Individual freedom requires social support. To say NO, you need others to respect your choice and not force you to obey. To move freely, you need others to support your movement and not erect walls and roadblocks. To change what does not work, you need others who are affected to accept the change.

Basically, freedom is a social relationship, where me having my freedom depends on you having yours. A system is required to secure this social arrangement.

Systems shape us

We create systems in order to make things happen. A system has three elements: a purpose or goal; a set of rules, policies, and procedures designed to achieve the goal; and relationships that are shaped by applying the rules, policies, and procedures.

The systems we create are not separate from us; they organize us. Consider competitive sports. There is a goal (to win). There are rules of the game and penalties for violating them. And there are participants, whose behavior and relationships are shaped by the game.

The goal of the capitalist system is to extract capital from human labor. Achieving that goal requires a system with rules, penalties, and social relationships that all support the goal.

This three-part essay examines how the capitalist system robs us of all three basic freedoms; what blocks us from claiming our freedom; and how we can create a social system that supports freedom for all.

Part 1. My Body Is Not Your Capital-Producing Machine – Or Is It?

It is commonly believed that we have little control over our work lives, but that life outside of work – family and social relationships – is ours to shape.

In reality, time outside of work is largely consumed with two things: replacing the energy we put out on the job so we can work again the next day, and raising the next generation of workers to replace the current one. Production depends on this reproduction of the worker.

The tight connection between production and reproduction is difficult to see because they are organized differently. Production is organized socially, with billions of workers linked in global chains of manufacture and distribution. Reproduction is organized privately, with individuals and families expected to replenish and reproduce themselves with no outside support.

Employers benefit from privatized reproduction. They can hire workers to produce while avoiding the cost of replacing them, even though their business depends on it. According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business,

Paid maternity leave is a totally ridiculous kind of demand to expect employers to pay. Those who want to have babies should pay for them.

Because production and reproduction are differently organized, it seems they exist in two different spheres: an economic sphere of work shaped by capitalism, where one has little control; and a personal sphere of friendship and family, not shaped by capitalism, where one is presumed to have total control.

In reality, work and life-outside-of-work are parts of a single capitalist system. Despite the relentless message that we make our own lives and ‘there is always a choice,’ it is impossible to have a personal life that is separate from, or exists outside of, the capitalist system. Lack of freedom on the job requires a lack of freedom outside it.

The more authorities restrict reproduction and individual behavior, the more the myth of two spheres breaks down to reveal only one sphere, capitalism, that dominates every aspect of life.

You cannot refuse, and you cannot leave

The goal of capitalist production is to produce capital. Capital is profit that is invested to extract more profit. Profit comes from paying workers less than the value of what they produce. The lower the wages, the higher the profit.

Jeff Bezos rakes in billions of dollars in profit by paying workers far less than the value of their work. He then uses this profit to purchase other businesses that enable him to exploit even more workers and make even more profit. Bezos is accumulating capital. The more capital he accumulates, the greater his power over society.

No one freely chooses to work all their life to produce capital to make others rich. The worker must be robbed of the freedom to say no, to leave, or to change the system. To maintain this social arrangement everyone, including the worker, must do their part.

Employers rely on the State to ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. As Braverman explained in Labor and Monopoly Capital,

In the most elementary sense, the State is guarantor of the conditions, the social relations, of capitalism, and the protector of the ever-more unequal distribution of property which this system brings about.

The State gives employers the legal authority to dictate the conditions of employment. Unionized workers can modify some of these conditions, but they have no legal right to challenge the nature of the work or how it is organized, to determine staffing levels, or to curb executive pay. All major work-related decisions fall under management rights. The State uses the legal system, the police, and the military to enforce those rights.

States allow employers to use, abuse, and discard workers as the cost of doing business. When hazardous working conditions cause sickness, injury, and death, the State sides with the employer. Workers’ claims for compensation are minimized or denied, fines levied against companies are too small to change anything, and no employer ever goes to jail for killing a worker.

States use legislation and monetary policy to prevent workers’ demands from cutting into profits. The legal minimum wage sets the bar so low that the average worker must go into debt to pay for basic essentials.

The only option for those who cannot work or refuse to do so is appeal to the State for support. Such support is notoriously difficult to get and kept miserably low to deter all but the most desperate. Ontario makes it easier to access euthanasia than to access social support.

States restrict travel in order to block workers from escaping to a better situation. Around the world, millions of people are incarcerated for the ‘crime’ of crossing a border in search of a better life.

Border restrictions trap workers in low-waged areas. Employers are free to move production in and out of these low-waged areas, giving them leverage to lower the pay of workers in higher-waged areas.

States use immigration controls to manage the size and composition of the workforce to benefit employers. Lower unemployment increases the pressure to raise wages, and importing more workers lowers that pressure. Denying equal rights to newcomers enables employers to underpay and overwork them, exerting a downward pressure on the pay and conditions of all workers.

All these measures ensure that, no matter how hard they labor or how much they protest, the worker is blocked from escaping their assigned role as a capital-producing machine.

What personal life?

The concept of ‘personal life’ ignores how much our lives are restricted outside work.

The modern family is a State-regulated institution. Laws dictate who can marry and who cannot, who is a family member and who is not, and how many unrelated people may live in a dwelling. Laws enforce gender norms, restrict access to contraception and abortion, and determine at what age a person may engage in adult activities.

One cannot leave a family at will. The State can forcibly return runaway youngsters to their families, place them in alternate families, or confine them in detention centers. Spouses who want to leave their marriages and parents seeking relief from childcare duties can be held financially responsible for ‘dependents.’

The State defines what it means to be a fit parent and can remove children from those it declares unfit. The State decides if families separated by national borders will be reunited or remain apart, and whether family members will be deported.

State laws compel young people to attend school, whether they want to or not, and parents are expected to enforce this law. In Jacksonville, Florida,

if a child has more than five unexcused absences [from school] in a calendar month or 15 unexcused absences in a 90-day period, parents can be arrested, charged with a misdemeanor, and face up to 60 days in jail.

Not free to be me

Organizing reproduction in family units demands distinct gender roles; men are cast as the primary producers, and women as the primary care-givers. Someone has to care for the young, sick, and infirm, and it’s typically the lower-paid woman who is paid less precisely because of her care-taking duties.

A family system based on reproducing couples allows no room for gender fluidity or for being intersex or trans. Those who do not conform to their socially assigned gender role risk punishment in the legal system or treatment in the medical system. As long as reproduction is rooted in the family, we cannot escape the pressure of binary gender roles and all the oppression they generate.

Capitalism favors standardized production, where large numbers of identical objects can be quickly produced with less labor and more profit. To produce uniform outcomes, the worker must make the same moves over and over again. This assembly-line model has been adopted in every industry, including hospitals and schools. As one principal instructed his teachers,

When I stand in the hallway, I should be able to hear all fourth grades saying the same thing. Do not deviate from the scripted program and do not fall behind in the pacing plan.

The demand for uniformity dominates every area of life. To maximize profit, the capitalist class engineer plants and animals to eliminate variation, reduce workers to the status of interchangeable cogs in a machine, and convince people of all nations to desire the same things and behave in the same ways.

Shut up and conform

Questioning makes progress possible; it invites us to examine what we are doing and why, and to consider different options. Capitalism makes questioning policies or those who make them a serious offense, even treasonous. We cannot speak freely or share vital information. The relentless persecution of whistle-blowers Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Steven Donziger serves as a general warning not to question authority or hold it accountable.

A system that demands conformity cannot tolerate dissent or diversity. In the past, people who thought, felt, or behaved differently were considered interesting, odd, eccentric, colorful, or characters. Today, such people risk being labeled ‘mentally ill,’ forcibly drugged, and confined to a psychiatric institution, possibly indefinitely.

The social power of modern psychiatry cannot be explained on the basis of its scientific validity or clinical effectiveness, both of which are highly contested. Its influence comes from its usefulness to the capitalist system.

Since slavery days, the State has partnered with medicine and psychiatry to enforce conformity and obedience. Today, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) catalogs unacceptable behavior in every area of life, with unacceptable behavior meaning protesting how things are, or disturbing others with your protest.

Being trapped in an oppressive social system is so painful that many people break down, lash out, use drugs, escape into fantasy, and so on. Mass misery cannot be acknowledged without bringing the entire capitalist system into question. Instead, modern medical systems practice damage control, where the sick and injured are patched up and returned to the same situations that harmed them.

Controlling fertility

States control reproduction to manage the size and composition of the workforce; minimize the cost of social support; and enforce social control. What the pregnant person wants or does not want is not considered.

To lower the birth rate, China imposed a limit of one child per family in 1980. Violators could be punished with fines, job loss, forced abortions, and loss of access to social services. As the birth rate fell, the one-child policy was replaced with a two-child policy in 2016, followed by a three-child policy in 2021.

To raise the birth rate, Nazi Germany outlawed all forms of birth control, including abortion, with stiff penalties for violators. ‘German-blooded’ women with large families were awarded the Mother’s Cross: bronze for up to five children; silver for six or seven; and gold for eight or more.

To increase the enslaved labor force in the US, Black women and girls were forcibly impregnated and compelled to bear their rapists’ children. When importing enslaved people was outlawed in 1808, forced reproduction became even more important to the slave economy.

Planters advertised for [Black women] as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogues. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen. They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to [do so].

To minimize the cost of social support and reduce the risk of rebellion, States sterilize those they consider ‘surplus’ or socially unfit, including Black, Indigenous, imprisoned, addicted, disabled, and poor people.

During the Great Depression, the International Congress of Eugenics met in New York City to discuss the mass sterilization of unemployed workers. One speaker declared,

A major portion of this vast army of unemployed are social inadequates, and in many cases mental defectives, who might have been spared the misery they are now facing if they had never been born.

The US-funded program to sterilize Puerto Rican women had two goals: to reduce the number of poor people on the island; and to promote the migration of women workers to New York, which would be easier if they had no children.

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, approximately one-third of the female population of Puerto Rico was sterilized, making it highest rate of sterilization in the world.

In the US today, 31 states plus Washington, DC, legally allow the forced sterilization of people with disabilities

Forced birth

When the US Supreme Court abolished the legal right to abortion, it shattered the belief that our bodies belong to us, and that life-outside-of-work is ours to shape.

When states coerce and force women, girls and people with the capacity for pregnancy to remain pregnant against their will, they create human chattel and incubators of them. By doing so, state lawmakers force their bodies into the service of state interests.

States typically prioritize the welfare of the fetus over that of the parent. Prospective parents are bombarded with advice on how to produce a healthy child and can be penalized for behaviors that risk fetal health. In the US today, a miscarriage can get you charged with manslaughter or murder. In El Salvador, a women was sentenced to 50 years in prison after a stillbirth.

Protecting the pregnant person is not a priority. There are no public warnings that pregnancy can cause severe pain, traumatic injury, hemorrhage, sepsis, sterility, disability, and death.

Women in the US are 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. In Mississippi, a Black woman is 118 times as likely to die from carrying a pregnancy to term than from an abortion. The United States is the most dangerous place in the industrialized world to give birth, ranking 55th overall in the world.

Because staying pregnant is more dangerous than having an abortion, a complete abortion ban in the US would increase the number of pregnancy-related deaths by an estimated 21 percent overall, and 33 percent for Black women. These figures do not include the rise in deaths from unsafe abortions.

The Supreme Court refused to consider these matters. Justice Alito wrote,

We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision.

It seems counter-productive for capitalism to restrict abortion. Women need to control their fertility so they can work outside the home. Denying this control has a devastating impact on their earning potential, as well as disrupting industries that depend on female labor.

The capitalist class are not united on all things. For some sections, social control is the highest priority. They rightly fear that people who are free to choose in any area of life will push for freedom on the job. To prevent that, they claim the right to dictate what people can and cannot do, and use the State to impose their beliefs on society.

Authoritarian

A tiny elite can only rule a large majority by robbing them of the choice to live any other way. By definition, such rule is authoritarian.

As the gap grows between the wealthy capitalist class and the impoverished working class, the risk of rebellion rises. To maintain social control, governments all over the world are becoming more authoritarian. Two recent US examples include the Trump insurrection and the proliferation of forced-birth laws.

In Canada, a seemingly liberal government has adopted an unprecedented number of Secret Orders-in-Council that are never published and cannot be accessed by Parliament or the public. Secret decision-making enables elites to enact policies that ordinary people would reject, such as exporting billions of dollars in weaponry to the US and Saudi Arabia. A genuine democracy has no need for secret policies.

Technological advances make it easier to enforce authoritarian control. A 2011 report warned,

Within the next few years, it will be technically possible and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders – every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.

Fear of majority rebellion has spurred increased funding for police and expanded police powers.

The budgets of modern police departments are staggeringly high and ever increasing, with no parallel in history, producing incarceration rates unseen around the world. If police and prisons made us safe, we would have the safest society in world history — but the opposite is true.

That is how afraid of us they are.

Fed Up

Having suffered through a lethal pandemic, most people are working harder and longer for less, while profits and executive pay soar. Inflation is rapidly rising, yet the modest demand that wages at least match inflation is rejected as excessive and inflationary. Corporate profiteers get no such criticism, even though fatter profits account for more than 50 percent of increased prices.

A US report found, “markups and profits skyrocketed in 2021 to their highest recorded level since the 1950s.” The average price markup was 72 percent higher than a company’s costs, pushing net profits to the highest value on record. The authors conclude,

Since markups are unusually and suddenly so high, there is room for reversing them with little economic harm and likely societal benefit, including lower prices and less inequality.

They must have missed the capitalist memo that profits are sacred and workers are expendable.

Instead of forcing corporations to lower prices or raise wages, officials are jacking up interest rates on loans and mortgages. This has the effect of undercutting wages, driving workers deeper into debt, and making it more difficult to pay for essentials, such as food, housing, and medical care.

Understandably, confidence in capitalist institutions is falling. Only 36 percent of Americans think the US system of government is sound, and only 13 percent of Americans are satisfied with how things are going in the US.

When the majority lose faith that the existing system can solve their problems, they look for alternatives. One result is a global resurgence of working-class rebellion with millions of people protesting their suffering and demanding fundamental social change.

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Source: https://susanrosenthal.com/capitalism/my-body-is-not-your-capital-producing-machine-or-is-it/

Coming soon: Part 2. Why Freedom Cannot be Won Within the System that Takes it Away.

The post My Body Is Not Your Capital-Producing Machine – Or Is It?- – Susan Rosenthal MD appeared first on Void Network.

The talk situates these formations within a social and political context in which various modes of difference were being mobilized to illustrate and expand the symbolic flexibility and the “writerly” potentials of socialism – particularly by the politically imaginative work of the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, the 1978 Socialist-Feminist Conference, the radical queer activist group Gay Liberation Front, and others.

The talk uses these formations as the context for arguing that this decade of socialist experimentation was one in which black queer activists and artists were central. More directly, those activists and artists were part of various projects to revise socialism in accordance with an interest in politicizing homoerotic desires and eroticizing anti-racist and socialist visions.

This lecture was recorded on December 3, 2013 at Barnard College in New York City.

SEE ALSO

The post Socialism in Black Queer Time: 70s and the Erotic Potentials of Radical Politics- Roderick Ferguson appeared first on Void Network.

Breaking with his principal focus on Southeast Asia, in September of last year, he published his ninth book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. In it, he interrogates long-held beliefs about how early civilizations formed. The book also serves as a blistering critique of the supposed function of states as “civilizing” instruments. Scott, who is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, lives on a farm outside of New Haven, Connecticut, where he tends to his hens and Highland cattle.

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FRANCIS WADE: What first drew you to your field of inquiry — the question of how states develop, how they control their subjects, and how they are then resisted?

JAMES C. SCOTT: Originally, this goes way back to my period as a graduate student and a Southeast Asianist when I was speaking against the Vietnam War. I was mesmerized by Sékou Touré, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, and others, and it was only toward the end of the 1960s that I realized that all these kinds of revolutionary struggles led to a stronger state that was able to batten itself on the population in a more authoritarian way than the state that it replaced. My first book, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, was an effort to understand peasant rebellion. That led to subsequent works on forms of resistance that were not revolutionary — everyday forms of resistance. Most recently I’ve become interested in the deep history of the state, and a previous book relevant to that question was a history of the hill people in Southeast Asia. Against the Grain was a natural progression from this, but I wanted also to give an ecological side to this. Scholarly work is infused these days with a deep sense of doubt about the place we’ve gotten to, and how we’ve gotten there — whether it’s global warming or extinction of species. Just this morning I was thinking that all the studies on how animals think and reason, and how they are agents, provides an interesting angle for a species — ourselves — who think of themselves as a class apart in terms of our intelligence. At some deep level I share this worry that the state forms and ecology of agrarian life that prevailed until fossil fuels were used are partly responsible for some of the problems we now face. So I was determined to go back as far as I could to look at how this thing called the state and its concentration of animals and crops and people in sedentary spaces got established in the first place.

Some reviews of Against the Grain have accused it of going too hard on the state. Can the state be the provider of freedoms as much as it can limit them?

I try to think about this question carefully in terms of the French Revolution, because that was the first time that an entire, at least male, adult population was enfranchised. And it was the first time that anyone anywhere in France, no matter their estate or property or occupation, was equal before national French law. France after the revolution was a great emancipatory state, but prior to it, the state only had access to the population through the different parliaments and different estates of the feudal order. Once the revolution occurred, the state for the first time had direct access to every citizen. That was the birth of citizenship, and that made possible the total mobilization of the population under Napoleon. So you had organization and mobilization of total war and emancipation being linked integrally to the achievements of the French Revolution.

What I object to in some of the critical reviews of Against the Grain is that they seem to assume that hunters and gatherers had the option of either continuing with their existence or joining the Danish welfare state. They’re choosing, or more likely being forced to join, an agrarian autocracy of one kind or another. Insofar as the state has any welfare aspects, it’s only what is necessary to hold a population at the center that can be useful for them.

Weapons of the Weak explores the material and ideological ways in which elite power is resisted by society’s most vulnerable. Had you gone to this Malaysian village specifically to look at these tools of resistance?

Actually in some respects Weapons of the Weak is the book I’m proudest of, partly because it’s based on two years of fieldwork in this Malaysian village where nothing revolutionary was happening. And I found that it’s not just ideological, subtle ways of resistance that the villagers were using. Struggles for people with no citizenship rights, which is to say most of the world’s population most of the time, are always material in a sense. Between 1650 and 1850 the most popular crime in the United Kingdom was poaching. And there were never any great marches on London, no parliamentary petitions, no riots — this was a struggle over common property that went on for two centuries and yielded real benefits on a daily basis for the peasantry. Similarly, look at the difference between a land invasion on the one hand, and squatting: squatters don’t make any public claim; they’re interested in de facto results. The same is true for army desertions as opposed to mutiny, because mutiny makes a public claim. So it dawned on me that most resistance in history did not speak its name, and actually a lot of it was cloaked by an apparent loyalty to the king or the tsar. It seems to me that the historians, by paying attention to formal organization and public demonstrations, have missed most acts of resistance throughout history.

Are these everyday “weapons” used by the Malaysian villagers — foot-dragging, evasion, gossip — in use at home too, in a developed country like the United States with robust political institutions?

