modernity

Friedrich Engels’ “The Civil War in Switzerland” (1847)

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Engraving of William Tell

While I appreciate Said more than most of the subsequent post-colonial theorists, this article alone should dispel the myth of Marx’s and Engels’ alleged Eurocentrism or chauvinism, as supposedly evidenced in their writings on the traditional societies of India and Algiers. Here Engels writes with more scorn and contempt about traditional society in Switzerland, in the heart of Europe, than anything either of them wrote about non-European societies.

At last the ceaseless bombast about the “cradle of freedom,” about the “grandsons of William Tell and Winkelried,” about the heroic victors of Sempach and Murten is being brought to an end.  At last it has been revealed that the cradle of freedom is nothing but the centre of barbarism and the nursery of Jesuits, that the grandsons of Tell and Winkelried can only be brought to reason by cannon-balls, and that the heroism at Sempach and Murten was nothing but the desperation of brutal and bigoted mountain tribes, obstinately resisting civilization and progress.

It is really very fortunate that European democracy is finally getting rid of this Ur-Swiss, puritan, and reactionary ballast.  As long as the democrats concentrated on the virtue, the happiness, and the patriarchal simplicity of these Alpine shepherds, they themselves still appeared in a reactionary light.  Now that they are supporting the struggle of civilized, industrial, modern-democratic Switzerland against the crude, Christian-Germanic democracy of the primitive, cattle-breeding cantons, they represent progress everywhere, now the last reactionary glimmer disappears, now they show that they are learning to understand the meaning of democracy in the 19th century.

There are two regions in Europe where old Christian-Germanic barbarism has retained its most primitive form, almost down to acorn-eating — Norway and the High Alps, especially Ur-Switzerland.  Both Norway and Ur-Switzerland still provide us with genuine examples of that breed of men who once beat the Romans to death in good Westphalian style with clubs and flails in the Teutoburg Forest.  Both Norway and Ur-Switzerland are democratically organized. But there are many varieties of democracy and it is very necessary that the democrats of the civilized countries should at last decline responsibility for the Norwegian and Ur-Swiss forms of democracy.

The democratic movement in all civilized countries is, in the last analysis, striving for the political domination of the proletariat. It therefore presupposes that a proletariat exists, that a ruling bourgeoisie exists, that an industry exists which gives birth to the proletariat and which has brought the bourgeoisie to power.

There is nothing of all this either in Norway or in Ur-Switzerland. In Norway, we have the very famous peasant regiment (bonde-regimente); in Ur-Switzerland a number of rough shepherds who, despite their democratic constitution, are ruled by a few big landowners, Abyberg, etc., in patriarchal fashion. A bourgeoisie only exists in exceptional cases in Norway, and not at all inUr-Switzerland. The proletariat is practically non-existent.

The democracy prevailing in civilized countries, modern democracy, has thus nothing whatever in common with Norwegian or Ur-Swiss democracy. It does not wish to bring about the Norwegian and Ur-Swiss state of affairs but something absolutely different. Let us nevertheless look a little closer at this primitive-Germanic democracy and deal first with Ur-Switzerland, which is what above all concerns us here.

Is there a German philistine who does not rave about William Tell, the liberator of his Fatherland; a schoolmaster who does not celebrate Morgarten, Sempach, and Murten along with Marathon, Plataea, and Salamis; a hysterical old maid who does not go into raptures over the strong leg calves and sturdy thighs of the chaste Alpine youths? The glory of Ur-Swiss valor, freedom, skill, and strength has been endlessly praised in verse and prose from Aegidius Tschudi to Johannes von Müller, from Florian to Schiller.  The carbines and cannons of the twelve cantons now provide a commentary on these enthusiastic panegyrics.

The Ur-Swiss have drawn attention to themselves twice during the course of history. The first time, when they freed themselves gloriously from Austrian tyranny; the second at the present time, when they march off to fight in God’s name for the Jesuits and the Fatherland.

On closer examination, the glorious liberation from the talons of the Austrian eagle does not look at all good. The House of Austria was progressive just once in the whole of its career; this was at the beginning of its existence when it allied itself with the urban petty bourgeoisie against the nobility, and sought to found a German monarchy.  It was progressive in the most philistine of ways but it was progressive nonetheless.  And who opposed it most resolutely? The Ur-Swiss.  The struggle of the Ur-Swiss against Austria, the glorious oath on the Grütli, Tell’s heroic shot, the eternally memorable victory at Morgarten, all this was the struggle of stubborn shepherds against the onward march of historical development, the struggle of obstinate, rooted local interests against the interests of the whole nation, the struggle of crude ignorance against enlightenment, of barbarism against civilization.  They won their victory over the civilization of the time, and as a punishment they were excluded from all further civilization.

As if this were not enough, these simple, stiff-necked shepherds were soon punished in a quite different way.   They escaped the domination of the Austrian nobility only to come under the yoke of the petty bourgeois of Zurich, Lucerne, Berne, and Basel.  These had already noted that the Ur-Swiss were just as strong and as stupid as their oxen.  They agreed to join the Swiss Confederation and stayed peacefully at home behind their counters while the thick-headed Alpine shepherds fought out all their battles with the nobility and the princes for them.  This is what happened at Sempach, Granson, Murten, and Nancy.  In return, these people were allowed to arrange their internal affairs as they wished and so they remained in blissful ignorance of how they were being exploited by their dear fellow-Confederationists.

Since then nothing much has been heard of them.  They busied themselves in all piety and propriety with milking the cows, with cheese-making, chastity and yodeling.  From time to time they had folk assemblies at which they divided into horn-men, claw-men, and other animal-like groups, and these gatherings never ended without a hearty, Christian-Germanic fight.  They were poor but pure in heart, stupid but pious and well-pleasing to the Lord, brutal but broad-shouldered and had little brain but plenty of brawn. From time to time there were too many of them and then the young men went off on their “travels,” i.e., enlisted in foreign armies where they displayed the most steadfast loyalty to the flag no matter what happened.  One can only say of the Swiss that they let themselves be killed most conscientiously for their pay.

The greatest boast of these burly Ur-Swiss was that from time immemorial they had never deviated by a hair’s breadth from the customs of their forefathers, that they had retained the simple, chaste, upright, and virtuous customs of their fathers unsullied throughout the centuries. And this is true. Every attempt at civilization was defeated by the granite walls of their mountains and of their heads.  From the days when Winkelried’s first ancestor led his cow, with the inevitable little pastoral bell round its neck, on to the virgin pastures of the Vierwaldstätter Lake, up to the present day, when the latest descendant of Winkelried has his gun blessed by the priest, all houses have been built in the same way, all cows milked in the same way, all pigtails plaited in the same way, all cheeses prepared according to the same recipe, all children made in the same way.  Here, in the mountains, is Paradise, here the Fall of Man has not yet come to pass.  And should some innocent Alpine lad happen to find his way to the great outside world and allow himself to be tempted for a moment by the seductions of the big cities, by the artificial charms of a decadent civilization, by the vices of sinful countries, which have no mountains and where corn thrives — his innocence is so deep-rooted that he can never quite succumb.  A sound strikes his ear, just two of those notes of the Alpine cowherd’s call that sound like a dog’s howling, and he falls on his knees, weeping and overwhelmed with remorse, and at once tears himself from the arms of seduction and will not rest until he lies at the feet of his old father! “Father, I have sinned against my ancient mountains and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”

In recent times two invasions against these artless customs and primitive power have been attempted.  The first was by the French in 1798. But these French, who spread a little civilization everywhere else, failed with these Ur-Swiss.  No trace of their presence has remained, they were unable to eliminate one single jot of the old customs and virtues.  The second invasion took place about twenty years later and did at least bear a little fruit. This was the invasion of English travellers, of London lords and squires and the hordes of chandlers, soap-manufacturers, grocers and bone merchants who followed them.  This invasion at least ended the old hospitality and transformed the honest inhabitants of the Alpine huts, who previously hardly knew what money was, into the most mean and rascally swindlers anywhere to be found.  But this advance made no impact at all on the old simple customs.  This not so very virtuous chicanery fitted in perfectly with the patriarchal virtues of chastity, skill, probity, and loyalty.  Even their piety suffered no injury; the priests were delighted to give them absolution for all the deceptions practiced on British heretics.

But it now looks as if all this moral purity is about to be thoroughly stirred up.  It is to be hoped that the punitive detachments will do their best to finish off all the probity, primitive power, and simplicity. Then moan, you philistines! For there will be no more poor but contented shepherds whose carefree peace of mind you might wish for yourselves on Sundays after you have made your cut out of selling coffee made of chicory and tea made of sloe leaves during the other six days of the week.  Then weep, you schoolmasters, for there will be an end to your hopes for a new Sempach-Marathon and other classical feats.  Then mourn, you hysterical virgins over thirty, for those six-inch leg calves, the thought of which solaced your solitary dreams, will soon be gone — gone the Antinous-like beauty of the powerful “Swiss peasant lads,” gone the firm thighs and tight trousers which attract you so irresistibly to the Alps.  Then sigh, tender and anaemic boarding-school misses, who when reading Schiller’s works delighted in the chaste but oh so powerful love of the agile chamois hunters, for all your fond illusions are lost and now there is nothing left for you but to read the works of Henrik Steffens and fall for the frigid Norwegians.

