Central Station, staging one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in NYC since 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/world/middleeast/grand-central-protest-nyc-israel-hamas-gaza.html (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
21. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.  ︎
22. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 105–110.  ︎
23. Michel Foucault,The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). ︎
24. Donatella della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995).  ︎
25. See reports on the post-October 2023 crackdown on Palestine solidarity activists across the US and Europe, e.g., Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/israel-and-palestine (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
26. Donatella Della Porta, “Moral Panic and Repression: the contentious politics of anti-Semitism in Germany”,PArtecipazione e COnflitto * The Open Journal of Sociopolitical Studies PACO, Issue 17(2) 2024: 276-349.  ︎
27. The IHRA working definition of antisemitism was adopted in 2016 and has been widely institutionalized; see IHRA official website, https://www.holocaustremembrance.com (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
28. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021), available at https://jerusalemdeclaration.org, is an alternative framework developed by leading scholars to safeguard free speech and clarify legitimate criticism (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
29. Butler, Frames of War; Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh University Press 2004). David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Wiley-Blackwell 2002); Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London and New York: Verso, 2000). ︎
30. On the concept of hierarchy of grief, see James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero (University of Hawaii Press 2001), and Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious (2002). ︎
31. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (Yale: Yale University Press 1993). ︎
32. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (James Currey Ltd / Heinemann, 1986). ︎
33. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press 2017). ︎
34. Azoulay, Potential History; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Duke University Press 2011). ︎
35. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961). ︎
36. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994). ︎
37. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso 2004). ︎
38. Ella Shohat,Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), especially the introduction and Chapter 2.  ︎
39. Ella Shohat, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 1–35. Butler, Parting Ways. ︎
40. Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (University of California Press, 2005).  ︎
41. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.  ︎
42. Israel W. Charny, “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide.” In Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, edited by George J. Andreopoulos, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 64–94. ︎
43. International Court of Justice, Case Concerning Application of the Genocide Convention (South Africa v. Israel), 2025 (pending). https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192 (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
44. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York and London: New Press 2003). ︎
45. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford University Press 2003); Antonis Liakos, Πώς το παρελθόν γίνεται ιστορία [How the Past turns into History (Athens: Polis 2007). ︎
46. See for example, Deborah E. Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now. Schocken Books, 2019. ︎
47. M. LeVine & E. Cheyfitz, “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Revisited”, Journal of Genocide Research, (2025), 1–23. ︎
48. International Court of Justice, Case on Palestine (South Africa v. Israel), 2024. ︎
49. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present ( Harvard University Press 1999). Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge 1994). Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). ︎
50. Traverso,The Origins of Nazi Violence. A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology”. The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, edited by Dan Stone, (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books 2012), pp. 272-289. ︎

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BRAD EVANS: For those of us who remain deeply concerned with understanding the worst episodes in human history, the life and work of Walter Benjamin still appear all too resonant. This in part has something to do with the tragedy of what he came to represent, along with the undoubted brilliance of his insight and challenges to political dogmatism. What is it about Benjamin that captures your attention as an author and critic?

JAMES MARTEL: I think that Benjamin has never been as relevant to questions of politics as he is today with the exception of his own lifetime. As I read him, Benjamin offers one of the best explanations both for the ongoing resilience of capitalism, despite all of its predations and all the instability that it creates, as well as the connection between fascism and liberalism that we are seeing being expressed today. He also offers, I think, the best way to understand how to address our contemporary moment and how to resist and upend capitalism, liberalism, and fascism all round.

In my view, Benjamin’s understanding of what he calls mythic violence is the key to understanding all of these questions. Mythic violence is Benjamin’s term for the way that illicit economic and political power has asserted itself over all human life, projecting a form of authority out into the world that then becomes accepted as reality itself. It is mythic because there is no true or ontological basis for the powers of liberalism and capitalism; its right to rule is self-proclaimed and then naturalized so that it becomes seen as fated and inevitable. It is violent because, without a genuine basis for its authority, mythic violence must endlessly strike out, killing and hurting over and over again to establish its power and even its reality.

In describing mythic violence, I think it’s very important to remember that this doesn’t always refer to actual physical violence per se. The German term that we translate into English as “violence” in Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” is gewalt, a word that may be better translated as force or projection. This is important because it shows first of all that a lot of what Benjamin calls mythic violence is not actually always literally violent (although, as already noted, literal violence is a critical part of what does). Mythic instantiations such as that are violent in a much deeper sense with physical violence being only the ultimate and last resort in their arsenal. But it is also important to note that Benjamin is not against responding to mythic violence with an answering form of physical violence at times. In the “Critique of Violence,” he tells us that even so seemingly clear a commandment as “thou shalt not kill” does not mean that we can never kill. It means, as he tells us, that we must struggle with the meaning of that commandment both separately and together and at times ignore or abandon it (that is to say to commit violence but in a way that sits squarely on our own shoulders, in a way that can’t be pawned off as “following orders” or obeying dictates from God or some other transcendent form of authority).

If we keep these two things in mind (that the state and capitalism are not always physically violent and that the resistance to these things can itself be violent at times) it helps to specify what Benjamin means in terms of a critique of and resistance to modern forms of mythic violence. The key thing to resist is not physical violence per se but rather projections of some kind of external source of authority (whether it is God or gods, nature or some mystical origins) which become the basis for illicit and anxious — hence often physically violent — forms of control.

What seems important to recognize here is how these categories, most notably concerning our allegiance to the mythical order of things, are applicable to both leftist and conservative ideologies, which history shows can author the most extreme violence.

For Benjamin, without an understanding and critique of mythic violence, any would-be vanquisher of capitalism and liberalism will swiftly become co-opted into the very same political and economic forms that it opposes, ultimately replacing one form of mythic violence with another. In Benjamin’s view, the left itself is far from immune from projections of authority (and anxious and violent ones at that). Even so, there is a key difference between the left and the right for Benjamin insofar as the right is based on nothing but mythic projection, projections about racial purity, ancient (false) forms of authority and hierarchies and so on, whereas the left tends to seek to denaturalize these relationships for the sake of a different and better form of political life. Benjamin speaks of a political and aesthetic form that is “useless for the purposes of fascism,” which means that it does not allow for the sedimentation of mythic projections. Instead of such projections, Benjamin looks to local and episodic forms of collective decision making, akin to what he calls “pure means” (that is to say, forms of politics that are not related to ends or teleologies which are invariably mythic).

Such a political form would indeed be useless for the right insofar as it denies and undermines precisely what the right is based on even as it is useful for a left that sought to discern political forms that do not reproduce mythic violence. This discerning mechanism, one that allows us to distinguish between what is mythic and what is not, determining what comes from false projections onto externalities and what comes from within our own communities, is, I think, the key political insight that Benjamin offers us for our own time.

While he wasn’t the first to ask what makes humans violent toward each other, we owe it to Benjamin for raising in union the two most pressing of all questions. Namely — “what time are we living in”? And “how can we develop a critique of violence adequate to these times”? What do these two questions say to you in the context of his legacy?

I think we are living in a time when the contradictions of mythic violence are perhaps especially legible in a way that has not been the case since Benjamin’s own time. More precisely, these contradictions are more visible in the West and the North; even in the richest and whitest of communities, the conflation between fascism and liberalism, the violence that undergirds both systems, has become particularly evident even to those who would prefer not to be reminded of this. In much of the Global South and in communities of color and poor communities within the West and the North as well, that violence has always been plainly visible (and by design).

In my view, Benjamin helps to explain why the neoliberal order seems to be collapsing into a fascist one. For Benjamin, liberalism and fascism are not as distinct as they are usually considered to be (at least by liberals and fascists!). It’s not that liberals and fascists are somehow in secret league with one another; they don’t have to be for the homeostasic nature of the systems of mythic violence to function. All that is required is the common mythic form itself and the deep anxieties that this produces in the system. As the inequalities fomented by neoliberalism become increasingly apparent, a turn to more violence (and thus fascism) is required to keep the core capitalist center of mythic violence protected and intact.

Clearly, we live in very scary times, but from a Benjaminian perspective this is also a time of tremendous potential for a revived radical left politics. One of the first things you get taught in a political science department (my own discipline) is that authority weakens the more you have to demonstrate the violence that underlies it. If you have to resort to outright violence, that is a sign that the fabric of reality that Benjamin calls the “phantasmagoria” is unraveling and is no longer doing the job of producing political and economic quiescence.

This is where the opportunity for radical change comes into play. For Benjamin, even as liberalism gives way to fascism, the vulnerability of mythic systems becomes that much more exposed. The need to resort to physical violence, and, perhaps just as critically, the need for those subjected to such violence to respond with terror and awe instead of defiance becomes that much more central to the perpetuation of mythic violence. The exposure of this vulnerability may be the reason that we are seeing an increasing refusal on the part of political subjects in our time to obey or even recognize these powers as such. Today we are seeing outbursts of resistance all over the world to mythic and neoliberal power. In Lebanon, Iraq, France, the UK, Bolivia, Chile, Hong Kong, and so many other places, resistance is growing even as repression and state violence are growing in equal measures (as Benjamin would predict).

I am reminded here of Arendt’s insistence that violence and power are qualitatively different. Whilst I do find some of this analysis too deterministic, from what you say it is important to remember the reason why totalitarian systems require so much violence is that they ultimately cannot persuade people to follow their systems of empowerment. And in this regard, totalitarian systems are marked not by their absolute power but rather by how precarious they really are when it comes to their durability. Does this resonate with the types of potentiality in Benjamin?

Yes, I think one of the most important things that Benjamin has to tell us is that fascism, for all of its terrifying appearance, is always and inherently on the brink of collapse. That is to say, that fascism is trapped by its own violence, forced to turn to a greater and greater degree of violence as it continually seeks to ground and reground itself. Usually when we think of a very violent and powerful system, we think that it is utterly in control of the situation and that it only collapses, if ever, by virtue of some externality (kind of the way that the combined force of the Allies in World War II ended fascism, at least for a moment). Yet, fascism in some sense does not even need external enemies because it bears its own vulnerability within itself. I’m not saying that a fascist regime can’t last for a very long time — Franco’s regime lasted for four decades after all — but rather that fascism’s requirement for a display of its violence (and just as importantly, as I was saying before, the requirement that its violence be received in a way that supports rather than undermines its political authority) means that it only survives from moment to moment; each moment could be its end. It could vanish in an instant because its power is entirely mythic and not based on any collective decisions. (Even though it always clothes itself in a relationship to “the people”; for this reason, I think that “populism” is not the right name for what we are experiencing in our own time. I would not call this populism but maybe something more like mythic groupthink, which is something very different and actually maybe the opposite of something that is inherent in a collective.)

I agree that Arendt’s distinction between violence and power has its limitations but I think it might be helpful here to think about the difference between what Benjamin calls (mythic) violence and nonviolence (with the latter corresponding roughly to Arendt’s notion of power). If nonviolence for Benjamin is marked by a refusal of externalities, then we can see that it actually has a far more stable basis than fascism does. Again, this does not mean that moments of nonviolence have a longer shelf life than fascist moments do. History tends to show the opposite; the real expressions of collective power have tended to be short lived indeed. Yet this lack of duration does not itself mean that nonviolent political moments are always doomed to short forms of duration. I think that in this case, the situation is the direct opposite of fascism: while fascism is internally unstable (because mythic) and doesn’t require an external threat to end (although those do help, of course), with nonviolence, the internal form is very stable because it comes out of actual collective forms of decision, which are made without recourse to externalities like racial purity, ancient history, or the like. It is in fact only externalities that can bring it to an end. Unfortunately those externalities are all too readily found; the creation of a nonviolent society seems to always bring a fascist response. (At this point, even a liberal regime, recognizing the threat that nonviolence poses to its markets, will turn into a fascist regime until the “emergency” is dealt with.)

This sounds like bad news, but I think that in the long run nonviolence may have the stronger hand. Arendt’s notion that power is always stronger than violence is very important here. As she informs us, in a clash between nonviolence and violence (recalling yet again that nonviolence for Benjamin does not always mean that it refrains from actual violence; maybe that is one big difference between him and Arendt), nonviolence will win every time. That is precisely why mythic violence is always frantically trying to assert its own existence, why liberal regimes readily give way to fascist ones, why the state must always kill no matter how benign it appears (or desires) to be. But in a way, mythic violence is the one facing an uphill battle; it has vulnerabilities that nonviolent forms do not have; all it has in the end is its own violence, and that cannot be counted on to produce its desired results in every single instance that it finds itself confronted by a nonviolent alternative.

Returning to his most celebrated essay, “Critique of Violence,” while appreciating its theoretical richness, I am still nevertheless troubled by the way various scholars simply take its key terms and comport them into the 21st century as if the logics and rules for power and violence remained the same. What do you think is required in updating the critique?

That is such an important question. I think that Benjamin must be held in his own time even as he speaks to ours. If not, such a juxtaposition threatens to lose that critical distinction that for Benjamin is the basis for why the thought or materiality of one period of time can disrupt another (and vice versa). If we make Benjamin into a 21st-century thinker, then we are making him into something that he is not, and in so doing, the critical perspective that he offers us is lost as well. One example of what you are talking about that I already touched on comes from a failure to understand what Benjamin means by violence in his “Critique.” (I think a related failure is to misunderstand what he means by nonviolence too.) Another example is to think that any number of actions constitute a General Strike, which for Benjamin takes very specific — and nonviolent — form.

Perhaps an even better example is the question of what constitutes what Benjamin calls “divine violence.” He describes divine violence in the “Critique” as a way for God to reject the fetishism and mythic violence that is often projected onto or attributed to divine sources. For Benjamin, divine violence does not create new laws and truths but merely acts to remove false ones. In my view — and I’ll admit that this is hardly a settled point — it is crucial to distinguish between divine violence and any form of human agency. As I see it, if human beings themselves can be said to engage in divine violence, then that defeats the whole purpose of exposing what is mythic and what is not. If people can be said to act as agents of God, then that simply reproduces mythic violence in a new guise. (How would you know when they are acting on God’s behalf and when they are not?) Benjamin himself really muddies this distinction in the “Critique,” offering that some human activities, including education, may constitute acts of divine violence. For this reason, some thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek have offered that when the poor rise up and attack the rich they are acting as agents of divine violence. I think this is a big mistake. What I’d say instead is that people act in the wake of an opening that divine violence produces. Divine violence is, in this account, what offers human beings a chance to act in ways that are not constituted by mythic violence, that is to say, to act in ways that are nonviolent. The General Strike is an example of such nonviolence, a way to say no to the entire apparatus of mythic violence.

Despite the fact that we must, as you suggest, keep Benjamin’s concepts distinct from those of our own time, I think that there is a huge benefit in connecting his time with our own and thinking alongside him. For me, Benjamin has helped me to see the big picture even if I use different terms than he does to describe our contemporary political moment. The name that I would give to the projections from mythic externalities is archism, a basis for much of our political and economic structures today. The name that I would give to non-mythic and collective nonviolent practices is anarchism (a term that Benjamin himself often uses although he tended to call himself a communist). In my opinion, to speak of archism helps us to avoid the mistake of thinking that the state is the only form of mythic violence that matters. (If it were, then taking over the state would end the predations of mythic violence. Yet, as we have seen in history, such a takeover generally leads to a mere change in rulers.) To speak of anarchism offers us a way to think of a collective and widespread form of resistance that is not merely utopian but is already extant. In fact, I would say that for Benjamin, anarchism is a widespread practice, a form of political nonviolence that archism sits atop, claiming credit for the support and possibility of political forms that in reality it only predates and parasitizes.

In conclusion, I am taken by the already extant forms of resistance you allude to here. Despite the pessimism of the types, then as now, what I still find in Benjamin is the idea that people will resist what is patently intolerable and will try to retain something of the human despite the desperate weight of historical persecution. If Benjamin offers us a single lesson moving forward, what do you think this demands from us?

I think that more than offering us something, Benjamin actually takes away one of the great conceits that allows us to remain ensconced in mythic violence, namely the idea that “there is no alternative.” This notion, akin to what Benjamin himself calls “left melancholia,” is a kind of self-defeatism that allows leftists and those who are against violence the comfort of thinking that there really isn’t anything that they can do, that leftist attempts to avoid violence all produce results that are no less violent than fascism and that therefore we must perforce make our peace with capitalism and just do the best we can. What Benjamin shows us, I think, is not only that a nonviolent life is possible, but that it exists all around us. We are actually engaged in it already. In his view, nonviolence is just another name for daily life, for the infinite decisions, agreements, arguments, and resolutions that we all make with one another each and every day and without any recourse to law or the state. This is what I like to call the anarchist life that we are already living. Nonviolence, then, is not some pie-in-the-sky utopia but an ongoing presence that we always have recourse too. We do not need to destroy everything and then start over. Rather we must remove the parasitic and mythic overlord that rules us through its violence and its lies. The greatest deception that mythic violence has ever pulled over on us is the notion (popularized by novels like Lord of the Flies) that if the state or other archist forms were to remove themselves from our life, we would all be stabbing one another within minutes. Benjamin shows us that it is the state itself, the veritable fox guarding the henhouse, that is the source of violence in our life. We may respond to it with various acts of violence of our own, but that is only to repeat the way that we are enmeshed in a violent and mythic order.

