Remember 2011. The Importance of a Year of Global Uprisings.
Chapter 2: The New Ethos of Resistance
From the defeatism imbued in the end of history also comes the possibility of its rebirth: “the long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity” (Fisher, 2010: 51). Despite the frustration of initial hopes that 2008 would mean the inevitable end of neoliberalism, what 2008 did mean was the end of its ideological hegemony. Having fully-fledged neoliberalism generated worse ghosts than those it claimed to drive away, it can no longer be championed as the best or only possible option. The space has thus been opened for the legitimate formulation of alternatives. As will be argued, these will need to challenge some of the core philosophical and moral assumptions that govern capitalism today; and to appeal at people’s more positive and socially constructive feelings. To instill a sense of utopian thinking will be hard: much of our social imaginary at present is charged with apocalyptic nightmares, and there is a generalized fear of “the possibility that capitalism has so deeply pervaded every physical and imaginary dimension of the world that its collapse may lead to the end of civilization as we know it.”(Berardi, 2012a: 612) The massive demonstrations of 2011 challenged this bleak vision for the first time in decades—with spontaneity they achieved to open the possibility for utopian thinking, but didn’t give it content. After the significant first step of achieving “the psycho-affective reactivation of the social body”, they were faced with the task of “activating a living relation between the social body and the general intellect”, meaning the transference of this raw energy (of what may be called revolutionary force) from the field of aesthetic subversion to that of intellectual formulation—for “only when the general intellect is able to reconnect with the social body will we be able to start a process of real autonomization from the grip of financial capitalism.” (Berardi, 2012b: 54) A key factor from these events was how intensely people tried to engage in friendly debates aiming to come up with new ideas with the potential to turn into feasible projects for the immediate future. People in the encampents of Zuccoti Park and Puerta del Sol would spend whole afternoons debating in assemblies, and often reaching no clear conclusions on what was the ideal world they wished to work for. This helped to evidence the important lack there was in this aspect, a void that needs filling.
The collapse of communism meant the failure of the grand theory on which an alternative to capitalism had been imagined during the past century and a half. Communism not only provided a route guide for building a non-capitalist society, but served as the diametrically opposite image of capitalism, generating in this way a bi-polar political spectrum. It served as an extreme reference point for those seeking to conceive alternatives outside of capitalism. In the non-communist countries, many social concessions were made thanks to the weight exercised by the extreme pole of communism. It is no mystery then that social democracy in the west ceased to have any leverage power once communism had been deprived of its legitimacy. Arguably, leftist thought has not recovered from these losses, and has equally not been able to generate valid arguments with the potential to encourage debate and stimulate policies that curb capitalism’s more socially erosive characteristics. The enormous significance this has for politics is not difficult to grasp: in absence of the bi-polar political spectrum, there is no contest of diametrically opposed ideas, and neoliberalism presents itself as the only viable option.
For many generations in the last century and a half, communism constituted a utopian reference that stimulated intellectual debate on how a more just world could be carried out. Neoliberalism is often presented as ‘realist’, not concerned with utopian references but understanding human nature and not trying to change it. But any system of knowledge in political philosophy needs an ideal referent to be able to formulate ideas that accord to it. The end of history and the rise of global capitalism were presented as the era of ‘post-ideology’—but I argue that neoliberalism is indeed strongly ideological. Neoliberalism is highly driven by utopia: the price system works as a kind of cosmological magic allocating resources in the most perfect way. The majority of neoliberalism’s most important policy products respond not to proven measures of success but to idealized conceptions that are only believed to work. In an exercise of true idealism, when the policies fail repeatedly with terrible consequences, it is deemed that it is not the idea that is wrong, but other external factors that could not be foreseen—which paradoxically resonates with explanations given for the failure of the Soviet project. So much of a utopian is the neoliberal policy maker, that he is ready to implement the same policies again and again amidst clear evidence of their failure.