But no more of that.  The Ur-Swiss must be fought with weapons quite different from mere ridicule.  Democracy has to settle accounts with them about matters quite different from their patriarchal virtues.

Who defended the Bastille on July 14, 1789 against the people who were storming it? Who shot down the workers of the Faubourg St. Antoine with grape-shot and rifle bullets from behind safe walls? — Ur-Swiss from the Sonderbund, grandsons of Tell, Stauffacher and Winkelried.

Who defended the traitor Louis XVI on August 10, 1792 from the just wrath of the people, in the Louvre and the Tuileries? — Ur-Swiss from the Sonderbund.

Who suppressed the Neapolitan revolution of 1798 with the help of Nelson? — Ur-Swiss from the Sonderbund.

Who re-established the absolute monarchy in Naples — with the help of Austrians — in 1823? — Ur-Swiss from the Sonderbund.

Who fought to the last on July 29, 1830, again for a treacherous king 10 and again shot Paris workers down from the windows and colonnades of the Louvre? — Ur-Swiss from the Sonderbund.

Who suppressed the insurrections in Romagna in 1830 and 1831, again along with the Austrians, with a brutality which achieved world notoriety? — Ur-Swiss from the Sonderbund.

In short, who holds the Italians down, to this day, forcing them to bow to the oppressive domination of their aristocrats, princes and priests; who was Austria’s right hand in Italy, who enables the bloodhound Ferdinand of Naples to keep a tight rein on his anguish-stricken people to this very moment, who has been acting as his executioners to this day carrying out the mass shootings he orders? Always, again and again, Ur-Swiss from the Sonderbund, again and again, the grandsons of Tell, Stauffacher and Winkelried!

In one word, wherever and whenever a revolutionary movement broke out in France either directly or indirectly advantageous to democracy, it was always Ur-Swiss mercenaries who fought it to the last, with the utmost resolution.  And especially in Italy these Swiss mercenaries were always the most devoted servants and handy men of Austria.  A just punishment for the glorious liberation of Switzerland from the talons of the two-headed eagle!

One should not think that these mercenaries were the refuse of their country, or that they were disavowed by their fellow- countrymen.  Have not the people of Lucerne had a statue hewn out of the rock at their city gates by the pious Icelander Thorvaldsen, depicting a huge lion, bleeding from an arrow wound, covering the Bourbon fleur-de-lis with his paw, faithful unto death, in memory of the Swiss who died at the Louvre on August 10, 1792?  This is the way Sonderbund honors the venal loyalty of its sons.  It lives by the trade in human beings and glorifies it.

Can the English, French, and German democrats have had anything in common with this kind of democracy?

Through its industry, its commerce and its political institutions, the bourgeoisie is already working everywhere to drag the small, self-contained localities which only live for themselves out of their isolation, to bring them into contact with one another, to merge their interests, to expand their local horizons, to destroy their local habits, strivings and ways of thinking, and to build up a great nation with common interests, customs and ideas out of the many hitherto mutually independent localities and provinces.  The bourgeoisie is already carrying out considerable centralization.  The proletariat, far from suffering any disadvantage from this, will as a result rather be in a position to unite, to feel itself a class, to acquire a proper political point of view within the democracy, and finally to conquer the bourgeoisie.  The democratic proletariat not only needs the kind of centralization begun by the bourgeoisie but will have to extend it very much further.  During the short time when the proletariat was at the helm of state in the French Revolution, during the rule of the Mountain party, it used all means — including grape-shot and the guillotine — to effect centralization.  When the democratic proletariat again comes to power, it will not only have to centralize every country separately but will have to centralize all civilized countries together as soon as possible.

Ur-Switzerland, on the other hand, has never done anything but obstruct centralization; with really brutish obstinacy it has insisted on its isolation from the whole outside world, on its local customs, habits, prejudices, narrow-mindedness, and seclusion.  It has stood still in the centre of Europe at the level of its original barbarism, while all other nations, even the other Swiss, have gone forward.  It stands pat on cantonal sovereignty with all the obduracy of the crude primitive Germans, that is, on the right to be eternally stupid, bigoted, brutal, narrow-minded, recalcitrant and venal if it so wishes, whether its neighbors like it or not.  If their own brutish situation comes under discussion, they no longer recognize such things as majorities, agreements, or obligations.  But in the 19th century it is no longer possible for two parts of one and the same country to exist side by side without any mutual intercourse and influence.  The radical cantons affect the Sonderbund, the Sonderbund affects the radical cantons, where, too, very crude elements still exist here and there.  The radical cantons are, therefore, interested in getting the Sonderbund to abandon its bigotry, narrow-mindedness and obduracy, and if it won’t, then its self-will must be broken by force; and this is what is happening at this moment.

The civil war which has now broken out can only help the cause of democracy.  Even though there is still a great deal of primitive Germanic crudity to be found in the radical cantons, even though a peasant, or a bourgeois regiment, or a mixture of both is concealed behind their democracy, even though the most civilized cantons still lag behind the development of European civilization and really modern elements only rise to the top slowly here and there, this is no great help to the Sonderbund.  It is necessary, urgently necessary, that this last bastion of brutal, primitive Germanism, of barbarism, bigotry, patriarchal simplicity, and moral purity, of immobility, of loyalty unto death to the highest bidder, should at last be destroyed.  The more energetically the Swiss Diet sets to work and the more violently it shakes up this old nest of priests, the more claim it will have on the support of all really resolute democrats, and the more it will prove that it understands its position.  But of course the five great powers are there and the radicals themselves are afraid.

As far as the Sonderbund is concerned, it is significant that the true sons of William Tell have to beg the House of Austria, Switzerland’s hereditary foe, for help just when Austria is baser, viler, meaner, and more hateful than ever.  This is yet another part of the punishment for the glorious liberation of Switzerland from the talons of the two-headed eagle and the much boasting that went with it.  And for the cup of punishment to be filled to the brim Austria itself has to be in such a pass that it could not give William Tell’s sons any help whatever.

Written about November 10, 1847

First published in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung No. 91, November 14, 1847

Video from “The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and Resistance” at NYU, 4.26.12

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[vimeo https://vimeo.com/41182235]

Video from our recent event on Reform, Revolution, and Resistance at NYU! Thanks to all the organizers, participants, and everyone who came out (and especially those who asked questions).

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Derick Varn of The Loyal Opposition to Modernity interviews Jacob Cayia of Platypus. Excellent job to both. Derick is admirably spare and understated in his questions; it’s something I could stand to learn a great deal from. I always feel the need to preface every question with a long narrative. Derick gets straight to the point while still being able to frame the course of the discussion, letting the interviewee have his say. Very good.

Domenico Losurdo to give a talk at the CUNY Graduate Center

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Who wants to go see Domenico Losurdo discuss the problematic legacy of political and economic liberalism for radical politics? Anyone living here in New York and interested in the history of the Left should attend. I just finished writing up a draft of a review of his book, Liberalism: A Counter-History.

In writing it, I have read pretty much all of Losurdo’s work that has been translated into English. While I disagree with his interpretation in certain important respects, his critique of liberalism must be taken very seriously.

“What would (or should) a Leftist, revolutionary art and critical practice look like today?” (Guest post by Paul Brennan)

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El Lissitzky - Sketch for PROUN 6B

by Paul Brennan

Like revolution, socialism, communism, and Marxism, like any conception that would have it that there is an alternative to capitalist ontology, today the avant-garde is as extinct as the proverbial dodo. The age of militant artistic publicity seems a long, long century ago. Back then there was still a future, one that could be determined by the productive, social imagination. The historical avant-gardes, pitting themselves against the demarcation that separated the creative from the social and political, were natural allies of revolution. Not always the right kind of revolution, of course, as the example of Italian Futurism, with its militarism and misogyny, and later fascism, shows. And not always, or even often, without a large quantity of crankery and self-indulgence to go with the inspiration. Still, surveying the early twentieth century scene, it is striking how different was the conception and practice of art compared to today. True, there were painters and writers and composers for whom art remained a trade, a form of petty commodity production, but there were others, many others, at work on projects which they pursued with an idealism that would make them a laughing stock today. These could be those like Breton or Maiakovskii, for whom the creative was inseparable from the idea of a new society, or those like Joyce or Pound, politically equivocal or even downright reactionary, but who made it so intensely new that to imagine proper readers for their works was to imagine an entirely different order. Today, figures like Joyce and Pound seem to belong to an entirely different world.

Last year Penguin Books published 100 Artists’ Manifestoes: From the Futurists to the Stuckists. It is an enthralling read, at least initially; after the excerpts from Situationist writings — and surely Situationism is the moment when the avant-garde achieves its most fully realized conception of the need to erase the boundary between life and art — the sad truth begins to sink in that the avant-garde has become a joke. The movements that define the boundaries of the text tell a story. Marinetti’s Futurists represent the Ur-form of the avant-garde — the moment when it was possible to declare that “time and space died yesterday” on the front page of Figaro and not only become a subject of mockery. By the time of the Stuckists any mockery one can imagine the artist’s tracts receiving seems completely justified. It is avant-gardism — or at least an avant-garde gesture — against the avant-garde, a silly, merely reactive whinge against conceptualism and a call for a return to figuration in painting.