If I thought that nothing that I did could ever lead to things being better or different then I would probably be entitled to engage in a bit of left melancholia, to sigh over how awful capitalism is and romanticize the various failed leftist assaults on capitalism’s reign. But if I knew, as Benjamin informs us, that capitalism was far more vulnerable than I thought, that I lived amid an entire network of mutually nonviolent collectivity (however much it was overlaid with echoes of state and other forms of mythic violence) then the onus is on me to actually do something about it.

I so admire the courage and clearheadedness that Benjamin displays in his last essay, “On the Concept of History.” This was written in 1940, the year of his death and a year that fascism was literally coming down all around him. Rather than allow himself into being terrified into quiescence, at the (fascist) end of history, Benjamin wrote an essay where he understood time itself as defeating the linearity of history and the sense that fascism is fated and cannot be resisted. I don’t think we are today quite where the world was when Benjamin wrote that essay, although that depends, once again, on who and where we are talking about, but we are clearly getting closer to this situation on a global scale. I hope that we can demonstrate the same resolve in our time that Benjamin showed in his. Even in the heart of fascism, he saw its true colors, its vulnerabilities, and the fact that it was never as powerful as it seemed. He was able to see mythic violence for what it is even when it ended up costing him his life. If he could do that in the face of Hitler, I hope we can do the same in the face of Trump and Johnson and the like and whomever, or whatever, is to come next.

¤
Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer, who specializes on the problem of violence. He is the founder/director of the Histories of Violence project, which has a global user base covering 143 countries.

The post Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Walter Benjamin Today appeared first on Void Network.

Sea, islands, and hereditary rule

There is a particularity about Greek mainstream politics -and Greek capitalism too, for that matter. Greece has a strong tradition of political dynasties. We often refer to those as “tzakia”, which means fireplaces, implying a rich, powerful family. Since the liberation from Nazi occupation on October 12, 1944, there have been three most notable such political “clans”, whose members keep coming up in the lists of Prime Ministers, ministers, MP’s and Athens Mayors. They are the Papandreou family, the Karamanlis family and the Mitsotakis family. The most recently established “fireplace” of those three, is the latter, the one of the Current Prime Minister. Since the ’90s, the Cretan Dynasty of Mitsotakis has had two PM’s, two Mayors of Athens, and several Minister and MP positions between four people of three generations. And these are just the political positions. Try to imagine for a second, the kind of arrogance that stems from such an obscene amount of consolidated privilege. Currently, Kyriakos Mitsotakis is the PM and his nephew Kostas Mpakogiannis is the Mayor of Athens, both elected with the right-wing party of Nea Dimokratia (New Democracy).

As aforementioned, Greek capitalism is considered somewhat particular as well. It has long been labelled (from Greek people themselves mostly, but not only), as the most “state-funded” in the Western World. Amusingly, the Greek word “kratikodietos” would literally translate as “on a State diet”. This relates, among other things, to the age-old tradition, going all the way back to the days of the Ottoman Empire, of the political class forming codependent relations of corruption with rich and powerful families, businesses and interest groups.

Obviously, none of this is unique to Greece, in fact, it’s the very nature of our global system, but perhaps in Greece, it is done in such a crudely brazen and unapologetically blatant manner, that it can seem somewhat “unfamiliar” to the eye of the Western audience. What is rather distinct to Greece though, is that the most powerful section of the capital is shipping capital. Many Greek ship-owners are included in lists of the richest people in the world. While many of them are mostly citizens of the global elite, not bothering too much with their small country of origin, certain shipping families wield enormous power over Greek society, economy and politics.

Now let’s identify some of the other key players in our main story.

Vangelis Marinakis: Born and bred in Pireas, Greece’s largest international port, he inherited a vast fortune from his father, a Cretan ship-owner and politician. Apart from founder and owner of Capital Maritime & Trading Corp., he’s also the owner and (technically former) president of Olympiakos F.C. and owner of Alter Ego Media, a vast media conglomerate. He has been accused in major corruption and criminal cases, in regards to fixing games in the Greek football championship, but most notoriously in the shady case of Noor1, a ship carrying 2,1 tons of heroin. A remarkably dubious case, where an unprecedented 9 witnesses have died, 3 judicial investigators have refused to take on the case and another 3 have quitted. Most notably Kaliopi Mantaka, who was considered to have made the furthest progress in the case, suddenly quit her job entirely, and moved with her whole family to the USA! Finally, Vangelis Marinakis, who has infamously been paying rent and equipment costs for Nea Dimokratia offices, is also the best man (in her wedding) of Ntora Mpakogianni, a Nea Dimokratia MP, sister of the PM and mother of the Mayor of Athens, and is widely considered one of the most ardent supporters and sponsors of the current government and ruling party.

Giannis Alafouzos: Born in the island of Santorini into a shipping family, he also inherited a vast fortune from his ship-owning father. He took over the family business Glafki (Hellas) Maritime Company and founded Ermis Maritime Corporation. He is administering Panathinaikos FC as its major shareholder, and president of SKAI media group and the newspaper Kathimerini. You might have noticed a tiny bit of a pattern so far. He has been prosecuted for petrol smuggling in 1992, and eventually acquitted. He was convicted in 2001 to 5 years imprisonment for debts, and later won the appeal. In 2016, the district attorney for Financial Crimes ordered the freezing of all of his assets of over 50 million Euro tax-dodging affair. Alafouzos later paid, and regained control of his assets. SKAI TV could be described as the FOX news of Greece, while Kathimerini tries to maintain a more serious bourgeois profile. Both, however, fervently support right-wing (and occasionally far right) politics, with hardly any pretence of objectivity.

Vardis Vardinogiannis and Family: The Vardinogiannis family is one of the most powerful in the country. Their business groups and conglomerates form a colossal network of power and wealth that includes shipping, petrol (refining and distribution), real estate & hotels, banking, media and others. Vardis, who is acknowledged as the leader of the clan, and the director of the big bulk of the family businesses, was targeted in 1990 by 17th November group, who fired 3 RPG rockets at his car. At least one hit the target, but the tycoon survived due to the car’s remarkably robust armour. The Cretan family has had a tradition of centrist politics, and specifically amical relations with the Papandreou political clan. Since 2007, however, Vardis’s niece, Olga Kefalogianni, has been a Nea Dimokratia MP, and the Minister of Tourism (2012-2015). She is the daughter of Eleni Vardinogianni, Vardis’s sister, and Giannis Kegfalogiannis, a prominent Nea Dimokratia politician. Also, another niece of Vardis, Chrysi Vardinogianni is married to actor Konstantinos Markoulakis, one of the closest friends and associates of the child rapist Dimitris Lignadis.

Two worlds collide, a war of old and new media, and a timeline of disgrace

Nea Dimokratia waged an ultimately successful election campaign with a hardline “Law and Order” rhetoric (among other things, such as lower taxes). It especially targeted the anarchists as a paradigmatic, collective personification of lawlessness, promising to eradicate them as a movement. After electoral victory, they set out to gradually bring unprecedented neoliberal and authoritarian legislation that was aiming to reshape the country in a long-lasting way. They started implementing the heavily advertised “law and order” agenda by waging war against the anarchists, evicting squats –starting with the ones that hosted refugees- and various other means of repression. When the Covid19 pandemic reached Greece and the lockdowns started, the party found a golden opportunity to accelerate their plans by bringing legislation that would have been unthinkable for previous governments, and in any case, would guarantee massive turmoil on the streets.

Most notably, the recently voted through the Parliament, and likely to never be implemented education reform, that includes introducing police forces and surveillance networks inside universities, penalizing all kinds of sociopolitical activities for students, and drastically cutting down the admissions; to create clientele for the private universities, that they are attempting to equate with the public ones in the same legislation.

An important note of context about this government is that it controls a staggering percentage of the mainstream media. It is commonly estimated that 80% of media are, not just on their side, but blindly praising them, to the point of ridicule. To mention one infamous (and rather amusing) example, Mitsotakis has been likened to Moses, who will lead the nation out of the desert of the current crisis. This has been achieved, not only by the eagerness of the business interests that control the media to support deregulation but also through literal bribes, given in broad daylight. The government has repeatedly issued special grants of public money, to a spectrum of their favourite news outlets, for “raising Covid19 awareness”.

This overwhelming rigging of public discourse in the traditional channels has shifted more power towards the new media of the internet, and especially social networking platforms. This is where anger and disdain have been brewing. Given that the Greek language has been hardly any priority for the central administrations of the tech giants that control platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and the old school, low tech repression capacities of the Greek State, the suppression of speech hasn’t caught up with what is going on in the English speaking world. In fact, if anything, this could be right now, the pivotal point of transition towards more comprehensive internet censorship. The timeline below will –among all else- manifest why.

August 7, 2020

One month after the election, the new Minister of Culture, Lina Mendoni, changes the laws about the positions of art directors, thus allowing for direct appointments without tender notice. Six days later she appointed Dimitris Lignadis as the new Art Director of the Greek National Theatre, the highest position in the industry. Dimitris Lignadis is considered to have a personal relationship with the PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis. According to prominent journalists, he has given him private tutoring in elocution.

January 8, 2021

After many years of vindictive treatment by the justice system, and the legislations blatantly passed with the sole purpose to deny him his prisoner rights, Dimitris Koufontinas starts a hunger strike. His demand is merely to stop the bold violation of the law (4760/2020, article 3) so that he can return to his original cell in Korydalos prison in Athens.

As a prime executioner of the Revolutionary Organization 17th November, Koufontinas was the person who executed Mitsotakis’s brother in law and the husband of the aforementioned Ntora Mpakogianni: Pavlos Mpakogiannis. More and more references in social media, begin to criticize the Mitsotakis clan for brazenly weaponizing the justice system, and handling Koufontinas in the manner of the Cretan Vendetta tradition.

January 20, 2021

Olympic Medalist and sailing champion Sofia Mpekatorou testifies to the District Attorney over her accusation of the 1998 sexual assault against a powerful sports manager. It was the official launch of the Greek #MeToo movement. The wave quickly starts sweeping the world of Greek theatre, with multiple accusations of sexual abuse surfacing.

February 2, 2021

As rumors about Dimitris Lignadis start circulating widely on social media, journalist Elena Akrita makes a post saying he is about to resign. The Ministry of Culture issues a scathing response, dismissing the claim and fully defending the director. During the next days, and while social outcry was raging, Lignadis took legal measures to prevent his name from being mentioned in public discourse in relation to such allegations. He is from then on referred to in the media as “the famous actor and director”. This is the first and only time this happened for anybody since the Greek #MeToo started.

February 6, 2021

The 20/20 Mag news website publishes an interview with Nikos S., where he describes his traumatic experience of being raped by “the famous actor and director” when he was 19 years old. The crime cannot be prosecuted, due to the statute of limitations (15 years). Although Nikos S didn’t name the director, his narration contains elements that directly identify Lignadis, who resignes the same day.

February 8, 2021

Nikos S. files a lawsuit against the director. On that day, Giorgos Kalaitzidis, a prominent member of the anarchist group Rouvikonas, makes the following post on Facebook: “The paedophile rapist Dimitris Lignadis is using his connections to get people to make phone calls, and threaten people to not move against him legally. This scum should know that more of us have entered this game. (…)” The post goes semi-viral.

February 10, 2021

Tens of thousands of people all over Greece come out to protest, amid the pandemic, against the education reform. The crowds are unexpectedly large, and it is regarded as a response to the government’s effort to take advantage of the lockdown. Many of those demonstrations are attacked by the police with multiple arrests, and the overall tension is growing.

February 11, 2021

The anarchist group Masovka makes an activist intervention at the political bureau of the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Miltiadis Varvitsiotis, where they throw leaflets and graffiti the walls in solidarity with Dimitris Koufontinas –among others. The next day, two of the group’s members are arrested/abducted right outside their homes. Soon after, in an egregious series of creative legal “innovations”, the whole group is facing prosecution as a “criminal organization”.

February 12-13, 2021

In an evidently coordinated manner, all the media outlets of the three aforementioned tycoons (see above) launch a shocking campaign of misinformation and propaganda in defence of Dimitris Lignadis, casting doubts or entirely dismissing the accusations. STAR TV, owned by the Vardinogiannis family, takes it the furthest. During the evening news on 12/02, they proclaim they will uncover “the whole truth” about the case, and broadcast a report titled “Famous director in the eye of the storm, over… nothing”. The still image of this title promptly goes viral, and triggers one of the biggest backlashes ever in Greek social media and the wider internet. So strong is the pushback, that STAR TV was forced to issue a public apology the next day. It appears the mainstream media have thoroughly lost this battle.

February 15, 2021

While more and more news surface about multiple further testimonies against the “famous actor and director”, and the internet is roaring with outrage, the spokesperson for the government gives a press conference. He makes some statements about the resignation of the “art director” -without mentioning his name- and goes on to explain that it was “for personal reasons”, while being so visibly awkward about it, that makes it, admittedly, hilarious to watch.

February 16, 2021

The actor Christos Perros gives a TV interview, accusing the “famous actor and director” of sexual harassment when Perros was 14 years old. The crime, again, cannot be prosecuted due to the statute of limitations. An anarchist demo in solidarity with Dimitris Koufontinas manages to take the streets and march through the city of Thessaloniki. Every similar attempt in Athens has been met with an overwhelming police force and brutality. Generally, throughout the whole month of February, there are activist actions and demos in several cities in Greece in solidarity with the hunger striker, which are heavily repressed more often than not.

February 17, 2021

A 40-year-old man called Vasilis gives another interview on television, describing how “the famous actor and director” sexually abused him when he was 15 years old. He had filed a lawsuit against him on February 5, but the crime cannot be prosecuted due to the statute of limitations.

February 18, 2021

A crowd of anarchists stages an intervention at the Ministry of Health in Athens, with banner drop and leaflets, in solidarity with Dimitris Koufontinas. 65 people are swiftly arrested and taken to the central police headquarters. They are later attacked by riot police inside the courts, after being released. That evening, the anarchist Giorgos Kalaitzidis of Rouvikonas posts on Facebook: “Christos Perros received a call after the [interview] broadcast where he accused Lignadis, and was told ‘You will die’. The Vice Minister of contemporary culture N.Giatromanolakis, instead of calling the lawyers of the victims, is calling the Actors Union every day, asking for information (to inform who?) Same with the District Attorney. Nikos S. (who also accused Lignadis) was stopped and searched by police outside his house.The gangsters are striking back. You will get steamrolled.” That post gets more than 500 shares.

February 19, 2021

More rallies in multiple cities in solidarity with Dimitris Koufontinas take place. The one in Athens is once again brutally attacked by the police. A third lawsuit is filed against Dimitris Lignadis for raping a 14-year-old boy. This time it’s within the statute of limitations. The Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni gives a press conference, where she says that she spoke with Lignadis and asked him persistently if the “rumours” were true, but he vehemently denied it. Then she goes on to say that he deceived her with his “profound acting”…True story!!

February 20, 2021

A surprise anarchist demo in solidarity with Dimitris Koufontinas reaches the headquarters of Nea Dimokratia party. The police attack the anarchists at the train station on their way back and arrest about 100 people. Dimitris Lignadis is finally arrested. The internet is flooding with commentary pointing out that he had two whole weeks since he was publicly accused of child rape -and resigned over it-, to destroy all possible evidence from hard drives, sim cards etc, that would further incriminate him, or even more so, possibly incriminate other prominent members of the country’s elite.

Today, the Nea Dimokratia government is on the ropes. Things were already going south for them before all this blew up. The handling of the pandemic has long escaped the appearance of control that they managed to project last spring. There is growing discontent on various layers of society for several different reasons. And now, they are taking more damage day by day from this scandal.

At the same time, there is growing concern that elements within the government may be considering a favourable to them scenario, in which Koufontinas death could provide the ideal exit strategy for them. Possibly the same elements who might advocate that such an eventuality will consolidate their far-right audience: the precious votes of the Golden Dawn. Hopefully, the more reasonable side will prevail. The one that understands that the consequences will be tremendous and long term.

The conclusion/synopsis of this complicated and nefarious story is that Greece is a kind of “banana republic” within the EU that is ruled by Feudal Gangsters, and the shade of the Acropolis cannot hide that. That the Greek state is degrading its own justice system in order to vindictively exterminate an already imprisoned guerilla fighter, in the same breath that it is degrading its own justice system in order to protect a child rapist. That if Dimitris Koufontinas becomes the first hunger striker to die in Europe since the IRA militants in 1981, it will be partially in order to create a distraction from an Epstein-level scandal that has “touched” the Prime Minister himself.

And finally, most importantly, if the worst happens, you should prepare to voice your anger about all this towards your local Greek Embassy, Consulate, or any other target of Greek interests. There is a day of solidarity called for tomorrow, February 24. 

Alexis Daloumis

P.S. “I am not ashamed, I do not repent, I am proud to have taken part in this great struggle for the freedom of humankind.”

Dimitris Koufontinas (towards the court, 15/1/2007)

________

source: Freedom Press

The post Greek Horror- How an Epstein level paedophile scandal could connect to the first time in Greek history that a political prisoner dies of hunger strike appeared first on Void Network.