If we’re talking about developed countries, we’re talking about an overall alienation from politics and an unwillingness to give one’s heart and soul to struggle in an arena that one sees as deeply corrupted and compromised. That alienation and withdrawal are the most common forms of resistance. In Eastern Europe they used to call it internal migration — you’d find something else to think about because it was hopeless to think about the public sphere. It was Hobsbawm who said that the peasants’ goal is to work the system to their minimum disadvantage — they can’t beat it but they can nibble around the edges. The other thing I discovered in this Malaysian village is the way in which people misrepresent themselves before different audiences — how the poor misrepresent their agreements and complicity with the elite of the village, how they talk among themselves as opposed to how they talk to power. This is something that happens in daily life everywhere. When the disparities in power are great, the misrepresentation is correspondingly greater. These are the “hidden transcripts” I’ve written of.

But remember that foot-dragging is not just a skill of the powerless; it’s used by bureaucracies too. A long time back in Massachusetts the state government decided it wanted to reduce welfare expenditures. But it didn’t have the courage to do so openly, and it would’ve been too politically difficult to formally change the welfare criteria and welfare stipend. So what they did was to essentially make the bureaucratic process so onerous by using lengthy forms, to make the opening hours of the welfare office as inconvenient as possible for mothers with children — to use a whole series of subtle obstacles, or everyday resistance by elites, if you like, to make sure most people never made it to the candy store. So while that kind of resistance may be the only weapon of the powerless, it is one of the many weapons that elites have.

You’ve devoted entire books to exploring state resistance in Southeast Asia. But I often sense an almost conditioned desire among some communities there for strong authority, without which society might break apart. Thailand and the Philippines are two recent examples that come to mind.

I don’t claim to be a specialist on public opinion but it strikes me that the cosmopolitan, educated middles classes of Thailand have turned against a populist, elected government and are very happy to have military rule. Likewise, the fact that there’s not an uprising against Duterte in the Philippines is part of the same desire for law and order at the expense of democratic freedoms. In Myanmar, one of the military’s long-range goals, in terms of public opinion, is to make people fear the country will fall apart unless a strong military is confirmed in power and has a free hand. This desire is cultivated from the top. I have a feeling that Aung San Suu Kyi wanted to extend ceasefires to all the peripheral nationalities because she wanted that major issue of national security under control and I think the military was perfectly happy to have that break down and conflicts flare — it was in their interests to have it so.

Can these supposedly benevolent campaigns — ceasefires in Myanmar; Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines — instead be strategies to project state power into regions of these countries where it lacks?

Every state intervention and extension of power is seen by state elites as a benevolent move in the interest of the population. Even if the rationale is not cynical, it is still likely to result in an amplification of state power at the expense of its subjects. In the Philippines the effort to extend state power in Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago is something that characterizes Philippine regimes back to President Magsaysay in the 1950s and the relocation of peasants into previously Islamic areas. So this effort to move what are seen to be friendly populations to the periphery of a state, among people who are seen as potentially hostile, happens all over Southeast Asia. You saw it with the transmigration efforts in Indonesia, and the efforts of the Vietnamese to move the Kinh majority ethnic group into the hills. This is something that is almost national policy. Some of it is stimulated and subsidized, some is voluntary.

Early states had to deal with a periphery of other peoples, with which they either had to make allies, or turn into mercenaries, or keep at arm’s length. Now, the population explosion of the last century and a half has meant there are land-starved lowland populations that can be used both to create plantations in the hills and new settlements and so on. In a sense the periphery can be controlled in large part through transplanting majority populations to the periphery. But now, modern technology and roads and transport allows the state to project its power in ways that weren’t previously possible. I think the degree to which the state has this control however varies a good deal across Southeast Asia. Most of Laos, for example, except for a few valley areas, is a non-state space.

Could there be something in the early processes of state formation there that accounts for this frequent pendulum swing between authoritarianism and democracy in Southeast Asia?

I guess if I were to address this question I’d want to look at World War II and postwar early independence history. In Myanmar in particular, it’s clear that military mobilization was an absolutely crucial part of the early creation of the Burmese state. Some of that is true in Indonesia too, and in spades in Vietnam. It seems that a lot of these places got a kind of muscle-bound military early on in the game that was accustomed to rule and in many cases to running the economy. They are the major economic interest as well. In that respect I think there’s an institutional military dominance that goes back a long way and the military then represents itself as the savior and soul of nation.

With that swing comes acute anxieties about the stability of society, and nationalist leaders are skilled at propagandizing on the fear that democracy will upend longstanding social orders, whether ethnic, religious, and so on. We’re seeing the lethal results of that in Myanmar right now.

If you ask which countries have the deepest and longest experience of open democratic politics in Southeast Asia, the answers would have to be the Philippines and Thailand, and Indonesia to some considerable extent now as well. The point is that a longer experience of relative stability under peaceful democratic political competition will reduce the fear that the nation will fall apart. I think of open democratic politics as a process of gradual education. On the other hand, if you have a continuous period of authoritarian rule then the only forms of opposition have to be deeply subversive or armed, and that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if the only kind of opposition that the Burmese military permits to its rule is armed secessionist movements. Then, in fact, the country will fall apart. It is, in a sense, a characteristic of politics that military rule has itself created.

On the question of Myanmar, this so-called pacted transition to democracy that Suu Kyi hopes to preside over raises a problem: the military has leased much of the natural resources to foreign companies, and they have grabbed lands and enterprises all over the country and deeded it to themselves and officers. It’s not clear to me, even if this transition were successful over the next eight years or so, that there would be a lot left that hadn’t been seized and made the property of the military or foreign companies with long leases. It’s turned out to be a bad bargain for the democrats.

You’re a longtime Myanmar watcher. Are you surprised at the intensification of ethno-religious violence there during democratization?

I have always remarked ever since I first went to Burma on what I thought as an irrational fear of Muslims in general. It’s a kind of hysteria — that these people are stealing our women, as if women are the property of Burmans [majority ethnic group] only. There’s a deep cultural fear of extinction, especially linked to males and Buddhism in its Burma guise, and it always seemed to be totally out of proportion to any real danger that the Burmese state faced.

There is no doubt that we have a massive humanitarian tragedy unfolding, the likes of which Southeast Asia has not seen at least since the massacres after 1965 in Indonesia. It seems to me that the Indonesians will be dealing with those massacres as a national stain for the next century, in the way that the Turks have to deal with the Armenian massacre. Whatever else one has to say about the Rohingya, they are human beings and they have been treated like cattle or worse — more than half a million have been driven away, their houses burned, their lives destroyed. When the dust settles, any Burmese regime is going to have to deal with this huge humanitarian tragedy for which the military and their allied militias will always be held responsible. This is one of those national stains. I’m not speaking from a positon of a nation that doesn’t have lots of genocides that it has to explain — the United States certainly does. But Burma has a genocide it needs to explain as well.

How does such a vast cross-section of a population come to rally in support of ethnic cleansing? It can’t just emerge from thin air.

I’m actually mystified by the deep suspicion and fears of Muslims that goes back long before the Rohingya crisis. I confess to not understanding this. There are all these links to the Indian population in Rangoon and dockworkers strikes and violence during the colonial period. There is a history there, but I am mystified by such a widespread fear of Muslims among ordinary Burmans, so I throw up my hands. But it’s been fanned and cultivated and whipped up by Buddhist nationalists who have their own particular agenda, and by Rakhine who have their own history and anxieties that are deeply rooted and realistic, and by the military, for whom all this helps to solidify their claims to power and control of the economy and state. These attitudes are there and they are deeply rooted but they have been politically mobilized like no one has ever seen. The Rohingya were quite passive historically but now they have become a point of public mobilization. Yet if one wanted to get upset about an “outside” economic threat in Myanmar then the Yunnan Chinese population, and the Chinese companies that control all of northern Burma, would be the source of a more realistic and palpable concern of economic domination than the Muslims have ever posed.

Is this perhaps a by-product of the creation of a new society — statecraft as pursued by a majority long denied the capacity to do so?

There are lots of groups in Southeast Asia that, like the Rohingya, spill over national boundaries. Outside of Southeast Asia, the Kurds are the most striking contemporary example. It seems to me that if you don’t want wars of secession then the only way to avoid them is for the international system to invent forms of association across borders on questions like culture, language, education, and so on — a whole series of issues that have to do with the cultural cohesion of a people that do not threaten the sovereignty of the nations across whose borders they spread. We need to invent something like that for the Kurds, the Rohingya, the Hmong, and lots of smaller ethnic groups.

The Burmese military could have gotten away with this assault on the Rohingya 30 years ago and the international press would have scarcely noticed. But the world is more closely integrated, such that every nation is going to have to answer for their treatment of helpless minority populations. The only thing that offers an even minor restraint on what is happening in Myanmar is this international scrutiny, and the more scrutiny the better. When it comes to the violation of essential human rights, there should be no place to hide.

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Francis Wade is a journalist and author of Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence And The Making Of A Muslim Other (Zed Books).

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source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/most-resistance-does-not-speak-its-name-an-interview-with-james-c-scott/

The post Most Resistance Does Not Speak Its Name: An Interview with James C. Scott appeared first on Void Network.

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On the 5th of May last the celebration of the centenary of the French Revolution began by the commemoration of the opening of the States-General at Versailles, at the same date, in the memorable year of 1789. And Paris—that city which in January last so clearly manifested its dissatisfaction with Parliamentary rule—heartily joined in the festivities organized to celebrate a day when parliamentary institutions, crossing the Channel, went to take firm root on the Continent. Must we see in the enthusiasm of the Parisians one of those seeming contradictions which are so common in the complicated life of large human agglomerations? Or was it the irresistible attraction of a spring festival which induced the Parisians to rush in flocks to Versailles? Or was it a manifestation intended to show that Paris proposes brilliantly to commemorate the Revolution, and the more so as the monarchies of Europe do not conceal their disgust at the very remembrance of such an event? Let it be as it may. At any rate, one who surveys the whole of the great commotion which visited France at the end of last century and exercised so powerful an influence upon the development of Europe during the next hundred years, cannot but look at the gatherings of the States-General on the 5th of May, 1789, as a decisive step in the development of the great revolutionary movement.

True that long before that date France was already in full insurrection. It is known that the advent of Louis the Sixteenth to the throne was the signal for a series of famine outbreaks which lasted till 1783. Then came a period of relative tranquility. But from 1786, and especially from 1788, the outbreaks began again with a new force. Famine was the leading motive of the former series; it played an important part in the new series as well, but the refusal to pay the feudal taxes was its distinctive feature. Small outbreaks became all but general from January 1789; from the month of March the feudal rents were no longer paid, and Taine, who has consulted the archives, speaks of at least three hundred outbreaks which took place since the beginning of the year. The first ‘Jacquerie’ had thus begun long before the gathering of the States-General, long before the memorable events by which the tiers état announced its firm resolution of no longer leaving political power in the hands of the Court.

However, a Jacquerie is not a revolution, though it be as terrible as that of Pugatchoff; nor is a simple change of government, like those which took place in 1830 and 1848, a revolution. The concurrence of two elements is necessary for bringing about a revolution; and by revolution I do not mean the street warfare, nor the bloody conflicts of two parties—both being mere incidents dependent upon many circumstances—but the sudden overthrow of institutions which are the outgrowths of centuries past, the sudden uprising of new ideas and new conceptions, and the attempt to reform all political and economical institutions in a radical way—all at the same time. Two separate currents must converge to come to that result: a widely-spread economic revolt, tending to change the economical conditions of the masses, and a political revolt, tending to modify the very essence of the political organization—an economical change, supported by an equally important change of political institutions. The convocation of the States-General at a moment when the French peasantry was already in open revolt gave the second element. Ten years before, the meeting of the representatives of the nation might have prevented the revolution; it would have certainly given it another character; but now, amid the peasant revolt, it meant the beginning of a revolutionary period. The revolt of the middle classes joining hands with the revolt of the peasants was a revolution.

The history of the French Revolution has been written and re-written. We know the slightest details of the drama played on the stages of the National Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and the Convention. The parliamentary history of the movement is fully elaborated. But its popular history has never been attempted to be written. So we must not wonder that even upon such a simple subject as the condition of rural France before 1789 opinions still remain discordant.

The fact is, that it was not the Revolution which abolished serfdom in France, as is sometimes maintained. Serfdom—that is, the bondage to the soil—had already disappeared long before. In 1788, there remained no more than 80,000 mainmortables in the Jura, and less than 1,500,000 all over France; and even these mainmortables were not serfs in the real acceptance of the word. As to the great bulk of the French peasantry, they no longer knew the yoke of serfdom. But, like the Russian peasants of our days, they had to pay, both in money and obligatory work, for their personal liberty. These obligations were exceedingly heavy, but not arbitrary: they were inscribed in the terriers which, later on, became the subject of such fury on the part of the peasants.

Besides, the manorial jurisdiction had been maintained to a very great extent; and when an old woman was bequeathing to her heirs an old woolen skirt and two chestnut trees’—I have seen such wills—she had to pay to the bailiff of the noble et généreuse dame du château, or the noble et généreux seigneur, a heavy tax.

True, that since the time of Turgot many of the feudal obligations were paid no longer. The governors of the provinces refused to support those claims of the landlords which they considered as mere exactions. But the heavier taxes, which represented a real value for the landlord or his sub-tenant, had to be paid in full, and they were ruining the peasants, just as the redemption-tax is now raining the Russian peasantry. So there is not a word of exaggeration in the dark pictures of village-life which we find in the introductory chapter of nearly every history of the Revolution; but there is also no exaggeration in the assertion that in each village there were individual peasants who were on the road to prosperity, and therefore were the more anxious to shake off the yoke of feudality. Both types represented by Erckmann-Chatrian—that of a bourgeois du village and that of a misery-stricken peasant—are true types. From the former the tiers état borrowed its real force; while the bands of insurgents which from January 1789 were extorting from the nobles the renouncement of the obligations inscribed in the terriers were recruited among the down-trodden masses who had but a mud-hut to live in, and chestnuts and occasional gleanings to live upon.

The same was true with regard to the cities. The feudal rights existed in the cities, as well as in the villages, and the poorest classes of the towns were as burdened by feudal taxes as the peasants. The right of patrimonial jurisdiction was in full vigor, and the houses of the artisans and workers had to pay the same feudal taxes on inheritance and sellings as the peasants’ houses; while many towns were bound to pay forever a tribute for the redemption of their former feudal submission. Moreover, most cities had to pay the king the don gratuit for the right of maintaining a shadow of municipal independence, and the whole burden of the taxes fell upon the poorer classes. If we add to these features the heavy royal taxes, the contributions in statute labor, the heavy tax on salt, and so forth, the arbitrariness of the functionaries, the heavy expenses in the law-courts, and the impossibility for a roturier of finding justice against a hereditary bourgeois or a noble, and all kinds of oppression, we shall have an idea of the condition of the poorer classes before 1789.

I need hardly mention the great intellectual movement which preceded the Revolution. No other period in the history of thought has so much been discussed, or is so well known, as that glorious era of revival which was born in this country, and after having been systematized and popularized in France, exercised so powerful an influence upon the minds and actions of the political leaders of the period. Full freedom of analysis; full confidence in humanity, and complete disdain of the inherited institutions which spoil human nature; the equality of all men, irrespective of their birth; equality before the law; Roman veneration for the law, and obligatory submission of every citizen—be he king or peasant—to the will of the nation, supposed to be expressed by its elected representatives; full freedom of contract and full freedom of religious opinions: all that, carefully elaborated into a system by the eminently systematic French mind, professed with the fanaticism of neophytes, ready to transport the results of their philosophical convictions into life—all this is well known. But what chiefly interests the historian is not so much the development of thought itself as the causes which determined the transition from thought to action—the circumstances which permitted men of thought to pass from mere criticism and theoretical elaboration to the application in life of the ideal which had grown out of their criticism. To induce men to pass from mere theory to action, there must be some hope of being able to realize their ideas. That hope was raised by the peasants’ outbreaks, by the discontent of the middle classes, and by the thus resulting necessity of making an appeal to the nation for the reform of its institutions.

It is well worthy of note that the writings of the most popular philosophers and political writers of the time were imbued to a great extent with what now constitutes the essence of Socialism. The word was not known then, but the ideas were much more widely spread than is generally believed. The writings of Rousseau and Diderot are full of socialistic ideas; Sieyès expressed some of them in most vigorous terms; and the saying la propriété c’est le vol, which later on became the beginning of the fame of Proudhon, was the title of a pamphlet written by the Girondist Brissot. Nationalization of land is not unfrequently met with in the pamphlets; the toiling masses are unanimously recognized as the real builders of national welfare, and ‘the people’ becomes a subject of idealization, not in Rousseau’s romances only, but also in a mass of novels and on the stage. All those writings had the widest circulation; their teachings penetrated into the slums and the mud-huts; and, together with the promises of the privileged classes and many secondary causes, they maintained in the masses the hopes of a near change. ‘I do not know what will happen, but something will happen some time soon,’ an old woman said to Arthur Young as he was traveling over France on the eve of the Revolution; and that was the expression of the state of minds all over France. Hopes of change were ripe amid the toiling masses; they had been maintained for years, but they had always been deceived. They had been renewed by the declarations of nobility during the Assemblées des Notables—and deceived again. And so, when the terrible winter of 1788 and the famine came, while the revolts of the Parliaments were stimulating hopes, the revolt of the peasants took the character of a general outbreak.

The French Revolution already has its legend, and that legend runs as follows:—

On the 12th of July [I omit the facts anterior to that date] the fall of Necker’s Ministry became known. That foolish step of the Court provoked the outbreak in Paris which led to the fall of the Bastille. As soon as the news reached the provinces, similar outbreaks began in the cities and spread into the villages. Many castles of the nobility were burned. Then, during the famous night of the 4th of August, the nobility and the clergy abdicated their feudal rights. Feudalism was abolished. Since that time the struggle continued between the national representation and the Court, and terminated in the defeat of the aristocracy and the royal authority. As to the peasants’ outbreaks which continued after the 4th of August, they were—the legend says—the work of mere robbers, inspired with the sole desire of plunder, when they were not instigated by the Court, the nobles, and the English. At any rate, they had no reason to continue since the feudal rights had been abolished, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man had become the basis of the French Constitution.

To begin with, the outbreak of the 14th of July was not caused by the fall of Necker’s Ministry.[1] It was an outbreak of the starving masses of Paris, and it began, with the watchword ‘Bread!’ three days before the fall of Necker; but the middle classes, aware of the coup d’état prepared by the Court, took advantage of it, supported it, and directed it against the stronghold of royalty in Paris—the Bastille. When the danger was over, and the Bastille taken, their armed militia crushed the popular movement, which was taking the character of a general revolt of the poor against the rich. In that outbreak, which had so decisive a meaning for the subsequent events, Paris did not take the lead, but followed in the wake of the provinces. However, the success of the outbreak at Paris provoked many similar outbreaks against the privileged classes in the provincial towns, and it encouraged the peasants, especially in the province of Dauphiné; but the Jacquerie, as said, had already begun long before, and Chassin is quite right in saying that if Paris had been defeated on the 14th of July, the outbreak of the peasants would have continued nevertheless.