One reviewer of 100 Artists’ Manifestoes suggested that Alex Danchev could have improved his book by including a selection of the documents published by a group that appeared in 1999, the International Necronautical Society, which threw down its marker by publishing its first manifesto, in an homage to Marinetti, on the front page of the London Times (http://necronauts.net/manifestos/1999_times_manifesto.html). The INS deserves attention; not at all because it has rekindled the true flame of the avant-garde, impossible anyway, but because it at least evinces some ambition and does represent a focused, immersed response to the historical avant-gardes and their place in modern cultural and political history.

The INS is a “parodic” or “ironic” avant-garde, indeed it styles itself a “semi-fictitious avant-garde network,” but it is not the self-consciousness of this organization that distinguishes it from the historical avant-gardes. Self-consciousness was a built-in, preconditional quality of those movements. The classic account of this may be Peter Bürger’s, in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1972). In this now somewhat derided text (it flatters no one and is hostile to any claim that there can be a valid “tradition” of the avant-garde) Bürger charts the history of modern art as a story of autonomy achieved (in the moment of the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth century) and then relinquished, when artistic self-consciousness, by the time of the late nineteenth century found itself dissatisfied with the available alternatives of artistic practice as either petty commodity production or aestheticism. The avant-gardes, for Bürger, wished to surrender their autonomy in return for an art rejuvenated by social relevance — hence the radical politicizations of art of the early twentieth century.

The self-consciousness, the reflexivity, of the INS is different. It is a organization that at once holds itself aloof from the narrowness of (particularly) contemporary British art and literature, but seems equally incapable of taking seriously the utopian projects of the historical avant-gardes. For this reason it presents itself as a kind of parody of a totalitarian state or party, merged with the attributes of movements like Surrealism and Situationism. Members can be expelled for the slightest infraction, if not shot. There are committees and sub-committees, communiques, and “agents.” The military aspect of the avant-garde is maintained, but with acknowledgment that it is more appropriate today, in our society of spectacular capitalism, to think of such activity as a kind of espionage. All of this with tongue firmly in cheek.

More striking is the death-obsession of the INS. Its members conceive of themselves as “necronauts,” travels or voyagers into death. This seems to me symptomatic of the place that the avant-garde has arrived at. It is no longer possible to think of an expansive, adventurous artistic activity, one outside of the Culture Industry, other than as life placed in a relation of perpetual adjacency to death. Its “General Secretary,” the now well-known novelist Tom McCarthy (http://www.surplusmatter.com/) gives special importance to the Freud of the Death Drive, to Heidegger, Bataille, and to Blanchot. The philosophical stance of the group (Simon Critchley is the INS “Philosopher in Chief”) is decidedly anti-humanist, with a particular hostility to Hegel and Marx. The emphasis falls on the post-structuralist “textual” author, on literature and art as networks, and on technology.

If the near-corpse of the Left is to be revived, then art will have to be revived with it. In the past leftists argued over what a healthy form for a radical art might be. In the age of great realistic fiction, Engels criticized novelists too quick to believe that they had to sacrifice verisimilitude for the sake of propaganda. Trotskii, in Literature and Revolution (1924) endorsed the idea of the avant-garde, but had many cogent criticisms to make of the artistic and cultural schools of this day. Lukács provided a defense of the realist novel against modernism in The Historical Novel (1937). In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno conducted a seminal discussion over the questions raised in the former’s “Artwork” essay (1936). Benjamin argued for an art appropriate to the “environment” which was “being prepared for us by technology” and advocated a practice that would seek to hurry along the extinction of the “aura” and that would be, at the very least, “completely useless” to fascism and its “aestheticization of politics.” Radical art would be a marriage of technology and tendency. Adorno responded by insisting on the value of artistic autonomy, emphasizing artistic technique over technology, as a last-line resistance to the onslaught of commodification. Examples could be multiplied, for Marxism has a rich legacy of aesthetic debate and discussion. (One place to look is the Fredric Jameson-edited anthology, Aesthetics and Politics, which contains writings by and exchanges between Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, and Sartre.)

Today art and literature mostly seem to be a business. One could be forgiven for characterizing them as merely a niche industry supplying a rather snooty form of entertainment commodity. The situation vis–à–vis the critical understanding of art is little better. Who cares, you may say, there are other priorities. But the idea of art is inseparable from the idea of the imagination and the imagination is in turn inseparable from the idea of another world, and so I ask, what would (or should) a Leftist, revolutionary art and critical practice look like today?

Το κίνημα ως αυτοσκοπός; Μια συνέντευξη με τον David Graeber

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Folk singer Tea Leigh at the #Occupy site

Folk singer Tea Leigh at the #Occupy site

Below is a Greek translation that was recently made of my interview with David Graeber, for The Platypus Review.  Many thanks to the eaganst group, which as I understand it from my friend Thodoris is an Autonomist organization based out of Greece, heavily influenced by the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis, among others (Adorno!).

Αρχική δημοσίευση: The Platypus Review

Μετάφραση: eagainst.com

Την 6η Δεκεμβρίου του 2011, ο Ross Wolfe πήρε συνέντευξη από τον David Graeber, αναπληρωτή καθηγητή του Κολεγίου Goldsmiths του Λονδίνου, συγγραφέα του έργου Θραύσματα μιας Αναρχικής Ανθρωπολογίας (2004), και κεντρική φιγούρα της πρώτης φάσης του κινήματος Occupy Wall Street. Αυτό που ακολουθεί, είναι μια επεξεργασμένη απομαγνητοφώνηση της συνέντευξης.

Ross Wolfe: Υπάρχουν εντυπωσιακές ομοιότητες μεταξύ του κινήματος Occupy και του κινήματος του 1999 ενάντια στην Παγκοσμιοποίηση στο Seattle. Και τα δύο ξεκίνησαν κατά την τελευταία χρονιά της προεδρίας των Δημοκρατικών, και η αιχμή του δόρατος ήταν οι αναρχικοί, παρακινούμενοι από την δυσαρέσκεια προς τον νεοφιλελευθερισμό, και έλαβαν την υποστήριξη της οργανωμένης εργατιάς. Ως ενεργός συμμετέχων τόσο σε αυτό της αντι-παγκοσμιοποίησης όσο και στο κίνημα του Occupy, σε ποιο βαθμό θα λέγατε ότι το Occupy αποτελεί συνέχεια του έργου που εγκαινιάστηκε στο Seattle; Τί, αν μη τι άλλο, κάνει το κίνημα αυτό ξεχωριστό;

David Graeber: Νομίζω πως αρκετοί από αυτούς που εμπλέκονταν στο κίνημα της παγκοσμιοποίησης, μεταξύ αυτών και εγώ, αισθάνθηκαν πως αυτό ήταν μια συνέχεια των προσπαθειών μας, γιατί ποτέ δεν πιστέψαμε πραγματικά πως το κίνημα της παγκοσμιοποίησης είχε φτάσει στο τέλος του. Χτυπούσαμε τα κεφάλια μας στον τοίχο κάθε χρόνο, λέγοντας “ναι, τώρα έχουμε πραγματικά επιστρέψει. Μια στιγμή, ίσως όχι.” Αρκετοί από εμάς σταδιακά αρχίσαμε να πιστεύουμε όλο και λιγότερο ότι επρόκειτο να αναζωπυρωθεί με τον τρόπο που πάντα νομίζαμε πως ξέραμε ότι θα γίνει. Και τότε συνέβη, ως ένας συνδυασμός τακτικών της προσπάθειας να δημιουργηθούν προεικοντιστικά μοντέλα μιας δημοκρατικής κοινωνίας, ως τρόπος οργάνωσης της διαμαρτυρίας ή δράσεων που στρεφόταν κατά μιας προφανέστατα αντιδημοκρατικής δομής διακυβέρνησης.