Postmodernism has taken various guises and, accordingly, there is no absolute consensus on what constituted it in the first place. Fredric Jameson characterized it in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism as the loss of historicity, a lack of depth and meaningfulness and a waning of emotional affect, while Brian McHale in Postmodernist Fiction (1987) argued that postmodernism is defined by its fascination with the ontological. Taken together, postmodernism seems essentially to involve a questioning of the real, both in terms of the actual world, and in the representational efficacy and fidelity of fiction.

The forces that once drove postmodernism seem now to be depleted, however. Postmodernism rejected grand narratives, including those of religion, the concept of progress and of history itself. Angela Carter’s fiction, and particularly The Bloody Chamber, provides a clear example of the typical postmodernist impulse: in rewriting traditional fairy-tales she subverts grand narratives of gender, sexuality and female subjectivity. In contrast, in today’s cultural climate there appears to be a renewed engagement with history and a revival of mythic meaning-making that the arch-postmodernists would have abhorred. Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), for example, relates interconnecting histories – among them the story of a Japanese Kamikaze pilot in the Second World War and the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan, contextualizing both in a history of ideas, by reflecting throughout on the principles of Zen Buddhism.

Postmodernism refracted reality into endless language-games, with authors such as Paul Auster making appearances in the fictional universes of their novels or, as is the case in Julio Cortázar’s short story “The Continuity of Parks”, with characters reading stories only to find the embedded story bleeding back into their level of representation. At first glance, today’s writers demonstrate a similar impulse to blur the lines between fiction and reality, as David Shields advocates in his book Reality Hunger (2010). Yet when authors, or other real elements, appear in fiction now – as Ben Lerner does in 10:04 – their presence is intended to signal realism, rather than to foreground the artifice of the text. Indeed, in place of postmodernism’s cool detachment, its anti-anthropomorphism, realism is once again a popular mode. Emotions, furthermore, are again playing a central role in literary fiction, as authors insist on our essential relationality – our connectedness as humans to one another in the globalizing world and with fictional characters as representations of our selves.

It seems then, that a new dominant cultural logic is emerging; the world – or in any case, the literary cosmos – is rearranging itself. This process is still in flux and must be approached strictly in the present tense. To understand the situation, we have to pose a number of questions. The first, and most dramatic, is “Is postmodernism dead?”; quickly followed by “If so, when did it die?”. Critics – such as Christian Moraru, Josh Toth, Neil Brooks, Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen – repeatedly point to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the new millennium, the 9/11 attacks, the so-called “War on Terror” and the wars in the Middle East, the financial crisis and the ensuing global revolutions. Taken together, these events signify the failure and unevenness of global capitalism as an enterprise, leading to an ensuing disillusionment with the project of neo-liberal postmodernity and the recent political splintering into extreme Left and extreme Right. The cumulative effect of these events – and the accompanying hyper-anxiety brought about by twenty-four hour news – has made the Western world feel like a more precarious and volatile place, in which we can no longer be nonchalant about our safety or our future.

It seems fitting to me that Oxford Dictionaries chose the politically-charged “post-truth” as their word of the year for 2016. The prevalence of the word – associated particularly with the current political climate (Trump, Brexit, personality politics in general) – is symbolic of contemporary attitudes towards the concept of truth. It can help us to think about the radical cultural shifts that are underway. While modernism was ultimately founded on a utopianism that upheld certain universal truths, postmodernism rejected and deconstructed the notion of truth altogether. The prefix “post-” paradoxically ends up drawing into closer focus the very concept it seeks to reject. The two elements of the word therefore form a kind of metonym for the current stance; “post” reflects a lingering postmodernist distrust, while “truth” remains an important touchstone.

There are many terms for this new supplanting cultural logic, this shift in the ruling belief system: to name a few – altermodernism, cosmodernism, digimodernism, metamodernism, performatism, post-digital, post-humanism, and the clunky post-postmodernism. There are convergences and divergences between these conceptualizations; they complement each other as much as they compete. Even so, consistent across these formations is a legacy of modernist and postmodernist stylistic practice, and a rehabilitated ethical consciousness. Lerner’s 10.04 provides an illustrative case. In one episode, the narrator Ben has just finished his monthly shift at Park Slope Food Co-op. Ben, like many members of the Co-op, simultaneously exhibits pride in its eco-friendly, anti-capitalist ethos and disdain at its inflexibility in accommodating his own extensive travel plans in the working rota. While bagging dried mangoes, Noor, a fellow member, reveals that she is not biologically related to the man she thought was her father. This has significant repercussions for her sense of self, particularly since her Arab-American identity has been founded on her father’s Lebanese heritage.

Despite the intensely personal and affecting nature of Noor’s story, it is punctuated with interruptions. The narrator repeatedly interjects with reporting clauses and narratorial intrusions, such as “Noor said, although not in these words”. The device is postmodern, recursively framing and foregrounding the story in a story, yet it serves not as a self-reflexive affectation; but rather as a way of showing the hermeneutic function of stories in our memories, in our narratives of self and in our relationships with others. There is a narrative interruption too, when Ben is called away from the mangoes. Not yet knowing how Noor’s story ends, Ben wrongly jumps to the conclusion that the story is about Islamophobia. This judgement made by Lerner’s narrating character, self-righteous but flawed, is seen as emblematic of widespread Western social hypocrisy and made more poignant precisely because readers are supposed to interpret the character as a textual proxy for the author. Again, what seems like postmodern metatextuality – the character of the author in the fiction – is not used to postmodern effect. The typically postmodern appearance of the author reduced him or her to a linguistic sign by the ontological impossibility of their presence in the fiction. Contrastingly, Lerner’s author is precisely at home in the fiction.

Later reflecting on Noor’s story, Ben wishes there had been a way to comfort her “without it sounding like presumptuous co-op nonsense”. Ben contemplates his own feelings: “my personality dissolving into a personhood so abstract that every atom belonging to me as good as belonged to Noor, the fiction of the world rearranging itself around her”. In 10.04, this rearrangement of the world turns on an axis of human subjectivity, conceived as intimately and ethically relational.

10.04 is just one example of contemporary fiction that articulates a sentiment beyond the postmodern. It can be categorized as autofiction, a genre that integrates the autobiographical into fiction, and that has blossomed alongside the so-called memoir boom. The genre, at first glance, may seem strictly postmodern, dealing as it does with the fragmentation of the subject and the blurring of the fact–fiction ontological boundary. Yet contemporary autofictions narrativize the self not as a game, but in order to enhance the realism of a text and tackle the sociological and phenomenological dimensions of personal life. Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy (2017) is a case in point, detailing within a work of fiction the author’s own experiences as an effeminate young man in a small working-class village in Northern France.

Other recent literary trends, such as the popularity of historical fiction, the revival of realism and fiction’s increased engagement with visual and digital culture are also emblematic of this shift. While David Foster Wallace is often cited as the literary figure who issued a call-to-arms against ironic postmodern pop-culture, many other contemporary writers appear to be mounting the offence: among them Ben Lerner, but also Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Franzen, Sheila Heti, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ruth Ozeki, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith and Adam Thirlwell. Thirlwell’s Kapow! (2012), for instance, engages with the revolutions of the Arab Spring, interrogating their historicity and significance, through comparison with the French Revolution. In the process, the self-conscious narrator mixes high and low cultural references, emphasizes the relay of the media’s reportage of world events, and considers the appropriateness of writing his own Arabic novel.

At the same time, our culture retains many of the themes and concerns that exercised writers of earlier generations; there is little sign of a radical literary avant garde sweeping away the old to make way for the new. Postmodernism might not be as emphatically over as some critics like to claim, but it does seem to be in retreat. Its devices have become so commonplace that they have been absorbed into mainstream, commercial and popular culture. Postmodernism has lost its value in part because it has oversaturated the market. And with the end of postmodernism’s playfulness and affectation, we are better placed to construct a literature that engages earnestly with real-world problems. This new literature can, in good faith, examine complex and ever-shifting crises – of racial inequality, capitalism and climate change – to which it is easy to close one’s eyes.

Alison Gibbons is Reader in Contemporary Stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University and an editor of Notes on Metamodernism

source: THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

photo: Woman looking through a hole in the Berlin Wall after the opening of the border on November 09, 1989, in Berlin. (©Thomas Imo/Photothek via Getty Images)

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Among the groundswell of books investigating the link between aesthetics and politics, Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader is particularly ambitious. Published in 2007 as a companion volume to the historical survey exhibition Forms of Resistance at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Holland, the book features a wide-ranging collection of texts and manifestos, divided into four sections corresponding to four major watersheds in contemporary social and political history: the Paris Commune of 1871, the Soviet Revolution of 1917, the social uprisings of 1968 and the 1989 revolutions in the former Eastern Bloc.

Editors Will Bradley and Charles Esche have completed the anthology by inviting six contemporary critics (Geeta Kapur, Lucy Lippard, John Milner, Gerald Raunig, Marina Vishmidt, and Tirdad Zolghadr) to provide both a historical context and an interpretation for some of the readings. However, the interpretative framework remains light enough that the core of the project resides in the selection of historical documents produced by the artists and activists themselves.

Image: Poster by Emory Douglas

Thus, a critical appraisal of Art and Social Change can only start from matters of inclusion and exclusion. Even though Bradley and Esche do not make their criteria explicit, it is fair to say that the anthology has been compiled following a genealogical approach. Rather than searching for a mythical origin and its historic continuity, a genealogy sets out to ‘maintain passing events in their proper dispersion’, as Foucault explained after Nietzsche. The genealogist focuses on the numberless beginnings,

the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals, the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us.¹

By cutting through discontinuities and heterogeneous layers to isolate ‘different points of emergence’ in history, the genealogical approach avoids any identitarian closure, leaving the reader free to invent a trajectory through the material – and crucially, to decide upon its value in the present. However, Bradley’s introduction does argue that the selection retraces geographically ‘what might be termed the “globalisation of modernism”‘:

The conception of art primarily at issue here is a modern, Western one that has been disseminated around the planet as the social, economic, and political conditions and institutions that support it have been replicated.²

This is only partly true, as the editors downplay or ignore the socially engaged art of Southern European countries such as Italy, Spain, and Greece, the decolonisation movements of the 1960s, and the entire Asian and Australian continents where the globalisation of modernism has been under way for several decades. About a half of the selected authors are from the Americas, most notably the United States, and, in a much smaller measure, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Cuba. On the other side of the Atlantic, the book pays due homage to the European avant gardes with a specific focus on France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Poland, and a handful of artists from Eastern and Northern Europe (Slovenia, Serbia, Hungary, Denmark, and Sweden). Closing gestures toward Asia and the Middle East serve primarily as a reminder of territories still unexplored.

But if we accept that this is mostly a ‘modern, Western’ selection, it is nevertheless worth highlighting some thematic blind spots. Striking by its omission, for example, is the powerful mural painting movement that began around Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros in Mexico and went on to inspire the socially engaged artists of the United States in the 1930s. This kind of gap is perfectly comprehensible if we read the anthology as a genealogy of post-’68 practices, turned decisively away from any mass address or modernising program, emphasising instead the autonomy and singularity of each experience. But if that is the case, then it would have been useful to include texts by the subcultures and creative fringes of social movements such as the Indiani Metropolitani of the Italian 1977, the activist side of punk, and all the experiments in guerrilla communication and culture jamming that stem from the No Future generation.

The scope of the book is broad enough to reveal surprising patterns and potential alliances among experiences that took place several decades apart and under quite different political circumstances. We shall now unpack a few of them by way of a conversation that will also include some of the missing references highlighted above.

Image: Leaflet publicising the Situationist International Anthology, 1981

Marco Deseriis: The book starts from a highly symbolic historic conjuncture, the Paris Commune of 1871. At the time, the bourgeois separation between art and social praxis was a fait accompli. The industrial revolution had just dealt a fatal blow to craftsmanship – an activity in which manual and intellectual skills, the pursuit of the aesthetic and the useful were still integrated. Once production was rationalised, artworks began to be identified only by their belonging to the aesthetic sphere. The theory of l’art pour l’art reflected this status quo: the removal of art from practical life and the tendency of artworks to lose their social function. With the Commune, however, the bourgeois autonomy of art came under scrutiny. Gustave Coubert’s call to artists to take over museums and art collections in the course of the uprising, and William Morris’ socialist conception of art ‘as a necessity of human life which society has no right to withdraw from any one of the citizens’, tell us that by the end of the 19th century artists had begun to reclaim a social function for art, in alliance with the workers’ movement.³

Brian Holmes: The anthology reflects on its own departure point by including the Situationists’ ‘Theses on the Commune’ from 1962. For them it was a gigantic festival marked by leaderless spontaneity, clearing the ground for a kind of ‘unitary urbanism’ by destroying the monuments of domination. Yet they also saw Courbet as a deluded idealist who toppled the Vendôme Column while ignoring the nearby Bank of France, ripe for looting. What really counted for the Situationists were the material results and the live aesthetic experiences of the Commune – an attitude passed on to the direct-action movements of 1990s.

There could have been another departure point, however: the 1848 revolutions, a fully-fledged cycle of struggles stretching all over Europe. In France, 1848 marked the first time urbanised workers recognised themselves as a class subject to unemployment, homelessness and starvation, and the first time they forced themselves onto the public stage of representative democracy. It’s the archetypal contemporary conflict, experienced by factions of the entitled classes as a crisis of legitimacy that drove them into new political solidarities and utopian aesthetic experiments. It’s clear why the editors of the anthology didn’t want to sift through the flood of romantic idealism produced by that brief outburst of bourgeois experimentation. Yet here is a problem I see throughout the post-’68 left: a refusal to deal with the full complexity of social relations, and with the ambiguous or even disfigured forms they inevitably leave behind.

MD: Right, the social composition of the revolutionary wave of 1848 was very diverse and stratified. It included the urban petty bourgeoisie agitating for liberal reforms and national independence, as well as dispossessed farmers and factory workers. The thinker of the time who tried to integrate these social contradictions in a powerful aesthetic and political vision is Charles Fourier. Even if the phalanstères were designed to host the rich and the poor, and to restore social harmony without questioning the basis of capitalist accumulation, still they inspired many utopian communitarian experiments to come. Fourier conceived of labour as a pleasurable, playful activity to be modelled after human attitudes and desires. This made his theories quite appealing to the Surrealists and the Situationists, and in general to all social movements which place a high value on the productive power of imagination.

Images: Destruction of Colonne Vendôme, Paris, 1871

Fourier’s vision, which is unfortunately left out of this anthology, could be seen as an early instance of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have called the ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism. Mostly developed by intellectuals, bohemians and exiles of the bourgeoisie, this critique targets the alienation and oppression derived from the Fordist organisation of labour and industrial specialisation of functions. It has been historically accompanied by the working class critique of the inequalities which stem from the unbounded accumulation of wealth characteristic of capitalism. But since this ‘social critique’ of inequalities does not necessarily imply a critique of alienation and oppression, and vice versa, Boltanski and Chiapello note that, depending on historical circumstances, these two types of critique may find themselves in association or in collision.⁴

The social critique is represented in the anthology by two separate strands. The first runs from the Commune to Berlin Dada, the Surrealists, and after WWII, the Situationists International (SI) and the San Francisco Diggers. These groups all share the belief that art can be fully realised only by being abolished as an autonomous sphere – a task that for them is inextricably tied to the abolition of capitalism. The second strand is represented by the Bauhaus and De Stijl, which try to overcome the dichotomy between manual and intellectual work, functionalism and pleasure, by introducing new design principles into industrial production. In one respect, Russian constructivism can be associated with this second modernist strand in that it also tries to merge art and industrial production; yet on an ideological level it is closer to Dada and the Situationists in its fierce rejection of any style or aesthetics which is not subjected to the transient, historic needs of the working class.

BH: All that is well said, but to locate social critique in movements that sought either to turn art into everyday life or to fuse art and industrial design is to underscore what’s been left out of this genealogy. Variations on socialist realism were spread around the world by the 1936 Popular Front against fascism, then reinvented in surprising ways by Third World liberation movements, often via surrealism. But they are barely represented here, so it’s hard to grasp the affinities between the Black Panther graphics of Emory Douglas in the US, the murals of the Brigadas Ramona Parra in Chile, and the posters of the Atelier Populaire in France. The missing link is revolutionary Cuba and the Tricontinental movement, which produced an influential series of posters advocating global revolution. The inclusion of the 1972 ‘Call to the Artists of Latin America’ gives an inkling of the leftist politics, but not of its visual traditions. Well, the editors found the genealogies of direct action and self-organisation more compelling, and so do I. Still, there have been fantastic political experiments with the popular languages of street art, which bear much closer relation to the workers’ movement and its social critique. Contemporary groups spring to mind, like Ne Pas Plier in France, or the Grupo de Arte Callejero and the Taller Popular de Serigrafia in Argentina, not to mention ongoing muralist movements in cities like Los Angeles.