As to the night of the 4th of August, it is a pity to destroy so gracious a legend, but the fact is that during that night the feudal rights were abolished in words only. All that display of patriotic abnegation was not serious, even if it was sincere, because already on the 6th of August the Assembly reexamined its work and introduced the subtle distinction between the personal, humiliating obligations of the peasantry, and the real ones which represented a pecuniary interest for the landlords. And while the decree of the National Assembly begins with the words ‘The National Assembly entirely abolishes the feudal system,’ we learn from the end of the same decree that the personal servitudes only are abolished, while the real obligations can be redeemed—on such conditions as will be established later on. And thus the peasants, mizerable as they were, had to pay, in addition to all taxes old and new, a redemption the amount of which was not even fixed, but was left to an agreement between the peasants and the landlords. The decrees were thus much more like a declaration of principles than a law. Nay, even these decrees were not promulgated till the end of September, and the promulgation consisted in simply sending them to the Courts of Justice together with the observations of the king.

It is evident that such concessions could not satisfy the peasants. ‘Our villages are most dissatisfied with the decree upon the feudal rights,’ Madame Roland wrote in May 1790. A reform will be necessary, otherwise the castles will burn again.’ But the longed-for reforms did not come. The question as to the feudal rights remained unsettled, and one who has grown accustomed to the legend is quite bewildered as he finds, under the date of 18th of June, 1790, a decree according to which ‘the tithes, both feudal and ecclesiastical’ (and we know that the tithes sometimes meant one fourth of the crop) had to be paid for the current year,’ in the usual way that is, in effects and to the usual amount; that the champarts, terrages, and agriers comptants[2] had to be paid in the same way ‘until redeemed’; and that any attack upon these rights, ‘either in writing or in speech, or by menaces’ should be punished in the severest way—that is, in all appearance, by hard labor or death. In fact, the abolition of the feudal rights without redemption was voted only in June 1792, and that vote was simply snatched from the Legislative Assembly while two hundred of its members were not present.

The peasants thus had no other means of obtaining a real abolition of feudal rights than themselves to compel the landlords to abandon their rights, or to storm the castles and burn the terriers. So the Jacquerie continued for nearly four years. But as soon as the middle classes had obtained their first successes over royalty in 1789, and as soon as they had armed their militia, they began to suppress the peasants’ outbreaks with a cruelty worthy of the old monarchy. The municipalities, at the head of the bourgeois militia, exterminated the bands of peasants. In the Dauphiné, where the revolt was severest, the grand-prévôt was traveling over the villages by the end of 1789, and pitilessly hanging the ‘rebels’—the more so as those brigands did not respect the castles of the ‘patriots’ and attacked them as well as the castles of the noble supporters of the king.[3]

Another feature, relative to the common-lands, also must be mentioned under this head, because some of my readers may not be aware that the communal possession and administration of commonlands, the communal assembly of all householders of the village (the mir, I should say) and the common liability for the payment of taxes had persisted in France till the reforms of Turgot.[4] It was Turgot who substituted for the communal assembly (which he found ‘too noisy’) elected bodies of notables, which soon became, in the hands of the richer bourgeois du village, an instrument for taking possession of the common-lands. A good deal of the common-lands having been enclosed both in this way, as well as in former times by the landlords, one of the aims of the peasants’ outbreaks was to restore to the commons the possession of their lands; but the National Assembly took no notice of that desire. On the contrary, it authorized (on the 1st of August, 1791) the sale of the common-lands, which simply meant the spoliation of the poorer inhabitants of the villages of their last means of existence, for the enrichment of the wealthier peasants. One year later the sale of the common-lands was suspended by a new law, but that law permitted their division between the richer peasants, to the exclusion of the proletarians; and it was not before the 10th of June, 1793, that the Convention, while ordering the communes to take possession of the lands arbitrarily enclosed in former times, enjoined them either to keep them undivided, or, in case the division be demanded by two-thirds of the inhabitants of the commune, to divide them between all inhabitants, rich and poor. The legislation about the common-lands was thus another cause of discontent which maintained the agitation, and continually resulted in fresh outbreaks till the question was settled in 1793. As to the towns, the outbreaks of the poorer classes became the more unavoidable since the National Assembly endowed the municipalities with wide powers, while the real power remained in the hands of a few privileged bourgeois and nobles.

I have been compelled to enter into these details—not always clearly understood—because the uprising of the peasants and the urban proletarians for the abolition of the last relics of feudal servitude was the real ground upon which the Revolution throve. That uprising permitted the great battle between the middle class and the Court to be fought; it prevented any solid government from being instituted for nearly five years, and thus enabled the middle classes to seize political power and to prepare the elements for its ulterior organization on a democratic basis. The middle classes alternately favored and opposed those uprisings. They used the popular discontent as a battering-ram against monarchy, but at the same time they were always anxious to maintain the popular wave in such a channel as not to compromise the privileges which they shared in common with the nobles or had acquired during the Revolution.

The National Assembly of 1789 boldly abolished in principle most of the odious privileges of the old régime. Proceeding in a most systematic way, it destroyed one after the other the old mediæval institutions and embodied its political principles in the shape of laws which are mostly distinguished by a remarkable lucidity of style and clearness of conception. It proclaimed the rights of the citizen and it elaborated a constitution; it elaborated also a provincial and a communal organization based on the principle of equality before the law. It abolished for ever the distinction between the three different ‘orders,’ and laid the bases of a complete reform of taxation; the titles of nobility were abolished; the Church was disendowed, rendered a department of the State, and its estates seized as a guarantee of national loans; the army was reorganized so as to make of it an instrument of national defense; and a judicial organization which could be advantageously contrasted with the present judicial organization of France was promulgated. Over-centralization had been avoided in all those schemes. The work was immense; it was performed by able hands; and many a historian, while passing in review the work of the National Assembly, has been brought to ask himself, Why the Revolution did not stop there? Why a second revolution was added to the first?

The answer is simple. Because otherwise all that symmetrical structure would have remained what it was, a dead letter, a simple declaration of principles, very interesting for posterity, but without any moment for the time being. Because there is an immense, often immeasurable, distance between a law and its application in life—a distance which is great even in the centralized, carefully organized States of our days, but was immense in a State like old France, which represented the most curious mixture of conflicting institutions inherited from several different historical epochs. Who was to execute those laws? In our modern States a law finds a ready centralized administration to execute it, and a whole army to enforce it in case of need. But nothing of the kind existed in 1789; the very organization for enforcing laws had to be created, and the law had to be enforced before reaction could set in and annihilate all reformatory work. Therefore, the so-called ‘second revolution’ was not a second revolution at all; it was simply the means for transforming into facts the theories proclaimed by the National Assembly.

As to the opposition which the new measures met with in the privileged classes, far from having been overrated by historians, it never has been fully told. The conspiracies of the Court are pretty well known. What formerly were represented as so many calumnies circulated by the liberal historians have now become historical facts. No serious student of the period will doubt any more that each of the uprisings in Paris was an answer to some coup d’état schemed by the Court. The appeal to the foreigner to invade France is no longer a matter of doubt. Besides, new materials are steadily coming to light to show the extension of the conspiracies planned to oppose the Revolution; and it is now known that if the Protestants in Southern France had not so heartily joined the Revolution, two Vendées, instead of one, would have had to be combated. But the resistance of the Vendées was but a trifle in comparison with the resistance which every act of even the National Assembly, (not to speak of those of the subsequent assemblies) met with in each provincial directoire, in each town, large or small. When asked by the German historian Schlosser, ‘How was it possible that Robespierre could keep all France in his hands?’ the Abbé Grégoire retorted: ‘Why, in each village there was its Robespierre!’ Surely so, but in each town, in each castle and in each bishop’s palace, there was also its Coblentz—its center of resistance of the old system. Hence the terrible struggles for the conquest of municipalities which we see all through the revolutionary period, the denunciations, the armed attacks, the local executions. Take, for instance, so simple a thing as the assessment of the income-tax, which had been entrusted to the municipalities. As long as the municipality remained in the hands of a few rich people from the privileged classes, the new taxation was not introduced; then, the proletarians took possession of the municipality, named their own men, and proceeded to realize the platonic declarations of the National Assembly. But if the royalists again obtained possession of the municipal power, they pitilessly executed the popular leaders, reintroduced the old system, and freed themselves from the burden of the taxes.

Moreover, the Revolution was far from universal. It had found warm followers in the east, the north-east, and the south-east of France, but over more than one-half of the territory either hostility or indifference prevailed, and in the best case men were waiting the issue of the events in order to take the side of the party which came out victorious; while the State expenses were growing every day, and the most strenuous efforts were required to cope with the foreign invasions.[5]

So it becomes evident that the National and the Legislative Assemblies had merely expressed desiderata, and that in order to transscribe those desiderata into facts, the ‘second revolution’ was rendered necessary on account of the resistance opposed to any innovation by adherents of the old régime. Not only had the flight of the king and the conspiracies of the Court rendered the republic a necessity; but the proclamation of the republic was needful in order to guarantee to France that it should not return under the rule of the old aristocracy—just as the proclamation of the Commune in 1871 proved to be the means of preventing the return of Monarchy after the disasters of the German war. There was a moment of relaxation of revolutionary energy, especially in 1791. That moment could have been utilized for strengthening what had been elaborated by the National Assembly. If the nobility and the Court had understood the necessity of concessions, and made them, they most probably would have saved part of their privileges. But they admitted nothing save a return, pure and simple, to the old state of affairs. Instead of accepting the compromise which the middle classes were only too willing to come to, they called foreign armies in order to reestablish the whole system in full. They concocted their foolish schemes of the flight of the king, and threatened to take a bloody revenge upon those who had disturbed them in the enjoyment of their former rights. In such circumstances there remained nothing but to fight, and the fight was fought to the bitter end.

Nay, the terrible struggles between revolutionists themselves in the Convention, which have been often represented as an outcome of so many personal rivalries, were nothing but the logical development of the same necessity. The foolishness of the nobility and the Court rendered the very name of royalty hateful. Royalty meant no other program than a destruction, with the help of foreigners, of even the modest reformatory work that had been done by the first Assembly of the States-General. A new enthusiasm only, a new revival of the revolutionary energy, could save the little that had been done; but the Girondists did not understand that necessity. They could not see that the return of Monarchy had to be prevented in order to give to the new institutions time to take root; that the peasant ought to plow for the first time his newly conquered field in order to be ready to fight for it; that the new judge, the new municipality, the new tax-gatherer had to be accustomed to their functions, and that the nation as a whole had to shake off its former habits of servility and submissiveness. The Girondists did not understand that, and they fell victims of their irresoluteness. Even so moderate an historian as Mignet, who, however, had the advantage of writing under the fresh impression of the epoch, judiciously remarks that a sure return to the old régime, a victory of the coalition and the dismemberment of France would have followed if the Commune of Paris had not taken the upper hand on the 31st of May, 1793, when the Girondists were arrested and sent to the scaffold. Without fanaticism, without the law of maximum and the requisitions, the young republic never would have succeeded in repelling the invaders and the old régime which found a refuge in their camp. The struggle between the parties in the Convention was not a struggle for personal domination: it was a struggle to settle the question how far the Revolution should go. Should it succumb, or live to insure its work? And without the temporary triumph of Marat and the Commune of Paris, the Revolution would have been terminated in May 1793.

In fact, the Revolution lived as long as the double current of popular outbreaks in the villages and the towns continued. When the feudal institutions were totally destroyed both in towns and the country, and the famous decree of the Convention ordered the burning all over France of all papers relative to the feudal system, the movement began to exhaust its energy. Those who had taken possession of the 1,210,000 estates (representing one-third of the territory of France), which had changed hands during the Revolution, hastened to enjoy the benefits of their newly acquired property. Those who had enriched themselves by all descriptions of speculations monopolized the fruits of the rich crops of 1793, and starved the cities. The proletarians of the cities thus saw themselves reduced to the same misery as before. The men who had never refused to respond to the appeals of the middle classes when an insurrection had to be opposed to a conspiracy of the nobles, were reduced to starvation again.

A third revolution, having a kind of vague Socialism for its economical program, and the full independence of the communes instead of the dictatorship of the Convention as a program of political organization, was ripening. But it was not at the end of a revolution so vast as the preceding that a new movement could have a chance of success. Besides, the middle classes were decided not to part with the conquered privileges, and the Jacobins were too preoccupied with definitely establishing the building they had so vigorously defended against its enemies. The young Socialist party was defeated, and its chief representatives followed the Girondists on the scaffold.

From that moment the masses of Paris abandoned the Revolution. They unwillingly supported the Reign of Terror. The people can resort to massacres in a moment of despair; but it cannot support the daily executions performed in cold blood with the appearance of law. These legal executions weighed upon the Parisians. In fact, the Revolution had already come to an end, and when a last attempt was made to provoke an insurrection in favor of Robespierre and against the other members of the Committee of Salut public, the people of Paris did not answer to the appeal. The contre-révolution [Counter-Revolution], headed by the returned royalists and the muscadins, had its hands free: the newly-enriched middle classes hastened to enjoy the fruits of their victory and began the orgies of the Directoire, and the urban proletarians could only do their best not to succumb to starvation in the expectation of a new revolution in which fraternity and equality would be vain words no more.

And now let us cast a glance at the consequences of the Revolution. Here we meet in the first place with the usual objection: ‘What was the use,’ it is said, ‘of all that bloodshed and disturbance if it had to result in the despotism of a Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons?’ The answer to that current remark has already been given in the preceding pages. The abolition of institutions which were doomed by history to disappear being so obstinately opposed, bloodshed and disturbances became an historical necessity.

As to those who would like to know what were the results of the Revolution, we would merely say to them: Go and travel over France, call at the peasants’ houses, examine into the economical conditions of the peasantry for the last fifty years, and compare them with what they were a hundred years ago; and if you like to realize those conditions of the past in a concrete way, go to Russia; there you will see conditions very much the same as those which prevailed in France before 1789. Go especially at a time (like the year 1881) when a third part of the country is suffering from a scarcity of grain, and is feeding on bark and grass mixed with some flour. There, on the fertile soil of south-eastern Russia, you will understand the famous words of the French royal intendant who advised starving peasants to eat grass if they were hungry; because there you might see (as it was in 1881) whole villages living on mountain-spinach, and sending their people to fetch some of it from a neighboring province. There you would see the ruined but arrogant nobility preventing the peasant from making use of the uncultivated land; the arbitrariness of the functionaries; the lawlessness of the ministers; you would find the Bastille at Schlüsselburg, and you would have an insight into ‘old France.’ Personal rule returned in France with Napoleon, but not the feudal institutions. Neither the laws promulgated under the Bourbons nor even the White Terror could take the land from the peasants, nor reintroduce the feudal servitudes, nor reintegrate the old feudal organization of the cities. And if now, especially during the last twenty years, the French peasants have again to complain of the accumulation of land in the hands of capitalists, they have enjoyed, at least for more than fifty years, a period of relative prosperity which has made the real might of the French nation. More than that, the whole aspect of the nation has changed. The ideas, the conceptions, the whole mode of thinking and acting are no longer those of the last century. Instead of coming exhausted out of the Napoleonic wars, France came out of them a fresh, consolidated nation, full of force—a nation which soon took the lead of European civilization. The period of reaction was soon over, and in 1848 France already made an attempt towards the establishment of a Socialist Republic. As to the degrading rule of Napoleon the Third, it was the necessary consequence of the unsuccessful revolution of 1848, and bourgeois Imperialism would appear in any other nation, if that nation repeated the errors of our French forerunners by attempting the State organization of labor.

The influence exercised by the French Revolution on European thought and institutions was immense. The revolutionary armies of sans-culottes gave to serfdom a mortal blow all over Europe. Their astonishing successes were not due to the military genius of Napoleon, but to the abolition of serfdom inscribed on the tricolor flag. And they succeeded only so far as they brought with them the downfall of feudalism. Even the Russian peasants considered the approach of the French army as a message of liberation from the yoke of servitude. But Napoleon, when he approached Russia, was already too much of an emperor. Even in Poland the liberation of the serfs was merely nominal: it was not even attempted in Russia; and the bloodiest battle on record, taking place at Borodino, put an end to the victorious revolutionary campaign.

The military campaign did not extend the full abolition of serfdom far beyond the eastern frontiers of France. But the French Revolution had given the watchword to the century, and this watchword was: the abolition of serfdom, leading to capitalist rule; and the abolition of absolute power, leading to parliamentary institutions. The wave slowly rolled east, and these two reforms have constituted the very essence of European history during our century. The abolition of serfdom in Germany which was begun in 1811 was accomplished after 1848; Russia abolished it in 1861; the Balkan States in 1878. The cycle was thus completed, and personal servitude disappeared in Europe. On the other hand, the necessary corollary of the above reform, the abolition of Court rule, which took a hundred years to cross the Channel, took another hundred years to spread through Europe. Even the Balkan States have parliamentary institutions, and Russia is now alone in maintaining absolute rule—a phantom of absolute rule. The two fundamental principles enunciated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man have thus been applied almost in full. And if liberty, equality, and fraternity do not yet reign in Europe, — we must look for some important omission in that famous Declaration.

All the sufferings which France underwent during the Revolution and the subsequent wars necessarily suggest the question whether that revolution may not be the last of the series of revolutions which has marked the ends of each of the last five centuries.

One might wish it, but when we take into consideration the state of minds in Europe, the immense agrarian question which has suddenly grown up in all countries, the still greater social problem which imperiously demands a solution, the difficulties put in the way of that solution, the indifference of the privileged classes which does not fall far short of the indifference of the French nobility, and, finally, the great dispute arising between the individual and the State, we cannot but foresee the approach of a great commotion in Europe, with this difference, that it cannot be limited to one country only but is likely to become international, like the uprising of 1848, although it is sure to assume different characters in different countries.

As to France, its present system of government is so undermined that it can hardly be expected to live more than the usual two decades which represent the maximum duration of a government in France during our century. However, historical previsions cannot go so far as to foretell the dates of coming events. The character of the next movement in France is almost sure to be in the direction of independent federated communes trying to introduce a life based on socialist principles. The fundamental principle bequeathed by the French Revolution is full freedom of choice of occupation and freedom of contracts; but neither can be realized as long as the necessaries for production remain the property of the few. To realize those conditions will surely be the aim of the future revolutions. As to whether any of them will take the acute character of the great movement of the last century, all will depend upon the intelligence of the privileged classes, and their capacities for understanding in time the importance of the historical moment we are living in. One thing, however, seems certain: namely, that in no country can the privileged classes of our times be as foolish as the privileged classes were in France a hundred years ago.

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[1] One may see in the Moniteur that the disorders began on the 6th of July, amid the twenty thousand unemployed engaged in relief-works at Montmartre. Two days later, the poorer classes of the suburbs, together with the same unemployed, attempted to burn the octrois. Encounters with the troops are mentioned in the Moniteur under the 10th of July; and on the 11th of July the people of the suburbs burned the octroi of Chaussée d’Antin. Next day, when the departure of Necker became known, the middle classes took advantage of the movement, organized it, and directed it against royalty.