Despite the important blow that neoliberalism received in 2008, some of its core assumptions are deeply ingrained in our collective imaginary, which stalls our capacity to think alternatively and also ensures legitimacy for the status quo. These assumptions, on the philosophical level, are reducible to the two core aspects that govern Friedrich Hayek’s writings. The first is that, while cooperation among individuals is necessary for any form of society, individuals do not cooperate on the basis of empathy or solidarity, but according to economic rationality; hence the only possible way of coordinating cooperation is through the price system. When the prime driving motive of people’s actions is reduced to an economic rationality, the act of collectively thinking how to improve quality of life according to an idea of justice or the common good is ruled out. This means, as those championing neoliberalism in the 1980s viewed with optimism, that ideological discussion is no longer necessary. ‘The end of history’ means the end of human capability of imagining futures outside this worldview. This is observable in the paradigm of politics of the last couple decades: governance is no longer concerned with the competition of ideas, but rather of the mere administration of society so as to allow for the smooth development of the free market. The second core assumption is that “justice is a mirage”: because perfect justice can’t be conceived by any human intellect, it is categorically illegitimate to try to impose an idea of justice on society, least of all ways through the coercive state.
The latter of these is the one that provided the strongest argument to oppose socialism, and it has stood the test of time. Communist experiments were flawed in that they were conceived to be executed by imposition. A strongly bureaucratized and centralized state, charged with the planning of all economic life, would try to apply the precepts of communist theory. Communism and socialism were products of their time; of the industrial revolution in which bureaucracy, centralisation and state influence constituted the mechanisms of power. Thus, these theories for social change were aimed at conquering these mechanisms and using them in favour of an idea of justice. And in what regards the world outside of the western sphere, communism and socialism were formulated at a time in which the global material and intellectual hegemony of the west was unquestioned even by the left. Europeans conceived of themselves at the avant-garde of history, hence believed a consistent social theory of redemption would be applicable to all societies of the world after their eventual industrial-scientific development. But both industrial capitalism—in its disciplinary form as theorised by Foucault—and coercive colonialism, are either disappeared or in the process of doing so: the tangible and identifiable agents of oppression have withered away. In absence of a clear agency of the oppressor, resistance can no longer be concerned with the overthrowing of the physical sites of power—with the revolutionary violence of the colonized subject advanced by Fanon, or the conquest of the means of production by the proletariat as advanced by Marx and Engels—, but rather with the exposure and deligitimization of the more abstract and subtle mechanisms of control. (Deleuze, 1992)
Under this ‘controlling’ apparatus that has shifted from a disciplinary ethos and is now deterritorialized, the revolutionary subject changes too. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983) It is no longer the oppressed working classes or colonized subjects that are to rise in arms to defeat the capitalist class or the white colonizer; it is a ‘universal subject’, defined in the aggregation of singular struggles that find their common denominator in the oppressive effects of global capitalism. The new revolutionary drive is aimed at the apparatus, not at the specific perpetuators of it—the space for contest is symbolic and not physical. And this requires, as the movements of 2011 achieved, the generation of discourses and systems of value alternative to the hegemonic ones of the neoliberal worldview. The quest is not an assault on the state, nor on any of the categories that accompany it, but the deposal of the humanity-annihilating dispositives of global capitalism. Felix Guattari already foresaw in 1989 this necessity of a change of ethos of resistance in the context of ‘semiotic capitalism’:
A new ecosophy, at once applied and theoretical, ethicopolitical and aesthetic, would have to move away from the old forms of political, religious and associative commitment. Rather than being a discipline of refolding on interiority, or a simple renewal of earlier forms of 'militancy', it will be a multifaceted movement, deploying agencies, instances and dispositives that will simultaneously analyse and produce subjectivity.” (2000: 67-68)
As Klein (2015) reports in her recent book on climate change, resistance movements of ecologic motives are an interesting phenomenon that illustrates well the kind of paradigm that victorious protest—at once localized, singular and appealing at a global cause—is undergoing at present. What stands out from the movements of ecologist resistance is that, amidst all the scientific studies proving the harmful effects of extractive systems being used at present (which alone should provide sufficient motive to stop them), battles are won on the ground of morality and affection. It is the vision and voice of people directly affected by the consequences of nature-harming activities that attain very important victories with a clear and concise ‘no’. The excessive exploitation of natural resources has activated a resistance that draws together very diverse sectors of the social spectrum, with very different belief and value systems. The common denominator of wellbeing and dignity that is land (a true common), and its inviolability for corporate interests, has achieved these singular reactions. This is a lesson that can be extended to other fields of resistance to the global machine of capital. That no matter the output of academic research produced in economics or political philosophy proving that neoliberal capitalism is a race to the bottom, to create conscience and resistance across the social spectrum the appeal has to be towards affects and emotions (and this the far-right is understanding well). The ‘fight’ against the hegemonic neoliberal ideology (hegemonic at least at the governmental level), finds its most important subversive potential in the generation of spaces of common understanding for the people, at once spontaneous and of common sense.