MD: Yes, the murals and the political posters you mention (to which I would add the anarchist posters of the Spanish Civil War) are only marginally represented here. The reader seems to privilege expressive forms such as performances, manifestos, and calls to action. Of course, activist murals and posters can also incite action, but the visual representation of resistance is always at risk of being instrumentalised by political vanguards, or of being turned into folk art after its ties to a living social struggle have been severed.

In this respect, Debord’s analysis of the spectacle may still be relevant. The reader features another situationist text, explaining that the expulsion of 28 members was due to their refusal to renounce their artistic careers – a position deemed incompatible with the SI.⁵ This highlights a contradiction that keeps haunting activist art. If social movements have always expressed their imagining activity in one form or another, the culture industry puts these representations at risk of being commodified. As you noted in ‘The Flexible Personality’, Boltanski and Chiapello argue that it was by neutralising social critique through economic concessions and by subsuming artistic critique that capitalism was able to enter its late phase.⁶

BH: The anarcho-libertarian vein of the ’68 movements was selectively mined for whatever could fit into the emerging hegemony of neoliberalism. This cultural integration is the glue that holds together a disjointed system. Boltanski and Chiapello were able to document the process by a statistical analysis of ’68-era terms being used in managerial literature. But they see no value in artistic critique. They lament the decline of the workers’ movement and they idealise the welfare period without questioning the welfare-warfare state, but they offer no resources for the characteristic struggles of the present.

By the late 1990s it was clear that whole new dimensions of alienation were setting in, not only on the receiving end of surveillance and monitoring, but at every level of professional and freelance practice. Individuals were constantly enjoined to be more productive, more appetitive, more intensively plugged into the digital prosumer system. All that was unimaginable without new developments in what I call the semiotic economy, referring both to the frenetic consumption of signs and images and to the continuous creation of credit money on the financial markets – two inseparable phenomena. Since the dead ends of this ‘new economy’ were already visible, I thought that artists should both critique the contemporary forms of alienation and find ways to revolt against them, in solidarity and collaboration with more directly oppressed and exploited people.

Image: San Francisco Diggers distributing free food, 1966

MD: The counter-culture was not only selectively mined to reorganise workflows around teamwork and flexibility, but also to harness its ethics of openness, sharing and decentralisation in the service of primitive accumulation in the IT sector. Fred Turner has shown how the encounter of San Francisco flower power with the technological culture of the Silicon Valley gave birth to what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have labelled as the Californian Ideology, the ‘anti-statist gospel of hi-tech libertarianism’, which provided the ‘spirit’ of the late 1990s dotcom boom.⁷

In this respect Art and Social Change tells only the first part of the story. No doubt, the Diggers’ ‘post-competitive game’ to build Free Cities across America, and their hilarious plan of action to persuade corporate employees to abandon the workplace – summarised in the slogan ‘Give Up Jobs. Be With People. Defend Against Property’ – offers a powerful blend of social and artistic critique.⁸ But after purging this critique of its radical aspects, flexible capital offered workers the option of fleeing the office (but not work) through the new communication technologies; to ‘be with people’ by expressing their own creative and relational qualities in teamwork; and to overshadow the issue of property and distribution of wealth under the ideology of the gift economy and free access to the information society. The result is that nowadays everyone is entitled to have free internet access, no matter whether they are homeless or survive on food stamps!

The largely untold side of this story, or its ‘obscene underside’ as Žižek would call it, is that the creative class quickly gentrifies the new urban districts where internet access is free but housing prohibitively expensive. Over the last two decades the cultural production of Richard Florida’s ‘high bohemians’ has been appropriated and re-sold at exorbitant prices by the real estate industry: in spite of their low income, artists are no longer seen as potential allies by the working class, but simply as the spearhead of gentrification.⁹ I think we need to ask ourselves how to reverse this trend. Where would you start from?

BH: I started by using new media to take to the streets, to spark confrontations. The thing is, spectacle has acquired a different meaning since the advent of flexible accumulation. It is no longer the homogeneous mass-produced image that characterised the state and corporate media of the 1950s and ’60s. Now it is something you constantly produce through a plethora of miniaturised devices. It has to be critiqued in motion, at the heart of interactivity.

This anthology contains great insights into the sources of what is now called ‘tactical media’, particularly in a series of texts running from Cildo Meireles’ ‘Insertions into Ideological Circuits’ to Paul Ryan’s ‘Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare’. The meeting between multimedia computers and the concept-art strategies for the activation of the viewer is directly prefigured in the alternative video movements envisioned by the journal Radical Software in 1970. Just as Meireles suggested in the Brazilian context, it is a matter of inserting subversive expressions into the very circuits where life under late capital is configured. To appropriate the media is tantamount to appropriating the means of production because, as Félix Guattari pointed out, what’s at stake is the production of subjectivity.¹⁰

Image: Theo van Doesburg, Counter-Composition V, 1924

Later developments can be glimpsed in the glossary of net-culture terms by the Raqs Media Collective or the interview with Ricardo Dominguez, one of the founders of the Electronic Disturbance Theatre. His work resonates with the hybrid border-crossing art of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and with the ‘invisible theatre’ of Augusto Boal in 1970s Brazil, which shifted Brecht’s alienation-effect into everyday spaces of performance. Figures like Boal are sources for the performative politics of the Zapatistas, with whom Dominguez has closely cooperated. So even in the most high-tech, networked performance there is a transformation of an aesthetic and revolutionary history stretching back to the Third World movements, which themselves reworked the internationalist struggles against fascism. If the anthology had included some links between the 1970s in Italy and the counter-globalisation movements, then we could trace similar lines of development in and around Europe. Unlike Boltanski and Chiapello, I don’t see how cultural issues can be disentangled from the politics of life and labour. Yet there has been a real decline in the capacity of artists to arouse outrage at both alienation and exploitation. The ideological force of neoliberal culture has been amazingly effective.

MD: In my view, there are two major reasons why the critique of alienation has withered. The first one is that as the opportunities for activists to insert themselves into the ‘ideological circuits’ increased, the feeling of being just another spectator declined (Indymedia’s motto ‘Don’t Hate the Media, Become the Media’ perfectly exemplifies this shift). With the emergence of the network society it is increasingly problematic to claim, as Debord did, that the spectacle is simply the language of capitalist separation, that is, a one-to-many relationship which rigidly divides ‘what is possible from what is permitted.’¹¹ In recent years, the single Spectacle has been accompanied by many spectacles which open up new political imaginaries while enhancing the autonomy of their producers.

The second reason why the 1960s artistic critique of alienation is no longer effective is that the new machines have become, as Donna Haraway once said, our ‘intimate components’ and ‘friendly selves’.¹² Since these machines enable a strange mix of repetitive and creative tasks, manual and intellectual activities, revolting against them would be like revolting against ourselves. But if in the age of networked publics every social and linguistic activity is immediately put to work, how can we produce subjectivities that do not simply feed capital? The text ‘How To?’ by the Tiqqun group, which can be criticised for its ambiguous celebration of political anonymity and insurrectionalist mystique, advances the idea of the Human Strike.¹³ From my understanding, this is a strike against the production of fake subjectivities and critiques which are not rooted in local communities sharing strong affective bonds. This could be read as a critique of the tactical media scene, and more broadly, of the tendency to generate critical discourses detached from any need to transform society from the ground up.

BH: ‘How To?’ is a poetic call to insurrection, resonating with a number of recent revolts. Tiqqun has developed a radical critique of cybernetic society, which they see as a total mobilisation of the ego for meaningless labour and consumption. Of course that implies a critique of tactical media, which has been largely neutralised by corporate and government sponsorship. Tiqqun proposes an anti-aesthetic, a way of cutting the feedback loops that bind us to our marketised selves. It is linked with a rising desire to exit the cities; but with an obvious difference from 1960s utopias, of the kind represented in the reader by the fascinating, yet little-known artist Bonnie Sherk with her text on the social art work of ‘The Farm’ in San Francisco. A more or less violent aesthetics of withdrawal from neoliberal networks is now being expressed in many countries, because it’s one way to begin shifting towards a new paradigm. A very dangerous way, however – which could also justify further escalations of the military-police state and the durable installation of authoritarian neoliberalism.

In the early part of this decade, I hoped that networked social movements could theatricalise the real social relations of neoliberal society, suspending its functional norms and opening up space and time for collective questioning. That was done by unleashing an unauthorised circulation of subversive ideas, to be embodied by militant groups in urban situations. Or anyway, that’s how I explained it in ‘The Revenge of the Concept’, included in this anthology. Those protests worked to a degree, because there has been an intense examination of neoliberalism including both social and ecological critiques. Now I’m hoping that social movements can influence the new economic paradigm that will ultimately emerge from the crisis, by inventing critical and poetic discourses, shaping viable territories and constructing cooperative machines. Leafing through the reader, I find myself wondering if our times can produce anyone like Theo Van Doesburg, who was both a dadaist and a member of De Stijl, and who called destructively for the end of art while designing a constructivist aesthetics of built environments. But that reference is a bit too genealogical! What do you see as the discontinuous breakthroughs of the present?

Image: Laibach poster, The Occupied Europe Tour, 1983

MD: I think we need to start by relocating the forms of alienation. As Matteo Pasquinelli points out in his new book Animal Spirits, the libidinal economy of the network society generates a symbolic surplus-value that the real estate market tries to parasite and put to work in the new creative districts of the world cities.¹⁴ The fact that information is an abstract, non-rivalrous good does not mean that its wealth cannot be appropriated and congealed into (private) space. From this flows the notion that the critique of intellectual property cannot be separated from a critique of material property and of rent, that is, of the earliest form of capitalist property.

In the contemporary factories of biopolitical production, artists are the urban pioneers who identify the hotspots in advance. Therefore it is their duty to ask themselves how to retain the value they produce through their common imagining activities and cultural production within the community in which they live. The reader features a great article on the group Park Fiction, which describes the successful struggle of a Hamburg association of residents to design and obtain a public park through a participatory planning procedure in the historic district of St. Pauli, against the attempts of the city to gentrify it.¹⁵

On a symbolic level the critique of alienation can take on many different forms. Personally I am fond of collective experiments such as Laibach, Luther Blissett, etoy, Ubermorgen, Rtmark, Yo Mango! and others which subtract themselves from the hegemonic field by changing the very coordinates in which they operate. The music and performances of Laibach exemplify this strategy perfectly. By juxtaposing industrial sounds, pop songs, totalitarian symbols, and avant garde art, Laibach restages the foundational violence of the nation state and of every spectacle. As they say in their manifesto, the Ten Items of the Covenant, included in the reader: ‘All art is subject to political manipulation […] except for that which speaks the language of this same manipulation.’¹⁶

It is important to recognise, however, that Laibach’s performances do not only target pop culture and totalitarian ideology but also art itself, in particular the will to power of the avant garde. I believe that a new artistic critique of alienation cannot ignore the basic fact that art is a form of power. This is particularly true now that art is no longer used, as in totalitarianism, to aestheticise politics, but to redesign the urban space according to the shifting needs of semiocapitalism. In this respect it would be very important to update Lefebvre’s analysis of the accumulation and distribution of power in urban space, to stimulate practices of reappropriation in which artists could play an important role. After all Lefebvre’s The Right to The City, written in 1967, became the slogan of a whole movement.¹⁷

Marco Deseriis <snafu AT thething.it> is a Ph. D. Candidate in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He has co-authored, along with Giuseppe Marano, a book on Net.Art (Shake, 2003-08) and collaborates with the festival of Culture Jamming and Radical Entertainment The Influencers, http://theinfluencers.org

Brian Holmes <brian.holmes AT wanadoo.fr> is a cultural critic, living in Paris and Chicago, working with artistic and political practices. He is the author of Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art and Politics in a Networked Era (Zagreb: WHW, 2002) and Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (New York: Autonomedia, 2008). He currently collaborates on the Continental Drift seminar with the 16 Beaver group in New York. Forthcoming book and text archive at http://brianholmes.wordpress.com

Info

Will Bradley and Charles Esche (eds.), Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, Tate Publishing UK, 2008

Footnotes

1 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, trans. and ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977, p.146.

2 Will Bradley, ‘Introduction’, in Will Bradley and Charles Esche (eds.), Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, London: Tate-Afterall, 2007, p.11.

3 William Morris, ‘The Socialist Ideal: Art’, in Art and Social Change, p.50.

4 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso, 2007.

5 Situationist International (J. V. Martin, Jan Strijbosch, Raoul Vaneigem, René Viénet), ‘Response to a Questionnaire from the Center for Socio-Experimental Art’, in Art and Social Change, pp.125-9.

6 Brian Holmes, ‘The Flexible Personality: For A New Cultural Critique’, in Hieroglyphs of the Future, Zagreb: WHW/Arkzin, 2002. Available at http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en

7 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, The University of Chicago Press, 2006; Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, ‘The Californian Ideology’, available on multiple websites, including www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/pessimism/ califIdeo_I.html

8 The San Francisco Diggers, ‘Trip Without A Ticket’, and, ‘The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free City’, in Art and Social Change, pp.146-56.

9 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books, 2002.

10 Félix Guattari, ‘On the Production of Subjectivity’, in Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, Indiana University Press, 1995.

11 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb, London: Rebel Press, 2002, p.14.

12 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991, p.178.

13 Tiqqun, ‘How To?’, in Art and Social Change, pp.297-312.

14 Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons, Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2009.

15 Christoph Schäfer and Cathy Skene with the Hafenrandverein, ‘Rebellion on Level P’, in Art and Social Change, pp.283-9.

16 Laibach, ‘Ten Items of the Covenant’, Art and Social Change, p.251.

17 Henri Lefebvre, ‘Right to the City’, in Writings on Cities, trans. and ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996, pp.63-177.

Source: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/concerning-art-and-social-change

The post CONCERNING ART AND SOCIAL CHANGE By Marco Deseriis and Brian Holmes appeared first on Void Network.

In most of the liberal discussions of the recent police killings of unarmed black men, there is an underlying assumption that the police are supposed to protect and serve the population. That is, after all, what they were created to do. If only the normal, decent relations between the police and the community could be re-established, this problem could be resolved. Poor people in general are more likely to be the victims of crime than anyone else, this reasoning goes, and in that way, they are in more need than anyone else of police protection. Maybe there are a few bad apples, but if only the police weren’t so racist, or didn’t carry out policies like stop-and-frisk, or weren’t so afraid of black people, or shot fewer unarmed men, they could function as a useful service that we all need.

This liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police and what they were created to do. The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid to late nineteenth century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.

This is a blunt way of stating a nuanced truth, but sometimes nuance just serves to obfuscate.

Before the nineteenth century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the Northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols. Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods.

Class conflict roiled late nineteenth century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class. This ideology of order that developed in the late nineteenth century echoes down to today – except that today, poor black and Latino people are the main threat, rather than immigrant workers.

Of course, the ruling class did not get everything it wanted, and had to yield on many points to the immigrant workers it sought to control. This is why, for instance, municipal governments backed away from trying to stop Sunday drinking, and why they hired so many immigrant police officers, especially the Irish. But despite these concessions, businessmen organized themselves to make sure the police were increasingly isolated from democratic control, and established their own hierarchies, systems of governance, and rules of behavior. The police increasingly set themselves off from the population by donning uniforms, establishing their own rules for hiring, promotion, and firing, working to build a unique esprit des corps, and identifying themselves with order. And despite complaints about corruption and inefficiency, they gained more and more support from the ruling class, to the extent that in Chicago, for instance, businessmen donated money to buy the police rifles, artillery, Gatling guns, buildings, and money to establish a police pension out of their own pockets.

There was a never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced “the law,” or came anywhere close to that ideal (for that matter, the law itself has never been neutral). In the North, they mostly arrested people for the vaguely defined “crimes” of disorderly conduct and vagrancy throughout the nineteenth century. This meant that the police could arrest anyone they saw as a threat to “order.” In the post-bellum South, they enforced white supremacy and largely arrested black people on trumped-up charges in order to feed them into convict labor systems.

The violence the police carried out and their moral separation from those they patrolled were not the consequences of the brutality of individual officers, but were the consequences of careful policies designed to mold the police into a force that could use violence to deal with the social problems that accompanied the development of a wage-labor economy. For instance, in the short, sharp depression of the mid 1880s, Chicago was filled with prostitutes who worked the streets. Many policemen recognized that these prostitutes were generally impoverished women seeking a way to survive, and initially tolerated their behavior. But the police hierarchy insisted that the patrolmen do their duty whatever their feelings, and arrest these women, impose fines, and drive them off the streets and into brothels, where they could be ignored by some members of the elite and controlled by others. Similarly, in 1885, when Chicago began to experience a wave of strikes, some policemen sympathized with strikers. But once the police hierarchy and the mayor decided to break the strikes, policemen who refused to comply were fired. In these and a thousand similar ways, the police were molded into a force that would impose order on working class and poor people, whatever the individual feelings of the officers involved.

Though some patrolmen tried to be kind and others were openly brutal, police violence in the 1880s was not a case of a few bad apples – and neither is it today.

Much has changed since the creation of the police – most importantly the influx of black people into the Northern cities, the mid-twentieth century black movement, and the creation of the current system of mass incarceration in part as a response to that movement. But these changes did not lead to a fundamental shift in policing. They led to new policies designed to preserve fundamental continuities. The police were created to use violence to reconcile electoral democracy with industrial capitalism. Today, they are just one part of the “criminal justice” system which continues to play the same role. Their basic job is to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system – who in our society today are disproportionately poor black people.