Ταυτόχρονα, νομίζω ότι ένας λόγος που οι τακτικές φαίνονται κατάλληλες σε κάθε περίπτωση είναι επειδή, κατά κάποιο τρόπο, μιλάμε για δύο γύρους του ίδιου κύκλου της ίδιας στην πραγματικότητα κρίσης χρέους. Κάποιος θα μπορούσε να προβάλει το επιχείρημα ότι ο κόσμος κατά κάποιον τρόπο έχει εισέλθει σε μια μορφή κρίσης του χρέους από τη δεκαετία του εβδομήντα, και ότι για το μεγαλύτερο μέρος εκείνης της περιόδου, η κρίση απείλησε τον παγκόσμιο Νότο, και σε κάποιο βαθμό κρατήθηκε μακριά από τον Βόρειο Ατλαντικό, από χώρες και περιοχές με τις πιο ισχυρές οικονομίες, οι οποίες περισσότερο ή λιγότερο χρησιμοποιούν την πίστωση για ν’ αποτρέψουν τη λαϊκή δυσαρέσκεια. Το παγκόσμιο κίνημα για τη δικαιοσύνη ήταν τελικά μια πολύ πετυχημένη μορφή λαϊκής εξέγερσης κατά της νεοφιλελεύθερης ορθοδοξίας, της Συναίνεσης της Ουάσιγκτον, και της τυραννίας των φορέων επιβολής του χρέους, όπως το ΔΝΤ και η Παγκόσμια Τράπεζα. Ήταν επίσημα τόσο πετυχημένο που το ίδιο το ΔΝΤ εκδιώχθηκε από πολλές χώρες του κόσμου. Δεν μπορεί πλέον να λειτουργήσει καθόλου σε πολλές περιοχές της Λατινικής Αμερικής. Και τελικά γύρισε πίσω. Ως εκ τούτου, είναι η ίδια διαδικασία: αναγγέλλοντας κάποιο είδος οικονομικής κρίσης που οι ίδιοι οι καπιταλιστές είναι υπεύθυνοι για αυτήν, και απαιτώντας την αντικατάσταση με τους λεγόμενους «ουδέτερους τεχνοκράτες» του ενός τύπου ή του άλλου, που στην πραγματικότητα έχουν εκπαιδευτεί σε αυτό το είδος της νεοφιλελεύθερης ορθοδοξίας, και οι οποίοι είναι στην οικονομία για χονδρική λεηλασία εκ μέρους των οικονομικών ελίτ. Και επειδή το Occupy αντιδρά στο ίδιο πράγμα με το Παγκόσμιο Κίνημα Δικαιοσύνης, δεν αποτελεί έκπληξη το γεγονός ότι η αντίδραση παίρνει την ίδια μορφή: ένα κίνημα για την άμεση δημοκρατία, την προεικονιστική πολιτική, και την άμεση δράση. Σε κάθε περίπτωση, αυτό που λένε είναι ότι τα εργαλεία της κυβέρνησης και της διοίκησης είναι εγγενώς διεφθαρμένα και ασύδοτα.

RW: Ενάντια στην δυσφορία που ακολούθησε από τη διάλυση του κινήματος της αντι-παγκοσμιοποίησης μετά την 9/11, ισχυριστήκαμε ότι ο κύριος λόγος της οριστικής ήττας του ήταν το ότι δεν ήξερε πώς να χειριστεί το σοκ των αρχικών επιτυχιών του, στην διαδρομή οι συμμετέχοντες είχαν “ζαλιστεί από την επιτυχία”. “Ένας λόγος που τόσο εύκολα [το κίνημα της αντι-παγκοσμιοποίησης] κατέρρευσε, ήταν […] ότι ακόμα μια φορά, στους περισσότερους από τους άμεσους στόχους μας, είχαμε ήδη, αναπάντεχα, νικήσει” [1]. Με άλλα λόγια, για σας το μονοπάτι για την ήττα ήταν στρωμένο από τη νίκη. Kατά έναν περίεργο τρόπο, αυτό εμφανίζεται να καθρεφτίζει, αν και από την αντίθετη κατεύθυνση, την αντι-ενστικτώδη κατανόηση του Ιούνη του 1848 από τον Μαρξ. Ο Μαρξ έγραψε πως “μόνο η ήττα του Ιούνη δημιούργησε όλες τις συνθήκες υπό τις οποίες η Γαλλία μπορεί να πάρει την πρωτοβουλία για την Ευρωπαϊκή επανάσταση. Μόνο αφού έχει βουτηχτεί στο αίμα της εξέγερσης του Ιούνη, η τρικολόρ έγινε η σημαία της Ευρωπαϊκής επανάστασης – η κόκκινη σημαία!” [2] Για τον Μαρξ, λοιπόν, ο δρόμος προς τη νίκη ήταν στρωμένος από την ήττα. Πώς είναι δυνατό να συνδέονται αυτές οι δυο φαινομενικά αντίθετες οπτικές; Αναιρούνται αμοιβαία, ή είναι πιθανώς συμπληρωματικές; Είναι σωστό ή ακόμα και πιθανο να μιλάμε για μια ‘διαλεκτική της ήττας”; [3]

DG: Είναι ενδιαφέρουσα αυτή η αναλογία. Θα ρωτούσε κανείς: “είχε δίκιο ο Μαρξ;” Είπε ότι η ήττα ήταν απαραίτητη για την τελική νίκη, αλλά δεν είναι ξεκάθαρο οτί η νίκη συνέβη στ’ αλήθεια. Είναι σίγουρα αληθές ότι συγκεκριμένα είδη ήττας μπορούν να μυθοποιηθούν, και μπορούν να μετατραπούν σε νίκη, ή καταστάσεις που μοιάζουν με ήττες να είναι στην πραγματικότητα νίκες που δεν είχες συνειδητοποιήσει πως είχες. Νομίζω πως αυτό συμβαίνει αρκετά συχνά στην επαναστατική ιστορία. Κατά κάποιο τρόπο, η τακτική ήττα σχετίζεται συγκυριακά με τη στρατηγική νίκη. Δεν υπάρχει προβλέψιμο σχέδιο, κάτι σαν την ιδέα του Immanuel Wallerstein για μια σειρά παγκόσμιων επαναστάσεων ξεκινώντας από τη Γαλλική επανάσταση, την παγκόσμια επανάσταση του 1848, που δεν κατάφερε νίκη τακτικής πουθενά, αλλά μεταμόρφωσε ριζικά τον τρόπο που λειτούργησαν οι κυβερνήσεις στην Ευρώπη. Έτσι προέκυψε η καθολική παιδεία, η αλλαγές στην πολεοδόμηση κτλ.

RW: Η Γαλλική Επανάσταση απέτυχε ακόμη και εσωτερικά, στο βαθμό που μετατράπηκε σε μια αυτοκρατορία από τον Ναπολέοντα. Αλλά ακόμα βοήθησε στην εξάπλωση εθνικιστικών και φιλελεύθερων/δημοκρατικών ηθών.

DG: Απολύτως. Υπήρχαν θεσμικά, συμπαγή υποδείγματα που αναδύθηκαν από αυτήν και που παραμένουν σε εμάς από τότε. Το ίδιο πράγμα συνέβει και με το 1917: Ήταν επιτυχημένη μόνο στην Ρωσία, αλλά είχε σχεδόν την ίδια επίδραση και σε άλλες χώρες. Τίποτα δεν ήταν το ίδιο στη συνέχεια. Βασικά, ο Wallerstein υποστηρίζει ότι το 1968 ήταν μια παρόμοια επαναστατική στιγμή, του ίδιου είδους με αυτήν του 1848. Τώρα μιλά για την παγκόσμια επανάσταση του 2011. Αλλά στην πραγματικότητα δεν είναι σαφές σε ποιο μοντέλο αυτή πρόκειται να μοιάσει.

Αυτό με έκανε να σκεφτώ τι είναι στ’ αλήθεια ο νεοφιλελευθερισμός: είναι περισσότερο πολιτικό παρά οικονομικό κίνημα, το οποίο αποτελεί μια αντίδραση στη σειρά νικών των κοινωνικών κινημάτων στη δεκαετία του εξήντα, είτε αυτά ήταν τα αντιπολεμικά κινήματα, ο φεμινισμός, η αντικουλτούρα, και ού τω καθεξής. Αυτό έγινε ένα είδος κοινωνικού ελέγχου,για την επίτευξη πολιτικών νικών διαμέσου της πρόληψης κάθε κοινωνικού κινήματος που θα μπορούσε να θεωρήσει τον εαυτό του ως πρόκληση για τον καπιταλισμό καθ΄οιονδήποτε τρόπο ή παρέχοντας οποιοδήποτε είδος βιώσιμης εναλλακτικής λύσης. Έτσι έγινε ένας πόλεμος προπαγάνδας ο οποίος έδινε συνεχώς προτεραιότητα στην δημιουργία ενός πραγματικά βιώσιμου καπιταλιστικού συστήματος. Ο τρόπος που διεξάχθηκε ο πόλεμος στο Ιράκ είναι άλλο ένα καλό παράδειγμα αυτού του γεγονότος. Είναι πολύ σαφές ότι η πραγματική εμμονή από την πλευρά εκείνων που σχεδίαζαν τον πόλεμο ήταν να αντεπεξέλθουν σε αυτό που αποκαλούσαν “το Σύνδρομο του Βιετνάμ”, δηλαδή το κύμα των αντιπολεμικών διαδηλώσεων της δεκαετίας του εξήντα οι οποίες είχαν στην πραγματικότητα εμποδίσει τις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες από το να παρατάξουν μεγάλες δυνάμεις εδάφους σε κάθε είδους σημαντικό χερσαίο πόλεμο τα τελευταία 30 χρόνια. Για ν’ αντεπεξέλθουν, χρειαζόταν να κάνουν τον πόλεμο με τέτοιον τρόπο ώστε να αποφευχθεί μια γενικευμένη κοινωνική κατακραυγή και αντίσταση μέσα στη χώρα. Αυτό που εκτίμησαν ήταν ότι “οι απώλειες είναι τα πάντα,” ως εκ τούτου έπρεπε να δημιουργήσουν αποτελεσματικά σχέδια μάχης ούτως ώστε να περιοριστούν όσο το δυνατόν γίνεται οι απώλειες Αμερικανών στρατιωτών έτσι ώστε να μην δημιουργηθεί μαζική αναταραχή με την μορφή αντιπολεμικού κινήματος. Βέβαια, προκειμένου να το επιτύχουν αυτό, αυτά τα σχέδια μάχης σήμαιναν ότι εκατοντάδες χιλιάδες Ιρακινών και Αφγανών πολιτών θα σκοτώνονταν, το οποίο με την σειρά του έκανε λίγο έως πολύ απίθανη την νίκη του πολέμου. Φαινόταν όμως ότι για αυτούς ήταν πιο σημαντικό το να αποφύγουν ένα αντιπολεμικό κίνημα παρά το να νικήσουν τον πόλεμο.