This new morphology of resistance outlined above does seem to constitute the basis on which a new ideal of democracy can be built. Hardt and Negri call this ideal “the organization of the multitude”. The multitude is defined as the aggregation of singularities (which can be individuals, groups, tribes, families) and thus forms a new type of unique subjectivity that gets rid of the old identitarian struggles. They argue that
the [current] global cycle of struggles develops in the form of a distributed network. Each local struggle functions as a node that communicates with all the other nodes without any hub or center of intelligence. Each struggle remains singular and tied to its local conditions but at the same time is immersed in a common web (2004: 217)
As was argued in the first part, the events of the Arab Spring, albeit being framed in a very particular geopolitical context, appealed to the generic—to an idea of justice and dignity that finds its expression in every culture everywhere; it is at once singular and global. This is the fundamental new ethos of resistance and struggle for social change in a highly inter-connected and globalised world. Whereas up until the last decades of the past century it was concerned with identitarian struggles and guided by a carefully laid theory, in the twenty-first century it is concerned with identifying local problems, and in the struggle for these, appeal to a cumulative global cause. The ecologist slogan applies: ‘act locally, think globally’. The idea is that where a small victory against the machine of global capital is achieved, it has the power to reverberate to the rest of the world. The values which are defended when resistance is posed against the privatisation and exploitation of the commons in a particular time and location are global and timeless. Because neoliberalism finds its strength foremost in the pervasiveness of its assumptions on human nature and the unfeasibility of justice, the way to confront and disarm it is through the promotion of symmetrically opposed values.
In sum, it can be argued that the movements of 2011 around the globe were an aggregation of heterodox base-conceptions of justice and freedom revolving around one same Idea—an Idea which is analogous to an age-old collection of values of the common good, and which although adapted to the nuances of each era, remains similar in its core:
The Idea was republican for decades, ‘naively’ communist in the nineteenth century, and state communist in the twentieth century. Let us provisionally suggest that it is dialectically communist in the twenty-first century. Its true name will arrive in the margins of the rebirth of History.
When history reawakens, it is the reawakening that matters; it is what is to be saluted; its rational consequences are what must be invested in by the Idea. This is valid by itself. As for the results, we shall see. (Badiou, 2012:63; 99)
The various occupations and encampmtents managed to bring together a broad range of people under similar banners of indignation at the system, not proposing a clearly outlined escape route from capitalism, but establishing its possibility. In the outrage they bred hope, and because they bred hope it made sense to be outraged. They posed a utopian vision of values and affects without formulating an ideology. Zizek suggests that we should read the wave of protests of 2011 not in the classical social-scientific lens of finding its causalities and its consequent programmatic reforms but rather, precisely because of their unexpected character, as “signs from the future”. Far from conceiving the protests as being a revolutionary outburst that is embedded in the process of history, we should instead celebrate them for opening the possibility precisely of un-determining the future: future is not written, it is to be imagined:
This requires difficult and patient work—of which the protests are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo has been broken, we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives. (Zizek, 2012: 77)