A democratic police system is imaginable – one in which police are elected by and accountable to the people they patrol. But that is not what we have. And it’s not what the current system of policing was created to be.

If there is one positive lesson from the history of policing’s origins, it is that when workers organized, refused to submit or cooperate, and caused problems for the city governments, they could back the police off from the most galling of their activities. Murdering individual police officers, as happened in in Chicago on May 3rd 1886 and more recently in New York on December 20th, 2014, only reinforced those calling for harsh repression – a reaction we are beginning to see already. But resistance on a mass scale could force the police to hesitate. This happened in Chicago during the early 1880s, when the police pulled back from breaking strikes, hired immigrant officers, and tried to re-establish some credibility among the working class after their role in brutally crushing the 1877 upheaval.

The police might be backed off again if the reaction against the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and countless others continues. If they are, it will be a victory for those mobilizing today, and will save lives – though as long as this system that requires police violence to control a big share of its population survives, any change in police policy will be aimed at keeping the poor in line more effectively.

We shouldn’t expect the police to be something they’re not. As historians, we ought to know that origins matter, and the police were created by the ruling class to control working class and poor people, not help them. They’ve continued to play that role ever since.

source: http://lawcha.org/wordpress/2014/12/29/stop-kidding-police-created-control-working-class-poor-people/#disqus_thread

Sam Mitrani is an Associate Professor of History at the College of DuPage. He earned his PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2009 and his book The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894 is available from the University of Illinois Press.

The post Stop Kidding Yourself! The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People- by Sam Mitrani appeared first on Void Network.

Gilles Dauvé’s pamphlet on the on the failures of the Russian, Spanish and German Revolutions, and the rise of fascism in Europe it becomes more and more important in our times where he fascists movements reappear all over Europe and the masses seems unable to overcome the smae old mistakes of the past.


Brest-Litovsk, 1917 and 1939

“If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.”

Marx/Engels – Preface to the Russian edition of the manifesto, 1882. This perspective was not realized. The European industrial proletariat missed its rendez-vous with a revitalized Russian peasant commune.

Brest-Litovsk, Poland, December 1917: the Bolsheviks propose peace without annexations to a Germany intent on taking over a large swath of the old Tsarist empire, stretching from Finland to the Caucusus. But in February 1918, the German soldiers, “proletarians in uniform” though they were, obey their officers and resume the offensive against a Russia still ruled by soviets. No fraternization occurs, and the revolutionary war advocated by the Bolshevik left proves impossible. In March, Trotsky has to sign a peace treaty dictated by the Kaiser’s generals. “We’re trading space for time”, as Lenin put it, and in fact, in November, the German defeat turns the treaty into a scrap of paper. Nevertheless, practical proof of the international link-up of the exploited had failed to materialize. A few months later, returning to civilian life with the war’s end, these same proletarians confront the alliance of the official workers’ movement and the Freikorps. Defeat follows defeat: in Berlin, Bavaria and then in Hungary in 1919; the Red Army of the Ruhr in 1920; the March Action in 1921…

September 1939. Hitler and Stalin have just carved up Poland. At the border bridge of Brest-Litovsk, several hundred members of the KPD, refugees in the USSR subsequently arrested as “counter-revolutionaries” or “fascists”, are taken from Stalinist prisons and handed over to the Gestapo.

1917-1937, twenty years that shook the world. The succession of horrors represented by fascism, then by World War II and the subsequent upheavals, are the effect of a gigantic social crisis opening with the mutinies of 1917 and closed by the Spanish Civil War*.

*This is a shorter, entirely reconceived version of the preface to the collection Bilan/Contre-révolution en Espagne 1936-1939, Paris, 1979 (now out of print). A text in progress will deal further with the question of the development of fascism, and thus of anti-fascism, in our own epoch.

“Fascism and Big Capital” 

If it is precisely the case, to use the formulation made famous by Daniel Guerin, that fascism serves the interests of big capital, 99% of the people articulating this perfectly accurate thesis hasten to add that, in spite of everything, fascism could have been averted in 1922 or 1933 if the workers’ movement and/or the democrats had mounted enough pressure to bar it from power. If only, in 1921, the Italian Socialist Party and the newly-founded Italian Communist Party had allied with republican forces to stop Mussolini; if only, at the beginning of the thirties, the KPD had not launched a fratricidal struggle against the SPD, Europe would have been spared one of the most ferocious dictatorships in history, a second world war, a Nazi empire of almost continental dimensions, the concentration camps, and the extermination of the Jews. Above and beyond its very true observations about classes, the state, and the ties between fascism and big industry, this vision fails to see that fascism arose out of a two-fold failure: the failure of the revolutionaries after World War I, crushed as they were by Social Democracy and parliamentary democracy, and then, in the course of the 1920’s, the failure of the democrats and Social Democrats in managing capital. Without a grasp of the preceding period as well as of the earlier phase of class struggle and its limits, the coming to power and, still more, the nature of fascism remain incomprehensible. For the rest, it is no accident that Guerin misjudges both the Popular Front, in which he sees a “failed revolution”, and the real significance of fascism .

What is the real thrust of fascism, if not the economic and political unification of capital, a tendency which has become general since 1914? Fascism was a particular way of bringing about that unity in countries–Italy and Germany– where, even though the revolution had been snuffed out, the state was unable to impose order, including order in the ranks of the bourgeoisie. Mussolini was no Thiers, with a solid base of power, ordering regular armed forces to massacre the Communards. An essential aspect of fascism is its birth in the streets, its use of disorder to impose order, its mobilization of the old middle classes half-crazed by their own decline, and its regeneration, from without, of a state unable to deal with the crisis of capitalism . Fascism was an effort of the bourgeoisie to forcibly tame its own contradictions, to turn working-class methods of mass mobilization to its own advantage, and to deploy all the resources of the modern state, first against an internal enemy, then against an external one.

This was indeed a crisis of the state, during the transition to the total domination of capital over society. First, worker organizations had been necessary to deal with the proletarian upsurge; then fascism was required to put an end to the ensuing disorder. This disorder was, of course, not revolutionary, but it was paralyzing, and stood in the way of solutions which, as a result, could only be violent. The crisis was only erratically overcome at the time; the fascist state was efficient only in appearance, because it forcibly integrated the wage-labor work force, and artificially buried conflicts by projecting them into militarist adventure. But the crisis was overcome, relatively, by the multi-tentacled democratic state established in 1945, which potentially appropriated all of fascism’s methods, and added some of its own, since it neutralizes wage-worker organizations without destroying them. Parliaments have lost control over the executive. With welfare or with workfare, by modern techniques of surveillance or by state assistance extended to millions of individuals, in short by a system which makes everyone more and more dependent, social unification goes beyond anything achieved by fascist terror, but fascism as a specific movement has disappeared. It corresponded to the forced-march discipline of the bourgeoisie, under the pressure of the state, in the particular context of newly-created states hard-pressed to also constitute themselves as nations.

The bourgeoisie even took the word “fascism” from working-class organizations in Italy, which were often called fasci.. It is significant that fascism first defined itself as a form of organization and not as a program. Its only program is to organize everyone, to forcibly make the component parts of society converge. Dictatorship is not a weapon of capital (as if capital could replace it with other, less brutal weapons); dictatorship is one of its tendencies, a tendency realized whenever it is deemed necessary. A “return” to parliamentary democracy, as it occurred (for example) in Germany after 1945, indicates that dictatorship is useless for integrating the masses into the state (at least until the next time). The problem is therefore not the fact that democracy ensures a more pliant domination than dictatorship; anyone would prefer being exploited in the Swedish mode to being abducted by the henchmen of Pinochet. But does one have the CHOICE? Even the gentle democracy of Scandinavia would be transformed into dictatorship if circumstances demanded it. The state can only have one function, which it fulfills democratically or dictatorially. The fact that the former is less harsh does not mean that it is possible to reorient the state to dispense with the latter. Capitalism’s forms depend no more on the preferences of wage workers than they do on the intentions of the bourgeoisie. Weimar capitulated to Hitler with open arms. Leon Blum’s Popular Front did not “avoid fascism”, because in 1936 France required neither an authoritarian unification of capital nor a shrinking of its middle classes.

There is no political “choice” to which proletarians could be enticed or which they could forcibly impose. Democracy is not dictatorship, but democracy does prepare dictatorship, and prepares itself for dictatorship.

The essence of anti-fascism consists in resisting fascism by defending democracy; it no longer struggles against capitalism but seeks to pressure capitalism into renouncing the totalitarian option. Since socialism is identified with total democracy, and capitalism with an accelerating tendency to fascism, the antagonisms between proletariat and capital, communism and wage labor, proletariat and state, are rejected for a counterposition of democracy and fascism presented as the quintessential revolutionary perspective. The official left and far-left tell us that a real change would be the realization, at last, of the ideals of 1789, endlessly betrayed by the bourgeoisie. The new world? Why, it is already here, to some extent, in embryos to be preserved, in little buds to be tended: already-existing democratic rights must be pushed further and further within an infinitely perfectible society, with ever-greater daily doses of democracy, until the achievement of complete democracy, or socialism.

Thus reduced to anti-fascist resistance, social critique is enlisted in dithyrambs to everthing it once denounced, and gives up nothing less than that shop-worn affair, revolution, for gradualism, a variant on the “peaceful transition to socialism” once advocated by the Communist Parties, and derided, before 1968, by anyone serious about changing the world. The retrogression is palpable.

We won’t invite ridicule by accusing the left and the far left of having discarded a communist perspective which they knew in reality only when opposing it. It is all too obvious that anti-fascism renounces revolution. But anti-fascism fails exactly where its “realism” claims to be effective: in preventing a possible dictatorial mutation of society.

Bourgeois democracy is a phase in capital’s seizure of power, and its extension in the twentieth century completes capital’s domination by intensifying the isolation of individuals. Proposed as a remedy for the separation between men and community, between human activity and society, and between classes, democracy will never be able to solve the problem of the most separated society in history. As a form forever incapable of modifying its content, democracy is only a part of the problem to which it claims to be the solution. Each time it claims to strengthen the “social bond”, democracy contributes to its dissolution. Each time it papers over the contradictions of the commodity, it does so by tightening the hold of the “safety net” which the state has placed under social relations. Even in their own desperately resigned terms, the antifascists, to be credible, have to explain to us how local democracy is compatible with the colonization of the commodity which empties out public space and fills up the shopping malls. They have to explain how an omnipresent state to which people constantly turn for protection and help, this veritable machine for producing social “good”, will not commit “evil” when explosive contradictions require it to restore order. Fascism is the adulation of the statist monster, while anti-fascism is its more subtle apology. The fight for a democratic state is inevitably a fight to consolidate the state, and far from crippling totalitarianism, such a fight increases totalitarianism’s stranglehold on society.





Rome, 1919-1922 
The countries where fascism triumphed are also the countries in which the revolutionary assault after World War I matured into a series of armed insurrections. In Italy, an important part of the proletariat, using its own methods and goals, directly confronted fascism. There was nothing specifically anti-fascist about its struggle: fighting capital compelled workers to fight both the Blacksh irts and the cops of parliamentary democracy.

Fascism is unique in giving counter-revolution a mass base and in mimicking revolution. Fascism turns the call to “transform the imperialist war into civil war” against the workers’ movement, and it appears as a reaction of demobilized veterans returning to civilian life, where they are nothing, held together by nothing but collective violence, and bent on destroying everything they imagine to be a cause of their dispossession: trouble-makers, subversives, enemies of the nation, etc.

Thus from the outset fascism became an auxiliary of the police in rural areas, putting down the agricultural proletariat with bullets, but at the same time developing a frenzied anti-capitalist demagogy. In 1919, when it represented nothing, fascism demanded the abolition of the monarchy, the Senate and all titles of nobility, the vote for women, the confiscation of the property of the clergy, and the expropriation of the big landowners and industrialists. Fighting against the worker in the name of the “producer”, Mussolini exalted the memory of the Red Week of 1914 (which had seen a wave of riots, particularly in Ancona and Naples), and hailed the positive role of unions in linking the worker to the nation. Fascism’s goal was the authoritarian restoration of the state, in order to create a new state structure capable (in contrast to democracy, said Mussolini), of limiting big capital and of controlling the commodity logic which was eroding values, social ties and work.

Traditionally, the bourgeoisie had tried to deny the reality of social contradictions; fascism, on the contrary, proclaimed them with violence, denying their existence between classes and transposing them to the struggle between nations, denouncing Italy’s fate as a “proletarian nation”.

Fascist repression was unleashed after a proletarian failure engineered mainly by democracy and its main fallback options: the parties and unions, which alone can defeat the workers by employing direct and indirect methods in tandem. It is false to present fascism’s arrival in power as the culmination of street battles in which it defeated the workers. In Germany, the proletarians had been crushed eleven or twelve years earlier. In Italy they were defeated by both ballots and bullets.

In 1919, federating pre-existing elements with other elements close to him politically, Mussolini founded his fasci. To counter clubs and revolvers, while Italy was exploding along with the rest of Europe, democracy called…for a vote, from which a moderate and socialist majority emerged.

“Victory, the election of 150 socialist deputies, was won at the cost of the ebb of the insurrectionary movement and the political general strike, and the rollback of the gains that had already been won”, Bordiga commented 40 years later.

At the time of the factory occupations of 1920, the state, holding back from a head-on assault, allowed the proletariat to exhaust itself, with the support of the CGL (a majority-socialist union), which wore down the strikes when it did not break them openly.

As soon as the fasci appeared, sacking the Case di Popolo, the police either turned a blind eye or confiscated the workers’ guns. The courts showed the fasci the greatest indulgence, and the army tolerated their exactions when it did not actually assist them. This open but unofficial support became quasi-official with the Bonomi circular of Oct. 20, 1921, providing 60,000 demobilized officers to take command of Mussolini’s assault groups. What did the parties do? Those liberals allied with the right did not hesitate to form a “national bloc”, including the fascists, for the elections of May 1921. In June-July of the same year, confronting an adversary without the slightest scruple, the PSI concluded a meaningless “pacification pact” whose only concrete effect was to further disorient the workers.

Faced with an obviously political reaction, the C.G.L. declared itself apolitical. Sensing that Mussolini had power within his grasp, the union leaders dreamed of a tacit agreement of mutual tolerance with the fascists, and called on the proletariat to stay out of the face-off between the CP and the National Fascist Party.

Until August 1922, fascism scarcely existed outside the agrarian regimes, mainly in the north, where it eradicated all traces of autonomous agrarian worker unionism. In 1919, fascists did burn down the headquarters of the socialist daily newspaper, but they held back from any role as strikebreakers in 1920, and even gave verbal support to worker demands. In the urban areas, the fasci rarely were dominant. Their “March on Ravenna” (September 1921) was easily routed. In November 1921, in Rome, a general strike prevented a fascist congress from taking place. In May 1922, the fascists tried again, and were stopped again.

The scenario varied little. A localized fascist attack would be met by a working- class counter-attack, which would then relent (following calls for moderation from the reformist workers’ movement) as soon as reactionary pressure tapered off; the proletarians trusted the democrats to dismantle the armed bands. The fascist threat would pull back, regroup and go elsewhere, over time making itself credible to the same state from which the masses were expecting a solution. The proletarians were quicker to recognize the enemy in the black shirt of the street thug than in the “normal” form of a cop or soldier, draped in a legality sanctioned by habit, law and universal suffrage.

At the beginning of July 1922, the C.G.L., by a two-thirds majority (against the Communist minority’s one-third), declared its support for “any government guaranteeing the restoration of basic freedoms”. In the same month, the fascists seriously stepped up their attempts to penetrate the northern cities…

On August 1, the Alliance of Labor, which included the railway workers’ union, the C.G.L. and the anarchist U.S.I., called a general strike. Despite broad success, the Alliance officially called off the strike on the 3rd. In numerous cities, however, it continued in insurrectionary form, which was finally contained only by a combined effort of the police and the military, supported by naval cannon, and, of course, reinforced by the fascists.

Who defeated this proletarian energy? The general strike was broken by the state and the fasci but it was also smothered by democracy, and its failure opened the way to a fascist solution to the crisis.

What followed was far less a coup d’etat than a transfer of power with the support of a whole array of forces. The “March on Rome” of the Duce (who actually took the train) was less a showdown than a bit of theatre: the fascists went through the motions of assaulting the state, the state went through the motions of defending itself, and Mussolini took power. His ultimatum of Octobre 24 (“We Want To Become the State!”) was not a threat of civil war, but a signal to the ruling class that the National Fascist Party represented the only force capable of restoring state authority, and of assuring the political unity of the country. The army could still have contained the fascist groups gathered in Rome, which were badly equipped and notoriously inferior on the military level, and the state could have withstood the seditious pressure. But the game was not being played on the military level. Under the influence of Badoglio, in particular (the commander-in-chief in 1919-1921) legitimate authority caved in. The king refused to proclaim a state of emergency, and on the 30th he asked the Duce to form a new government. The liberals — the same people anti-fascism counts on to stop fascism–joined the government. With the exception of the Socialists and the Communists, all parties sought a rapprochement with the PNF and voted for Mussolini: the parliament, with only 35 fascist deputies, supported Mussolini’s investiture 306-116. Giolitti himself, the great liberal icon of the time, an authoritarian reformer who had often been president of the state council before the war and who had again been head of state in 1920-1921, whom fashionable thought still fancies in retrospect as the sole politician capable of opposing Mussolini, supported him up to 1924. The dictator not only received his power from democracy; democracy ratified him.

