– Foundations of a communalist strategy.
Before thinking about strategy, we must first understand what we are fighting against. This first part offers a critical analysis of the structures that dominate us—capitalism and the state—to better understand their logic, their transformations, and their limitations. For it is from a clear diagnosis that an emancipatory strategy can emerge.
In a second part, a follow-up to this text, entitled “Organizing to liberate – instituting communalism in everyday life,” will propose concrete courses of action: how to move from criticism to organization, from refusal to the construction of a counter-power rooted in our territories and our daily lives.
“It may seem strange, but anyone who knows war in this sense knows very well that an important strategic decision requires much more willpower than a tactical decision, where one is carried away by the moment.” Clausewitz – On War
Understanding the strategies of the automaton subject
Capitalism is a series of innovative processes that constitute a fundamentally directional immanent dynamic of the mode of production, expressed through a compulsion for productivity. Its strength lies in its constant upheavals—a kind of permanent revolution—but also in its ability to neutralize, if not integrate, the resistance it encounters. It knows no restructuring; it exists fundamentally only as permanent restructuring, which has successively transformed it from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism, then to financial capitalism, and now to cognitive capitalism. The latter is leading us to an increasing anthropomorphization of technology, to the point of contempt, even hatred, for living beings. For this techno-liberalism, through connected objects and the misnamed “artificial intelligence,” intends to profit from our every move, effectively ushering in the era of a life industry. In doing so, with the digital integration of society and nature under the banner of rationalization, companies have never been so massive and powerful in the hands of so few. At first glance, the current modernization of capitalism appears to be a successful social process, a coherent, conquering, and unavoidable one. This is all the more true as advances in AI are leading to the creation of machines capable of beating a champion at the game of Go, i.e., making decisions appropriate to a situation by sorting through billions of pieces of data (data mining). There is therefore no doubt that they will be used to optimum effect by the strategists of Capital. The birth of capital – what Marx calls primitive accumulation – is not a moment in time, but a process that is set to continue over time. To ensure this, the functionaries of valorization, the officers and non-commissioned officers of Capital, according to Marx, immediately developed institutions and strategies—sometimes contradictory and competing—against a backdrop of class warfare, aimed at making this anthropological rupture acceptable and establishing this new social order, beginning with terror. Its gradual colonization of the world was accompanied by the colonization of minds, imaginations, and bodies.
Thus, in Western countries, the impetuous feminist and environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which went so far as to seriously question the essential categories of capitalism, suffered the same decline as the labor movement before them, but at an accelerated pace. And even if, since then, certain social movements have been able to denounce the harmful effects of the valorization of value and challenge its logic, they are far from having been able to mark breaking points capable of causing systemic imbalances, as the various class struggle movements had done before them. In the current climate, the scope of these protests is limited by their fragmentation and disunity, and consequently by their difficulty in implementing alternative political and social visions that challenge the real power relations. But how did this shift, so destabilizing for movements claiming to be progressive or even anti-capitalist, come about? Since then, we have witnessed the proliferation, dispersion, and aporia of new critical theories that have displaced the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But if we agree that by dispensing with criticism instead of criticizing the economy, any emancipatory project unwittingly recreates capitalism, this is not enough, and we need to take the analysis further. While avoiding falling into obtuse conspiracy theories, would it be unreasonable to see in these dynamics of widespread protest the result of an economic and ideological offensive against everything that hinders capitalist expansion? It is not possible to understand the structure of a political and social system without considering its evolution over time.
By tracing the evolution of our positions—those of the defeated—on this battlefield, we can retrace that of our collective intellect, undermined by the dominant ideology. To fully understand these strategies, we must place ourselves in the wake of the gradual decline of the labor movement, defeated in this class war rooted in the very constitution of capitalism. But as machines become increasingly intelligent, our intelligence tends to become mechanical. Therefore, without rejecting everything, betting on our Collective Intelligence requires a completely different approach to action, knowing that:
Like science, technology does not exist in itself; it has no essence, it is an assembly of materials, social relations, and political and economic powers, historically situated. Criticizing technology in general makes little sense; through technology, it is always a certain type of sociopolitical arrangement that is at stake. François Jarrige
We can therefore envisage the development of a genuine flexible and evolving strategy aimed at overturning this power relationship, which could not be more unfavorable to us at the beginning of this century, in order to put us back on the path to emancipation, which is achieved by walking, that is, by acting with the support of thought.
