We live in “apocalyptic” times, in the literal sense of the term: times that reveal, that reveal. ("Apocalypse" means, etymologically, to remove the veil, discover or reveal). The first thing they reveal is that the 2008 financial collapse opened a period of political breakdown. The alternative "fascism or revolution" is asymmetric and unequal: we are immersed in an apparently irresistible succession of "political ruptures" executed by neo-fascist, sexist and racist forces; and the revolutionary rupture turns out to be for the moment a mere hypothesis dictated by the need to reintroduce what neoliberalism managed to erase from memory, action and the theory of the forces that fight against capitalism. That has been his most important victory.
What the apocalyptic times also show is that the new fascism is the flip side of neoliberalism. Wendy Brown very surely holds a truth of the opposite sign: “From the point of view of the first neoliberals, the galaxy that encompasses Trump, Brexit, Orbán, the Nazis in the German Parliament, the fascists in Parliament Italian turns the neoliberal dream into a nightmare. Hayek, the ordoliberals or even the Chicago School would repudiate the current form of neoliberalism and especially its more recent aspect. ” This is not only wrong from the point of view of the facts, but it is also problematic to understand capital and the exercise of its power. By erasing the "founding violence" of neoliberalism, embodied by the bloody dictatorships of South America, we make a double political and theoretical mistake: we focus only on the "conservative violence" of the economy, institutions, law, governmentality - first experienced in Pinochet's Chile - and we present capital as an agent of modernization, as a power of innovation. Furthermore, we leave aside the world revolution and its defeat, which are the origin and cause of "globalization" as a global response of capital.
The new fascisms are reactivating the relationship between violence and institution. We live in a time of hybridization between the rule of law and the state of exception
The conception of power that derives from it is pacified: action on an action, government of behaviors (Foucault) and no action on people (of which war and civil war are the most complete expressions). Power would be incorporated into impersonal devices that exert soft violence automatically. On the contrary, the logic of the civil war that is at the base of neoliberalism has not been reabsorbed, eliminated or replaced by the functioning of the economy, law and democracy.
The apocalyptic times make us see that, although there is no communism threatening capitalism and property, the new fascisms are reactivating the relationship between violence and institution, between war and "governmentality". We live in an age of indistinction, of hybridization between the rule of law and the state of exception. The hegemony of neo-fascism is measured not only by the strength of its organizations, but also by its ability to hate the State and the political and media system. Apocalyptic times reveal that, under the democratic façade, behind the economic, social and institutional "innovations", there is always class hatred and the violence of the strategic confrontation. A movement of rupture like that of the yellow vests, which has nothing revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary, is enough for the "spirit of Versailles" to awaken and the desire to shoot against that "garbage" that threatens power and property, even if only symbolically. When the time of capital is interrupted, even a bourgeois columnist can capture the emergence of something of the order of the real: “The current empire of hatred resurrects class and caste borders that have been blurred for a long time […]. And suddenly, the acid of hate corrodes democracy and suddenly envelops a decomposed, unstructured, unstable, fragile and unpredictable political society. The old hatred reappears in shaky France in the 21st century. Beneath modernity, hatred ”.
Apocalyptic times also highlight the strength and weakness of political movements that, since 2011, have been trying to challenge the monolithic power of capital. I finished this book during the lifting of the yellow vests. Adopting the point of view of the “world revolution” to read this movement (but also the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street in the United States, May 15 in Spain, June 2013 in Brazil, etc.) may well be appear pretentious or hallucinated. And yet, “thinking about the limit” means starting again starting not only from the historical defeat suffered in the sixties by the world revolution, but also from the “unrealized possibilities” that were created and raised as a banner by the revolutions, differently in the North than in the South, timidly mobilized by contemporary movements.