[2] The obligation of giving a certain amount of the crop to the landlord.

[3] Twenty peasants were hanged in the Dauphiné, twelve at Douai, eighty at Lyons, and so on (Buchez et Rous, ii.). The National Assembly fully approved the summary justice of the municipalities. The version representing the revolted peasants as paid robbers already appears in the history written by the ‘Amis de la Liberté,’ as well as in the Histoire Parlementaire, by Buchez and Itoux.

[4] For more details see Babeau’s Le Village sous l’Ancien Régime, and La Ville sous l’Ancien Régime. The general assembly of all inhabitants was maintained in smaller towns till 1784.

[5] I once drew a map on which I marked the localities the names of which occur in connection with insurrections in general works and works of local history of France during the Revolution. It appeared that only the north-eastern, eastern, and south- eastern parts of France were marked on my map, and that sporadic spots only occurred in western and central France. When I saw, later on, the map on which the electoral districts which had reelected ‘the three hundred and sixty-three ‘ (under McMahon’s presidency) were represented by a special color, I was struck with the likeness of both maps. Revolutionary traditions are transmitted, like all other kinds of tradition.

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The post The Great French Revolution and its Lesson – Pëtr Kropotkin appeared first on Void Network.

— Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

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“HOW DO YOU throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” This question, formulated by Johanna Hedva in “Sick Woman Theory,” has been with me for quite some time now. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. Why? Because it points to a situation familiar to too many of us (but who is that “us”?): a situation characterized by despair and depression. A situation in which you really can’t get out of bed. This situation is also, in most cases, saturated by politics and by the economy. Contrary to mainstream psychological and psychiatric discourse the reason why you can’t get out of bed is not because you have a bad attitude, a negative mindset, or because you have somehow chosen your own unhappiness. Nor is it merely a matter of chemistry and biology, an imbalance in the brain, an unlucky genetic disposition, or low levels of serotonin. More often than not it is a matter of the world you live in, the work that you hate, or the job that you just lost, the debt that haunts your present from the future, or the fact that the planet’s future is going still faster and further down the drain.

This essay, then, is an attempt, based on a dissertation and some personal experience — I had a postpartum depression in 2013/2014 — to think about depression and politics; to think about the political economy and the psychopathologies of the present. It is animated by a fact, a claim, and a call. The fact first: as the Danish Mental Health Foundation makes clear, more and more people in Denmark are diagnosed with depression. At any given time, four to five percent of the population is depressed, or, more accurately, diagnosed as such. Indeed, according to the Danish Health Authority more than 450,000 Danes bought antidepressants in 2011, a figure which has almost doubled over the past decade. This tendency can be observed all over the Western world. The US National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 7.1 percent of the adult American population — 17.3 million people — suffers from depression. Other data suggest that depression affects one in every five Americans. These numbers have led the World Health Organization to conclude that depression is the most common mental disorder and the prime cause of disability and suicide, affecting around 350 million people worldwide. No wonder, then, that the global consumption of SSRI antidepressants has gone through the roof with sales now approaching $14 billion annually, according to the market research firm alliedmarketresearch.com, which also, in some very clumsy prose indeed, points out that “[t]here are many factors including genes, factors such as stress and brain chemistry that could lead to depression.”

The claim: Depression makes manifest the contemporary subject’s alienation, in its most extreme and pathological form. As such, the psychopathology needs to be related to a world of capitalist realism, where there really is no alternative, as Thatcher triumphantly declared, and the future seems frozen once and for all. The crisis embodied by depression thus becomes a symptom of a historical and capitalist crisis of futurity. It is a kind of structure of feeling, as Raymond Williams would say. Consequently, any cure to the problem of depression must take a collective, political form; instead of individualizing the problem of mental illness, it is imperative to start problematizing the individualization of mental illness. The call is for the left, for these specific reasons, to take seriously the question of illness and mental disorders. Dealing with depression — and other forms of psychopathology — is not only part of, but a condition of possibility for an emancipatory project today. Before we can throw bricks through windows, we need to be able to get out of bed.

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The best political thinker of depression remains the late Mark Fisher, who suffered from and in the end took his own life because of depression. His whole oeuvre is an ongoing meditation on depression as a personal experience and a social and political experience. In the book Capitalist Realism from 2009, he connected depression to what I have already referred to as capitalist realism, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” In this book, depression becomes a paradigm case of how capitalist realism operates, a symptom of our blocked and bleak historical situation. In the essay “The Privatisation of Stress” from 2011, later reprinted in K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016) from 2018, Fisher wrote that one difference between sadness and depression is that “while sadness apprehends itself as a contingent and temporary state of affairs, depression presents itself as necessary and interminable: the glacial surfaces of the depressive’s world extend to every conceivable horizon,” and because of that, because of that specific characteristic of depression, a strange resonance exists between “the seeming ‘realism’ of the depressive, with its radically lowered expectations, and capitalist realism.” And in the text Good for Nothing from 2014, Fisher stated that his depression always involved a deep and ineradicable conviction that he was literally good for nothing. He wrote that he offered up his own experiences of mental distress not because he thought there was anything special or unique about them, but “in support of the claim that many forms of depression are best understood — and best combatted — through frames that are impersonal and political rather than individual and ‘psychological.’” The importance of arriving at a political understanding of depression cannot be overstated. If the reader only takes one thing away from my text let it be this: depression has a set of causes and a concrete context that transcend any diagnostic manual, as well as the neoliberal ideology of focusing on subjects, not structures; personal responsibilities, not collective ones; chemistry, not capital.

However, to understand depression through political frames does not mean that the problem of depression can be immediately solved by political means. There is a horror to depression that cannot and must not be translated too quickly into the sphere of politics, regardless of our critical and revolutionary aspirations. As anyone who has been depressed — or been around someone who has — knows, it is literally hell on earth. The physical pain is unbearable, your body is inert and feels too heavy, your mind is not functioning, and you cannot escape the feeling of being stuck, stagnated, that the race is run and that the present — which is hell — is all there is and all that can ever be imagined to be. It would be an offense to say, well, it’s just politics. By the same token there is absolutely no need to romanticize what has become known as depressive realism, since that “realism” only runs in tandem with and supports the realism of capitalism: that there are no alternatives, that there really is nothing to be done about the current state of affairs. This is another thing to take away from this. Let’s also not forget that depression is the major contributor to suicide deaths, which number close to 800,000 per year according to a recent report from WHO.

A third and final thing to be considered here is that it is indeed difficult to write about depression. By this I do not only mean that it is difficult to write about your own depression; it is also just difficult to write about the immense suffering while at the same time finding a position in relation to depression or developing a discourse on depression that is not in itself utterly depressing. Not less so after Mark Fisher’s tragic death.

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We have a lot of facts about depression, but the facts do not speak for themselves. The sale of antidepressants does not correspond exactly to occurrences of depression, as SSRIs are not exclusively used for treating depression, but used to treat a range of other mental illnesses as well. The frequency of diagnoses does not necessarily mirror the frequency of depressions, and thus the increase in diagnoses could testify to a growing number of depressed people or to an escalating tendency to pathologize common, “normal” affects such as sadness, translating them into the diagnostic category of depression (the latest example of this tendency is the inclusion of grief in the new editions of diagnostic manuals such as the DSM and ICD). We also have to wonder, why does there seem to be so much comfort in psychiatric diagnoses? Because there is comfort in the diagnosis of depression. So that’s why I feel so bad! Depression! A chemical imbalance in the brain! In this way, the diagnosis provides momentary meaning to meaningless misery. The suffering gets a name and a cause: a lack of serotonin. But this cause has causes which in the diagnostic system — and in the capitalist world as a whole — remain undiagnosed and untold.

As Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism:

It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.
Before going into the causality of depression, however, let me first describe the morality that surrounds depression. Take, as an example, a self-help video, “Why am I depressed?,” by a man called Leo Gura. He is, according to his Twitter profile, “a professional self-development junkie, life coach, video blogger, entrepreneur, and speaker,” who helps “people design awesome lives.”

Gura, a bald man with a goatee and the founder of actualized.org, starts the video by saying that he wants to answer the question of the title, “Why am I — you [raising eyebrows, while forming with his hands a parenthesis in the air as if around the word] — depressed?” And the answer is simple: you are depressed because your psychology sucks. It should be noted that this is also the title of a video work by the artist duo Claire Fontaine, who in their ready-made video Untitled (Why Your Psychology Sucks) from 2015 has an African-American actress perform an almost exact verbatim copy of Gura’s talk, unfolding a pungent and quite comical criticism of the neoliberal self-help industry’s ideological personalization of depression and generalized responsibilization of the subject as such. Claire Fontaine is one of the artists who have worked in the most concentrated and consistent way with the problem of depression. In their work, depression is always already political and must be understood in relation to its real basis in social conflicts within a capitalist economy of debt and financial speculation.

Back to the original video, where a flashing sequence of catchphrases or keywords succeeds Gura’s introductory remarks. In the order given, the words read: “Success, happiness, self-actualization, life purpose, motivation, productivity, peak performance, creative expression, financial independence, emotional intelligence, positive psychology, consciousness, peak performance, personal power, wisdom.” (Apparently, the concept of “peak performance” is so important that it must be repeated.) Then, Gura delivers his message, his shocking truth: “Here is the deal. I’m going to blunt with you here, because the bottom line is that the reason you’re depressed is because your psychology sucks. Alright, you’ve got shit psychology. I’m not blaming you, I’m telling you a fact.” He goes on to clarify that he is not talking about people who are “clinically depressed,” and who thus have “legitimate” depression. He is talking about the rest of us, the majority who get a diagnosis of depression and whom he is not blaming, except that he is. The video lasts a little more than 20 minutes, and at one point Leo Gura boldly and bluntly declares: “You are causing your depression.” There is something wrong with your mental and cognitive apparatus, your psychology is “shit.” Stop being a victim and take ownership of your psychology! Peak performance!

It is easy enough to laugh at the video and make fun of its logic, but the logic is the dominant one in the world of today — even if it is sometimes articulated in more moderate ways — and it has real effects. The logic is this: people create their own reality. Thoughts alone can change things. This means that you weave the thread of your own fate, there are no external circumstances and no excuses either.

A Danish sociologist with a quasi-royal name, Emilia van Hauen, expresses the same logic when writing on her homepage that “happiness is a choice — your choice,” and fellow Danish therapist, Eva Christensen, sings along (again in my own translation):

Happiness is a personal responsibility. Happiness is not something you can expect to get from others. Everybody has the key to their own happiness. And hence also the responsibility to put the key in the right lock. Happiness is created from the inside, it is not other people’s responsibility to make us happy, it is our own responsibility. Just as we cannot change other people, only ourselves.
If the individual is responsible for her own happiness, then she is also responsible for her own unhappiness. If the keys are in our own hands, each of us is personally responsible for almost everything. Success or failure, and health or illness are a matter of subjective willpower, lifestyle, and choice alone. While we may not be able to change other people, or the world for that matter, we certainly can work on changing ourselves and our selves. Structural change, a change of the system, is abandoned in favor of subjective change, a change of the self. Every problem, however social, political, or economic in nature, is personalized and even criminalized, the subject is made responsible for its own unhappiness, and made to suffer alone and to feel guilty, at the same time, for feeling unhappy, for not being a good and productive citizen, for not coming to work, for not getting out of bed.

These processes of personalization and responsibilization that positive psychology and the imperative of happiness entail, these processes go hand in hand. Mark Fisher was attuned to this logic, or should we say ideology. Depressed people are encouraged to feel and believe that their depression is their fault and their fault only. “Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures, which in any case they have been induced into believing do not really exist,” as he wrote in “Good for Nothing” — implicitly referencing another of Thatcher’s claims, that society does not exist. This is where the problem of depression feeds into a more general problem: the model of subjectivity advocated in the original self-help video by Leo Gura is identical to the model of the autonomous, self-determining, competitive individual, the fiction of capitalist subjectivity. In the video “the viewer,” the “you,” is the cause of his or her own depression, but consequently also the only cure. What the video wants to do is to teach you how to “master your psychology” and eventually put you in a state of “total bliss and happiness.” It is a deeply moral message. Failing to be happy is simply immoral. If you are such an immoral and bad person that you have become unhappy — or depressed — it is you, and you alone that is to blame. This is the blaming cult of contemporary capitalism: you are causing your own depression — even when evidently you are not.

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Capitalism, in other words, inflicts a double injury on depressed people. First, it causes, or contributes to, the state of depression. Second, it erases any form of causality and individualizes the illness, so that it appears as if the depression in question is a personal problem (or property). In some cases, it appears to be your own fault. If you had just lived a better and more active life, made other choices, had a more positive mindset, et cetera, then you would not be depressed. This is the song sung by psychologists, coaches, and therapists around the world: happiness is your choice, your responsibility. The same goes for unhappiness and depression. Capitalism makes us feel bad and then, to add insult to injury, makes us feel bad about feeling bad.

From my own experience of depression — except that it is not really “my own” experience — and from having written a dissertation on the topic, I think it is beyond doubt that we need another analysis of depression, and, also, another kind of cure. The personalization of depression must be answered by a politicization of depression. At the level of analysis and social causation, the phenomenon of depression should be connected to issues of labor and work — and unemployment, since stats show that unemployed people are more susceptible to get depressed than people in jobs, regardless of how much these people hate their job. It should be connected to our brutal, neoliberal culture of competition (Happy Hunger Games and may be odd be ever in your favor!) and to the concomitant ideology of happiness, which forces all of us to smile and be happy nonstop, even or especially when we are fighting among each other, fighting to make ends meet and just get by another day. Depression should, moreover, be connected to the realm of education: it is obvious to me that so many of the students at the University of Copenhagen, where I work and teach, are struggling with countless mental illnesses. I cannot even begin to imagine how it must be in the United Kingdom or United States, where students don’t have the benefit of free education as is the case Denmark but are driven ever deeper into a spiral of debt. No matter where we look, students are depressed, anxious, stressed out, burned out.

In the wake of the economic crisis, a plethora of studies have looked into the psychopathological consequences of debt. In 2012, economist John Gathergood published a study showing that people awash in a sea of debt experience and exhibit a variety of mental problems, including depression. By all accounts, it seems that being indebted can, and indeed does, lead to an increased risk not only of depression but also suicide. Another study found that “[t]hose in debt were twice as likely to think about suicide after controlling for sociodemographic, economic, social and lifestyle factors.” And in The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu have conducted an epidemiological research project which demonstrates that austerity policies — rather than recession as such — have disastrous consequences for the state of public and private health. At one point in their book, Stuckler and Basu refer to a particular study of Americans over the age of 50 which found “that between 2006 and 2008, people who fell behind on their mortgage payments were about nine times more likely to develop depressive symptoms.” Their bleak conclusion is that austerity not only hurts, but kills, exemplified by the tragic case of the Greek Dimitris Christoulas, who on April 4, 2012, “put a gun to his head in front of the Greek parliament and declared: ‘I am not committing suicide. They are killing me.’ Then he pulled the trigger.”

These conditions are real, and so are the causal connections. Obviously, the causes are many, and complex. But the symptoms of depression are also symptoms of something else. And the fact is that the economy of debt causes deep distress as indebted people, students and otherwise, are forced to pawn their own future. Yet the psychiatric and public discourse remain bent on treating depression as a personal problem devoid of context. Nowhere is this clearer than in the discourse of the diagnostic manuals — a discourse that increasingly dominates public opinion — where mental illnesses are addressed solely in terms of symptoms, without any regard for the historical, social, and economic context of the person suffering. An important task, then, for a leftist analysis of the present is not only to insist on the context but also and perhaps above all to insist, with Hedva, that “it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick.” Not the world in any abstract sense, but the concrete, capitalist world in which we live, or plod our way through. This is the reason why so many of us lie in bed, and can’t get out of it. Or as queer theorist Ann Cvetkovich argues in her book Depression: A Public Feeling:

Epidemics of depression can be related (both as symptom and as obfuscation) to long-term histories of violence that have ongoing impacts at the level of everyday emotional experience. […] What gets called depression in the domestic sphere is one affective register of these social problems and one that often keeps people silent, weary, and too numb to really notice the sources of their unhappiness (or in a state of low-level chronic grief — or depression of another kind — if they do).
The history of depression is a history of our contemporary capitalist world — and also, in the words of Cvetkovich, a history of violence: the violence that people of color, or LGBT people, or asylum seekers, experience on a daily basis, a violence both physical and psychic. Data are, again, overwhelming on this point, but suffice it to mention the “38 percent of low-income mothers and mothers of color who develop postpartum depression,” to quote from Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now; the half of LGBT people who have experienced depression in the past year; and the 61 percent of all the kids in Sjælsmark Udrejsecenter, a prison-like camp for rejected asylum seekers in Denmark, who would meet the criteria for a psychiatric diagnosis. In many instances, depression bears the mark of such violence and vulnerability, though it is not, sadly, the only mental health issue at stake.

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Up until this point I have not mentioned the climate crisis, but on the evidence of what has been said so far, it doesn’t risk exaggeration to say that ecology and mental health stands in an intimate relation. This is not to neglect the material reality, only to hint at the profound psychic effects of ecological losses and a warming globe. Again, the young generation of today, sometimes called the fucked-up generation, is worth mentioning (Phil Neel writes about this generation, “the first in a grand parade of the futureless,” in his brilliant book Hinterland). They are living in a world where tomorrow will most likely be worse than today, where there really are no alternatives and no future, not least because of how the climate crisis quite literally annihilates the future as such. Who can blame them for being depressed?

All of this to say that the current — social, political, economic, ecological — crisis is thus a mental health crisis as well. The perpetuum mobile of capitalism and its exhaustion of resources also pertains to mental resources. The economic and the psychological seem to have become indistinguishable from each other, as the double meaning of depression would also suggest. Naturally, we are not all in the same boat, or in the same bed. We are not all depressed (and those of us who are are experiencing it in the same way, or for the same reasons). We are not equally fucked (up). Some strata of society have access to futurity in ways that others do not, some bear the burden more than others, and some simply die sooner than others. People in Greece during the Euro Crisis, or people in the US higher educational system, are not indebted or depressed in the same way. As shown above, the violence and social suffering are differentially distributed along axis of class, gender, and race; so is the climate crisis insofar as citizens of Copenhagen are not feeling the devastating weight of it as those in Chittagong.

Insisting on the politics of illness, mental health, and depression, it is crucial to keep such local and global differences in mind. This should not, however, lead to a competition of social suffering. Competition is precisely what capitalism is all about, and seeks to intensify, so that we are, simultaneously, alone in our suffering and fighting among each other’s suffering selves. But it should lead to a recognition that a critique of capitalism will need to take into account the contextualized psychopathology of depression as well as other mental illnesses. Furthermore, it gives us an idea of a possible “cure,” of what needs to be done, of how we get out of bed (or maybe, why we even want to get out of bed).