The offensive that came from the US
The results of the economic offensive of Fordism and its liberal policies, which courted the most privileged sector of the workforce, now the middle class,with the help of Roosevelt and his New Deal (1933-1938), could not be more convincing. Added to this was the complacency, even complicity, of the social democracy that had established itself on the left but was resolutely on the political side of Capital from the beginning of the 20th century. With the Second World War over on June 5, 1947, the United States launched the Marshall Plan, allocating massive aid to Europe to rebuild its devastated cities and infrastructure. This was to be the greatest economic and ideological offensive, determining all others to this day. The appearance of a key word in Truman’s traditional State of the Union address on January 20, 1949, caused a veritable tsunami that swept around the globe. Three objectives were announced: strengthening the United Nations (UN), maintaining the Marshall Plan, and creating a military alliance against the Soviet Union: NATO. But at the last minute, a fourth objective was added, with a decidedly humanist focus: development.
We must launch a bold new program to apply the benefits of our scientific leadership and industrial progress to the improvement and growth of underdeveloped regions. More than half of the world’s population lives in conditions close to poverty. (…) Old-style imperialism, exploitation for foreign profit, has no place in our intentions. What we want is a program of development based on the concepts of fair and democratic negotiation. Excerpt from Truman’s speech
This may seem trivial, but it is important to remember that, as Karl Marx said: “Only material force can break material force, but even theory, once it becomes the theory of the masses, becomes a material force.”
From 1949 onwards, two billion of the world’s inhabitants became underdeveloped, ordered to conform to the Western model of life. Their very different conceptions of existence, their language, their intimate and family lives, their subsistence labor, everything became an obstacle to the Progress decided by others. But economic development also means capitalist accumulation and therefore intensification of inequalities between poor and rich areas. The ratio rose from 1 to 5 around 1900 to 1 to 45 in 1980. And while the combined wealth of the five richest men in the world was $405 billion in 2020, it rose to $869 billion in less than four years, according to Oxfam on January 15, 2024.
The result of this offensive was the Golden Age of Political Economy between 1948 and 1973 for Western countries under the auspices of Social Democracy: the Trente Glorieuses in France, the Sixties in England, and economic miracles in Germany and Italy. Unexpectedly, however, opposition to the Vietnam War in the US in the early 1960s triggered a wave of revolt: civil rights, renewed labor struggles, environmentalism, feminism, anti-racism, and squatters. All of this was fueled by a counterculture that challenged a lifestyle based on consumption, competition, and hierarchical domination. It was in this context that a readjustment of the political economy took place with the abandonment of the dollar’s convertibility into gold in 1971 and the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system. The decline of the dollar and the establishment of floating exchange rates, the beginning of financial deregulation linked to the process of globalization, were compounded by Saudi Arabia’s embargo on oil exports to the United States, followed by other Western countries in 1973. This marked the end of the Trente Glorieuses (the thirty glorious years) and led to an explosion in unemployment. Morally, it was the end of an era of exceptional confidence in the future and the beginning of a climate of gloom from which we have not yet emerged: the thirty glorious years were followed by the forty anxious ones.
Thus, the democratic ambitions of civil society were gradually curtailed in order to guarantee the economic interests of businesses. Contrary to popular belief, the rise of neoliberalism did not correspond to a withdrawal of the state from the economic sphere, but rather to the discreet emergence of a state authoritarianism capable of stimulating it. Not only have the fertile minds of the Pentagon and the White House legalized preventive war under the pretext of fighting terrorism, but they have also embarked on a kind of preventive counter-revolution, not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution. The anxiety caused by the precariousness of workers – even more so for women – will be followed by management aimed at creating the illusion that the company is, without distinction, the entire workforce. The state will take charge of managing the social unrest resulting from the surplus labor force, acting as grains of sand in the gears of the megamachine.