Βέβαια, το αντιπολεμικό κίνημα της τελευταίας δεκαετίας βρέθηκε σε άσχημη κατάσταση με τις επιθέσεις της 11ης Σεπτεμβρίου, μια επίθεση τέτοιας κλίμακας που δεν είχε συμβεί ξανά σε Αμερικανικό έδαφος. Τώρα, είναι επίσης αλήθεια ότι αποτελεί ορόσημο το γεγονός ότι η 9/11 ήρθε σε μια πολύ κατάλληλη στιγμή, και αν δεν είχε συμβεί αυτή η επίθεση, πιθανότατα θα είχαν εφεύρει κάποια άλλη δικαιολογία για να ξεκινήσουν πόλεμο στο εξωτερικό. Διότι φαίνεται ότι όταν τελικά βλέπεις ένα πολιτικό κίνημα βάσης, είτε πρόκειται για το κίνημα των Πολιτικών Δικαιωμάτων, το αντι-πυρηνικό κίνημα, το κίνημα για παγκόσμια δικαιοσύνη, ή οποιοδήποτε άλλο φωτεινό παράδειγμα, αυτό συμβαίνει. Το αξιοσημείωτο πράγμα για εμένα είναι πως ξαφνικά η άρχουσα τάξη πανικοβλήθηκε και ένιωσε ότι έπρεπε να προβεί σε μαζικές παραχωρήσεις και κατά βάση φαίνεται να ξεκινά κάποιο είδος πολέμου στο εξωτερικό. Φαίνεται ότι έχουν παγιδεύσει τον εαυτό τους σε ένα είδος συμβιβασμού. Είναι ξεκάθαρο ότι έχουμε ένα πρόβλημα εδώ στην Αμερική, αλλά δεν είναι πραγματικά ξεκάθαρο σε ποιόν πρόκειται να επιτεθούν ή σε ποιόν θα μπορούσαν να επιτεθούν στο εξωτερικό.

RW: Μια από τις σημαντικότερες αντιπαραθέσεις μέσα στο OWS αφορά τον βαθμό στον οποίο το κίνημα παραμένει ιδεολογικά περιεκτικό και ανοιχτό σε όλους. Από την αρχή, οι διαδηλώσεις στην Liberty Plaza προσέλκυσαν μια σειρά νεοφιλελεύθερων ιδεολόγων: υποστηρικτές του Ron Paul, του κινήματος του τσαγιού και δεξιούς συνωμοσιολόγους. Ενώ η ορατότητά τους μέσα στο κίνημα έχει ίσως ελαχιστοποιηθεί τις τελευταίες εβδομάδες, εξακολουθούν να είναι μια αδιαμφισβήτητη, αν και περιθωριακή, παρουσία στις εκδηλώσεις του Occupy. Κάποιοι έχουν απορρήψει την ιδέα του να τοποθετηθούν εντός του πολιτικού φάσματος «αριστεράς” και «δεξιάς», καθώς θεωρούν ότι οι δύο αυτές κατηγορίες είναι πολύ περιοριστικές και φοβούνται ότι η ταύτισή τους με το ένα ή το άλλο θα μπορούσε να απομακρύνει τους εν δυνάμει υποστηρικτές. Θα λέγατε ότι ο λόγος της «δεξιάς» και της «αριστεράς» έχει ακόμη κάποια ωφελιμότητα για το Occupy Wall Street; Μήπως το Occupy αντιπροσωπεύει ένα νέο λαϊκό κίνημα της Αριστεράς;

DG: Υπάρχει δυστυχώς μια τάση να προσδιορίζουμε την «αριστερά» όχι σαν ένα σύνολο ιδανικών ή ιδεών αλλά σαν ένα σύνολο θεσμικών δομών. Πολλοί ατομικιστές, αναρχικοί, εξεγερσιακοί και πριμιτιβιστές έχουν ταυτίσει την Αριστερά με τα διάφορα πολιτικά κόμματα, εργατικά σωματεία, αυτό που γενικά θα αποκαλούσαμε ως «οι κάθετοι» και μπορώ να καταλάβω γιατί κάποιος θα ήταν πιο επιφυλακτικός να προσδιορίσει τον εαυτό του με βάση αυτά. Αλλά την ίδια στιγμή, ακούμε τουλάχιστον από το τέλος του Δευτέρου Παγκοσμίου Πολέμου ότι η διαφορά μεταξύ αριστεράς και δεξιάς δεν είναι πια υπαρκτή. Είναι κάτι που λέγεται κάθε πέντε χρόνια σε κάθε μεγαλεπήβολη τοποθέτηση. Και το γεγονός ότι το κάνουν τόσο συχνά δείχνει ότι δεν είναι αλήθεια. Είναι σαν τον τρόπο με τον οποίο ορισμένοι εξακολουθούν να κάνουν βαρύγδουπες δηλώσεις για το ότι η όλη αφήγηση της προόδου έχει τελειώσει. Το κάνουν σχεδόν μία φορά κάθε γενιά. Αλλά γιατί θα πρέπει να το ανακοινώνουν αυτό κάθε γενιά, αν πραγματικά έχει τελειώσει; Πιστεύω λοιπόν ότι αυτές οι έννοιες παραμένουν.

Το Κόμμα του Τσαγιού επίσης υποστήριζε ότι δεν ήταν μια δεξιά συσπείρωση αλλά μια ευρεία λαϊκή απόρριψη της δομής της υπάρχουσας πολιτικής τάξης, με τον ίδιο τρόπο που θέλουν να βλέπουν οι άνθρωποι το Occupy Wall Street . Αλλά είναι μια πολύ δεξιά λαϊκιστική απόρριψη, ενώ το κίνημα του Occupy εμπνέεται από αριστερές αρχές. Και πολλά από αυτά δεν έχουν να κάνουν μόνο με τη στάση του ατόμου απέναντι στην οικονομία της αγοράς, αλλά με τον κορπορατιστικό καπιταλισμό. Έχουν αυτό το ουτοπικό ιδεώδες για το τι θα πρέπει να είναι ο καπιταλισμός, που στην πραγματικότητα είναι πολύ πιο ουτοπικό από κάθε αντίληψη για το τι είναι σοσιαλισμός, ή οτιδήποτε άλλο θα μπορούσε να αφορά την Αριστερά. Έτσι, οι έσχατες ουτοπίες του Κόμματος του Τσαγιού και του Occupy είναι βαθιά διαφορετικές, γεγονός που δείχνει τη διαφορά σε βασικές κατευθύνσεις τους. Και το Occupy Wall Street είναι, στην τελική, αντι-ιεραρχικό. Και νομίζω ότι αυτό είναι το βασικό. Η Δεξιά δεν είναι, κατά βάση, αντι-ιεραρχική. Θέλει να περιορίσει ορισμένες μορφές της ιεραρχίας, και να προωθήσει άλλες μορφές, αλλά κατά βάση δεν είναι ένα εξισωτικό κίνημα. Επομένως, πιστεύω ότι το να αγνοούμε την ευρύτερη κληρονομιά της αριστεράς είναι ανόητο. Μου φαίνεται πραγματικά ανέντιμο. Καταλαβαίνω ότι αυτό μερικές φορές είναι χρήσιμο από άποψη τακτικής προκειμένου να δημιουργηθεί ένα δίκτυο όσο το δυνατόν ευρύτερο και καθαρό, επειδή στην πραγματικότητα υπάρχει πολύ κοινό έδαφος. Πολλοί δεξιοί λαϊκιστές έχουν ορισμένες βασικές αντιρρήσεις που αφορούν, για παράδειγμα,την μονοπωλιοποίηση της κουλτούρας, ή το γεγονός ότι υπάρχει αντικειμενικά μια πολιτιστική ελίτ. Μια ορισμένη κοινωνική τάξη μονοπωλεί τις θέσεις εργασίας στις οποίες θα μπορούσε κάποιος να δραστηριοποιηθεί ή να επιδιώξει μορφές αξίας που δεν έχουν να κάνουν με το χρήμα. Η εργατική τάξη έχει ένα συντριπτικό μίσος κατά της πολιτιστικής ελίτ και ένα ενθουσιασμό για τον στρατό, ώστε να υποστηρίζει τα στρατεύματά μας. Αυτό προκύπτει απ΄το γεγονός ότι αν προέρχεσαι από μια τάξη με εργατικό υπόβαθρο,έχεις μια πολύ μικρή πιθανότητα να γίνεις ένας επιτυχημένος καπιταλιστής, αλλά πραγματικά δεν υπάρχει πιθανότητα να γίνεις κριτικός θεάτρου για την New York Times. Νομίζω ότι θα ήταν υπέροχο αν μπορούσαμε να βρούμε έναν τρόπο να προσελκύσουμε τέτοιους ανθρώπους με μη πελατειακό τρόπο. Αλλά και πάλι, η απόρριψη αυτού του διαχωρισμού μεταξύ της Δεξιάς και της Αριστεράς εξ ολοκλήρου, μου φαίνεται, πως κινείται σε εντελώς λάθος κατεύθυνση.