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The first thing to note is that an adequate diagnosis of depression — and its context — is not enough in itself. It is common wisdom, however, that the diagnosis does not necessarily entail the cure. Just because we know what’s wrong does not mean that we will be able to deal with it. On the contrary, one of the primary symptoms of depression is that what you need to do is precisely what you cannot do, at least not alone and on your own. Or in the plain words of Ann Cvetkovich: “Saying that capitalism (or colonialism or racism) is the problem does not help me get up in the morning.” Also, there is no reason to believe that abolishing private property ownership, or realizing a global and absolute cancellation of private debt, will relieve the suffering of depressed people with a single stroke, as if by magic. But, in an act of speculation, I am tempted to say that revolution is the best antidepressant there is, it makes for a better world, true happiness. But, alas!, in order to do revolution, we need to get out of bed. A real dialectical catch-22 of depression.

Maybe a good place to start, then, with regards to the politics of depression, is to collectivize suffering, externalize blame, communize care. At this point, the question of responsibility returns in all its force. The neoliberal responsibilization of the depressed subject must be rejected, and, also, replaced by an idea of collective responsibility. The same goes for any kind of therapeutic project, and Italian thinker Franco “Bifo” Berardi — who is, admittedly, a bit loose and careless when it comes to precision in the clinical vocabulary — may be right when he asserts that “in the days to come, politics and therapy will be one and the same.” Therapy as resistance, not as reactionary obedience to the given order. Therapy as a collective project, not an individual one. Therapy as the overcoming of alienation.

What might such collective and emancipatory “therapy” look like? We have an archive of feminist and artistic projects of care, self-care, and collective care from Audre Lorde to Claire Fontaine to, rather recently, Danish artist and activist Jakob Jakobsen and the Hospital for Self Medication that he initiated after a severe depression and several months of hospitalization. We need a language that joins this archive to a movement and separates it from institutional psychiatry, neoliberal therapies, and the capitalist pursuit of profit. This is care that transcends the hospital, the clinic, the family, the state, the insurance company, Capital as such (even if one does not have access to those institutions in the first place). This is care which, based on a politicized understanding of mental illness, moves beyond care in its commodified and capitalist form. When bodies take care of each other, when responsibility is redistributed, and individual collapses are transformed into collective intimacies, the future can be (re)built in the name of a communist, shared, and sustainable one.

As poet Wendy Trevino writes:

We can’t individually “win” in this world
& simultaneously create another
Together.

This would be one way of imagining a “cure” for depression without reinforcing conformity and the status quo. What is certain is that any left politics worthy of its name must go beyond saying capitalism is the problem (even if it surely is) and confront the question of how to get up in the morning. This problem is as practical as it is revolutionary. Of course, sometimes staying in bed can be a revolutionary act in itself, a kind of strike, the epitomization of an exhausted and negative No, I can’t in a world that revolves increasingly around an emphatic and positive Yes, I can. But there are also people finding new ways to get out of bed: I’ll just mention in passing, as an encouraging sign, that there are cracks in the edifice of capitalist realism that Mark Fisher didn’t live to see.

Regardless, the point is obviously not to get out of depression so that we can get back to the work that caused the depression to begin with. The point must be, rather, to destroy the material conditions that make us sick, the capitalist system that destroys people’s lives, the inequalities that kill. Thus, creating another world together. But to do that, to get to where that becomes possible, what is called for is not competition among the sick, but alliances of care that will make people feel less alone and less morally responsible for their illness. In alliance with each other, people might eventually be able to get up and throw some bricks.

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Adapted from the book Going Nowhere, Slow, out on Zero Books November 29, 2019.

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Mikkel Krause Frantzen holds a PhD from the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, and is currently postdoctoral fellow at University of Aalborg, Denmark. He is the author of Going Nowhere, Slow — The Aesthetics and Politics of Depression (Zero Books, 2019).

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source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/future-no-future-depression-left-politics-mental-health

The post A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health appeared first on Void Network.

“What’s happening around you / is no longer your business”. Like the geography of a country that you must leave behind forever. Yet how does it still affect you? Precisely now that it is no longer your business, now that everything seems over, everything and every place now appears in its truest guise, somehow they all touch you even more intimately—just as they are: splendor and poverty.

Philosophy, a dead language. “The language of poets is always a dead language…it is a strange thing to admit: a dead language that one uses to provide greater life to thought.” Perhaps not a dead language, but a dialect. That philosophy and poetry speak in a language that is less than language is the measure of their rank, of their special vitality. To weigh and judge the world by measuring it against a dialect, a dead language that nevertheless pours forth anew, in which not even a comma can be changed. Keep speaking this dialect, even now that the house is on fire.

Which house is on fire? The country where you live, or Europe, or the entire world? Perhaps the houses and cities already burned down in some enormous fire—who knows how long ago—that we pretended not to notice. Of most of them all that remains are pieces of walls, a fresco, a patch of roof, names, so many names, already gnawed upon by flames. Nevertheless we carefully cover it all over with whitewash and falsified words, so that it looks intact. We live in houses and cities incinerated from one end to another as if they were still standing upright; people pretend to live in them and stroll in masks through ruins as if they were still in the familiar neighborhoods of a bygone era.

Today the flame has changed its form and nature, it has become digital, invisible and cold—but precisely for this very reason it is even closer still and surrounds us at every moment.

That a civilization—a barbarism—can sink, never to rise again, is nothing new. Historians are accustomed to identifying and dating caesuras and shipwrecks. But how can we bear witness to a world that is falling into ruin with eyes blindfolded and face covered, a republic collapsing with neither lucidity nor pride, but in abjection and fear? The blindness is all the more desperate since the shipwrecked claim to be governing their own shipwreck, they swear that everything can be controlled technically, that there is no need for either a new god or a new sky, only prohibitions, experts and doctors. Panic and villainy.

What would a God be to whom neither prayers nor sacrifices were addressed? And what would a law be that knew neither command nor enforcement? What is a word that has neither meaning nor command, but is truly held in the beginning—indeed, before the beginning?

A culture that feels it is at its end, that it has no life left, attempts to govern its decay in the only way it knows how, through a permanent state of exception. The total mobilization in which Jünger saw the essential character of our time should be understood from this perspective. People must be mobilized, they must feel themselves in a state of emergency at every moment, regulated down to the last detail by those who maintain the power to declare such an emergency. But whereas in the past mobilization sought to gather people together, today it aims to isolate them, to distance them from one another.

How long has the house been burning? How long since it burned down? Certainly a century ago, between 1914 and 1918, something happened in Europe that poured flames and madness upon everything that once seemed to remain intact and alive; then thirty years later, the flames again spread everywhere, and ever since have continued to burn without pause, submerged, barely visible beneath the cinders. But perhaps the fires began much earlier, when humanity’s blind impulse towards salvation and progress united with the power of the flame and machines. All of this is well known and does not bear repeating. Instead, we ought to ask ourselves how we could continue to live and think while everything burned, what was it that somehow still remained intact in the center of the fire, or at its edges. How have we been able to breathe through the flames, what have we lost, and to what wreckage—what pretensions—have we clung? Now that there are no longer flames but only numbers, figures and lies, no doubt we are weaker and more alone; but we also now find ourselves without any possible compromise, lucid as never before.

If it is true that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible only in the house ravaged by fire, then you can now see what is at stake in the history of the West, what it has tried so hard to grasp, and why it could not help but fail.

It is as if power sought at all costs to seize hold of the bare life it produces, and yet, no matter how hard it tries to appropriate and control it by means of every available apparatus—no longer simply those of policing but also those of medicine and technology—this life always escapes its grasp, because it is by definition ungraspable. To govern bare life is the madness of our time. People reduced to their pure biological existence are no longer human; instead, the governance of people and of things coincides.

The other house, the one I can never inhabit, but which is my true home; the other life, the one I did not live while I thought I was living it; the other language, the one I spelled out syllable by syllable without ever managing to speak in it—all so much my own that I can never have them…

When thought and language are divided, we believe that we can speak while forgetting we are speaking. Poetry and philosophy, when they speak, do not forget that they are speaking, they remember language. If we remember language, if we do not forget that we can speak, then we become more free, we are not bound to things and rules. Language is not a tool, it is our face, the openness in which we are.

The face is the most human of things. Humans have faces and not simply muzzles or snouts because they dwell in the open, because through their faces they expose themselves and communicate. This is why the face is the site of politics. Our unpolitical era does not want to see its own face, it keeps it at a distance, masks and covers it. There must no longer be faces, only numbers and figures. Even the tyrant is faceless.

To feel alive: to be affected by one’s own sensibility, to be delicately consigned to one’s own gesture without being able either to assume nor evade it. To feel myself living makes life possible for me, even if I were locked in a cage. And nothing is as real as this possibility.

In the coming years there will be only monks and delinquents. And yet it is impossible to simply step aside, to believe that one can escape the rubble of the world that has crumbled all around us. Because the collapse affects and addresses us, because we too are rubble. And we must learn how to use the rubble correctly, carefully, without being noticed.

Aging: “to grow only in roots, and no longer in branches.” To put down roots, but no longer flowers or leaves. Or, rather, like a butterfly floating drunkenly over what it has experienced. There are still branches and flowers in the past. And you can still make honey out of them.

The face is with God, but the bones are atheist. Outside, everything pushes us towards God; inside, the obstinate, mocking atheism of the skeleton.

That body and soul are indissolubly linked—this is spiritual. The spirit is not a third instance between the soul and the body: it is simply their helpless, wonderful coincidence. Biological life is an abstraction, and it is this very abstraction that we claim to govern and cure.

Alone, there can be no salvation for us: there is salvation because there are others. And this is not for any moral reason, because I should act for their well-being. Only because I am not alone is there salvation: I can only save myself as one among many, as another among others. Alone—and this is the special truth of solitude—I do not need salvation; I am, by definition, unsaveable. Salvation is the dimension that opens up because I am not alone, because there is plurality and multitude. God, incarnate, ceased to be unique, and became one man among many. For this reason, Christianity has had to bind itself to history and follow its destiny to the end; and when history, as happens today, fades away and decays, Christianity also nears its final days. Its incurable contradiction is that it tried, in and through history, to find salvation beyond history, and when this comes to a close the ground falls away beneath its feet. The Church was, in truth, not in solidarity with salvation but with the history of salvation, and since it sought ‘salvation’ [salvezza] through history it could only end up with ‘health’ [salute]. And when the time came, the Church did not hesitate to sacrifice salvation for health.

It is now necessary to tear salvation away from its historical context and discover a non-historical plurality, plurality as an exit route from history itself.

To leave behind a place or situation without entering other territories, to leave behind an identity and a name without adopting other ones.

We can only regress towards the present, whereas we move straightforward inthe past. What we call the past is merely our long regression towards the present. Separating us from our past is power’s first resort.

What frees us of burden is breath. In breath, we are weightless; we are propelled as if in flying without the pull of gravity.

We will have to learn to judge all over again, but with a judgment that neither punishes nor rewards, neither absolves nor condemns. An act without ends, that strips existence from ends, necessarily unjust and false. Only an interruption, an instant poised between time and eternity—in which the image of a life without ends or plans flashes up, without name or memory—and which for this reason saves, not in eternity, but in a “kind of eternity.” A judgment without pre-established criteria, and yet precisely for this reason a political judgment, because it restores life to its naturalness.

To feel and to have feelings, sensation and self-affection, are contemporaries. In every sensation there is a feeling of feeling, in every feeling of oneself there is a feeling of the other, a friendship and a face.

Reality is the veil through which we perceive the possible, what we can and cannot do.

It is not easy to tell which of our childhood desires have been fulfilled. And, above all, whether the part of the fulfilled that now borders on the unfulfilled is enough to convince us to go on living. Fear of death arises when the unfulfilled part of our desires swells beyond measure.

“Buffalos and horses have four hoofs: that’s what I call Heaven. To halter the horses, to pierce the buffalo’s nostrils: that’s what I call human. That is why I say: take care that the human does not destroy Heaven within you, take care that the intentional does not destroy the celestial.”

In the burning house, language remains. Not language, but the immemorial, weak and prehistoric forces that watch over it and remember it: philosophy and poetry. What do they watch over, what do they remember of language? Not this or that meaningful proposition, nor this or that article of faith or bad faith. Rather, the very fact that there is language, that without a name we are open within the name, and that in this openness, in a gesture, in a face, we are unknowable and exposed.

Poetry, the word, is the only thing left to us from that time when we did not yet know how to speak, a dark song within language, a dialectic or idiom that we cannot fully understand, but to which we cannot help but listen—even if the house burns, even if in their scorched language people continue to speak nonsense.

But is there a language of philosophy, just as there is a language of poetry? Like poetry, philosophy dwells entirely within language and only in its mode of dwelling does it distinguish itself from poetry. Two tensions in the field of language, which intersect at one point only to then tirelessly separate again. Anyone who speaks truthfully, clearly, draws themselves into this tension, and inhabits it.

Whoever notices that the house is burning can be tempted to look upon their unnoticing peers with disdain and contempt. And yet are these unseeing and unthinking people not the lemurs who you will have to see and account for on the last day? That we realize the house is burning does not elevate us above others: on the contrary, it is with them that you will have to share one last glance as the flames close in. What can you say to justify your claims of conscience to these people who are so unaware that they seem almost innocent?

In the burning house you continue doing what you did before—but you cannot help but see what the flames are showing you so nakedly. Something has changed, not in what you do, but in the way in which you release it into the world. Poetry written in a burning house is more just and true because no one will hear it, because nothing ensures that it will escape the flames. But if, by chance, it were to find a reader, they would still not escape that which calls to them from the helpless, inexplicable, submerged din. 

The truth can only be spoken by those who stand no chance of being heard, only by those who speak from within a house that is being relentlessly consumed by flames.

Today humankind is disappearing, like a face drawn in the sand and washed away by the waves. But what is taking its place no longer has a world; it is merely a bare and muted life without history, at the mercy of the computations of power and science. Perhaps, however, it is only by beginning from this wreckage that something else can appear, whether slowly or abruptly—certainly not a god, but not another man either—a new animal perhaps, a soul that lives in some other way…

October 5th, 2020 

Translated by Richard Braude  

Special thanks to Giorgio Agamben for his permission to publish this translation

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source: ILL WILL EDITIONS

The post When the House is on Fire- Giorgio Agamben appeared first on Void Network.

TRANSLATED by Ken Knabb 

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August 13-16, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident between traffic police and pedestrians developed into two days of spontaneous riots. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. By the third day the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of street fighting to finally bring it under control. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned. Official sources listed 32 dead (including 27 blacks), more than 800 wounded and 3000 arrests.

Reactions from all sides were most revealing: a revolutionary event, by bringing existing problems into the open, provokes its opponents into an inhabitual lucidity. Police Chief William Parker, for example, rejected all the major black organizations’ offers of mediation, correctly asserting: “These rioters don’t have any leaders.” Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides. What did one of those unemployed leaders, NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins, have to say? He declared that the riot “should be put down with all necessary force.” And Los Angeles Cardinal McIntyre, who protested loudly, did not protest against the violence of the repression, which one might have supposed the most tactful policy at a time when the Roman Church is modernizing its image; he denounced “this premeditated revolt against the rights of one’s neighbor and against respect for law and order,” calling on Catholics to oppose the looting and “this violence without any apparent justification.” And all those who went so far as to recognize the “apparent justifications” of the rage of the Los Angeles blacks (but never the real ones), all the ideologists and “spokesmen” of the vacuous international Left, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets) and the 2000 fires with which the blacks lit up their battle and their ball. But who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve?

We will. Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in smoke, and McIntyre blubber over his slain deputy sheriff. Let the sociologists bemoan the absurdity and intoxication of this rebellion. The role of a revolutionary publication is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives, to explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search.

In Algiers in July 1965, following Boumédienne’s coup d’état, the situationists issued an Address to the Algerians and to revolutionaries all over the world which interpreted conditions in Algeria and the rest of the world as a whole. Among other examples we mentioned the movement of the American blacks, stating that if it could “assert itself incisively” it would unmask the contradictions of the most advanced capitalist system. Five weeks later this incisiveness was in the streets. Modern theoretical criticism of modern society and criticism in acts of the same society already coexist; still separated but both advancing toward the same realities, both talking about the same thing. These two critiques are mutually explanatory, and neither can be understood without the other. Our theory of “survival” and of “the spectacle” is illuminated and verified by these actions which are so incomprehensible to American false consciousness. One day these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.

Until the Watts explosion, black civil rights demonstrations had been kept by their leaders within the limits of a legal system that tolerates the most appalling violence on the part of the police and the racists — as in last March’s march on Montgomery, Alabama. Even after the latter scandal, a discreet agreement between the federal government, Governor Wallace and Martin Luther King led the Selma marchers on March 10 to stand back at the first police warning, in dignity and prayer. The confrontation expected by the demonstrators was reduced to a mere spectacle of a potential confrontation. In that moment nonviolence reached the pitiful limit of its courage: first you expose yourself to the enemy’s blows, then you push your moral nobility to the point of sparing him the trouble of using any more force. But the main point is that the civil rights movement only addressed legal problems by legal means. It is logical to make legal appeals regarding legal questions. What is irrational is to appeal legally against a blatant illegality as if it was a mere oversight that would be corrected if pointed out. It is obvious that the crude and glaring illegality from which blacks still suffer in many American states has its roots in a socioeconomic contradiction that is not within the scope of existing laws, and that no future judicial law will be able to get rid of this contradiction in the face of the more fundamental laws of this society. What American blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live, and in the final analysis this requires nothing less than the total subversion of this society. This becomes increasingly evident as blacks in their everyday lives find themselves forced to use increasingly subversive methods. The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks. The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites who were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers. Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty. Speaking in Paris last October, he said: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.”

The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects. But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Watts consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities. The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population — women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: “Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They’d mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who’d have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o’clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it’s no use pretending that food wasn’t looted. . . . All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn’t get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years. . . . Me, I’m only a little black girl.” Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: “Now the whole world is watching Watts.”

How do people make history under conditions designed to dissuade them from intervening in it? Los Angeles blacks are better paid than any others in the United States, but they are also the most separated from the California superopulence that is flaunted all around them. Hollywood, the pole of the global spectacle, is right next door. They are promised that, with patience, they will join in America’s prosperity, but they come to see that this prosperity is not a fixed state but an endless ladder. The higher they climb, the farther they get from the top, because they start off disadvantaged, because they are less qualified and thus more numerous among the unemployed, and finally because the hierarchy that crushes them is not based on economic buying power alone: they are also treated as inherently inferior in every area of daily life by the customs and prejudices of a society in which all human power is based on buying power. Just as the human riches of the American blacks are despised and treated as criminal, monetary riches will never make them completely acceptable in America’s alienated society: individual wealth will only make a rich nigger because blacks as a whole must represent poverty in a society of hierarchized wealth. Every witness noted the cry proclaiming the global significance of the uprising: “This is a black revolution and we want the world to know it!” Freedom Now is the password of all the revolutions of history, but now for the first time the problem is not to overcome scarcity, but to master material abundance according to new principles. Mastering abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but totally reorienting it. This is the first step of a vast, all-embracing struggle.