The movements primarily targeted
In addition to these coercive social measures to make us submit to the diktat of inclusion and benevolence at work, the liberal intellectual elite had already succeeded in the 1970s in defusing the hard core of protest. These included radical environmentalism, which rejected the coercive dynamic of “grow or die,” and feminism, which questioned the very foundations of capitalism, namely its invisible social reproduction and all the forms of domination and exploitation that structure it. As usual, the strategists of political economy sought to acknowledge and highlight the problems that had been pointed out, and then contain them within the framework of state institutions in order to steer the protest movement towards accepting mainstream solutions, whether technical or political. In addition to this widespread media co-opting, the counter-offensive focused on the hard core of critical theory, that of the collective intellect mainly originating in universities, in order to sow the seeds of doubt that paralyze action.
Openly against environmentalism
Recognition always comes during battles that are already well underway, and it is in this context that the initiative to organize global conferences has been taking place since the early 1970s, addressing issues related to ecology alongside those of feminism. The Meadow Report (March 2, 1972), commissioned by a few decision-makers, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, launched the first offensive against environmentalism. It pointed to growth—the pressure of large-scale industry on land and oceans—as the main cause of massive pollution and the destruction of life on Earth. But how could one advocate both a slowdown in growth – zero growth – from 1975 onwards in developed countries, while tripling global industrial production by 1990 in order to reduce mineral resource consumption to a quarter of its current level? The stimulation of the production of more sustainable goods, recycling, and waste reduction was met with the accelerated development of the “immaterial” economy, including the marketing of previously non-commodified goods and services, thus offsetting the losses from the so-called decline in industrial activity. There was no criticism of consumer society, which structurally obscures any reflection on the production of goods and the reality of human needs. There was nothing about our “synthetic environment” (Bookchin) and almost nothing about the revitalization of the rural world. In short, there was nothing about what was already at the heart of the most advanced ecological thinking.
As a result, whether political (green parties) or social (environmental organizations such as Friends of the Earth, Ecologistas en Acción, WWF, Greenpeace, etc.), the environmental movement subsidized by states or other creditors turned away from questioning the social order responsible for the depredations it had previously denounced. Bookchin had warned:
We hope that environmental groups will reject any appeal to the “head of state” or to national and international bureaucratic institutions, that is, to criminals who are materially contributing to the current ecological crisis. – Murray Bookchin – 1969
The eloquent work illustrating the appropriation of environmentalist discourse and sensibilities is the UN report with the innocuous title Our Common Future, which in 1987 laid the foundations for the oxymoronic notion of “development” – still, but this time “sustainable.” Its author, former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, stated unequivocally that not only are development and the environment compatible, but that the former alone makes the protection of the latter possible. Far more ideological than scientific, it merely echoed the Meadows report, while adding a significant nuance: “Ecological concerns must be considered through the prism of development, prosperity, and industry rather than in opposition to them.” The underlings of capitalism via the UN now relied on Brundtland rather than Meadows. Advocating “sustainable development” rather than “degrowth,” they aimed to “square the circle,” adopting the Orwellian lexicon of “oxymoron” to do so. And the cause of the problem was transformed into the solution.