Αυτό που έχουμε είναι αυτή η φοβερή σύνθεση της αγοράς και της γραφειοκρατίας που έχει κατακλείσει κάθε πτυχή της ζωής μας. Μέχρι στιγμής, μόνο η Δεξιά έχει κριτική κατά της γραφειοκρατίας. Είναι μια πολύ αφελής κριτική, αλλά η Αριστερά πραγματικά δεν έχει καμία.

RW: Κάποιοι έχουν χαρακτηρίσει το κίνημα του Occupy σαν έναν προάγγελο του “ταξικού πολέμου”. Αναφέρουν το πλέον πανταχού παρόν σύνθημα του Occupy Wall Street, “Είμαστε το 99%!” ως απόδειξη αυτού του γεγονότος. Σαν ένας φαινομενικά εισηγητής αυτού του συνθήματος, πιστεύετε ότι το Occupy Wall Street είναι μια εκδήλωση της λανθάνουσας ταξικής πάλης που διέπει την αστική κοινωνία; Όποιο και αν είναι το ρητορικό της αποτέλεσμά, παρέχει αυτή η θέση το επαρκή πλαίσιο για την ανάλυση της ταξικής πάλης;

DG: Δεν το σκέφτομαι σαν μια ανάλυση όσο σαν επεξήγηση. Είναι ένας τρόπος θέασης της ανισότητας. Φυσικά, ένα σύνθημα ποτε δεν απαντά στο πραγματικά θεμελιώδες ζήτημα του πώς αναπαράγονται οι κοινωνικές τάξεις. Αυτό που κάνει ένα σύνθημα είναι να σου δείχνει πώς μπορείς ν’ αρχίσεις να σκέφτεσε για ένα πρόβλημα που μπορεί να μην ήξερες πριν ότι υφίσταται. Ήταν εξαιρετικά αποτελεσματικό σε αυτό, για δύο λόγους: ο ένας, επειδή επισημαίνει πόσο μικρή είναι η ομάδα των ανθρώπων που απολαμβάνουν τα κέρδη της οικονομικής ανάπτυξης, της παραγωγικότητας μας. Μας άρπαξαν ουσιαστικά τα πάντα. Επίσης, το σύνθημα έκανε το Occupy επιτυχώς περιεκτικό κατά ένα τρόπο που άλλα κοινωνικά κινήματα είχαν πρόβλημα με το ζήτημα αυτό. Νομίζω, δηλαδή, ότι αυτό ήταν το αποτελεσματικό με αυτό το κίνημα. Προφανώς υπάρχουν άπειρες αποχρώσεις διαφορών μεταξύ μας, και η τάξη είναι ένα πολύ πιο περίπλοκο πράγμα από το γεγονός ότι απλά υπάρχει μια συγκεκριμένη ομάδα ανθρώπων που είναι εξαιρετικά πλούσιοι και διαθέτει μεγάλη πολιτική δύναμη. Αλλά παρ ‘όλα αυτά, παρέχει στα άτομα έναν τρόπο για ν’ αρχίσουν να μιλάμε ο ένας με τον άλλο για το τι κοινό έχουν, παρέχοντας έτσι τη βάση στην οποία τα άλλα πράγματα μπορούν να εντοπιστούν. Θα πρέπει να αρχίσεις με αυτό που έχεις κοινό. Και πάνω σε αυτό το θέμα περάσαμε αρκετά δύσκολους καιρούς μέχρι τώρα.

RW: Οι περισσότεροι στο κίνημα του Occupy αναγνωρίζουν το πασιφανές γεγονός της δραματικής κοινωνικής ανισότητας, αλλά διαφωνούν σχετικά με τη μέθοδο που θα πρέπει ν’ αναζητηθεί για την επίλυση αυτού του προβλήματος. Πολλοί ελπίζουν ότι το Occupy θα παρέχει τη λαϊκή πολιτική ορμή που χρειάζεται για να περάσει μια σειρά οικονομικών μεταρρυθμίσεων, οι οποίες τυπικά θα έρθουν από την νομοθεσία που ψηφίστηκε μέσω των υφιστάμενων διαύλων διακυβέρνησης. Άλλοι βλέπουν το Occupy ως εν δυνάμει επαναστατικό, ότι στοχεύει σε κάτι πέρα από το στενά “οικονομικό”. Οι δύο αυτές προοπτικές φαίνεται να δείχνουν τις ριζικά διαφορετικές κατευθύνσεις που το κίνημα δύναται να πάρει. Θα χαρακτηρίζατε το κίνημα αυτό ως «αντι-καπιταλιστικό»; Θα έπρεπε να είναι; Αν ναι, ποια είναι η φύση των «αντι-καπιταλιστικών» πολιτικών κατευθύνσεών του;

DG: Θα ξεκινήσω λέγοντας ότι οι άνθρωποι που αρχικά συμμετείχαν στη δημιουργία του Occupy ήταν υπερβολικά αντικαπιταλιστές, πολύ ανοιχτά.Προφανώς και δεν θα έπρεπε να είναι ,ακόμα και αν πιστεύαμε ότι θα μπορούσαμε να ανατρέψουμε τον καπιταλισμό με την πρώτη. Εργαζόμαστε προς αυτήν την κατεύθυνση σαν απώτερο στόχο. Γι’ αυτό είναι βασικό το να έχεις ένα αποτέλεσμα που πραγματικά θα βοηθήσει τις ζωές των ανθρώπων. Το Occupy δεν βρίσκεται σε αντιδιαστολή με τον επαναστατικό παλμό, και μας βοηθά να κινηθούμε προς μια κατεύθυνση περισσότερης ελευθερίας και αυτονομίας, εννοώντας δηλαδή την ελευθερία από τις δομές τόσο του κράτους όσο και του καπιταλισμού. Τώρα, για να δημιουργήσεις ευρείες συμμαχίες σε αυτό το πλαίσιο, θα πρέπει να είσαι πολύ προσεκτικός σχετικά με τις οργανωτικές και θεσμικές δομές σου. Επειδή ένα από τα πράγματα που είναι επαναστατικά στο κίνημα του Occupy είναι ότι προσπαθεί να δημιουργήσει προεικονιστικούς χώρους στους οποίους μπορούμε να πειραματιστούμε και να δημιουργήσουμε θεσμικές δομές που θα υπάρχουν σε μια κοινωνία χωρίς κράτος και καπιταλισμό. Ελπίζουμε να τους χρησιμοποιήσουμε για να δημιουργήσουμε ένα είδος κρίσης της νομιμότητας των υφιστάμενων θεσμών.

Βέβαια, εγώ μπορώ να μιλήσω μόνο για τον εαυτό μου. Αλλά οι περισσότεροι από τους ανθρώπους με τους οποίους δούλευα, οι οποίοι δούλευαν πάνω σε αυτό το όραμα, είχαν αυτή την κοινή πεποίθηση: ότι το μεγάλο πλεονέκτημα που είχαμε ήταν ότι άνθρωποι όλου του πολιτικού φάσματος στην Αμερική μοιράζονται μια βαθιά αποστροφή για το υπάρχον πολιτικό σύστημα, στο οποίο αναγνωρίζουν ένα σύστημα θεσμοθετημένης διαφθοράς που έχει πολύ λίγο να κάνει με αυτό που λέμε δημοκρατία. Το χρήμα σαφώς ελέγχει κάθε πτυχή του πολιτικού συστήματος. Έτσι, θα χρειαζόταν μόνο να απονομιμοποιήσουμε ένα σύστημα το έχει ήδη απονομιμοποιήσει σχεδόν εξ ολοκλήρου τον εαυτό του. Υιοθετήσαμε αυτό που ισοδυναμεί με μια “διπλή στρατηγική δύναμη.” Με τη δημιουργία αυτόνομων θεσμών ανταποκρινόμενων στο τι θα μπορούσε να είναι μια πραγματική δημοκρατία, θα μπορούσαμε να προκαλέσουμε μια κατάσταση για μια μαζική απονομιμοποίηση των υπαρχόντων θεσμών της εξουσίας. Προφανώς, αυτοί που είναι οι πιο βίαιοι είναι πιο δύσκολο να απονομιμοποιηθούν. Στην αμερικανική κοινωνία, για διάφορους ιδεολογικούς λόγους, οι άνθρωποι μισούν τους πολιτικούς, αλλά έχουν εκπαιδευτεί να ταυτίζονται με το στρατό και την αστυνομία σε βαθμό που δεν συμβαίνει οπουδήποτε αλλού στον κόσμο. Έχει υπάρξει μια αμείλικτη προπαγάνδα για να δημιουργηθούν συμπάθειες για τους στρατιώτες και τους αστυνομικούς, από τότε που οι ταινίες με τους Καουμπόι μετατράπηκαν σε αστυνομικές ταινίες. Πιστεύω ότι θα ;ήταν μεγάλο λάθος να πάμε από αυτές τις προεικονιστικές δομές στην υποστήριξη κάποιου πολιτικού υποψηφίου. Αλλά ακόμα και η ιδέα να μετατραπούμε σε ένα γκρουπ που ασκεί πιέσεις [lobbying group] επιδιώκοντας μια ρεφορμιστική ατζέντα είναι εξαρχής λάθος. Από την στιγμή που συμπλέκεσαι με το σύστημα, όχι μόνο το νομιμοποιείς, αλλά απονομιμοποιείς και τον εαυτό σου, διότι η ίδια σου η πολιτική γραμμή έχει στρεβλωθεί. Ακόμα και η αποδοχή του χρήματος έχει ολέθριες συνέπειες. Αλλά από τη στιγμή που διασυνδέεσαι με κάθετα οργανωμένες δομές της εξουσίας, οι οποίες στην τελική βασίζονται στον εξαναγκασμό, αυτό δηλητηριάζει τα πάντα. Με την ενεργή απονομιμοποίηση της δομής, είμαστε σε θέση, ίσως και ως παρενέργεια των ενεργειών μας, να δημιουργήσουμε τις μορφές που θα είναι πραγματικά προς όφελος των απλών ανθρώπων.