We might add that in the following months, several unions, including (among others) those of the railway workers and the sailors, declared themselves “national”, pro-patriotic and therefore not hostile to the regime; repression did not spare them.

Turin 1943
If Italian democracy surrended to fascism almost without a fight, the latter spawned democracy anew when it no longer corresponded to the balance of social and political forces.

The central question after 1943, as in 1919, was how to control the working class. In Italy even more than in other countries, the end of World War II shows the class dimension of international conflict, which can never be explained by military logic alone. A general strike erupted at FIAT in October 1942. In March 1943, a strike wave rocked Turin and Milan, including attempts at forming workers’ councils. In 1943-1945, worker groups emerged, sometimes independent of the CP, sometimes calling themselves “Bordigists”, often simultaneously antifascist, rossi, and armed. The regime could no longer maintain social equilibrium, just as the German alliance was becoming untenable against the rise of the Anglo-Americans, who were seen in every quarter as the future masters of western Europe. Changing sides meant allying with the winners-to-be, but also meant rerouting worker revolts and partisan groups into a patriotic objective with a social content. On July 10, 1943, the Allies landed in Sicily. On the 24th, finding himself in a 19-17 minority on the Grand Fascist Council, Mussolini resigned. Rarely has a dictator had to step aside for a majority vote.

Marshal Badaglio, who had been a dignitary of the regime ever since his support for the March on Rome, and who wanted to prevent, in his own words, the “the collapse of the regime from swinging too far to the left”, formed a government which was still fascist but which no longer included the Duce, and turned to the democratic opposition. The democrats refused to participate, making the departure of the king a condition. After a second transitional government, Badoglio formed a third in April 1944, which included the leader of the Communist Party, Togliatti. Under the pressure of the Allies and of the CP, the democrats agreed to accept the king (the Republic would be proclaimed by referendum in 1946). But Badaglio stirred up too many bad memories. In June, Bonomi, who 23 years earlier had ordered the officers to take over the fasci, formed the first ministry to actually exclude the fascists, and the situation was reoriented around the tripartite formula (PC+PS+Christian Democracy) which would dominate in both Italy and France in the first years after the war.

This game of musical chairs , often played by the self-same political class, was the theatre prop behind which democracy metamorphosed into dictatorship, and vice-versa, while the phases of equilibrium and disequilibrium in the conflicts of classes and nations unleashed a succession and recombination of political forms aimed at maintaining the same state, underwriting the same content. No one was more qualified to say it than the Spanish CP, when it declared, either out of cynicism or naiveté, during the transition from Francoism to democratic monarchy in the mid-1970’s:

“Spanish society wants everything to be transformed so that the normal functioning of the state can be assured, without detours or social convulsions. The continuity of the state requires the non-continuity of the regime.”

VOLKSGEMEINSCHAFT vs. GEMEINWESEN 
Counter-revolution inevitably triumphs on the terrain of revolution. Through its “people’s community”, National Socialism would claim to have eliminated the parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy against which the proletariat revolted after 1917. But the conservative revolution also took over old anti-capitalist tendencies (the return to nature, the flight from cities…) that the workers’ parties, even the extremist ones, had negated or misestimated by their inability to integrate the a-classist and communtarian dimension of the proletariat, by their inability to critique the economy, and their inability to think of the future world as anything but an extension of heavy industry. In the first half of the nineteenth century, these themes were at the center of the socialist movement’s preoccupations, before they were abandoned by “Marxism” in the name of progress and Science, and they survived only in anarchism and in sects.

Volksgemeinschaft vs. Gemeinwesen, people’s community or the human community… 1933 was not the defeat, but only the consummation of the defeat. Nazism arose and triumphed to defuse, resolve and to close a social crisis so deep that we still don’t fully appreciate its magnitude. Germany, cradle of the largest Social Democracy in the world, also gave rise to the strongest radical, anti-parliamentary, anti-union movement, one aspiring to a “worker’s” world but also capable of attracting to itself many other anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist revolts. The presence of avant-garde artists in the ranks of the “German radical left” is no accident. It was symptomatic of the attack on capital as “civilization” in the way that Fourier criticized it. The loss of community, individualism and gregariousness, sexual poverty, the family both undermined but also affirmed as a refuge, the estrangement from nature, industrialized food, increasing artificiality, the prostheticization of man, regimentation by time, social relations increasingly mediated by money and technique: all these alienations passed through the fire of a diffuse and multiformed critique. Only a superficial backward glance sees this ferment purely through the prism of its inevitable recuperation.

The counter-revolution triumped in the 1920’s only by laying the foundations, in Germany and in the U.S., of a consumer society and of Fordism, and by pulling millions of Germans, including workers, into industrial, commodified modernity. Ten years of fragile rule, as the mad hyperinflation of 1923 shows. This was followed in 1929 by an enormous earthquake, in which not the proletariat but capitalist practice itself repudiated the ideology of progress and an ever-increasing consumption of objects and signs.

Nazi extremism, and the violence it unleashed, were adequate to the depth of the revolutionary movement it took over and negated, and to these two rebellions, separated by 10 years, against capitalist modernity, first by proletarians, then by capital. Like the radicals of 1919-1921, Nazism proposed a community of wage-workers, but one which was authoritarian, closed, national, and racial, and for 12 years it succeeded in transforming proletarians into wage-workers and into soldiers.

Berlin 1919-1933 
Dictatorship always comes after the defeat of social movements, once they have been chloroformed and massacred by democracy, the leftist parties and the unions. In Italy, several months separated the final proletarian failures from the appointment of the fascist leader as head of state. In Germany, a gap of a dozen years broke the continuity and made Jan. 30, 1933 appear as an essentially political or ideological phenomenon, not as the effect of an earlier social earthquake. The popular basis of National Socialism and the murderous energy it unleashed remain mysteries if one ignores the question of the submission, revolt, and control of labor, and of its position in society.

The German defeat of 1918 and the fall of the empire set in motion a proletarian assault strong enough to shake the foundations of society, but impotent to revolutionize it, thus bringing Social Democracy and the unions to center stage as the key to political equilibrium. The Social Democratic and union leaders emerged as men of order, and had no scruples about calling in the Freikorps, fully fascist groupings with many future Nazis in their ranks, to repress a radical worker minority in the name of the interests of the reformist majority. First defeated by the rules of bourgeois democracy, the communists were also defeated by working-class democracy: the “works councils” placed their trust in the traditional organizations, not in the revolutionaries easily denounced as anti- democrats.

In this juncture, democracy and Social Democracy were indispensable to German capitalism for regimenting the workers, killing off the spirit of revolt in the polling booth, for winning a series of reforms from the bosses, and dispersing the revolutionaries.

After 1929, on the other hand, capitalism needed to eliminate part of the middle classes, and to discipline the proletarians, and even the bourgeoisie. The workers’ movement, defending as it did political pluralism and immediate worker interests, had become an obstacle. As mediators between capital and labor, working-class organizations derive their function from both, but also try to remain autonomous from both, and from the state. Social Democracy has meaning only as a force contending with the employers and the state, not as a force absorbed into them. Its vocation is the management of an enormous political, municipal, social, mutualist and cultural network, along with everything which today would be called “associative”. The KPD, moreover, had quickly constituted its own network, smaller but vast nonetheless. But as capital becomes more and more organized, it tends to pull together all its different strands, bringing a statist element to the enterprise, a bourgeois element to the trade-union bureaucracy, and a social element to administration. The weight of working-class reformism, which ultimately pervades the state, and its existence as a “counter-society” make it a factor of social conservation and Malthusianism which capital in crisis has to eliminate. By their defense of wage labor as a component of capital, the SPD and the unions fulfilled an indispensable anti-communist function in 1918-1921, but this very same function later led them to put the interest of the wage-labor work force ahead of everything else, to the detriment of the reorganization of capital as a whole.

A stable bourgeois state would have tried to solve this problem by anti-union legislation, by recapturing the “worker fortresses”, and by pitting the middle classes, in the name of modernity, against the archaism of the proles, as Thatcher’s England did much later. But such an offensive assumes that capital is relatively united under the control of a few dominant factions. But the German bourgeoisie of 1930 was profoundly divided, the middle classes had collapsed, and the nation-state was in shambles.

By negotiation or by force, modern democracy represents and reconciles antagonistic interests, to the extent that it is possible. Endless parliamentary crises and real or imagined plots (for which Germany was the stage after the fall of the last socialist chancellor in 1930) in a democracy are the invariable sign of long-term disarray in ruling circles. At the beginning of the 1930’s, the crisis whipsawed the bourgeoisie between irreconcilable social and geopolitical strategies : either the increased integration or the elimination of the workers’ movement; international trade and pacifism, or autarchy laying the foundations of a military expansion. The solution did not necessarily imply a Hitler, but it did presuppose a concentration of force and violence in the hands of the central government. Once the centrist-reformist compromise had exhausted itself, the only option left was statist, protectionist and repressive.

A program of this kind required the violent dismantling of Social Democracy, which in its domestication of the workers had come to exercise excessive influence, while still being incapable of unifying all of Germany behind it. This unification was the task of Nazism, which was able to appeal to all classes, from the unemployed to the captains of industry, with a demagogy that even surpassed that of the bourgeois politicians, and an anti-Semitism intended to build cohesion through exclusion.

How could the working-class parties have made themselves into an obstacle to such xenophobic and racist madness, after having so often been the fellow travelers of nationalism? For the SPD, this had been clear since the beginning of the century, obvious in 1914, and signed in blood in the 1919 pact with the Freikorps, who were cast very much in the same warrior mould as their contemporaries, the fasci. The KPD, for its part, had not hesitated to ally with the nationalists against the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, and openly talked of a “national revolution” to the point of inspiring Trotsky’s 1931 pamphlet Against National-Communism.

In January 1933, the die was cast. No one can deny that the Weimar Republic willingly gave itself to Hitler. Both the right and the center had come around to seeing him as a viable solution to get the country out of its impasse, or as a temporary lesser evil. “Big capital”, reticent about any uncontrollable upheaval, had not, up to that time, been any more generous with the NSDAP than with the other nationalist and right-wing formations. Only in 1932 did Schacht, an intimate adviser of the bourgeoisie, convince business circles to support Hitler (who had, moreover, just seen his electoral support slightly decline) because he saw in Hitler a force capable of unifying the state and society. The fact that the big bourgeoisie neither foresaw nor still less appreciated what then ensued, leading to war and then defeat, is another question, and in any event they were not notable by their presence in the clandestine resistance to the regime.

On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor, in complete legality, by Hindenberg, who himself had been constitutionally elected president a year earlier, with the support of the socialists, who saw in him a rampart against. …Hitler. The Nazis were a minority in the first government formed by the leader of the NSDAP.

In the following weeks, the masks were taken off: working-class militants were hunted down, their offices were sacked, and a reign of terror was launched. In the elections of March 1933, held against the backdrop of violence by both the Stormtroopers and the police, 288 NSDAP deputies were sent to the Reichstag (while the KPD still retained 80 and the SPD 120). Naive people might express surprise at the docility with which the repressive apparatus goes over to dictators, but the state machine obeys the authority commanding it. Did the new leaders not enjoy full legitimacy? Did eminent jurists not write their decrees in conformity with the higher laws of the land? In the “democratic state”–and Weimar was one–if there is conflict between the two components of the binomial, it is not democracy which will win out. In a “state founded on laws”–and Weimar was also one–if there is a contradiction, it is law which must be made to serve the state, and never the opposite.

During these few months, what did the democrats do? Those on the right accepted the new dispensation. The Zentrum, the Catholic party of the center, which had even seen its support increase in the March 1933 elections, voted to give four years of full emergency powers to Hitler, powers which became the legal basis of the future dictatorship. The Zentrum was forced to dissolve itself in July.

The socialists, for their part, attempted to avoid the fate of the KPD, which had been outlawed on February 28 in the wake of the Reichstag fire. On March 30, 1933, they left the Second International to prove their national German character. On May 17, their parliamentary group voted support for Hitler’s foreign policy. Nevertheless, on June 22, the SPD was dissolved as “an enemy of the people and the state”.

The unions followed in the footsteps of the Italian CGL, and hoped to salvage what they could by insisting that they were apolitical. In 1932, the union leaders had proclaimed their independence from all parties and their indifference to the form of the state. This did not stop them from seeking an accord with Schleicher, who was chancellor from November 1932 to January 1933, and who therefore was looking for a base and some credible pro-worker demagogy. Once the Nazis had formed a government, the union leaders convinced themselves that if they recognized National Socialism, the regime would leave them some small space. This strategy culminated in the farce of union members marching under the swastika on May 1, 1933, which had been renamed “Festival of German Labor”. It was wasted effort. In the following days, the Nazis liquidated the union and arrested the militants.

Having been schooled to contain the masses and to negotiate in their name, or, that failing, to repress them, the working-class bureaucracy was still fighting the last war. Its furtive acts of propitiation got it exactly nowhere. The labor bureaucrats were not being attacked for their lack of patriotism, but rather as a useless expense for the capitalist class. What bothered the bourgeoisie was not the bureaucrats’ lingering lip service to the old pre-1914 internationalism, but rather the existence of trade unions, however servile, retaining a certain independence in an era in which capital no longer tolerated any other community than its own, and in which even an institution of class collaboration became superfluous if the state did not completely control it.

Barcelona, 1936 
In Italy and in Germany, fascism took over the state by legal means. Democracy capitulated to dictatorship, or, worse still, greeted dictatorship with open arms. But what about Spain? Far from being the exceptional case of a resolute action that was nonetheless, and sadly, defeated, Spain was the extreme case of armed confrontation between democracy and fascism in which the nature of the struggle still remained the same clash of two forms of capitalist development, two political forms of the capitalist state, two state structures fighting for legitimacy in the same country.

Objection!

“So, in your opinion, Franco and a working-class militia are the same thing? The big landowners and impoverished peasants collectivizing land are in the same camp?”

First of all, the confrontation happened only because the workers rose up against fascism. All the power and all the contradictions of the movement were manifest in its first weeks: an undeniable class war was transformed into a capitalist civil war (though there was, of course, no worked-out agreement and and no assignment of roles in which the two bourgeois factions orchestrated every action of the masses).

The history of a class-divided society is ultimately shaped by the need to unify those classes. When, as happened in Spain, a popular explosion combined with the disarray of the ruling groups, a social crisis becomes a crisis of the state. Mussolini and Hitler triumphed in countries with weak, recently-unified nation-states and powerful regionalist currents. In Spain, from the Renaissance until modern times, the state was the colonial armed might of a commercial society it ultimately ruined, choking off one of the pre-conditions of industrial expanion, agrarian reform. In fact, industrialization had to make its way through monopolies, the misappropriation of public funds, and parasitism.

Space is lacking here for a summary of the nineteenth-century crazy quilt of countless reforms and liberal impasses, dynastic factions, the Carlist wars, the tragicomic succession of regimes and parties after World War I, and the cycle of insurrections and repression that followed the establishment of the Republic in 1931. Beneath all these rumblings was the weakness of the rising bourgeoisie, caught as it was between its rivalry with the landed oligarchy and the absolute necessity of containing peasant and worker revolts. In 1936, the land question had not been resolved; unlike France after 1789, the mid-19th century selloff of the Spanish clergy’s lands wound up strengthening a latifundist bourgeoisie. Even in the years after 1931, the Institute for Agrarian Reform only used one-third of the funds at its disposal to buy up large holdings. The conflagration of 1936-1939 would never have reached such political extremes, up to and including the explosion of the state into two factions fighting a three-year civil war, without the tremors which had been rising from the social depths for a century.

In the summer of 1936, after giving the military rebels every chance to prepare themselves, the Popular Front elected in February was prepared to negotiate and perhaps even to surrender. The politicians would have made their peace with the rebels, as they had done during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1931), which was supported by eminent socialists (Cabellero had served it as a technical counselor, before becoming Minister of Labor in 1931, and then head of the Republican government from September 1936 to May 1937). Furthemore, the general who had obeyed republican orders two years earlier and crushed the Asturias insurrection — Franco– couldn’t be all that bad.

But the proletariat rose up, blocked the putsch in half of the country, and hung onto its weapons. In so doing, the workers were obviously fighting fascism, but they were not acting as anti-fascists because their actions were directed against both Franco and against a democratic state more unsettled by the workers’ initiative than by the military revolt. Three prime ministers came and went in 24 hours before the fait accompli of the arming of the people was accepted.