The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 accentuated the perversion of concepts, inaugurating the highly publicized Earth Summits and COPs, guaranteeing the definitive triumph of the concept of sustainable development throughout the world. Thus, Article 3 of the grand final declaration of Rio, which neither the good Harry Truman nor, of course, Mrs. Brundtland would have disowned: “The right to development must be exercised in a way that equitably meets the development and environmental needs of present and future generations.” The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), created in conjunction with this summit, brings together some 200 companies, all philanthropic, such as China Petrochemical Corporation, Mitsubishi Chemical Holding Corporation, Solvay, AREVA, Dassault Systèmes S. A., L’Oréal, BASF, Bayer, Italcementi Group, Shell, Philips, Hoffmann-La Roche, Novartis, Syngenta, BP, Rio Tinto, Alcoa, Boeing, Chevron Corporation, Dow Chemical, Du Pont, not to mention The Coca-Cola Company. From that date onwards, thousands of NGOs, public and private institutions, and government agencies have been spouting the vocabulary of Rio. A generation of activists believed—and still believes—in the SDGs of Agenda 21, the 17 SDGs of Agenda 2030, and international conventions on climate, biodiversity, and desertification. Since then, denial has become obsolete and meaningless expressions are repeated ad nauseam to lull everyone into a false sense of security: energy transition, ecological transition, green economy, clean hydrogen, carbon neutrality, etc.
The major challenge for feminism
“One in two men is a woman” – banner at the Arc de Triomphe – August 26, 1970
The second wave of feminism unfolded in the late 1960s, starting on American campuses, in connection with the struggle against the Vietnam War and also for the civil rights of Black Americans. Social ecology owes a great deal to feminism, to the point of occupying its very core in terms of its analytical concept. It locates the origin of ecological disasters in social injustices, which are rooted in domination, starting with that of men over women.
“Thus, it was the first radical feminists who, in their writings, transformed social ecology into a critique of forms of hierarchical domination, not just class domination. (…) Feminism shed light on the meaning of hierarchy in a very existential way. (…) Insofar as it revealed the degradation of the human condition that affected everyone, but particularly women, it unmasked the subtle rules that governed the nursery, the bedroom, the kitchen, the playground, and the school—and not just the workplace or the public sphere in general.” – Murray Bookchin, A Society to Be Remade, 1993
Throughout the 20th century, women have achieved a certain formal equality, but today we are forced to acknowledge the enormous gap between this formal equality and real equality.
The anti-feminist offensive in the open
As with environmentalism, the instrumentalization of feminism was carried out internationally in all corners of the world, directly and without detours, by the UN. This institution has become indispensable to states for acting in concert at the global level and has no autonomy other than that granted to it by the latter. On March 8, 1975, in Mexico City, the first World Conference on the International Women’s Year opened, bringing together 1,300 delegates from 133 countries. While in 1975 in Mexico City some feminists denounced the UN conference as an attempt to co-opt their movements, twenty years later, the NGO Forum organized by the UN in September 1995 in Beijing, China, welcomed an exceptional participation of the global feminist movement under the banner of Struggle for Equality, Development and Peace. The feminist movement now resembled a vast field of professionalized NGOs, which effectively defused the authentic feminist movements. Thanks to widespread Newspeak, all realities were reversed: those who starved became redeemers, and the weapons of the neoliberal, racist, and patriarchal system appeared as charitable hands extended to poor women in the South, as with microcredit, for example.
“Microcredit operators present women’s poverty as a natural state and their own intervention as a gateway to a cultural state where women, who must be continually supervised, trained, and initiated, will finally have control over their destiny. However, the reality is exactly the opposite. Developing countries and the women of these countries are being impoverished by Structural Adjustment Programs and the savagery of globalization.” – Hedwige Peemans-Poullet – Feminism and Development – 2000
But after deactivation comes ideology to freeze it in place. Thus, greenwashing for ecology is matched by feminismwashing advertising by Dior on a T-shirt: We should all be feminists. This is a clear result of the neoliberal appropriation of these two movements, with advertising becoming ideology for the people after being conceived by the academic intelligentsia of the ideology factory.