RW: Μια διαίρεση που προέκυψε από νωρίς μεταξύ των καταληψιών, αφορούσε την ανάγκη αναζήτησης αιτημάτων. Έχετε στο παρελθόν απορρίψει την ιδέα της πολιτικής ως μικροπολιτική, θεωρώντας ότι τα αιτήματα για εκλογική μεταρρύθμιση ή για κανονιστικές μεταρρυθμίσεις της αγοράς θα οδηγήσουν το κίνημα σε μια συντηρητική κατεύθυνση. Αν όχι αιτήματα, τι είδους «οράματα και λύσεις», όπως το έχετε θέσει, νομίζετε ότι το κίνημα Occupy θα πρέπει να παρέχει;

DG: Υπάρχει μια βαθιά ασάφεια στη γλώσσα της πολιτικής διαμαρτυρίας. Πάντα αναφέρομαι στη γραμματική των σημείων ή του συνθήματος. Κάποιος λέει “Λευτεριά στoν Μουμία” [Mumia Abu Jamal] ή “Σώστε τις φάλαινες.” Αλλά από ποιόν ζητάει να το κάνει αυτό; Εννοεί πως πιέζει όλο το σύστημα να το πράξει; Ή μήπως καλεί εμάς ως συλλογικότητα να τους πιέσουμε να το πράξουν; Οπότε ναι, θα μπορούσε κανείς να θέσει το επιχείρημα ότι η διάκριση μεταξύ «οραμάτων», «αιτημάτων» και «λύσεων» είναι κάπως αυθαίρετη.

Όταν πρωτοασχολιόμασταν με την ιδέα για το Occupy Wall Street, υπήρχαν κάποιοι που ισχυρίστηκαν ότι θα μπορούσαμε να θεσουμε μια σειρά από αιτήματα που αποτελούν μέρος της διαδικασίας απονομιμοποίησης, θέτοντας δηλαδή αιτήματα για θέματα κοινής λογικής, τα οποία κανονικά δεν θα τα λάμβαναν υπόψιν τους ούτε σε χίλια χρόνια . Έτσι, αυτό δεν θα ήταν απλά μια προσπάθεια να ικανοποιηθούν τα αιτήματα, αλλά μάλλον θα ήταν ένας επιπλέον τρόπος για να αποδομηθεί η εξουσία, οι οποία θα αποδεικνυόταν εντελώς άχρηστη στην παροχή των αναγκαίων για τους ανθρώπους. Αυτό για το οποίο μιλάμε εδώ είναι στρατηγικές ρητορικής, όχι στρατηγικές διακυβέρνησης, επειδή το Occupy Wall Street δεν φιλοδοξεί να αναλάβει τον έλεγχο των οργάνων της εξουσίας, ούτε σκοπεύει να το κάνει. Όσον αφορά τα μακροπρόθεσμα οράματα, ένας από τους κύριους στόχους μας έχει ήδη επιτευχθεί σε βαθμό που ποτέ δεν είχαμε φανταστεί ότι θα μπορούσε να γίνει. Ο στόχος μας ήταν να εξαπλωθεί μια ορισμένη αντίληψη για την άμεση δημοκρατία, για το πώς θα μπορούσε να λειτουργήσει η δημοκρατία.

Για τη διάδοση της ιδέας, η κατάληψη του δημόσιου χώρου ήταν πολύ καρποφόρα. Ήταν ένας τρόπος να πούμε: «Είμαστε ο λαός. Ποιος θα μπορούσε να μας κρατήσει έξω από τον χώρο μας;» Υιοθέτησαν μια Γκαντιανή στρατηγική. Με το να είναι επιμελώς μη-βίαιη, μια ομάδα ανθρώπων που δεν θα μπορούσε να αποτελέσει απειλή για κανέναν, μπορεί να αναδείξει πόσο το κράτος είναι πρόθυμο να αντιδράσει με ακραία βία. Φυσικά, ανέκαθεν το πρόβλημα με την Γκαντιανή στρατηγική ήταν ότι χρειάζεται ο Τύπος να την παρουσιάσει με αυτόν τον τρόπο. Ένας λόγος που το κίνημα στο Σιάτλ έγινε εξεγερσιακό ήταν γιατί μεγάλο μέρος των ανθρώπων που συμμετείχαν ήταν ακτιβιστές για τα δάση που είχαν χρησιμοποιήσει στο παρελθόν αποκλειστικά Γκαντιανές τακτικές – κάθισμα σε δέντρα, δημιουργία “αλυσίδων”για να σταματήσει η καταστροφή των αρχέγονων δασών, κλπ. Η αντίδραση της αστυνομίας ήταν να χρησιμοποιήσει οπλοποιημένες μεθόδους βασανιστηρίων. Έτσι, αυτοί οι ακτιβιστές κατάλαβαν ότι οι Γκαντιανές τακτικές δεν ήταν πλέον αποτελεσματικές: επρεπε να δοκιμάσουν κάτι άλλο. Τώρα όμως, αναπάντεχα, η Γκαντιανή προσέγγιση ήταν σχετικά επιτυχής. Υπήρξε αυτή η προοπτική, και είναι ενδιαφέρον να αναρωτηθούμε: “Γιατί;”

RW: Ένα από τα σκεπτικά του Occupy Liberty Plaza ήταν ότι οι συμμετέχοντές του δούλευαν μαζί για να δημιουργήσουν ένα μικρής κλίμακας μοντέλο ανταποκρινόμενο στο πως μια χειραφετημένη κοινωνία του μέλλοντος θα μπορούσε να μοιάζει. Αυτή η συλλογιστική προϋποθέτει μια πολύ στενή σχέση μεταξύ της ηθικής (changing oneself) και πολιτικής (changing the world). Ωστόσο, δεν είναι δύσκολο να δούμε ότι οι περισσότερες από τις υπηρεσίες που παρέχονται στο Liberty Plaza ήταν και εξακολουθούν να είναι εξαρτημένες από τη χρηματοδότηση που έλαβαν από δωρεές, η οποία με τη σειρά τους προήλθαν από την κοινωνία της συνδιαλλαγής: τον καπιταλισμό. Από τη στιγμή που τα μέσα για την προσφορά αυτών των υπηρεσιών μπορούν να θεωρηθούν ως παρασιτικά από την καπιταλιστική ολότητα, μήπως το γεγονός αυτό περιπλέκει ή θέτει σε κίνδυνο καθ΄οιονδήποτε τρόπο τη νομιμότητα αυτών των φερόμενων ως προεικονιστικών κοινοτήτων;

DG: Νομίζω ότι η «καπιταλιστική ολότητα» υπάρχει μόνο στη φαντασία μας. Δεν νομίζω ότι υπάρχει μια καπιταλιστική ολότητα. Νομίζω ότι υπάρχει κεφάλαιο, το οποίο είναι εξαιρετικά ισχυρό, και αντιπροσωπεύει μια ορισμένη λογική που είναι στην πραγματικότητα παρασιτική για πάρα πολλές άλλες κοινωνικές σχέσεις, χωρίς τις οποίες δεν θα μπορούσε να υπάρξει. Νομίζω ότι ο Μαρξ δεν είχε κατασταλάξει πάνω σε αυτό το θέμα ο ίδιος. Υποστήριξε, φυσικά, την Παρισινή Κομμούνα. Ισχυρίστηκε ότι ήταν ο κομμουνισμός στην πράξη. Έτσι, ο Μαρξ δεν ήταν ενάντια σε όλες τις πειραματικές, προεικονιστικές μορφές. Εκείνος είχε πει ότι η αυτο-οργάνωση της εργατικής τάξης ήταν «κομμουνισμός εν κινήσει». Κάποιος θα μπορούσε να θέσει το επιχείρημα, αν θέλετε να πάρουμε τις καλύτερες πτυχές του Μαρξ (αν και νομίζω ότι ήταν βαθιά αμφίθυμος πάνω στο θέμα αυτό, στην πραγματικότητα), ότι αποδέχθηκε την ιδέα ότι ορισμένες μορφές αντίστασης θα μπορούσαν να διαδραματίζονται προεικονιστικά. Από την άλλη πλευρά, είναι βέβαιο ότι είχε βαθιές διαφωνίες με τους αναρχικούς για το θέμα αυτό, σε ό,τι αφορούσε την πρακτική εφαρμογή.