Once again, the unfolding of the insurrection showed that the problem of violence is not primarily a technical one. Victory does not go to the side with the advantage in weaponry (the military) or in numbers (the people), but rather to the side which dares to take the initiative. Where workers trust the state, the state remains passive or promises the moon, as happened in Zaragoza. When their struggle is focused and sharp (as in Malaga), the workers win; if it is lacking in vigor, it is drowned in blood (20,000 killed in Seville).

Thus the Spanish Civil War began with an authentic insurrection, but such a characterization is incomplete. It holds true only for the opening moment of the struggle: an effectively proletarian uprising. After defeating the forces of reaction in a large number of cities, the workers had the power. But what were they going to do with it? Should they give it back to the republican state, or should they use it to go further in a communist direction?

Created immediately after the insurrection, the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias included delegates from the CNT, the FAI, the UGT, the POUM, the PSUC (product of the recent fusion of the CP and the SP in Catalonia), and four representatives of the Generalitat, the Catalan regional government. As a veritable bridge between the workers’ movement and the state, and, moreover, tied if not integrated into the Generalitat’s Department of Defense by the presence in its midst of the latter’s councilor of defense, the commissar of public order, etc. the Central Committee of the Militias quickly began to unravel.

Of course, in giving up their autonomy, most proletarians believed that they were, in spite of everything, hanging onto real power, and giving the politicians only the facade of authority, which they mistrusted, and which they could control and orient in a favorable direction. Were they not armed?

This was a fatal error. The question is not: who has the guns? but rather: what do the people with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000 proletarians armed to the teeth are nothing if they place their trust in anything beside their own power to change the world. Otherwise, the next day, the next month or the next year, the power whose authority they recognize will take away the guns which they failed to use against it.

The insurgents did not take on the legal government, i.e. the existing state, and all their subsequent actions took place under its auspices. It was “a revolution that had begun but had never consolidated”, as Orwell wrote. This is the main point which determined both the course of an increasingly losing armed struggle against Franco as well as the exhaustion and violent destruction by both camps of the collectivizations and socializations. After the summer of 1936, real power in Spain was exercised by the state and not by organizations, unions, collectivities, committees, etc. Even though Nin, the head of the POUM, was an advisor to the Ministry of Justice, “the POUM nowhere succeeded in having any influence over the police”, as one defender of that party admitted . While the worker militias were indeed the flower of the Republican army, and paid a heavy price in combat, they carried no weight in the decisions of the military high command, which steadily integrated them into regular units (a process completed by the beginning of 1937), preferring to wear them down rather than tolerating their autonomy. As for the powerful CNT, it ceded ground to a CP which had been very weak before July 1936 (having elected 14 deputies to the Popular Front chamber in February 1936, as opposed to 85 Socialists), but which was able to insinuate itself into part of the state apparatus and turn the state increasingly to its own advantage against the radicals, and particularly against the militants of the CNT. The question was: who was master of the situation? And the answer was: the state can make brutal use of its power when it is necessary.

If the Republican bourgeoisie and the Stalinists lost precious time dismantling the peasant communes, disarming the POUM militias, and hunting down Trotskyist “saboteurs” and other “agents of Hitler” at the very moment when anti-fascism was supposed to be throwing everything into the struggle against Franco, they did not do so from a suicidal impulse. For the state and for the CP, (which was becoming the backbone of the state through the military and police) these operations were not a waste of time. The head of the PSUC supposedly said: “Before taking Zaragoza, we have to take Barcelona”. Their main objective was never crushing Franco, but retaining control of the masses, because this is what states are for. Barcelona was taken away from the proletarians. Zaragoza remained in the hands of the fascists.

Barcelona, May 1937
The police attempted to occupy the Telephone Exchange, which was under the control of the anarchist (and socialist) workers. In the Catalan metropolis, heart and symbol of the revolution, legal authority stopped at nothing in disarming whatever remained alive, spontaneous and anti-bourgeois. The local police, morever, was in the hands of the PSUC. Confronted by an openly hostile power, the proletarians finally understood that this power was not their own, that they had given it the gift of their insurrection ten months earlier, and their insurrection had been turned against them. In reaction to the power grab by the state, a general strike paralyzed Barcelona. It was too late. The workers still had the capacity to rise up against the state (this time in its democratic form) but they could no longer push their struggle to the point of an open break.

As always, the “social” question predominated over the military one. Legal authority cannot impose itself by street battles. Within a few hours, instead of urban guerrilla warfare, a war of position, a faceoff of apartment building against apartment building set in. It was a defensive stalemate in which no one could win because no one was attacking. With its own offensive bogged down, the police would not risk its forces in attacks on buildings held by the anarchists. Broadly speaking, the CP and the state held the center of the city, while the CNT and the POUM held the working-class districts. The status quo ultimately won out by political means. The masses placed their trust in the two organizations under attack, while the latter, afraid of alienating the state, got people to go back to work (though not without some difficulty) and thereby undermined the one force capable of saving them politically and…”physically”. As soon as the strike was over, knowing that it henceforth controlled the situation, the government brought in 6,000 Assault Guards, the elite of the police. Because they accepted the mediation of “representative organizations” and councils of moderation from the POUM and the CNT, the very same people who had defeated the fascist military in July 1936 surrended without a fight to the Republican police in May 1937.

At that point, repression could begin. Only a few weeks were necessary to outlaw the POUM, to arrest its leaders, to kill them legally or otherwise, and to disappear Nin. A parallel police was established in secret locales, organized by the NKVD and the secret apparatus of the Comintern, and answering only to Moscow. From that point onward, anyone showing the slightest opposition to the Republican state and its main ally, the USSR, would be denounced and hunted down as a “fascist”, and all around the world an army of well-meaning, gentle souls would repeat the slander, some from ignorance, others from self-interest , but every one of them convinced that no denunciation was too excessive when fascism was on the march. The fury unleashed against the POUM was no aberration. By opposing the Moscow trials, the POUM condemned itself to be destroyed by a Stalinism locked in a merciless world struggle against its rivals for control of the masses. At the time, most parties, commentators and even the League for the Rights of Man came out in endorsement of the guilt of the accused. Sixty years later, mainstream ideology denounces these trials and sees them as a sign of the Kremlin’s mad will to power. As if Stalinist crimes had nothing to do with anti-fascism! Anti-fascist logic will always align itself with the most moderate forces and will always fight against the most radical ones.

On the purely political level, May 1937 gave rise to what, a few months before, would have been unthinkable: a Socialist even farther to the right than Caballero, Negrin, heading a government which came down hard on the side of law and order, including repression against the workers. Orwell–who almost lost his life in these events–realized that the war “for democracy” was obviously over. What remained was a faceoff between two fascisms, with the difference that one was less inhuman than its rival . Nevertheless, Orwell clung to the necessity of avoiding the “more naked and developed fascism of Franco and Hitler”. From that point onward, the only issue was fighting for a fascism less bad than the opposing one…

War Devours the Revolution 
Power does not come from the barrel of a gun any more than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but the military dimension is not the central one. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armories, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes the logic of capitalism. Barricades and machine guns flow from this “weapon”. The more vital the social realm, the more the use of guns and the number of casualties will diminish. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any non-violent principle, but because it will be a revolution only by subverting more than by actually destroying the professional military. To imagine a proletarian front facing off against a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary moment had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems, in short for everything that diminishes the common man. In the service of the state, the working- class “militia man” invariably evolves into a “soldier”. In Spain, from the fall of 1936 onward, the revolution dissolved into the war effort, and into a kind of combat typical of states: a war of fronts.

Formed into “columns”, workers left Barcelona to defeat the fascists in other cities, starting with Zaragoza. Taking the revolution beyond areas under republican control, however, meant completing the revolution in the republican areas as well. But even Durruti did not seem to realize that the state was everywhere still intact. As Durruti’s column (70% of whose members were anarchists) advanced, it extended the collectivizations: the militias helped the peasants and spread revolutionary ideas. But, Durruti declared, “we have only one aim: to crush the fascists”. However much he reiterated that “these militias will never defend the bourgeoisie”, they did not attack the bourgeoisie either. Two weeks before his death (Nov. 21, 1936), he stated: “We have only one thought and one goal (…): to crush fascism (…) For now, no one should be thinking of wage increases or a shorter work week…we must sacrifice and work as much as necessary (…) we must have the solidity of granite. The moment has come to call on trade-union and political organizations to end their bickering once and for all. On the home front, what we need is administration (…) After this war, we must not, by our own incompetence, provoke another civil war among ourselves (…) Against fascist tyranny, we should stand as one; only one organization, with only one discipline, should exist.”

Durruti and his comrades embodied an energy which had not waited for 1936 to storm the existing world. But all the combative will in the world is not enough when workers aim all their blows against one particular form of the state, a nd not against the state as such. In mid-1936, accepting a war of fronts meant leaving social and political weapons in the hands of the bourgeoisie behind the lines, and moreover meant depriving military action itself of the initial vigor it drew from another terrain, the only one where the proletariat has the upper hand.

In the summer of 1936, far from having decisive military superiority, the nationalists held no major city. Their main strength lay in the Foreign Legion and in the “Moors” recruited in Morocco, which had been under a Spanish protectatorate since 1912 but which had long since rebelled against the colonial dreams of both Spain and France. The Spanish royal army had been badly defeated there in 1921, largely due to the defection of Moroccan troops. Despite Franco-Spanish collaboration, the Rif war (in which a general named Franco had distinguished himself) ended only when Abd el-Krim surrendered in 1926. Ten years later, the announcement of immediate and unconditional independence for Spanish Morocco would, at minimum, have stirred up trouble among the shock troops of reaction. The Republic obviously gave short shrift to this solution, under a combined pressure from conservative milieus and from the democracies of England and France, which had little enthusiasm for the possible breakup of their own empires. At the very same time, moreover, the French Popular Front not only refused to grant any reform worthy of the name to its colonial subjects, but dissolved the Etoile Nord-Africaine, a proletarian movement in Algeria.

Everyone knows that the policy of “non-intervention” in Spain was a farce. One week after the putsch, London announced its opposition to any arms shipment to the legal Spanish government, and its neutrality in the event that France was drawn into a conflict. Democratic England thus put the Republic and fascism on the same level. As a result, the France of Blum and Thorez send a few planes, while Germany and Italy sent whole armies and their supplies. As for the International Brigades, controlled by the Soviet Union and the Communist Parties, their military value came at a heavy price, namely the elimination of any opposition to Stalinism in working-class ranks. It was at the beginning of 1937, after the first Russian arms shipments, that Catalonia removed Nin from his post as adviser to the Ministry of Justice.

Rarely has the narrow conception of history as a list of battles, cannons and strategies been more inept in explaining the course of a directly “social” war, shaped as it was by the internal dynamic of anti-fascism. Revolutionary elan initially broke the elan of the nationalists. Then the workers accepted legality; the conflict was stalemated, and then institutionalized. From late 1936 onward, the militia columns were bogged down in the siege of Zaragoza. The state armed only the military units it trusted, i.e. the ones which would not confiscate property. By early 1937, in the poorly-equipped POUM militias fighting the Francoists with old guns, a revolver was a luxury. In the cities, they rubbed shoulders with perfectly outfitted regular soldiers. The fronts bogged down, like the Barcelona proletarians against the cops. The last burst of energy was the republican victory at Madrid. Soon thereafter, the government ordered private individuals to hand in their weapons. The decree had little immediate effect, but it showed an unabashed will to disarm the people. Disappointment and suspicions undermined morale. The war was increasingly in the hands of the specialists. Finally, the Republic increasingly lost ground as all social content and revolutionary appearances faded away in the anti-fascist camp.

Reducing the revolution to war simplifies and falsifies the social question into the alternative of winning or losing, and in being “the strongest”. The issue becomes one of having disciplined soldiers, superior logistics, competent officers and the support of allies whose own political nature gets as little scrutiny as possible. Curiously, all this means taking the conflict further from daily life. It is a peculiar quality of warfare that, even for its enthusiasts, no one wants to lose but everyone wants it to end. In contrast to revolution, except in the case of defeat, war does not cross my doorstep. Transformed into a military conflict, the struggle against Franco ceased to be a personal commitment, lost its immediate reality, and became a mobilization at once economic (working for the front), ideological (wall posters in the street, meetings) and human: after January 1937, voluntary enlistments tapered off, and the civil war, in both camps, came to depend mainly on compulsory military service. As a result, a militia man of July 1936, leaving his column a year later, disgusted with republican politics, could be arrested and shot as a “deserter”!

In different historical conditions, the military evolution from antifascsm- insurrection to militias and then to a regular army is reminiscent of the anti-Napoleonic guerrilla warfare (the term passed into French during the First Empire) described by Marx:

“If one compares the three periods of guerrilla warfare with the political history of Spain, one notes they represented the three corresponding degrees to which the counter-revolutionary government had reduced the spirit of the people. In the beginning, the entire population rose up, then guerrilla bands carried on a war of attrition backed up by entire provinces; and finally, there were bands without cohesion, always on the verge of turning into bandits or dissolving into regular regiments.”

For 1936 as for 1808, the evolution of the military situation cannot be explained exclusively or even mainly by the art of war, but flows from the balance of political and social forces and its modification in an anti-revolutionary direction. The compromise evoked by Durruti, the necessity of unity at any cost, could only hand victory first to the republican state (over the proletariat) and then to the Francoist state (over the Republic).

There was the beginning of a revolution in Spain, but it turned into its opposite as soon as the proletarians, convinced that they had effective power, placed their trust in the state to fight against Franco. On that basis, the multiplicity of subversive initiatives and measures taken in production and in daily life were condemned to fail by the simple and terrible fact that they took place in the shadow of a perfectly intact state structure, which had initially been put on hold, and then reinvigorated by the necessities of the war against Franco, a paradox which remained opaque to most revolutionary groups at the time. In order to be consolidated and extended, the social transformations without which revolution remains an empty word had to pose themselves as antagonistic to a state clearly designated as the adversary. But, after July 1936, dual power existed in appearance only. Not only did the instruments of proletarian power which emerged from the insurrection, and those which subsequently oversaw the socializations, tolerate the state, but they accorded the state a primacy in the anti-Franco struggle, as if it were tactically necessary to pass through the state in order to defeat Franco. In terms of “realism”, the recourse to traditional military methods accepted by the far left (including the POUM and the CNT) in the name of effectiveness almost invariably proved inneffective. Fifty years later, people still deplore the fact. But the democratic state is as little suited for armed struggle against fascism as it is for stopping its peaceful accession to power. States are normally loathe to deal with the social war, and normally fear rather than encourage any fraterization. When, in March 1937 in Guadalajara, the antifascists addressed themselves as workers to the Italian soldiers sent by Mussolini, a group of Italians defected. But such an episode remained the exception.

From the battle for Madrid (March 1937) to the final fall of Catalonia (February 1939), the cadaver of the aborted revolution decomposed on the battlefield. One can speak of war in Spain, not of revolution. This war wound up having as its first function the resolution of a capitalist problem: the constitution in Spain of a legitimate state which succeeded in developing its national capital while keeping the popular masses in check. In February 1939, Benjamin Peret analyzed the consommation of the defeat as follows:

“The working class (…), having lost sight of its own goals, no longer sees any urgent reason to be killed defending the bourgeois democratic clan against the fascist clan, i.e. in the last analysis, for the defense of Anglo-French capital against Italo-German imperialism. The civil war increasingly became an imperialist war.” (Cl”š, No. 2)

The two camps undeniably had quite different sociological compositions and social meanings. If the bourgeoisie was present on both sides, the immense majority of workers and poor peasants supported the Republic, whereas the archaic and reactionary strata (landed property, small holders, clergy) lined up behind Franco. This class polarization gave a progressive aura to the republican state, but it does not disclose the historical meaning of the conflict, any more than the percentage of working-class members of the SPD, SFIO or PCF exhausts the question of the nature of these parties. Such facts are real, but secondary to the social function in question. The party with a working-class base which controls or opposes any proletarian upsurge softens class contradictions. The republican army had a large number of workers, but for what, with whom and under whose orders were they fighting? To ask the question is to answer it, unless one considers it possible to fight the bourgeoisie in an alliance with the bourgeoisie.

“Civil war is the supreme expression of the class struggle” (Their Morals and Ours, 1938). Trotsky’s assertion is right, as long as one adds that, from the so-called Wars of Religion to the Irish or Lebanese convulsions of our own time, civil war is also, and most often, the form of an impossible or failed social struggle, where class contradictions which cannot assert themselves as such erupt as ideological or ethnic blocs, still further delaying any human emancipation.

Anarchists in the Government 
Social Democracy did not “capitulate” in August 1914, like a fighter throwing in the towel; it followed the normal trajectory of a powerful movement which was internationalist in rhetoric and which, in reality, had become profoundly national long before. The SPD may well have been the leading electoral force in Germany in 1912, but it was powerful only for the purpose of reform, within the framework of capitalism and according to its laws, which included, for example, accepting colonialism, and also war when the latter became the sole solution to social and political contradictions.