The neoliberal ideology factory
“Today,” he observed, ‘it is the liberals who are afraid of freedom and the intellectuals who are ready to do anything to suppress thought.’ – George Orwell – Preface to Animal Farm –
Thus, through the university, neoliberal ideology has engulfed the fertile ground of theoretical confusion in protest movements, neutralizing them. Thomist in the great Christian era, then Kantian in the secular era, Heideggerian during Nazi Germany, and social democratic in the postwar period. From the 1960s onwards in the US, it became structuralist, post-structuralist, and deconstructivist. This approach was based on the thoughts of renowned French philosophers, selected and brought together under the name of “French Theory,” providing an essential ideological justification for the strategists of neoliberalism. This ideology undermined the very heart of the dangerous subversive ideas of the time, particularly those of feminism and radical ecology, and hijacked them in order to justify the frantic pursuit of value. The example of Michel Foucault is significant in this regard. One wonders how left-wing theorists—even anarchists—could have fallen for his trap.
When will it finally be possible to “draw something clear from Foucault, given that his formulations lend themselves to contradictory interpretations,” asked Bookchin. He likened his approach to an existential and aesthetic approach that he called “lifestyle anarchism,” consisting of “adapting oneself, making one’s life a work of art, or changing one’s life—and one’s thinking—without changing the world.” An approach that consists of extolling “a practice of staging Foucauldian personal insurrections.” But it could be that this lack of clarity hides a much more disturbing and not directly acknowledged approach on Foucault’s part. From 1967 to 1984, his critique of Marxism became more radical and, far from waging a resolute intellectual struggle against the dogma of the free market, he seemed to adhere to it on many points. Thus, he never systematically opposed what he called the “legal-deductive and axiomatic” path of “liberalism” to the “utilitarian” and “neoliberal” path. He even seemed fascinated by neoliberalism, which he did not present as a system to be “overthrown” or as a nightmare from which we must wake up. Instead, he emphasized the difference between the traditional doctrine of laissez-faire and the neoliberal doctrine of promoting competition, including through state action. The subject is conceived as having the power to act rather than as a holder of rights. For him, this power to act has a positive side, which he calls empowerment, and a negative side in the form of victimhood—guilt versus responsibility. Since the goal of neoliberal law is to unleash action, it relies, just like the economy, on everyone’s ability to act and make transactions. The term “rational actor” implies that action is as important as reason, because what matters above all is action. The hard liberal path, that of uncompromising economists, opens up something quite fascinating in that it replaces the disciplinary society with a policy of respect for differences, which until then had been impossible to envisage, even from a purely theoretical point of view.
Thus, demands for heterodoxy took a major place in Foucault’s political thinking. Admittedly, he brought to the fore a whole range of forms of domination that had previously been largely ignored, but these were theorized and conceived outside the context of questions relating to exploitation. Far from developing a theoretical perspective that considers these two concomitant relationships, he gradually came to oppose them. This conceptual shift contributed to “replacing exploitation and its critique with a focus on the victim of denial of rights, whether prisoner, dissident, homosexual, refugee, etc.” – Isabelle Garo. Thus, François Ewald, his assistant at the Collège de France, was able to become an advisor to MEDEF (the French employers’ union), while claiming to follow his thinking, and the elites of neoliberal orthodoxy venerated him on American campuses, but also by purchasing his archives in 2015 for the “modest price” of €3.8 million from the French National Library.
And the first attempt at diversity/diversion was marked
It seems that Margaret Thatcher was inspired by this for her speech at the Conservative Party Conference on October 10, 1975, where she was acclaimed for her “vision” of society. – “her utopia” –: “Some socialists seem to believe that people should be numbers in an administrative computer. We believe they should be people.” We are all unequal. No one, thank heaven, is the same as anyone else, contrary to what most socialists claim. We believe that everyone has the right to be different, but for us every human being is of equal importance.
Let us remember this fine example of the shift in liberal discourse that opened the door to the neoliberal revolution. The term “unequal” was very cleverly used—it has two meanings in English: unequal but also different—to contrast the beautiful concept of “difference” with “leveling” socialism. It thus transformed something perceived as negative by the vast majority of the population, “economic inequality,” into a question of “diversity,” claimed by both the humanist tradition and environmentalism. From then on, the problem was no longer that we were unequal because of the capitalist class system that serves the owners of the means of production to the detriment of their servants, but that, having the right to be different and rebellious, we must oppose all those anti-capitalists who, like the communists, seek to make us all the same. With this sleight of hand, Mrs. Thatcher not only found an effective alibi for transforming an unjust and flawed system into a game where the best are rewarded, she also succeeded in breaking the class struggles of the time.