The will to politicize the post-2008 movements imposes what the revolution of the 1960s rejected: the (charismatic) leader, the party's “significance”, the delegation of representation
The form of the revolutionary process had already been transformed in the 1960s, but it had encountered an insurmountable obstacle: the inability to invent a different model from the one inaugurated in 1917 by the long succession of revolutions in the 20th century. In the Leninist model, the revolution still had the form of realization. The working class was the subject that already contained the conditions for the abolition of capitalism and the installation of communism. The transition from the “class itself” to the “class for itself” had to be carried out through awareness and the seizure of power, organized and directed by the party that contributed from the outside what was lacking in the practices “ union "of the workers.
However, since the 1960s, the revolutionary process took the form of the event: the political subject, instead of already being there potentially, is an “unforeseen” subject (the yellow vests are a paradigmatic example of this unpredictability); it embodies not the need for history, but the contingency of political conflict. Its constitution, its "awareness", its program and its organization are based on a rejection (to be governed), a rupture, a radical here and now that no promise of democracy and justice to come is capable of satisfying.
Of course, as much as Jacques Rancière is sorry, the uprising has its "reasons" and its "causes". Yellow vests are smarter than philosophers because they have "understood" that the relationship between "production" and "circulation" has been reversed. The circulation - of money, goods, people and information - currently prevails over "production". They no longer occupy the factories, but rather the streets and squares of the city, and they attack the circulation of information (the circulation of money is more abstract: it will be necessary, to reach it, another level of organization and action).
The condition of the emergence of a political process is obviously a break with the "reasons" and the "causes" that generated it. Only the interruption of the existing order, only the departure of the governmentality can assure the opening of a new political process, because the "governed", even when they resist, are double the power, its counterpart, its partner. By creating new unimaginable possibilities before their appearance, the break with time of domination constitutes the conditions for the transformation of the self and the world. It is not necessary to resort to any mystique of revolt or idealism of insurrection.
The processes of constitution of the political subject, the forms of organization, the production of knowledge for the struggle that the interruption of the time of power made possible are immediately faced with "reasons" such as profit, property and inheritance, which the revolt did not made disappear. On the contrary, they are more aggressive, immediately invoking the restoration of order, putting their police first, continuing as if nothing had happened with the implementation of the "reforms". The alternatives are then radical: either the new political process manages to change the "reasons" for capital, or these same reasons will end up changing it. The opening of possible politicians faces the reality of a double and formidable problem: that of the constitution of the political subject and that of the power of capital, because the former can only take place within the latter.
Sexual and racial divisions structure not only the reproduction of capital, but also the distribution of social roles and functions
The answers that the Arab Springs, Occupy Wall Street, June 2013 in Brazil, etc., offered for these questions are very weak; movements continue to search and experiment without finding a true strategy. There is no chance that this impasse can be overcome by the "left populism" practiced by Podemos in Spain. His strategy achieved the liquidation of the revolution started in post-68 by many Marxists whose Marxism had failed. Democracy as a place of conflict and subjectivation replaces capitalism and revolution (Lefort, Laclau, Rancière) at the same time that the capital machine literally engulfs "democratic representation". Claude Lefort's claim - "in a democracy, the place of power is an empty place" - has been denied since the early 1970s: this place is occupied by capital as sui generis "sovereign". Any party settling in there can only function as its "proxy" (many have mocked Marxian "simplification", which has been completely carried out in an almost cartoonish way by the current President of France, Emmanuel Macron). Left-wing populism breathes new life into something that has already ceased to exist. In neoliberalism, representation and Parliament do not hold any power, and power is so concentrated in the Executive that it does not obey the orders of the "people" or the general interest, but those of capital and property.
The will to politicize the movements after 2008 appears to be reactionary, since it imposes precisely what the revolution of the 1960s rejected and what each movement that has emerged since then rejects: the (charismatic) leader, the “transcendence” of the party , the delegation of representation, liberal democracy, the people. The position of left-wing populism (and its theoretical systematization by Laclau and Mouffe) makes it impossible to name the enemy. Its categories (the "caste", "those above" and "those below") are one step away from the conspiracy theory and two steps from its culmination, the denunciation of "international Judaism" that would control the world through of finance. This confusion, which the leaders and theorists of an unfeasible left-wing populism are interested in maintaining, continues to run through the movements. In the case of the yellow vests, the confusion comes from the media and the political system, which expresses the vagueness that still characterizes the modality of the rupture. It must be said that in the contemporary political desert, carved out by fifty years of counterrevolution, it is not easy to get your bearings.