The blacks are not alone in their struggle, because a new proletarian consciousness (the consciousness that they are not at all the masters of their own activities, of their own lives) is developing in America among strata which in their rejection of modern capitalism resemble the blacks. It was, in fact, the first phase of the black struggle which happened to be the signal for the more general movement of contestation that is now spreading. In December 1964 the students of Berkeley, harassed for their participation in the civil rights movement, initiated a strike⁽¹⁾ challenging the functioning of California’s “multiversity” and ultimately calling into question the entire American social system in which they are being programmed to play such a passive role. The spectacle promptly responded with exposés of widespread student drinking, drug use and sexual immorality — the same activities for which blacks have long been reproached. This generation of students has gone on to invent a new form of struggle against the dominant spectacle, the teach-in, a form taken up October 20 in Great Britain at the University of Edinburgh during the Rhodesian crisis. This obviously primitive and imperfect form represents the stage at which people refuse to confine their discussion of problems within academic limits or fixed time periods; the stage when they strive to pursue issues to their ultimate consequences and are thus led to practical activity. The same month tens of thousands of anti-Vietnam war demonstrators appeared in the streets of Berkeley and New York, their cries echoing those of the Watts rioters: “Get out of our district and out of Vietnam!” Becoming more radical, many of the whites are finally going outside the law: “courses” are given on how to hoodwink army recruiting boards (Le Monde, 19 October 1965) and draft cards are burned in front of television cameras. In the affluent society disgust is being expressed for this affluence and for its price. The spectacle is being spat on by an advanced sector whose autonomous activity denies its values. The classical proletariat, to the very extent to which it had been provisionally integrated into the capitalist system, had itself failed to integrate the blacks (several Los Angeles unions refused blacks until 1959); now the blacks are the rallying point for all those who refuse the logic of this integration into capitalism, which is all that the promise of racial integration amounts to. Comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market, what in fact the market specifically eliminates. The level attained by the technology of the most privileged becomes an insult, and one more easily grasped and resented than is that most fundamental insult: reification. The Los Angeles rebellion is the first in history to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heat wave.

The American blacks have their own particular spectacle, their own black newspapers, magazines and stars, and if they are rejecting it in disgust as a fraud and as an expression of their humiliation, it is because they see it as a minority spectacle, a mere appendage of a general spectacle. Recognizing that their own spectacle of desirable consumption is a colony of the white one enables them to see more quickly through the falsehood of the whole economic-cultural spectacle. By wanting to participate really and immediately in the affluence that is the official value of every American, they are really demanding the egalitarian actualization of the American spectacle of everyday life — they are demanding that the half-heavenly, half-earthly values of the spectacle be put to the test. But it is in the nature of the spectacle that it cannot be actualized either immediately or equally, not even for the whites. (The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.) In taking the capitalist spectacle at its face value, the blacks are already rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a drug for slaves. It is designed not to be taken literally, but to be followed from just out of reach; when this separation is eliminated, the hoax is revealed. In the United States today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it. The blacks are asking for more than the whites — this is the core of a problem that has no solution except the dissolution of the white social system. This is why those whites who want to escape their own slavery must first of all rally to the black revolt — not, obviously, in racial solidarity, but in a joint global rejection of the commodity and of the state. The economic and psychological distance between blacks and whites enables blacks to see white consumers for what they are, and their justified contempt for whites develops into a contempt for passive consumers in general. The whites who reject this role have no chance unless they link their struggle more and more to that of the blacks, uncovering its most fundamental implications and supporting them all the way. If, with the radicalization of the struggle, such a convergence is not achieved, black nationalist tendencies will be reinforced, leading to the futile interethnic antagonism so characteristic of the old society. Mutual slaughter is the other possible outcome of the present situation, once resignation is no longer viable.

The attempts to build a separatist or pro-African black nationalism are dreams giving no answer to the real oppression. The American blacks have no fatherland. They are in their own country and they are alienated. So are the rest of the population, but the blacks are aware of it. In this sense they are not the most backward sector of American society, but the most advanced. They are the negation at work, “the bad side that makes history by provoking struggles” (The Poverty of Philosophy). Africa has no special monopoly on that.

The American blacks are a product of modern industry, just like electronics or advertising or the cyclotron. And they embody its contradictions. They are the people whom the spectacle paradise must simultaneously integrate and reject, with the result that the antagonism between the spectacle and human activity is totally revealed through them. The spectacle is universal, it pervades the globe just as the commodity does. But since the world of the commodity is based on class conflict, the commodity itself is hierarchical. The necessity for the commodity (and hence for the spectacle, whose role is to inform the commodity world) to be both universal and hierarchical leads to a universal hierarchization. But because this hierarchization must remain unavowed, it is expressed in the form of unavowable, because irrational, hierarchical value judgments in a world of irrational rationalization. It is this hierarchization that creates racisms everywhere. The British Labour government has come to the point of restricting nonwhite immigration, while the industrially advanced countries of Europe are once again becoming racist as they import their subproletariat from the Mediterranean area, developing a colonial exploitation within their own borders. And if Russia continues to be anti-Semitic it is because it continues to be a hierarchical society in which labor must be bought and sold as a commodity. The commodity is constantly extending its domain and engendering new forms of hierarchy, whether between labor leader and worker or between two car-owners with artificially distinguished models. This is the original flaw in commodity rationality, the sickness of bourgeois reason, a sickness which has been inherited by the bureaucratic class. But the repulsive absurdity of certain hierarchies, and the fact that the entire commodity world is directed blindly and automatically to their protection, leads people to see — the moment they engage in a negating practice — that every hierarchy is absurd.

The rational world produced by the Industrial Revolution has rationally liberated individuals from their local and national limitations and linked them on a global scale; but it irrationally separates them once again, in accordance with a hidden logic that finds its expression in insane ideas and grotesque values. Estranged from their own world, people are everywhere surrounded by strangers. The barbarians are no longer at the ends of the earth, they are among the general population, made into barbarians by their forced participation in the worldwide system of hierarchical consumption. The veneer of humanism that camouflages all this is inhuman, it is the negation of human activities and desires; it is the humanism of the commodity, the solicitous care of the parasitical commodity for its human host. For those who reduce people to objects, objects seem to acquire human qualities and truly human manifestations appear as unconscious “animal behavior.” Thus the chief humanist of Los Angeles, William Parker, could say: “They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo.”

When California authorities declared a “state of insurrection,” the insurance companies recalled that they do not cover risks at that level — they guarantee nothing beyond survival. The American blacks can rest assured that as long as they keep quiet they will in most cases be allowed to survive. Capitalism has become sufficiently concentrated and interlinked with the state to distribute “welfare” to the poorest. But by the very fact that they lag behind in the advance of socially organized survival, the blacks pose the problems of life; what they are really demanding is not to survive but to live. The blacks have nothing of their own to insure; their mission is to destroy all previous forms of private insurance and security. They appear as what they really are: the irreconcilable enemies, not of the great majority of Americans, but of the alienated way of life of the entire modern society. The most industrially advanced country only shows us the road that will be followed everywhere unless the system is overthrown.

Certain black nationalist extremists, to show why they can accept nothing less than a separate nation, have argued that even if American society someday concedes total civil and economic equality, it will never, on a personal level, come around to accepting interracial marriage. That is why this American society itself must disappear — in America and everywhere else in the world. The end of all racial prejudice, like the end of so many other prejudices related to sexual inhibitions, can only lie beyond “marriage” itself, that is, beyond the bourgeois family (which has largely fallen apart among American blacks) — the bourgeois family which prevails as much in Russia as in the United States, both as a model of hierarchical relations and as a structure for a stable inheritance of power (whether in the form of money or of social-bureaucratic status). It is now often said that American youth, after thirty years of silence, are rising again as a force of contestation, and that the black revolt is their Spanish Civil War. This time their “Lincoln Brigades” must understand the full significance of the struggle in which they are engaging and totally support its universal aspects. The Watts “excesses” are no more a political error in the black revolt than the POUM’s May 1937 armed resistance in Barcelona was a betrayal of the anti-Franco war.⁽²⁾ A revolt against the spectacle — even if limited to a single district such as Watts — calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, a protest of real individuals against their separation from a community that could fulfill their true human and social nature and transcend the spectacle.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
December 1965

[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]

1. The “Free Speech Movement.” See David Lance Goines’s The Free Speech Movement.

2. Lincoln Brigades: Americans volunteers who went to Spain to fight against Franco during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista): Spanish revolutionary Marxist organization, allied with the anarchists in opposing the machinations of the Stalinists within the anti-Franco camp. It was largely destroyed by the Stalinists in May 1937 through a series of repressions, arrests and assassinations.
     The concluding sentence (“A revolt against the spectacle . . .”) is a détournement from Marx: “A social revolution involves the standpoint of the whole — even if it takes place in only one factory district — because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, because it proceeds from the standpoint of the single actual individual, because the community against whose separation from himself the individual is reacting is the true community of man, true human nature” (Critical Notes on “The King of Prussia and Social Reform,” 1844).

“Le déclin et la chute de l’économie spectaculaire-marchande” was immediately translated into English and circulated in England and the United States in December 1965. The French version was reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #10 (Paris, March 1966).

This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

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The BPS website features Ken Knabb’s writings, his translations from Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and a large archive of writings by and about Kenneth Rexroth.
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Neither with the State, nor with the Idiots:  The Social Project of Reclaiming Public Sector.                                                                  

(Thoughts triggered by the coronavirus crisis)

The greek word “ιδιώτης” [private person, as opposed to one taking part in public affairs][1] translates into English as idiot. And if you are wondering how the mutation in the meaning of this word came about, you would be surprised to learn that the early meaning of the word in the greek language was the same as in English. If we refer to Aristotle’s “Politics”, not only do we find the definition of the human being as a “social and political animal”, since man can only be perceived within society and for society (ἐκ τούτων οὖν φανερὸν ὅτι τῶν φύσει ἡ πόλις ἐστί), but we will also discover this not-so-flattering word to describe non-participant citizens, those who do not demonstrate social responsibility and political awareness, private citizens, all those who chose to place themselves outside of society. So, “άπολις”, (the man without a city-state or against it), if he is not a being superior to man, (in other words if he is not God), he is undoubtedly inferior to man; he is a “φαῦλος”, a wretched man.[2]

After the Great Depression, the worldwide economic crisis that took place in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes realised a major problem in the functioning of capitalism, which half a century earlier Marx had already predicted. The fierce competition amongst individuals in all spheres of production, the individual’s independent effort to prevail against his competitors leads to a position of exclusive dominance, that is, to the creation of a monopoly. This razing to the ground of the many for the benefit of the one has caused overwhelming social consequences, since, in addition to dismantling infrastructure (factories and production units), it triggers mass unemployment and decline in purchasing power. Thus, the overall economic outcome inflicts the independent capital, which though it has prevailed as the dominant monopoly, the extensive crisis – caused by the overwhelming social consequences – now threatens it too. Keynes pinpointed that the competitive nature of individual capitalists, their very own “idiocy” would sooner or later lead to the complete destruction of capitalism and – who knows – perhaps to a World Revolution. So, being an impenitent bourgeois, he stated boldly: Capitalism is too important to be left to capitalists.

To answer this problem, Keynes introduced the basic idea of the historical transformation of the role of the state. The state would no longer be just “the army and the police” to guard the capitalists, to protect private property from the revolutionary looting of the poor. It would be much more: the coordinator, the organiser and the supervisor in all areas of production; an omniscient super-capitalist, above other capitalists, set to ensure that the interest of the one capitalist (idiot) [ιδιώτη], would no longer be detrimental to the interests of the other capitalists (idiots) [ιδιώτες].

Keynes copied this idea, to a great extent, from the then-young Soviet experiment, having noticed that the state’s central production plan was a safeguard from the private capital’s short-sighted desire for demolition of the public infrastructures [to be replaced by private ones]. The nationalisation of strategic sectors of production and public infrastructure projects, such as the construction of roads, ports, railways, taxation and social benefits, in other words, all what  we nowadays call Keynesian model – though commended by much of the working class – was historically proven to be the most intelligent strategy against the working class itself. After creating a state — a giant-sized collective capitalist — which not only financially rescues the large-scale enterprise capitalist [the individual, the “idiot”], but also when this individual fails in the ruthless competition with other “idiots” —  utilising public funds that basically belong to us,  the state undertakes to build and improve  infrastructures that are essential for the private sector. In the next phase, when the crisis is over, the state hands over to its favourites in the private sector, those infrastructures that were built in the first place with public funds as public property. In other words, it implements blatant privatisations. After all, this repeated oscillation between privatisation and nationalisation that we have witnessed in the last century (the so-called large-scale rescue programs), which are naively perceived as political confrontation between social democrats and liberals, is nothing but the two sides of the same coin: a state acting like an overprotective father rescuing independent capitalists, the idiots [ιδιώτες] when they go bankrupt by buying or financing their business with aid programs, on the one side; and on the other, feeding them, with new, fully-equipped, profitable public infrastructures (call it privatisation) which are sold at a bargain price. Without this bi-functional nature of the state, the “idiots”[ιδιώτες] of the private sector would have vanished into History’s archives.

Considering all the above, nowadays, those who identify the social project of reclaiming the public sector (i.e. the sharing of common goods, infrastructures, which are under constant social control and horizontal [grassroots] management)with the state, have not fully grasped the very nature of the modern state as the largest enemy of the common good. So, the question that urgently needs to be asked is: why do idiots [ιδιώτες][3] still win?

To answer this question we ought to be extra vigilant. Independent capitalists are no more unintelligent than the rest of us. There is nothing innately inferior in their brainpower, just as there is nothing superior in the intelligence of others. Actually, their idiocy proves to be the chief characteristic of their strategy in the free-market game: anyone who makes no effort to crush their competitors, sooner or later will be eliminated. In other words, it is in the “nature of the game” to behave idiotically [i.e. individualistically]. Nevertheless, every single one of us — who lives in a free-market society, that is, in a society of consolidated competition — displays exactly the same stupidity, the same individualistic spirit, when we favour our personal (short-term) interest against the overall (long term) one. For, workers, who instead of being organised in their union become their boss’s “brownnose” and will be the losers in the end. Any union, which instead of being part of the collective struggle of the working class prioritises demands of its own trade or its own factory, will find itself at a loss. Moreover, the working class, in any country, which sees its interests in competition with the interests of the “foreign” workers, will also find itself at a loss. The ephemeral interest of the individuals, who once had come close to becoming the “undertakers of the capitalism”, condemns the suppressed to perpetual misery.

Marx noted that in the early capitalist communities of the Middle Ages, the first capitalists managed to develop and gradually prevail after centuries, because, in those difficult conditions, the short-term private interest was identified, paradoxically, with the collective long-term one. The small independent producers of the time, in order to be able to survive in the suffocating system of feudalism, had to think cooperatively, to build markets/bazaars together, to create shared infrastructures, to collaborate freely and on equal terms, to build ports for their ships, to build towns at strategic points on trade routes, to create institutions of collective self-governance, to print money and to build banks. So, in the midst of a hostile society, they built their own community step-by-step. They managed to identify the private interest with the public interest, the short-term interest with the long-term interest. This is the greatest achievement of the bourgeois class throughout its history. When it ceased to follow this reasoning, its decline commenced.

So, what must we do to overthrow the kingdom of idiots [i.e. the state], what must we do to shift to the power of communal sharing? All we have to do is learn from the history of idiots [ιδιώτες][4]; the social class we are set to overthrow. Let’s ask ourselves: how can we make today’s common interest be identical to the collective interest? What collective projects and ideas can transform daily rivalry into solidarity and mutual aid? What aesthetic images can compensate today’s ethics of rivalry that stand in the way of our ultimate goals?

The recent coronavirus crisis, when public health and healthcare staff emerged as a collective good — in stark contrast to the plans of the state and private sector — provides an opportunity for reflection. The whole situation is in contrast with the culture of the idiots [ιδιώτες][5]; it is clear that anyone who defends the power of private interests (as all states do today) puts at stake the lives of the entire community. It is an opportunity to seriously consider: why shouldn’t hospitals, pharmaceutical and health infrastructures be public goods (since we all pay for them); without (most) private capitalists (pharmaceutical-industry owners, private-clinic owners and other parasites) making a profit? Why not have more hospitals, better-equipped hospitals in small towns, more parks, squares, sport centres and other public facilities that we will all fund together instead of handing over their management to some “stupid” pimps who sell us nothing but hot air? Why don’t we manage as our own, through grassroots collective administration and decision- making, the sectors of health, education, food production, mass media, culture, schools and factories?

Let’s put an end to this kingdom of idiots, to this state that has lasted far too long, (we’re sick of it). Let’s take our lives into our own hands, with confidence, with courage and awareness of our real power.

[1] T.N.: Those who did not contribute to politics and the community were known as “Idiotes” (ΙΔΙΩΤΕΣ), originating from the word “Idios” (ΙΔΙΟΣ) which means the self. If you did not demonstrate social responsibility and political awareness you were considered apathetic, uneducated and ignorant. https://www.historydisclosure.com/what-does-idiot-mean/

[2] [See: Aristotle, Politics, 1253a1-9]

[3] T.N.: i.e. private capital

[4] T.N.: i.e. private capital

[5] ditto

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written by Sotiris Lycourghiotis, MSc, PhD

Translation: Rodanthe Scourtelli / Void Network

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“I didn’t think the Apocalypse would have this much admin”

– A teacher from Hastings

Setting aside the more technical and delicate issues of agency and intentionality, a virus, like the by now notorious Coronavirus (aka SARS-CoV-2), has a certain mode of being, with its peculiar rhythms and refrains. To a substantial extent, in a modernized society, the comprehension of the ontic structure of a virus, of its “being” or even better of its becoming (indeed quite a dynamic one, with a marked capacity to mutate)falls within the cognitive domain of the natural sciences.One of the lessons that the pandemic should have brought home to social and political theorists is that reducing scientific discourse to its aspects of power and control or to its formal structure as a “language-game” can become a recipe for a Black Death-level of disaster. This is not to deny the intricate and institutionalized links between scientific knowledge and capitalism or the modern state, which go much deeper than a simple misuse, nor their occasionally catastrophic consequences. Science, like any other system of knowledge, is a social practice, that cannot be entirely disembedded from the sociopolitical relations within which it operates. Nevertheless, the contents of scientific knowledge are not simply reducible to the wants and needs of capital, nor would the abolition of capitalist relations of production immediately make defunct quantum physics, thermodynamics, evolutionary biology etc.For the case at hand, that systems of scientific knowledge have developed a capacity (far from complete to be sure) to delineate the composition and behavior of pathogens is a major break through in terms of their containment and treatment. If a leftist politics is to challenge the dominant administration of the crisis, it must be able to take the “hard sciences” into consideration, and to build channels of cooperation and mutual feedback –which can be critical and transformative in its scope – as well as provide spaces for their fruitful advancement.

Then again, from the perspective of critical theory this (if left to stand on its own) is an inadequate inference, since it tends to yield skinless and arbitrary comparisons between different social-historical periods, effectively reproducing a naïve liberal progressivism a la Steven Pinker,which amasses statistics and graphs to assert how much better things are today(whilst drowned and encamped bodies pile up at the borders of enlightened Europe).A virus’ epidemiological journey is not only a biological process, it is a social phenomenon, which in fact, as the recent pandemic reveals, may well reach the status and intensity of an event. This generic proposition holds true whether the site of a virus’appearance is a local ecosystem somewhere in the Amazon or an industrial megacity like Wuhan.In fact, the distinction is mainly analytical, for “nature”as sentient materiality is already social, in that it contains structured forms of community as one of its main determinations,just like “society”, from a hunter-gatherer tribe to the most technologically advanced social formation,never stops partaking in the physical strata of the world, the microbiological substrata included–yet another painful reminder of the coronavirus pandemic.The task of critical theory therefore must be to sublate– which is not quite the same as to abolish – the distinction between the natural and the social in order to study the material environment within which SARS 2 has emerged and which the latter subsequently affects in its various dimensions.