The identity trap
In this vein, as Bookchin points out, Judith Butler repeatedly draws on Foucault’s ideas throughout her work and gives birth to the concept of “gender,” which will drive queer theory. From then on, the ideas of identity minorities gained ground and made their way into universities, giving rise to Cultural Studies and then Gender Studies. This wave went so far as to dethrone Marxist thought and the critical theory inspired by the Frankfurt School—two pillars of American university political studies that criticized the apolitical nature of French Theory. Perry Anderson in 1980 clearly understood the implications of this shift, arguing that these authors had “subjected meaning to an intense bombardment, declared war on truth, completely reversed ethics and politics, and destroyed history.” With queer, confusion would now take hold in feminism and obscure it, and today large sections of the LGBT movement and feminism are realizing with horror that they have a Trojan horse within their organizations, and that all the sensibilities of emancipatory struggles will be affected by turmoil leading to paralysis.
Like lesbian separatism in the 1980s, queer is a new avant-gardism that breaks all political solidarity with women as a dominated group. It leaves no room for real women living in a mixed world, nor for the struggle against male domination. Especially since the confusion in gender is also a confusion in the subject, resulting from postmodern theory. (…) The relationship between men and women is the subject and object of the historical feminist project. (…) Postfeminist ideology triumphed, proclaiming the end of patriarchy and the obsolescence of revolt. – Françoise Picq
The trans-queer movement provides tools for a solipsistic and hedonistic individualism that is highly functional for liberal ideology and its market economy, but not for a political theory of social change. Sex is used today as a banner for diversity, for this incredible variety of identities and lifestyles. Our socially constructed self constantly asserts its aspiration to diversity, but it hates the collective. When it comes to social issues, it flees from the collective, but revels in the struggles that make it feel original and different and elevate it above others.
People who are rich and have a different skin color or sexual orientation feel more comfortable without touching the thing that, above all else, makes them feel more comfortable: their money. Walter Benn Michaels – Diversity in Equality –
In fact, diversity has become a business in the hands of diversicrats of all stripes, who enrich themselves with generous subsidies, both public and private. Until now, US companies have spent up to $8 billion a year on diversity training, and Google invested $150 million in these programs in 2015, even though serious studies have proven their ineffectiveness and even their harmfulness.
But depending on the fierce battles waged in the marketplace between competing lobbies, the cursor on the political economy vector shifts from left to right or vice versa, inevitably bringing back the yo-yo metaphor. The convulsive identity nebula, with its authoritarian overtones and polychromatic dispersion, is preparing the ground for the digital oligarchs and their ideology of globalized Caesarism, united around Trump. Thus, on both sides, we encounter the same form of hypocrisy. In response to the “cancel culture” of the progressive elite, which they claim is quick to violently condemn authors, filmmakers, and political figures who oppose their views, thereby contributing to the deculturation and destruction of social bonds, the “woke right” can now rely on the full power of the state apparatus to implement reactionary social policies. These two spectacular trends are merely following the constrained dynamics of capitalism, which is moving towards authoritarianism out of a need to increasingly rationalize the means of guaranteeing and stimulating the valorization of value.
Inclusive language and intersectionality that disperse
We are in the process of giving language its final form, the form it will have when no one speaks it anymore. When we are finished, people like you will have to learn everything all over again. – O’Brien addressing Winston – 1984 – Orwell
Inclusive language is a smokescreen to obscure the path to emancipation and a beautiful fetishism of form at the expense of substance, a pure aberration of Butler’s theory. Acting on language by correcting its representation would change our relationship to gender and change power relations. Unless it is to better obscure them, as NATO has clearly understood, advocating inclusive language in its Handbook for Women, Peace and Security. A military organization if ever there was one, has it changed course to commit itself fully to feminism and emancipation?