Like the limits of all the movements that have been taking place since 2011, the limits of the movement of the yellow vests are evident, but no "external" force, no party can take charge of teaching "what to do" and "how" , as the Bolsheviks had done. These indications can only come from within, immanently. The interior is made up, among other things, of the knowledge, experience, and points of view of other political movements, because the struggles of the yellow vests, unlike those of the "working class", do not have the capacity to represent to the entire proletariat, nor to express criticism from all the domains that constitute the machine of capitalism.
Without a critique of racial and sexual divisions, a social movement is exposed to all possible recoveries from the right and the extreme right
Constituted on the North / South division, the movement of the "internal colonized" that reproduces a "third world" within the core countries necessarily implies, in addition to the critique of internal segregation, a critique of the international domination of capital , the global exploitation of the planet's workforce and resources. Something that is missing in the yellow vests. Deprived of this "racial" and international component of capitalism, the movement sometimes offers the image of a "frankute" nationalism. But it is not possible to be deluded with a national space: the nation-state, in the 19th century, owed its existence to the global dimension of colonial capitalism, and the welfare state to the world revolution and to the planetary scale of the strategic confrontation of the Cold War.
The racial fracture suffered by the "colonized" divided not only the world labor organization, but also the revolution of the 1960s. Today, the conditions for the possibility of a world revolution lie, on the one hand, in the invention of a new internationalism that neocolonized movements (immigrants, first of all) incorporate almost physically and that women's movements, thanks to their networks around the world, they mobilize almost exclusively; and, on the other hand, in the critique of capitalist hierarchies, which should not be limited to the sphere of work. Sexual and racial divisions structure not only the reproduction of capital, but also the distribution of social roles and functions.
Today, a movement focused on the “social question” cannot be spontaneously socialist as in the 19th and 20th centuries due to the fact that the world and social revolution (which involves all power relations) has passed through there . Without a critique of racial and sexual divisions, the movement is exposed to all possible recoveries (from the right and the extreme right), which so far, despite everything, it has been able to resist. If the subjectivities that embody the struggles against these different forms of domination cannot be reduced to the unity of the "empty signifier" of the people, as left populism would wish, the double problem of common political action and the power of capital remains intact . The inability to think of capital as a global and social machine, whose exploitation and domination are not limited to "work", is one of the fundamental causes of the defeat of the 1960s. From this point of view, the strategy did not It has changed: today as yesterday, we are far from having one.
Since 2011, the movements have been "revolutionary" in terms of their forms of mobilization (inventive in the choice of the space and time of the struggle, radical democracy and great flexibility in the modalities of organization, rejection of representation and of the leader, subtraction to the centralization and totalization by a party, etc.) and "reformists" regarding their demands and the definition of the enemy (we "liberated" ourselves from Mubarak, but we did not touch his system of power, in the same way as the Critics focus on Macron when he is, without a doubt, a component of the capital machine.) The rupture does not produce notable changes in the organization of power and property, but in the subjectivity of the insurgents. And if, in the short term, movements are defeated, subjective changes will surely continue to produce political effects. On condition of not falling into the illusion that a "social revolution" can take place without "political revolution", that is, without overcoming capitalism. Post-68 has shown that when the social revolution is separated from the political revolution, it can be integrated into the capitalist machine without any difficulty as a new resource for capital accumulation. The "revolutionary becoming" inaugurated by these subjective transformations cannot be separated from the "revolution", under pain of becoming a component of capital, therefore its power of destruction and self-destruction, which is manifested today in neo-fascism.
Maurizio Lazzarato , Italian philosopher and sociologist, is a researcher at the CNRS and a member of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. Among his books are the Politics of the Event (2006), For a minor policy (2006), The factory of the indebted man (2013) and Governing through debt (2015). His new essay, Capital Hates Everyone . Fascism or revolution (Eternal Cadence), published on June 29.