In the same way, the integration of Spanish anarchism into the state in 1936 is only surprising if one forgets its nature: the CNT was a union, an original union undoubtedly but a union nonetheless, and there is no such thing as an anti-union union. Function transforms the organ. Whatever its original ideals, every permanent organism for defending wage laborers as such becomes a mediator, and then a conciliator. Even when it is in the hands of radicals, even when it is repressed, the institution is doomed to escape control of the base and to become a moderating instrument. Anarchist union though it may have been, the CNT was a union before it was anarchist. A world separated the rank-and-file from the leader seated at the bosses’ table, but the CNT as an apparatus was little different from the UGT. Both of them worked to modernize and rationally manage the economy: in a word, to socialize capitalism. A single thread connects the socialist vote for war credits in August 1914 to the participation in the government of the anarchist leaders, first in Catalonia (September 1936) and then in the Republic as a whole (November 1936). As early as 1914, Malatesta had called those of his comrades (including Kropotkin) who had accepted national defense “government anarchists”.

From one compromise to the next, the CNT wound up renouncing the anti- statism which was its raison d’etre, even after the Republic and its Russian ally had shown their real faces and unleashed their fury on the radicals in May 1937, not to mention in everything that followed, in the jails and secret cellars. Then, like the POUM, the CNT was all the more effective in disarming proletarians, calling on them to give up their struggle against both the official and Stalinist police bent on finishing them off. Some of them even had the bitter surprise of being in a prison administered by an old anarchist comrade, stripped of any real power over what when on in his jail. In 1938, a CNT delegation which had gone to the Soviet Union requesting material aid did not even criticize the Moscow trials.

Everything for the anti-fascist struggle…

Everything for cannons and guns…

But even so, some people might object, the anarchists by their very nature are vaccinated against the statist virus. In appearance…

Some “Marxists” can recite whole pages of Marx on the destruction of the state machine, and pages of Lenin saying in State and Revolution that one day cooks will administer society instead of politicians. But these same “Marxists” can still practice the most servile state idolatry, once they come to see the state as the slightest agent of progress and of historical necessity. Because they see the future as a capitalist socialization without capitalists, as a world still based on wage labor but egalitarian, democratized and planned, every thing prepares them to accept a state (transitional, to be sure) and to go off to war for a capitalist state they see as bad, but against another one they see as worse.

For its part, anarchism overestimates state power by seeing authority as the main enemy, and thus underestimates it with the belief that state power can be destroyed by itself. Anarchism does not see the effective role of the state as the guarantor but not the creator of the wage labor relation. The state represents and unifies capital, it is neither capital’s motor nor its centerpiece. Anarchism deduced, from the undeniable fact that the masses were armed, that the state was losing its substance. But the substance of the state resides not in its institutional forms, but in its unifying function. The state ensures the tie which human beings cannot or dare not create among themselves, and creates a web of services which are both parasitic and real. When, in the summer of 1936, it seemed weak in republican Spain, it subsisted as a framework capable of picking up the pieces of capitalist society, and it continued to live in hibernation. Then it awoke and gained new strength when the social relations opened up by subversion were loosened or were torn apart; it revived the hibernating organs, and, the occasion permitting, assumed control over those which subversion had caused to emerge. What had been seen as a mere nuisance showed itself capable not merely of revival, but of emptying out the parallel forms of power in which the revolution thought it had best embodied itself.

The CNT’s ultimate justification of its role comes down to the idea that the legal government no longer really had power, because the workers’ movement had taken power de facto. “(…) the government has ceased to be a force oppressing the working class, in the same way that the state is no longer the organism dividing society into classes” (Solidaridad Obrera, September 1936)

No less than “Marxism”, anarchism fetishizes the state and imagines it as being incarnated in a place. Blanqui had already thrown his little flock into attacks on city halls or on barracks, but he at least never claimed to base his actions on the proletarian movement, only on a minority which would awaken the people. A century later, the CNT declared the Spanish state to be a phantom relative to the tangible reality of the “social organizations” (i.e. militias, unions). But the existence of the state, its raison d’etre, is to paper over the shortcomings of “civil” society by a system of relations, of links, of concentrations of force, an administrative, police, judicial, military network which goes “on hold”, as a backup, in times of crisis, awaiting the moment when police investigators can go sniffing into the files of the social services. The revolution has no Bastille, police station or governor’s mansion to “take”; its task is to render harmless or destroy everything from which such places draw their sustenance.

The Failure of the Collectivizations
The depth and breadth of the industrial and agrarian socializations after July 1936 was no historical fluke. Marx noted the Spanish tradition of popular autonomy, and the gap between the people and the state which made itself manifest in the anti-Napoleonic war, and then in the revolutions of the nineteenth century, which renewed age-old communal resistance to the power of the dynasty.The absolute monarchy, he observed, did not shake up various social strata to forge a modern state, but rather had left the living forces of the country intact. Napoleon could see Spain as a “cadaver”, “but if the Spanish state was indeed dead, Spanish society was full of life” and “what we call the state in the modern sense of the word is materialized, in reality, only in the army, in keeping with the exclusively “provincial” life of the people”.

In the Spain of 1936, the bourgeois revolution had been made, and it was vain to dream of scenarios such as 1917, not to mention 1848 or 1789. But if the bourgeoisie dominated politically, and capital dominated economically, they were nowhere near the creation of a unified internal market and a modern state apparatus, the subjugation of society as a whole, and the domination of local life and its particularisms. For Marx, in 1854, a “despotic” government coexisted with a lack of unity that extended to the point of different currencies and different systems of taxation: his observation still had some validity 80 years later. The state was neither able to stimulate industry nor carry out agrarian reform; it could neither extract from agriculture the profits necessary for capital accumulation, nor unify the regions, nor still less keep down the proletarians of the cities and the countryside.

It was thus almost naturally that the shock of July 1936 gave rise, on the margins of political power, to a social movement whose realizations with communist potential were reabsorbed by the state they allowed to remain intact. The first months of a revolution, already ebbing, but whose extent still concealed its failure, looked liked nothing so much as a splintering process in which each region, commune, enterprise, collective and muncipality escaped the central authority without attacking it, and set out to live differently. Anarchism, and even the regionalism of the POUM, express this Spanish originality within the workers’ movement, which is wrongly grasped if one sees only the negative side of this “late development” of capitalism. Even the ebb of 1937 did not eradicate the elan of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants who took over land, factories, neighborhoods, villages, seizing property and socializing production with an autonomy and a solidarity in daily life which struck both observers and participants.Sad to say, if these countless acts and deeds, sometimes extending over several years, bear witness (as do, in their own way, the Russian and German experiences) to a communist movement remaking all of society, and to its formidable subversive capacities when it emerges on a large scale, it is equally true that its fate was sealed from the summer of 1936 onward. The Spanish Civil War proved both the revolutionary vigor of communitarian bonds and forms which have been penetrated by capital but which are not yet directly reproduced by capital, and also their impotence, taken by themselves, in bringing off a revolution. In the absence of an assault against the state, and of the stablishment of different relationships throughout the country, they condemned themselves to a fragmentary self-management preserving the content and even the forms of capitalism, notably money and the division of activities by individual enterprise. Any persistance of wage labor perpetuates the hierarchy of functions and incomes.

Communist measures could have undermined the social bases of the two states (republican and nationalist), if only by beginning to resolve the agrarian question: in the thirties, more than half the population was under-nourished. A subversive force erupted, bringing to the fore the most oppressed strata, those farthest from “political life” (e.g. women), but it could not go all the way and eradicate the system root and branch.

At the time, the workers’ movement in the major industrial countries corresponded to those regions of the world which had been socialized by a total domination of capital over society, where communism was both closer at hand as a result of this socialization, and at the same time farther away because of the dissolution of all relations into commodity form. The new world, in these countries, was most commonly conceived as a worker’s world, if not necessarily as an industrial one.

The Spanish proletariat, on the contrary, continued to be shaped by a capitalist penetration of society that was more quantitative than qualitative. From this reality it drew both its strength and its weakness, as attested by the tradition and demands for autonomy represented by anarchism.

“In the last hundred years, there has not been a single uprising in Andalusia which has not resulted in the creation of communes, the sharing out of land, the abolition of money and a declaration of independence (…) the anarchism of the workers is not very different. They too demand, first of all, the possibility of managing their industrial community or their union themselves, and then the reduction of working hours and of the effort required from everyone (…).

Vast numbers of proposals were made, some of them were realized, and others were initiated. Communism is also the re-appropriation of the conditions of existence.

One of the main weaknesses was the attitude towards money. The “disappearance of money” is meaningful only if it entails more than the replacement of one instrument for measuring value with another one (such as labor coupons). But, like the majority of radical groups, whether they call themselves Marxist or anarchist, Spanish proletarians did not see money as the expression and abstraction of real relationships, but as a tool of measurement, an accounting device, and they thereby reduced socialism to a different management of the same categories and fundamental components of capitalism.

The failure of the measures taken against commodity relations was not due to the power of the UGT union (which was opposed to the collectivizations) over the banks: as if the abolition of money was first of all something to be undertaken by the centers of power! The closing of private banks and of the central bank puts an end to mercantile relations only if production and life are organized in a way no longer mediated by the commodity, and if they, on this basis, gradually come to dominate the totality of social relationships. Money is not the “evil” to be removed from an otherwise “good” production, but the manifestation (today becoming increasingly immaterial) of the commodity character of all aspects of life. It cannot be destroyed by eliminating signs, but only when exchange itself disappears as a social relationship.

In fact, only agrarian collectives managed to do without money, and they often did so with the help of local currencies, with coupons often being used as “internal money”. Unable to extend non-commodity production beyond different autonomous zones with no scope for global action, the soviets, collectives and liberated villages were transformed into precarious communities and sooner or later were either destroyed from within or violently suppressed by either the fascists or the republicans. In Aragon, the column of the Stalinist Lister made this a specialty. Entering the village of Calanda, his first act was to write on a wall: “Collectivizations are theft”.

Collectivize or Communize?
Ever since the First International, anarchism has counterposed the collective appropriation of the means of production to Social Democratic statification. Both visions, nonetheless, begin from the same exigency of collective management. But the problem is: management of what? Of course, what Social Democracy carried out from above, and bureaucratically, the Spanish proletarians practiced at the base, armed, with each individual responsible to everyone, thereby taking the land and the factories away from a minority specialized in the organizing and exploitation of others. The opposite, in short, of the co-management the Coal Board by socialist or Stalinist unions. Nevertheless, the fact that a collectivity, rather than the state or a bureaucracy, takes the production of its material life into its own hands does not, by itself, do away with the capitalist character of that life.

Wage labor means the passage of an activity, whatever it might be, plowing a field or printing a newspaper, through the form of money. This money, even as it makes the activity possible, is also expanded by it. Equalizing wages, deciding everything collectively, and replacing currency by coupons has never beeng nough to eradicate the wage-labor relationship. What money brings together cannot be free, and sooner or later money becomes its master.

Substituting association for competition on a local basis was a guaranteed recipe for disaster. Because if the collective did abolish private property within itself, it also set itself up as a distinct entity and as a particuliar element among others in the global economy, and therefore as a private collective, compelled to buy and to sell, to engage in commerce with the outside world, thereby becoming in its turn an enterprise which, like it or not, had to play its part in regional, national and world competition, or else disappear.

One can only rejoice in the fact that one part of Spain imploded: what mainstream opinion calls “anarchy” is the necessary condition for revolution, as Marx wrote in his own time. But these movements made their subversive impact on the basis of a centrifugal force which also fed into localism. Rejuvenated communitarian ties also locked everyone into their village and their barrio, as if the point were to rediscover a lost world and a degraded humanity, to counterpose the working-class neighborhood to the metropolis, the self-managed commune to the vast capitalist domain, the countryside of the common folk to the commercialized city, in a word the poor to the rich, the small to the large and the local to the international, all the while forgetting that a cooperative is often the synonym for the longest road to capitalism.

There is no revolution without the destruction of the state: that is the Spanish “lesson”. But be that as it may, a revolution is not a political upheaval, but a social movement in which the destruction of the state and the elaboration of new modes of debate and decision go hand in hand with communization. We don’t want “power”; we want the power to change all of life. As an historical process extending over generations, can one imagine, over such a time frame, continuing to pay wages for food and lodging? If the revolution is supposed to be political first and social later, it would create an apparat whose sole function would be the struggle against the supporters of the old world, i.e. a negative function of repression, a system of control resting on no other content than its “program” and its will to realize communism the day that conditions finally allow for it. This is how a revolution ideologizes itself and legitimizes the birth of a specialized stratum assigned to oversee the maturation and the expectation of the ever-radiant day after tomorrow. The very stuff of politics is not being able, and not wanting, to change anything: it brings together what is separated without going any further. Power is there, it manages, it administers, it oversees, it calms, it represses: it is. Political domination (in which a whole school of thought sees problem #1) flows from the incapacity of human beings to take charge of themselves, and to organize their lives and their activity. This domination persists only through the radical dispossession which characterizes the proletarian. When everyone participates in the production of their existence, the capacity for pressure and oppression now in the hands of the state will cease to be operative. It is because wage-labor society deprives us of our means of living, producing and communicating, not stopping short of the invasion of once-private space and of our emotional lives, that its state is all-powerful. The best guarantee against the reappearance of a new structure of power over us is the deepest possible appropriation of the conditions of existence, at every level. For example, even if we don’t want everyone generating their own electricity in their basements, the domination of the Leviathan also comes from the fact that energy (a significant term, another English word for which is power) makes us dependent on industrial complexes which, nuclear or not, necessarily remain external to us and escape any control.

To conceive the destruction of the state as an armed struggle against the police and the armed forces is to mistake the part for the whole. Communism is first of all activity. A mode of life in which men and women produce their social existence paralyzes or reabsorbs the emergence of separate powers.

Balance Sheet
The Spanish failure of 1936-37 is symmetrical to the Russian failure of 1917-21. The Russian workers were able to seize power, but not to use it for a communist transformation. Backwardness, economic ruin and international isolation by themselves to do not explain the involution. The perspective set out by Marx, and perhaps applicable in a different way after 1917, of a renaissance in a new form of the communal agrarian structures, was at the time not even thinkable. Leaving aside Lenin’s eulogy for Taylorism, and Trotsky’s justification of military labor, for almost all the Bolsheviks and the overwhelming majority of the Third International, including the communist left, socialism meant a capitalist socialization PLUS soviets, and the agriculture of the future was conceived as the large landholdings managed democratically. (The difference– and it is a major one!– between the German-Dutch left and the Comintern on this question was that the left took soviets and democracy seriously, whereas the Russian communists–as their practice proved–saw in them nothing but tactical formulas.

In any case, the Bolsheviks are the best illustration of what happens to a power which is only a power, and which has to hold on without changing real conditions very much. Very logically and, at first, in perfectly good faith, the state of the soviets perpetuated itself at any cost, first in the perspective of world revolution, then for itself, with the absolute priority being to preserve the unity of a society coming apart at the seams. This explains, on one hand, the concessions to small peasant property, followed by requisitions, both of which resulted in a futher unraveling of any communal life or production. This explains, on the other hand, the repression against workers and against any opposition within the party. A power which gets to the point of massacring the Kronstadt mutineers (who were, for their part, only raising democratic deands) in the name of a socialism it could not realize, and which goes on to justify its actions with lies and calumny, is only demonstrating that it no longer has any communist character. Lenin died his physical death in 1924, but the revolutionary Lenin had died as head of state in 1921, if not earlier. The Bolshevik leaders were left with no option but to become the managers of capitalism.

As the hypertrophy of a political perspective hell bent on eliminating the obstacles which it could not subvert, the October Revolution also dissolved into a self-cannibalizing civil war. Its pathos was that of a power which, unable to transform society, degenerated into a counter-revolutionary force. In the Spanish tragedy, the proletarians, because they had left their own terrain, wound up prisoners of a conflict in which the bourgeoisie and its state were present behind the front lines on both sides. In 1936-37, the proletarians of Spain were not fighting against Franco alone, but also against the fascist countries, against the democracies and the farce of “non-intervention”, against their own state, against the Soviet Union, against….

1936-37 closed the historical moment opened by 1917. 
In a future revolutionary period, the most subtle and most dangerous defenders of capitalism will not be the people shouting pro-capitalist and pro-statist slogans, but those who have understood the possible point of a total rupture.

Far from eulogizing advertising and obedience, they will propose to change life…but to that end will call for building a true democratic power first. If they succeed in dominating the situation, the creation of this new political form will use up people’s energies, fritter away radical aspirations and, with the means becoming the end, will once again turn revolution into an ideology. Against them, and of course against overtly capitalist reaction, the proletarians’ only path to success will be the multiplication and coordinated extension of concrete communist initiatives, which will naturally be denounced as anti-democratic or even as…”fascist”. The struggle to establish places and moments for deliberation and decision, making possible the autonomy of the movement, is inseparable from practical measures aimed at changing life.

“(…) in all past revolutions, the mode of activity has always remained intact and the only issue has been a different distribution of this activity and a redistribution of work among different persons; whereas the communist revolution is directed against the mode of activity as it has existed up till now and abolishes work and the domination of all classes by abolishing classes themselves, because it is carried out by the class which is no longer, in society, considered as a class and which is already the expression of the dissolution of all classes and all nationalities, etc. within society itself” (Marx, The German Ideology, 1845-46)

Gilles Dauvé (1979)

source: http://libcom.org/library/when-insurrections-die

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