In this conceptual hubbub, intersectionality, a concept conceived and theorized in the late 1980s by Kimberly Crenshaw, an African-American lawyer, seemed to take up the challenge of identity divisions. However, it was hijacked and captured by the US academic intelligentsia, ultimately reinforcing their identity ideology and strategy. As a result, intersectionality became “first the name of a problem rather than a solution” (Alexandre Jaunait). The reversal stems from the fact that this overemphasis on race and gender comes at the expense of class, which in fact encompasses them. This also applies to the theory of decolonial reason, which suffers from this culturalist bias, understood primarily through the prism of racism or the domination of the North over the global South, thus relegating to the background the fundamental opposition between rich and poor.
Wokism
Wokism is the necessary complement to neoliberalism, which is not content with replacing fundamental knowledge in primary school with the acquisition of a progressive gospel; spelling, grammar, and syntax are also considered elitist concerns, remnants of a patriarchal order that must be dismantled. Jean-Claude Michéa – Extension du domaine du capital (Extension of the Domain of Capital) – Albin Michel – 2023
Along the way, the defamation, proscriptions, prohibitions, and destruction perpetuated by the cultural wars, cancel culture, and intersectional ideology affect most so-called democratic countries and even more so people and movements endowed with common sense. The primary difficulty is the refusal to engage in debate, which has become consubstantial with this ideology, as demonstrated by the slogan “my rights are not up for debate,” which is reminiscent of the “irreducible opposition between the enemy and us” of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. The woke, using a combination of physical intimidation and the institutional positions they have seized, have decided to crush all their opponents. This is worrying, given that this post-modernism is being taken up both by decolonial theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who inspired Podemos and LFI, and by proponents of Martin Sellner’s version of metapolitics, a thinker of the Austrian neo-Nazi party FPÖ. The right wing worships the market while cursing the culture it engenders, and the left claims to fight the logic of the market while bowing down to the culture it engenders. While LTI – the language of the Third Reich – is striking in its rigidity, today’s newspeak is more subtle and dangerous because it is invisible, fluid, and malleable, and seems self-evident. And while Nazism can be interpreted as a product of modernity, particularly the spread of instrumental and bureaucratic rationality, it can also be read as a dictatorship of participation.
Neoliberalism and the totalitarian horizon
It is indeed the Chinese model that political economy strategists such as Elon Musk dream of, where the central government manages to combine almost liberal economic management with marked political authoritarianism, while displaying a style of “good governance” whose transnational criteria are well known from the World Bank’s dogma: increased privatization and/or delegation to the private sector; decentralization and/or assertive multi-level cooperation; flexibilization of employment and status. All this while celebrating the participation of workers in companies and citizens in the civil sphere.
“The central role of what I call the ‘emperor’ is uncontested. He makes all the key decisions and gives himself complete freedom to change his mind if the situation evolves, which he often does in practice. Paradoxically, this model is not incompatible with real autonomy for teams, which work horizontally. The middle management does not act as a barrier between the boss and the operational teams; it is responsible for keeping itself informed at the grassroots level.” – Sandrine Zerbib, former president of Adidas China
As for political management, resident committees, which are at the heart of the current structure of shequ—residential communities of 100 to 700 inhabitants—have been the cornerstone of a networked urban society since the 1950s. This network, which complements work units, aims to monitor residents, strengthen political education, and facilitate the local implementation of policies issued at the highest levels. The purpose of the shequ is to relieve the state of certain duties and responsibilities by transferring them to citizens participating in the shequ. The community building policy illustrates the tenuous boundary between protection and social control. It allows the latter to be perceived by residents as a means of preserving their security rather than as oppression, playing the role of social control.