A brief sojourn in the epigenesis of a social crisis

“The bug, whatever its point of origin, has long left the barn, quite literally.”

– Robert Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu

That the material environment of today’s world, hence the spread of the viral strains it breeds, is conditioned to an unprecedented scale by human agency,in particular by the systematic activity of the techno-industrial complex, is not a distinctly Marxist claim, being registered also by scientific research funded and conducted within mainstream institutional channels. Nor is there anything leftist or radical in asserting that the coronavirus pandemic would be impossible without the forms and processes of social and economic connectivity and integration that go by the term “globalization”. What critical theory can add(among other things) is a delineation of the social force that acts as a singular and potent determination of the material environment on a global scale, and which can consequently be legitimately considered a key catalyst both of macro-historical processes, like climate change,and short-term yet recurrent phenomena like epidemics;and this social force is none other than capital.

To be sure, “Capital”(especially when writ large) can be used in an entirely abstract manner, explaining everything and nothing, which can be at the same time a pretty vulgar and moralistic manner, which turns a complex process into the grand villain of history. Yet, there is nothing abstract, simplistic or moralizing when theoretical analysis attends to the ways the production and circulation of viruses is conditioned by the forms of mass production, circulation, exchange, and consumption through which capital actualizes itself today.Intensive monocultures and huge concentration of live-stock, systematic contacts between humans and other animals, unsanitary working and living conditions (chiefly in the industrial peripheries), expansive markets, incessant flows of goods and humans, crowded megacities; in brief, the real movement and spatialized actuality of capital valorization and accumulation, embedded as they are into distant social formations and a world-market that brings them together,do not only facilitate zoonotic transfer and the rapid spread of viruses, they create evolutionary pressures for the development of its more virulent forms. To quote from the brilliant text of Chuang:

“the basic logic of capital helps to take previously isolated or harmless viral strains and place them in hyper-competitive environments that favor the specific traits which cause epidemics, such as rapid viral lifecycles, the capacity for zoonotic jumping between carrier species, and the capacity to quickly evolve new transmission vectors”.

Although much more unpacking is certainly required, the parallel with neoliberal forms of subjectification and financialization – which also require flexibility, adaptability, rapidness, transferability (and quite often virulence) as key capacities for thriving in the hyper-competitive environment of the world market – is too attractive not to be highlighted. Nor should we avoid drawing the provocative inference: the material environment of late capitalism fosters the development of highly self-assertive forms of individuation, which are potentially damaging to the communities that host them. How far this analogy can be drawn should be left open. It certainly must not be taken to mean that entrepreneurs are parasites or financialization a viral strainn or conversely that viruses are driven by the “spirit of capitalism”, much less by anything like ambition.But it cannot go unnoticed how among different life-forms or, more generically, forms of being,homologous patterns of behavior are developed as a response to the pressures exercised and the opportunities provided by current socioeconomic conditions. To this extent, regardless how we tackle it theoretically and philosophically, we are not dealing here with a superficial resemblance but with a substantial analogy: similar to the way individual entrepreneurs or enterprises tend to stand out in the“free market”precisely because of their competitiveness, viral strains “tend to stand out precisely because of their virulence”.

Following this materialist line of thought, Chuang astutely conceives of the coronavirus pandemic as a social contagion, whose various contours need to be mapped out. The more immediate of these contours is of course the one that concerns health. That the outbreak is serious in an out-of-the-ordinary way cannot be measured simply by the death toll – even though, as numbers increase exponentially, the mortality rate of Covid-19 weighs heavily as a potent factor – but by the outbreak of a virus for which there is neither herd-immunity nor vaccines or medicine and which consequently has a high degree of penetrance. In this respect, as Wallace remarks, statistical comparisons with the influenza (when they are made for the purpose of explaining away the pandemic as an “exaggeration”, driven by ulterior motives and interests) are an entirely misplaced “rhetorical device”.Then again, that the epidemic journey of a viral strain morphed into a worldwide health crisis is not irrelevant to social context, specifically to the condition of health care systems in countries where the outbreak has spread. It is unlikely that any healthcare system would not be strained by a sudden and exponential increase of people in need of hospitalization. Yet, as it has been widely argued,e.g. by Mike Davis and David Harvey, neoliberal policies (with their consistent devaluation of public health care systems and their“just-in-time”management) combined with the near total domination of the pharmaceutical sector by corporations (driven by profit and underfunding research aimed at prevention) has made states ill-prepared for a potential pandemic, despite warnings to the contrary. Coupled with the initial underestimation of the threat by governing authorities, the lack of discipline on the social basis (again mainly at the eastly phases) and sprinkled with good doses of anti-Chinese propaganda and orientalism, many factors came together to ensure that a health crisis with global reach would break out. Alain Badiou is adamant that, virulent as the viral strain may be, there is nothing novel or worthy of critical thought in the pandemic, save its spread to the “comfortable” West. Even this fact should not be underestimated though, for the outbreak of a lethal and rapidly transmitting viral strain to the center of today’s hyper-connected world, inevitably gave rise to the specter of a crisis that we have been accustomed to see on screens. Infecting our dystopian imaginary as much as our bodies, Covid-19 has elicited an affective mass transmission of vulnerability and insecurity.

Serious as the health-crisis may be (and it looks quite serious), what makes the social contagion sufficiently disruptive to pass the threshold of an “event” are its wider consequences.In these terms, it hardly takes a Marxist to realize that, having emerged within and circulated through the worldmarket, the coronavirus was bound to affect the extensive and intensive circuits of production, exchange and consumption that constitute today’s globalized economy. Some in fact have been quick to pinpoint in economic interests and calculations the true cause behind the façade of global epidemic, confidently exclaiming (in the words of an autonomist’s poster in Athens) that the coronavirus “is not a flu but a commercial war”. For sure, against vacuous invocations of an international community standing together in solidarity, it is sensible to expect that the pandemic will aggravate existing economic and geopolitical rivalries. Reductions of the pandemic to economic interests however actually mar this issue by soaking it in a conspiratorial logic, which assumes an impossible intentionality and control over a torrent of events – even more so, events involving nonhuman factors. Factories, businesses, shops, industries have ceased operating or started operating far below their usual velocity, while,receiving the vibes of the shutdown, the stock market commencedits own free fall; the overall result has been a major shockwave affecting all the key domains of the capitalist market: supply, demand and finance.This surely does not stop individual enterprises, even entire economic sectors,from profiting or profiteering (the line between the two being blurred as the mechanism of “supply and demand”receives input from the spreading social contagion).There is nothing novel here: in all major social crises, be it wars, natural disasters or even popular uprisings, some find an opportunity to make“big bucks”. Yet, just like the fact that during the Second World War some companies profited does not alter the equally recorded fact of widespread economic devastation in whole continents, neither the increased profit of individual companies nor even the accelerated activity of economic sectors to day excludes the occurrence of an unexpected “great deceleration”.

“Unexpected” does not mean “out of the blue” or “ex nihilo”. Pretty much like national healthcare systems, even the more robust economy would be put to the test by a shutdown of such scale,much more so a global economy that was having enough troubles to allow predictions of a new cycle of recession and crisis to achieve wide circulation. In this respect, even though multiple scenarios can still be made, depending on the standpoint of the speaker,SARS 2, a true “agent of chaos”, is going to reveal and aggravate the chronic problems and systemic weaknesses of the current economic system, both on a global/international and on a national level – something that clearly allows for diversity in form and intensity. Granting the open nature of the events and the different outcomes they may yield, the salient point is that, along with a health crisis, the social contagion the coronavirus has spurred takes the shape of an economic crisis of potentially gigantic proportions. And since by “economy” we refer not only to some figures on a balance sheet but to the social (re)production of life, just like “health” refers not only to the well being of individual bodies but to the smooth operation of a structured yet vulnerable collective assemblage, we can ultimately grasp why the unfolding social contagion marks the epigenesis of a generalized social crisis. Expectedly, faced with the reality and,no less important,the specter of disruption that such an extensive crisis necessarily entails, the state as ultimate guarantor of the smooth and proper functioning of contemporary societies has been called upon.

The immunological Urstaat and the new normal

“Build Babylon, the task you have sought. Let bricks for it be moulded and raise the shrine”

– Enuma Elish, 57-58

There is a veritable assumption– a true “myth” in the Barthian sense – among advocates of the free market that the forms of competitive interaction composing this institution are structured by a mechanism of self-regulation,capable of achieving and maintaining in the long-run a certain homeostatic balance. The committed evangelists of this idea are willing to embrace the “creative destruction”necessarily entailed in the process– after all they are rarely affected personally by it. Moreover, with the exception of the true zealots, free-market advocates (those widely regarded as apostles of neoliberalism included) acknowledge the need of public law as a safeguard to property and capital accumulation, as well as some form of state regulation and intervention, which may not be restricted to the role of a “watchdog”, as it extends to institutional and legal facilitation, but which, if need be, can become considerably intensive and repressive, e.g. establish a military dictatorship that makes “commies” disappear. Why should the principle change when the threat posed to the market comes not from communists and unruly workers but from a viral strain? After all, historically, communism has been depicted as a “bacillus”, leading a century ago to the establishment of a “sanitary zone” meant to contain the epidemic in Russia, which had already fallen victim to the disease.“Biopolitics”, and the intermingling of medical and political discourse that it entails, can be a component of international relations and foreign policy as much as of domestic policies directed to the population living inside a given territory.

The inference to be drawn from all these is that the extensive state intervention which we are witnessing, and which seems to follow the exponential growth rates of Covid-19, in no way spells the sudden “death” of neoliberalism, even less so of capitalism. In sharp contrast, even if it is accepted that the “normal” political form of a capitalist society is that of a liberal state (a contested claim), highly authoritarian forms of statism are still not just a digression but a condition for the reproduction of the capitalist market, either at a national or even at a“world-system” level. To put it schematically, the crisis of reproduction of capitalist social relations, and by extension of parliamentarism as a form of political mediation, generates an objective tendency towards authoritarian regimes of regulation. Moreover, since we are dealing with mutations of the state form, a formal antithesis between authoritarianism and democracy can be misleading, for it fails to comprehend how the two intermingle and morph into each other. The transition from a liberal democracy to an authoritarian regime (or vice versa)is usually crisis-laden, yet it still takes place within the state form; which is to say, the latter absorbs the interplay between the two as moments of its own reproduction and history. There is thus a certain duality or to be more precise a two-in-one operating in times of crises of social reproduction: what from one perspective is an act of preservation, of dominant social relations,constitutes also an act of re-composition, unified in a singular process of restructuration, where the dissolution of identity is prevented only through its self-differentiation– thus, self-negation.

How far have we moved towards such a direction of regime change today?The recent self-suspension of Parliament in Hungary is certainly something to take note of, as it shows how the social contagion enables an immunological re-composition of the state towards more authoritarian forms. Nevertheless, talk about a “new totalitarianism” or “fascism” may look premature or even forced by a gaze predisposed to see them.What can be said with certainty is that most affected states have responded to social contagion by declaring a state of emergency and since then managing it through a varied mix of sovereignty and governmentality. The aspect of sovereign power is not hard to grasp, it is the very capacity to declare emergency and any measures that follow thereafter. This is the key point of Carl Schmitt’s infamous definition: no matter if the emergency is“real” or simply a fabrication, sovereignty is the power to declare it and thus assume the responsibility of its administration and resolution. That said, even sovereign power, insofar as it is exercised, has a dimension of relationality; and although its form is vertical and mainly defined by imposition, the exercise of sovereign power still requires a degree of acceptance. Therefore, while during an emergency the normative aspects of the state recede in favor of its prerogative dimension, normativity does not disappear, it is rather invested in the sovereign, who does not simply do what is “needed” but also what ought to be done e.g. save lives, businesses and jobs. The obvious problem here, highlighted virtually by everyone who has engaged with the phenomenon, is that in the process the forms of sovereign power that appeared during the state of emergency can be entrenched, completing the dialectic of preservation/ re-composition/ restructuration highlighted above.

Picking up on this fact, at an earlier phase of the pandemic, commentators on the left, like Giorgio Agamben, have criticized the emergency declared as a disproportionate, hence unwarranted, act, whose real purpose was to enhance the grip of government on citizens, taking one more (big) step towards an authoritarian state. In retrospect, it is easy to say that this was a very hasty assessment of the Covid-19 epidemic. In fact,such an indictment is not enough; what needs to be added, going back to a point made at the beginning, is a deeply worrying tendency in critical theory to undermine as a matter of principle the veracity of scientific discourse,or worse the materiality of the physical world, in the name of a sweeping critique of power and a vulgar social constructivism, which end up seeing everywhere domination and machinations meant to entrench it. As suggested earlier, this attitude can lead to dangerous paths,which start from seemingly innocuous claims that Covid-19 is simply a “heavy flu” and all that is needed is to wash your hands(!) but which can then arrive at a total disregard for science under a pose of radical resistance.On the other hand, this “critique of the critique” also risks missing a key point, which concerns the political effects and affects of the pandemic, namely the affirmation and justification (in a substantial sense) of the state’s capacity to adopt authoritarian measures and hence assume more authoritarian shapes.

Although it is quite unclear when the pandemic will end, we can be relatively assured that the more severe emergency measures will not outlive it, since no state can possibly aim at empty cities with highly reduced economic activity as the norm. Whatever valid critique can be made on the curfews that states have imposed, and there are criticisms even from the World Health Organization about their efficacy, it is exceedingly naïve to reduce all such measures taken to a sinister ploy by “state and capital”. One is hard-pressed to seriously imagine any collective form that would not have to implement some restrictions in face of an epidemic, which politically means to give its invested powers an authoritarian twist. Equally difficult is to see how hierarchy can be entirely replaced with horizontality, on an institutional level, without at the same time reducing scientific knowledge to opinion. This is not to say that people lack the capacity to discipline themselves without patronizing or appreciate expertise without imposition (though in our era of social media it is astonishing how much obscurantism if not plain idiocy circulate asknowledge).It is only to stress that in times of emergency the institutional forms mediating communal existence are pressed to adopt and develop more authoritarian lines of operation.Yelling“power”or “state of emergency” does not constitute a political event and the axiomatic assumption that “horizontality” is preferable in all possible situations, along with its underside  assumption that hierarchy is on principle an expression of injustice, are ideologemes that can be as dogmatic and damaging as authoritarianism. How would it be possible to respond to the epidemic and stop the rapid escalation of the viral strain if some institutional organs (either composed by scientists or receiving input by scientific committees) were not invested with a real power to swiftly decide and act, but instead such power was diffused in a meshwork of local assemblies in thrall of voices declaring with passionate conviction that the virus is a heavy flu or a commercial war (not to mention assemblies in thrall of other voices declaring that the holy communion does not disseminate the virus)?

Yet from a materialist viewpoint, it is precisely the objectivity of authoritarian measures in times of crises which makes them more dangerous, for it creates an affectively fertile situation for the suspension of critique and the immunization of sovereign power. To assert that not everything can be decided during an emergency –perhaps also in ordinary times, but this is another issue – through mass popular assemblies requiring unanimity or consensus is one thing; to claim that democracy is a luxury and, instead of fostering public dialogue and accountability of representative organs, to join calls from the right for  uncritical public obedience is wholly another. Moreover, no matter how deeply periods of emergency suspend the normal temporality and spatiality of a community, they always leave traces on collective memory and the institutional forms that retain it and manage it. The administration of the unfolding social contagion is not going to be washed away like an antiseptic, it instead produces a certain experience, upon which states will be able to build in case of another emergency. This is no dystopian speculation, for states always (try to) absorb a crisis as a moment of their history, so that even when a re-composition is performed, the continuity of the state-form will be affirmed. The administration of the unfolding social contagion itself, no matter how exceptional some of the measures may be, falls within a well-established process of securitization, that has been defining of state policy for decades. Riots, mass migration flows, extreme climatic phenomena, financial bubbles, indebtedness, epidemics and now a global pandemic; from the perspective of the existing capitalist order, hence of the state that sustains it, these phenomena share a key feature, they are sources of instability and factors of disruption to the smooth functioning of society; hence they are necessarily experienced as security threats – “security” being precisely the condition whereby a being can feel comfortable persevering in its current state. This is the backbone of the shift from the rule of law to a state of security, which takes it upon itself to constantly declare emergencies and suspend rights that are constitutional, hence theoretically part of a state’s normative structure. Security also provides the necessary affective basis for social acceptance and mass support, as it leads individuals or entire social groups affected by insecurity to desire the presence of more state, even in full militarized form. From this angle, the coronavirus pandemic may radicalize the historical trend of securitization that has been underway, and the authoritarianism it breeds. Given that the duration of the social contagion is indefinite, the critical notion of a state of emergency becoming the norm needs to be taken seriously, although its contours require further unpacking.

The overall process is buttressed by the second facet of the biopolitical emergency currently in operation, which pertains to governmentality. Alongside a staggering show of sovereign power, all affected states have in one way or another incorporated personal responsibility in their policy,stressing the duty of citizens to perform social distancing and “#stay home”. There is no need again to evoke a masterplan devised and executed by an omnipresent Power in order to grasp the tendency at work and the wider process it is embedded. The whole idea of “governmentality” was to conceptually grasp forms of power that do not operate through the vertical diagrammatic lines of a sovereign power that commands, but in a more diffused and horizontal way, integrated to the autonomous activity of individuals. Towards this end, a key mediating role has been played by new digital technologies, which individuals carry as an integral part of their own social and personal identity: cards and their pins, mobile phones and their tracking devices(either physical or preference tracking), social media and their accounts;these are only the more obvious manifestations of a technology that, the very same moment it is said to facilitate individual autonomy, enhances the capacity of political power to keep individuals accountable – by making them (keep an) account– of their actions. Recognizing the role of technology, we must still not be carried away by the dystopian version of techno-fetish, since even in states like Greece where biopolitical emergency is not as high-tech, similar (if less effective) patterns and forms of governmentality have emerged, blurring the boundaries between discipline, control and autonomy. For sure,the insistent stress on the role of personal responsibility in the “battle” against the coronavirus, may well be a policy calculated to displace discussion from the shortages of national healthcare systems or from other governmental policies – e.g. the scandalous tolerance shown to heavy industry in Italy and big call centers in Greece where all major tech-companies outsource their customer service, which have been allowed to operate without even ensuring that they keep the necessary measures of protection for workers. Moreover, the point here is not to dispute that people do have a responsibility to practice social distancing or that the latter is actually an act of solidarity towards other people, rather than an expression of petty bourgeois survivalism. Nevertheless, the consistency of the discourse of personal responsibility as a governmental policy, alongside the unspecified time horizon of the quarantine,carries a long-term dynamic of adaptation that can act as a catalyst for the systematization of a state of affairs where tracking and surveillance are not experienced as infringements but as a civic duty and a condition for the exercise of individual freedom, the boundaries of which will have been of course determined in advance.