“In normal times, neighborhood committees provided a number of services to the community, particularly for the elderly. With the arrival of Covid-19, they became the zealous enforcers of a particularly strict prevention policy that led them to regiment people’s lives.” – Sandrine Zerbib
Less successful was the self-appointed “communal state” in Bolivia, an oxymoron to describe the supposedly “democratic and participatory” state initiative aimed at establishing “popular power” from the top down. Projects were set up through the constitution by the inhabitants in the form of self-management and community self-government, communal councils and communes, designed as the foundations of a communal state under construction. Ultimately, as sociologist Paula Vásquez points out: “The law on communal councils laid the foundations for a new state that turned out to be a huge clientelist machine.” With its internal contradictions and constant harassment from the US, state-run Chavism now sees itself as a civil-military power engaged in a struggle for survival, despite the aid and advice provided by China.
Something new in the West: NMP or NPM
Participation is the watchword of New Public Management (NPM). A direct offshoot of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), created in 1980 to modernize public administration, this management model, much more discreet than market globalization, swears by the “3 Es”—Economy, Efficiency, and Effectiveness—and the “3 Ds”—Downsizing (staff cuts), Defunding (budget cuts), and Devolution (decentralization). It has become a powerful force in contemporary liberal democracies. Efficacy – and the 3 Ds – Downsizing – staff reduction – , Defunding – Devolution – Decentralization – . It has become firmly established in contemporary liberal democracies.
When individuals and the state become entrepreneurs, management becomes universal. It becomes the universe that neoliberal culture gives us to live in and takes the place of political categories. This is true of the idea of governance, which suggests that no one has or holds power, that all decisions are based on the objective necessities of the situation and the will of the people. Management, on the surface, no longer imposes anything, asking everyone to make their own decisions at the grassroots level, according to more or less defined procedures. We are not yet there in our “advanced societies,” which still lack many elements for this type of “managerial organization.” But in recent decades, this process has been reinforced by the “citizenist movement” emerging from the middle classes affected by the 2008 crisis. This movement is mainly focused on a desire for more “direct, more participatory democracy” in state institutions. Now promoted directly by the state—through “citizen conferences” and “citizen consultations”—which aim to give citizens a voice when the time comes, “citizen democrats” will be able to implement the OECD’s proposals for NPM in a kind of “mega-service relationship” via municipal institutions.
Citizenship is not just a political dead end. By taking the bait of NPM, and even going further than it in its desire to manage affairs collectively through existing municipal institutions, it ends up accentuating the current trend toward depoliticization and the acceptance of political economy as the ultimate horizon. Indeed, the citizen-customer ends up becoming a citizen obsessed with localism, with his private world, and blind to anything that does not directly concern him outside his neighborhood or municipality. By giving this still minority citizen movement the status of a privileged interlocutor of the state, the political elite could well place it at the source of this work of producing indifference, the extent of which must be fully understood, because: “Indifference acts in history. It acts passively, but it acts. It is fatality, that which cannot be counted on, that which disrupts programs, that which upsets the best-laid plans, it is the raw material that rebels against intelligence and suffocates it.” – Gramsci
More terrifying than the sound of boots is the silence of slippers. Max Frisch
Dictatorial regimes are not an exception, a kind of democratic aberration. They are the logical outcome of a form of government necessary for the structuring of societies for the optimum profitability of financial capital. It is up to us communalists to draw a clear line, from the outset of any coherent strategy, between our initiatives and those that are self-managed but part of the political economy and end up stifling what is still in its infancy. It is up to us to promote new institutions integrated into a broad and vast movement in tension with the institutions of the state. Failing that, like the citizenists, we would be just another attempt to reinforce the blind dynamics of Capital. For in the end, whatever new forms of power are developed by the ruling classes in all countries, they are never the result of subjective choice but are, on the contrary, rooted in objective economic processes. And our subjectivity can only be truly constructed if we are able, together with others, to grasp the objectivity of the world we share. Understanding means power, the ability to reestablish communication with our surroundings, to crack the ice of separation and change the world before it changes us completely.
Translated by TerKo using a free tool.
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