While important to recall that we are mapping out tendencies, not finalized actualities, an overall picture still emerges: the biopolitical emergency that the unfolding crisis has generated raises the specter of a “new normal”, which among other features will contain recurrentrestrictions to movement and association, partly imposed from above partly accepted as an act of self-responsibility. While the regime that will embody this new normality will surely be authoritarian,there is much more involved than an increase in the levels of state repression, that is, a quantitative change; there is rather a qualitative re-composition underway (tentative, open and still fragile, to be sure)through which the spatial domains of the state and of individual autonomy are reconfigured. From a left wing perspective there is something unsettlingly dystopian in this path,heading towards a future that only science-fiction has visualized: a fully administered society that has effectively collapsed the distinction between heteronomy and autonomy, servitude and freedom, that is, the key distinctions upon which our politics has been premised.Yet this is not entirely accurate as a critical anatomy; for in their very novelty, these biopolitical spatializations are evoking political images and landscapes that are age-old and that, moreover, are not figments of a dystopian imagination but expressions of a veritable, utopian imaginary.

The notion of the Urstaat, proposed by Deleuze and Guattari , is possibly problematic as a genetic account of state-formation, but grasps compactly a key characteristic of the state-form, highlighted also by other, more historically nuanced, analyses: states may be structures of domination, yet from its earliest appearance the state-form and, more specifically, the cities that stand as its political, administrative, economic, cultural and ideological epicenter have a markedly utopian dimension, not standing as an ideological superstructure but overcoding the state’s everyday activities. At the heart of this utopia –every state’s essence, dream and fetish, is Order: in distributing rights and duties, in keeping records, in setting boundaries and limits, in caring for the needy and punishing trespassers, state is ordering a territory to assume its proper form. Needless to say, there is hardly any state that has lived up to its self-image, with phenomena like corruption, nepotism and clientelism being typical of states, past and present; so typical indeed that they can be considered endemic to the hierarchical structures and mechanisms of the state-form. Yet even the most corrupt and ruthless state needs to maintain at least the institutional skeleton of a normative order. It follows that, although states will tolerate their own corruption (always promising to improve),they need to eliminate or at least contain and control every autonomous source of disorder, either internal or external. But while every state loathes disorder, it also requires it and invites it as a condition for its consolidation; which is to say, states see reflected in disorder not only their Other, but the reason and righteousness of their own being. This is precisely what Foucault has grasped in his analysis of the disciplinary measures taken on the occasion of a plague outbreak in the 17^th century; as an embodiment of disorder, the plague fed into a “political dream”, “the utopia of the perfectly governed city”.

That similar measures are taken currently by states may well have to do with their instrumentality for an effective containment of epidemics; yet, in its very necessity, the biopolitical emergency of today may nourish a similar political imaginary,of a well-ordered, hence rational, society in which the state ensures that we all stay where we must and only act for identifiable reasons. From this point of view, the specific set of measures taken by governments and their debatable character is secondary – though far from unimportant; what chiefly matters is that the state appears as the necessary guarantor of order, hence, as the absolute condition of justice and right: “I the State, I am Order, I am Justice”. At a time of intensive securitization and growing authoritarianism, a flaring up of such a political imaginary is considerably dangerous, since at its endpoint stands the fantasy of total territorialization – the most potent historical form of which in modern times is none other than fascism.

It is necessary to insist here that the Urstaat, in its historical actuality as well as utopian proclivity, does not concern the realization of a homogeneous substance, but the reterritorialization of heterogeneous externalities in a hierarchical field of interiority, externalities which serve to give to the state its historical form.

Yet another thing that the coronavirus pandemic has served to remind is that even at the time of the so-called “Anthropocene”, where humankind is supposed to have become the chief macro-historical agent, there are numerous nonhuman externalities, from the climatic to the microbiological levels, invading states, affecting their civic body, subverting their stability, creating leaks and short-circuits. Point granted, equally arguable is that, today, the most powerful and potent externality is capital, which the state needs to integrate, regulate and ensure its valorization as a condition for its own stability. A relation of codependence is thus formed, yet the relation never reaches a full identity, either logical or historical;there remains an excess from the side of capital, whose global spatiality puts pressures to the territoriality of states (even the most powerful ones), and an autonomy from the side of the state, which allows it to take initiatives – even if these are to serve the interests of capitalists, as it happens in Greece currently with many of the measures taken by the government, aiming to ensure that businesses will not simply remain viable but will sustain or quickly recapture their profitability.

What all these points concretely mean is that the (re)composition and (re)structuration of a new normal is necessarily mediated by the effective immunological management of the spreading social contagion, in its twofold valence as a health and economic crisis.As far as the first is concerned, policies more sophisticated and targeted than the current quarantine should be expected to appear sooner or later. Nevertheless, as long as a vaccine is not available and no herd-immunity exists, Covid-19 will carry on being a haunting presence, a threat to public health and a source of anxiety and insecurity affecting social relations. It is hard for a state, even more so states evoking human rights and popular sovereignty as key legitimizing principles, to totally disregard the affective imprint of mass insecurity, anxiety, fear or the pain of regular loss that a pandemic brings. Moreover, irrespective of whether we use biopolitics as a catchword, no state can ignore public health, since it is a necessary feature of order hence a potential source of disorder; what will indeed happen if healthcare systems collapse? Panic, fear and insecurity can creep into the state machine as much as to the individual psyche, hindering its calculating rationality. Yet it increasingly becomes clear that the looming economic crisis starts to preoccupy authorities as much as the health crisis, nay it becomes their center of concern. To be sure, the two crises, being precisely the salient expressions of a social contagion, are connected even in terms of their administration. For the chief response of states and relevant agents, notably the EU, is to pour large sums of money in order to halt the effects of the great deceleration, whilst allowing systematic social distancing to continue. In the long run however, this tactic is unviable and bound to aggravate the economic crisis, by soaring deficits and turning private insolvency into a huge public debt. Simplistic as it sounds, at some point some will be called to pay the bill.

Expectedly, a growing number of voices, even in more tactful ways than Trump and the republican Right of the United States, begin to openly state that the economy needs to start running again in more regular velocities, which in capitalism of course can only mean constant acceleration. The trouble here is that a relaxation of social distancing in order to re-stimulate economic activity will most likely lead to another spike in viral infections. No clearly worked out plan exists for this quandary, and it is more than likely that states will adopt different policies, depending also on the political outlook of their government and the configuration of social powers reflected therein. Whatever its details though, the response will have to amount to nothing less than a reboot. As a matter of fact, the latter may have already been initiated and current configurations could move from being exceptional to become a component of the new normal: a working-force of “connected/domesticated”subjects working from home while another mass of “mobile/disposable” subjects working to provide for them, the result being a division of labor where roles are complementary but the immediate interests antagonistic. Point granted,many more sectors of the economy need to resume their regular velocities in order for the global market to be back on its feet; amidst a pandemic which may have not yet peaked this is far from easy. To an even greater extent probably than the health crisis, the climax of the economic crisis lays ahead of us. In this context, the tension that is already operating today will escalate its intensity: namely the tension between health and economy or in other words between the value of life and the objectified value that is capital. Even if the health crisis is overcome the tension will continue, because we can be certain that amidst an unraveling economic crisis the ruling class will attempt to shift the burden to the plebeian masses. Possibly this will entail a reaffirmation of neoliberal orthodoxy and a new round of austerity; perhaps a deeper re-composition and restructuration will have to transpire, even some revamped Keynesianism may have its window of opportunity. In either case, the first moment of the dialectic will be always operative, the preservation of the current order of things – for the Order that the state maintains concerns concrete social relations and their identifiable hierarchies and privileges. The wager here for the state will be to maintain the full initiative so that it can block experiences of injustice (along with the accompanying despair, anger and resentment) passing from the affective level to that of organized critique; repression of dissent and muting of criticism through the control of media outlets will be one means to this end,state benefits coupled with organized charity by the wealthy can be another. In all cases, the utopia of the Urstaat, that is, the apotheosis of the state-form as the embodiment of Order, will as much depend on the successful management of the crisis as it will be boosted by its escalation. In such a scenario, biopolitical emergency will frequently resume as a way to deal with another expression of the social contagion, which will be all the more likely to break out as the tension between the two other expressions, health and economy, grows to become a proper historical contradiction: mass insurgencies from below.

All (quiet) rise in the plebeian front.

“It’s time to build the brigades”.

– Commune

The streets of Athens, as of so many other cities in the world, are empty, offering at times a truly post apocalyptic imagery, filled with silent fear, hidden trauma and sad beauty.And yet,behind this serene and terrifying stillness, there is movement on the social basis: much of it is unfolding in digital space, but a significant part erupts and flows in excepted institutional spaces: in prisons, camps and workplaces. It is no sign of Marxist stubbornness to insist on the significance of the strikes that are taking place in various countries after the pandemic broke out. Struggles in the workplace at a time such as this are crucial for a number of related reasons: they pierce the ideological crust of national unity to unveil a material reality of exploitation and the class nature of (a significant part of) the governmental measures; they mark out the essential role of labor for social reproduction in any given situation as well as the significance of the body as a source of social value; last but not least, they are practical reminders that a state of emergency does not suspend the class-struggle and that even during the Apocalypse justice will play out as a contentious practicality. Who must work? Why and for whom do we work? How long and where do we work? What is the value of work? Who is to decide on such issues and on what criteria? Ongoing working-class struggles block the reduction of these questions to their functional and technical aspects (real at these may be) and unveil their irreducible political character.

Working-class struggles will most likely intensify in the coming months. And there should be little doubt that if these struggles infringe seriously on the economic reboot underway, the biopolitical emergency can be invoked to quell them. In such a context, it will be vital to build bridges of solidarity between the different segments of the working class: the mobile precariat, the domesticated cognitariat and the proletarian mass of unemployed that is expected to skyrocket. Such a unity is difficult and painstaking to achieve, requiring among other things a set of concrete demands that can be shared and a common political vision to bring them together. As far as practical demands are concerned two will stand out: universal healthcare for sure and possibly a basic income disconnected from market performance. These demands can be plausibly expected to contribute in a concerted challenge to the neoliberal gospel that has waxed lyrical in recent decades and lend support to a reconstruction of the social state, since without the latter it is hard to see how they can be realistically satisfied.But would they not then join the orchestra that signs of the state as the necessary guarantor of a well-ordered society? Which is to say, has the pandemic painfully revealed that, if we want today proper healthcare and descent living conditions for everyone, we need to depose the vision of a stateless society,which has fed the utopian imaginary at least since the 19^th century,to the altar of the Urstaat and become the apostles of its left wing version?

If demands for large scale reforms seem to be irresistibly pulled towards the state, the other major form of grassroots activity to have emerged during the pandemic attempts to maintain a critical distance from centralized power and invest on the powers of social self-organization. Despite the objective difficulties that social distancing and extensive quarantine pose, a whole array of practices and infrastructures has been flourishing on the social basis, having as their common buzzword “mutual aid”.

Regardless of their specific content, these practices and infrastructures have a twofold valence: first, they resist the atomization that dominant forms of governmentality advance and negotiate with the acceptable forms of social distancing, beyond the familial bond. As such, apart from the concrete aid they offer to people in need, they provide outlets for an affective discharge of anxiety and depression as well as conduits for the development of more positive and politically fertile affects. Second, horizontal self-organization offers a version of biopolitical emergency that makes the restriction of individual autonomy an occasion for fostering common responsibility, collective action and active participation in mutual well being. Which is to say, responding to the pandemic, a type of alternative biopolitics has emerged, which,instead of administering from above the well being of individual lives under a statistical concept of public health, proliferates activities from below that see in the active, mutual care for individual members of the community an essential facet of the collective good.

On account of their difference, this grassroots biopolitics has been politically invested with an antagonistic valence vis-à-vis the dominant management of the pandemic and its mix of sovereignty and governmentality. Could we indeed regard the practices and infrastructures of mutual aid in operation today as fulcrums of dual power, capable of breaking the spell of the Urstaat that encroaches societies? Unfortunately, affirming as much would be an exaggeration. All these infrastructures and practices quite simply lack the resources, know how and institutional means to adequately respond to the requirements of the pandemic on a mass, non-local, scale. Moreover, they lack representative power, which could allow them to issue effective calls and injunctions. Without such a capacity to mobilize the masses it is hard to see what “dual power” they have. To this extent, although they may provide an alternative diagrammatic form of operation to the vertical administration of the state, at present they can only be at best complementary to the latter. Thus, while their significance in breaking the state monologue should not be underestimated, their limitations testify at the same time to the necessity of demands directed at the state, such as those concerning healthcare and a basic income.

It should hardly be a surprise thus that many anarchist and far-left groups embrace these demands. Equally necessary though is not to shy away from the political inference such support implies: at the current conjuncture, social struggles cannot simply be “against the state”, still conceived as an 19^th century Leviathan with high-tech gear, but about improving vital aspects of social reproduction that the state has integrated.How can this be done without fueling the political imaginary of the Urstaat and its looming authoritarianism? An answer would be to insist on the democratization of the state mechanism as a parallel process to the reconstruction of the social state.Yet, the last cycle of struggles suggests that current states, not to mention interstate and international institutions like those composing the EU, have become immune to democratic flows coming from below. Under conditions of expanding crisis and securitization the trend towards an entrenched authoritarianism should be expected to grow not recede its intensity, absorbing popular demands born out of the experience of the pandemic as a moment of its further consolidation.

In this context it seems all the more necessary to maintain the autonomy of grassroots forms of activity and strengthen them towards the direction of a real dual power, even if this entails articulating demands that require state mediation – broaching in turn the issue of the collective form(s) of transversal between these two political domains. Without pressing this point too far, the following seems a sensible strategy at the moment: cultivating collective forms that can intervene in the intermittent system failures that lie ahead, helping overcome their worst aspects while at the same time preparing for and being ready to carry the wave of systemic collapse.

Ultimately, the forms of struggle that are going to appear or more prescriptively need to be forged in the coming cycle of events cannot be separated by the broader question of what type of society and what type of world we want to live in. Massive as they sound, these questions are being forced upon us. The escalation of the economic dimension of the social contagion will tend to link even more clearly and painfully with the environmental crisis. Given what was said at the start about the conditions fostering the outbreak of viral strains, the pandemic must be indeed seen as a “dress rehearsal”. More than one dystopian path is thereby opened up, one of them being what Christian Parenti has named the “politics of the armed lifeboat,” or climate fascism, which will complete the current trend of securitization and authoritarianism and establish its statist utopia, the Urstaat of the 21^st century.

Yet, there is also the pathway of a radically different, sustainable form of symbiosis with the world and amongst us, which will transform the crisis laden and crisis ridden material environment of today. No system failure will bring such large-scale change automatically and even less does it make sense to think of SARS 2 as a political “ally” or even worse as a blessing. Still, the social contagion and social crisis generated unintentionally by the long journey of a microscopic pathogen have made the necessity of thinking and naming such an alternative form of symbiosis all the more urgent. Disaster communism? Yes please…

VOID NETWORK [Theory, Utopia. Empathy, Ephemeral Arts]

https://voidnetwork.gr

_________________

*George Sotiropoulos is Doctor of Political Theory and author of A Materialist Theory of Justice: the One, the Many, the Not-Yet.

*Gene Ray is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 and Beyond.

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The post Pandemic Dystopias: Biopolitical Emergency and Social Resistance appeared first on Void Network.

Since it seems that in the next few days a significant portion of our time, on the one hand, we will be sitting at home and dealing with the coronavirus, we said to gather here for archival reasons some interesting things we have read these days.

And when we say interesting things, we mean: that they are not practical guidelines (which is obviously useful but different), that they have a more social / political and less scientific look, that we obviously don’t agree with everything they say, but also that they do not include the various versions of conspiracy or authoritarian conception of history.

This post made possible through a facebook comment of a comrade from Greece- “Alexander Plats”. We thank him for inspiration.

None of these texts are sufficient in themselves. By combining elements from all of them, however, we find that they form a pretty good picture. 

So in a random order, let's start with:
 
Italy- To our friends all over the world from the eye of Covid-19 storm  https://www.dinamopress.it/news/to-our-friends-all-over-the-world-from-the-eye-of-covid-19-storm/  

- Text by the very interesting Chuang team on microbiological class warfare in China.
 http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/

   
 - Text by Dialectical Delinquents from USA on social control and anti-insurgency in epidemic conditions. 
 http://dialectical-delinquents.com/coronavirus-an-exercise-in-intensified-social-control/?fbclid=IwAR1x3JwUgIG1OISrvtSzbkGSE-Ofv84cnwHqUriyWDKDaN8JfaNcWtXFA9w 

- Text by the ever-remarkable Mike Davis describing the pandemic as a medical Hurricane Katrina. 
 http://links.org.au/mike-davis-covid-19-monster-finally-at-the-door?

- Text of the ever-controversial Slavoj Zizek but with interesting details on the relationship between disaster and community 
  https://www.rt.com/op-ed/481831-coronavirus-kill-bill-capitalism-communism/
 
- Interview with biologist Rob Wallace on the ecological aspect of the pandemic.  https://climateandcapitalism.com/2020/03/11/capitalist-agriculture-and-covid-19-a-deadly-combination/
 
- Text by remarkable author Angela Mitropoulos on race and nation dialectics in quarantine.  https://thenewinquiry.com/against-quarantine/ 
 
- Text by academic Eric Toussaint on the relationship between the coronavirus and the coming economic downturn.  https://www.cadtm.org/No-the-coronavirus-is-not-responsible-for-the-fall-of-stock-prices 

- Text by feminists Abigail H. Neely and Patricia J. Lopez on the politics of care in the coronavirus era. https://antipodeonline.org/2020/03/10/care-in-the-time-of-covid-19/  

- Text that flirts with the troll but also demonstrates in some places how the pandemic is testing the limits of capitalist modernity.  https://tsakraklides.com/2020/03/07/the-virus-that-dared-to-stand-up-to-capitalism/ 




Finally, in the form of a post-script, we draw your attention hereafter. Nearly 10 years ago, there was a nuclear disaster in Fukushima. If we are interested in the side of communities and the struggle for coexistence and solidarity in times of fear and panic, then we think we have a lot to learn from social self-organization in conditions of incarceration, quarantine and abandonment after the disaster in Japan.  

Some interesting examples from the standpoint of analysis and testimony can be found either in the book Fukushima Mon Amour  https://libcom.org/library/fukushima-mon-amour  or at the site Fissures in the Planetary Apparatus https://jfissures.wordpress.com/ 

For all comrades out there searching for ways to help we propose the inspirational call out from USA  Autonomous Groups Are Mobilizing Mutual Aid Initiatives To Combat The Coronavirus  https://itsgoingdown.org/autonomous-groups-are-mobilizing-mutual-aid-initiatives-to-combat-the-coronavirus/  

CAPITALISM WILL NOT SAVE US FROM CORONAVIRUS

GLOBAL MUTUAL AID!

Void Network – https://voidnetwork.gr

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