Νομίζω ότι το πραγματικό πρόβλημα είναι ο Εγελιανισμός του Μαρξ. Το στοιχείο της ολότητας στην κληρονομιά του Χέγκελ είναι μάλλον ολέθριο. Μία από τις εξαιρετικά σημαντικές διαφωνίες μεταξύ Μπακούνιν και Μαρξ είχε να κάνει με το προλεταριάτο, ιδιαίτερα των πιο προχωρημένων τμημάτων του, ως αναγκαίο παράγοντα της επανάστασης, σε σχέση με τους αγρότες, τους τεχνίτες, ή τους πρόσφατα προλεταριοποιημένους. Το βασικό επιχείρημα του Μαρξ ήταν ότι μέσα στην καπιταλιστική ολότητα, το προλεταριάτο είναι το μόνο που αναιρείται απολύτως και που μπορεί να απελευθερώσει τον εαυτό του μέσα από την απόλυτη άρνηση του συστήματος. Όλοι οι υπόλοιποι είναι ένα είδος «μικροαστών». Μόλις κολλήσεις με την ιδέα της απόλυτης άρνησης, αυτό ανοίγει την πόρτα σε μια σειρά από αρκετά επικίνδυνα συμπεράσματα. Υπάρχει ο κίνδυνος να πούμε ότι κάθε μορφή ηθικής ,ως μη σχετική πλέον, είναι άχρηστη. Δεν γνωρίζεις πια τη μορφή της ηθικής που θα είναι λειτουργική σε μη αστική κοινωνία, δικαιολογώντας έτσι πολλά πράγματα που πραγματικά δεν μπορούν να δικαιολογηθούν.

Αυτό που προσπαθώ να πω είναι πως είναι πολύ πιο λογικό να υποστηρίζει κανείς ότι όλες οι κοινωνικές και πολιτικές δυνατότητες υπάρχουν ταυτόχρονα. Το ότι ορισμένες μορφές συνεργασίας στάθηκαν δυνατές μόνο μέσω της λειτουργίας του καπιταλισμού, ότι τα καταναλωτικά αγαθά είναι καπιταλιστικά, ή οι τεχνικές παραγωγής είναι καπιταλιστικές, δεν τις κάνει πιο παρασιτικές στον καπιταλισμό από το γεγονός ότι τα εργοστάσια μπορούν να λειτουργήσουν χωρίς τις κυβερνήσεις. Κάποια μορφή συνεργασίας και καταναλωτικών αγαθών τις καθιστά σοσιαλιστικές. Υπάρχουν πολλές,αντιφατικές λογικές ανταλλαγής, λογικές δράσης, και λογικές συνεργασίας που υπάρχουν ανά πάσα στιγμή. Είναι ενσωματωμένες η μια στην άλλη, σε αμοιβαία αντίφαση, συνεχώς σε ένταση. Ως αποτέλεσμα, υπάρχει μια βάση από την οποία μπορεί κανείς να κάνει μια κριτική του καπιταλισμού, ακόμη και την ίδια στιγμή που ο καπιταλισμός υπαγάγει συνεχώς όλες αυτές τις εναλλακτικές λύσεις σε αυτόν. Δεν σημαίνει πως οτιδήποτε κάνουμε αντιστοιχεί σε μια λογική του καπιταλισμού. Υπάρχουν εκείνοι που υποστηρίζουν ότι μόνο το 30-40% των όσων κάνουμε υπόκεινται στη λογική του καπιταλισμού. Ο κομμουνισμός ενυπάρχει ήδη στις στενές σχέσεις μας σε πολλά διαφορετικά επίπεδα, γι ‘αυτό το ζήτημα είναι η σταδιακή επέκτασή του, και τελικά η καταστροφή την εξουσίας του κεφαλαίου, παρά αυτή η ιδέα της απόλυτης άρνησης που μας βυθίζει σε κάποιο μεγάλο άγνωστο.

RW: Η εκδοχή του αναρχισμού που αποδέχεστε τονίζει τη σχέση των μέσων και των σκοπών. Έχετε γράψει ότι «[ο αναρχισμός] επιμένει, πριν από οτιδήποτε άλλο, ότι τα μέσα κάποιου πρέπει να είναι σύμφωνα με τους σκοπούς του: δεν μπορεί κάποιος να φέρει την ελευθερία μέσα από αυταρχικά μέσα. Στην πραγματικότητα, όσο το δυνατόν περισσότερο, πρέπει κανείς, στις σχέσεις του με τους φίλους και τους συμμάχους του, να ενσαρκώνει την κοινωνία που επιθυμεί να δημιουργήσει». [4] Φαίνεται ότι έχετε την τάση να υιοθετείτε μια προσέγγιση για την άμεση δράση του τύπου «ποικιλία στρατηγικής» . Αν κάποιος επιμένει σε μια αυστηρή ταυτότητα μέσων και σκοπών, δεν μπορεί μια βίαιη πορεία δράσης να παραβιάσει την αρχή της επίτευξης μιας μη βίαιης κοινωνίας;

DG: Η ιδέα της ταυτότητας των μέσων και των σκοπών ισχύει ιδιαίτερα στον τρόπο που επαναστάτες αλληλεπιδρούν ο ένας με τον άλλον. Θα πρέπει να δημιουργήσεις τις δικές σου σχέσεις με τους συντρόφους σου, να είσαι μια ενσάρκωση του κόσμου θέλεις να δημιουργήσεις. Προφανώς, δεν έχεις την ελευθερία να κάνεις τη σχέση σου με τους καπιταλιστές ή την αστυνομία στα πρότυπα του κόσμου θέλεις να δημιουργήσεις. Στην πραγματικότητα, αυτό που έχω ανακαλύψει είναι ότι εθνογραφικά αυτό όριο πρέπει να διατηρείται πολύ καλά. Οι άνθρωποι συνήθιζαν να επικρίνουν το παγκόσμιο κίνημα για την δικαιοσύνη, επειδή χρησιμοποιούνταν όροι όπως «κακό», αλλά πραγματικά αυτό που η λέξη σήμαινε ήταν ακαθόριστο. Υπάρχουν ορισμένοι θεσμοί με τους οποίους μπορούμε τουλάχιστον να ασχοληθούμε, επειδή δεν είναι θεμελιωδώς εχθρικοί σε αυτό που προσπαθούμε να κάνουμε. Υπάρχουν άλλοι που είναι μη αναστρέψιμοι. Απλά δεν μπορούμε να μιλήσουμε γι ‘αυτούς. Γι ‘αυτό αρνηθήκαμε ν’ ασχοληθούμε με το WTO [Παγκόσμιος Οργανισμός Εμπορίου]. «Κακό» σήμαινε «δεν μπορούμε να επεκτείνουμε την προεικονιστική λογική σε αυτούς». Όταν έχουμε να κάνουμε με ανθρώπους που είναι “μέσα” στον κύκλο μιας προεικονιστικής πρακτικής μας, υποθέτεις ότι ο καθένας έχει καλές προθέσεις. Τους δίνεις το δικαίωμα της αμφιβολίας. Ακριβώς όπως (και αυτό είναι μια άλλη αναρχική αρχή) δεν υπάρχει καλύτερος τρόπος να φροντίσεις ώστε κάποιος να συμπεριφέρεται σαν παιδί από το να τον αντιμετωπίζεις σαν παιδί, έτσι και ο μόνος τρόπος για να φροντίσεις ώστε κάποιος να συμπεριφέρεται σαν ενήλικας είναι να τον αντιμετωπίζεις σαν ενήλικα. Έτσι, τους δίνεις το δικαίωμα της αμφιβολίας συναφώς, ως καλοπροαίρετος και ειλικρινής. Αλλά πρέπει να έχεις και ένα όριο. Τώρα, για το τι συμβαίνει σε αυτό το όριο είναι που γίνεται όλη η συζήτηση. Τι θα έκανε κάποιος σε μια ελεύθερη κοινωνία, εάν έβλεπε ανθρώπους να συμπεριφέρονται με τρόπους που ήταν τρομερά ανεύθυνοι και καταστροφικοί;

RW: Ενώ η δημοκρατική ιδεολογία που αντιπροσωπεύει το κίνημα Occupy το βοήθησε σίγουρα να γίνει λαοφιλές, πολλοί έχουν παραπονεθεί ότι εντός του μοντέλου συναίνεσης στη λήψη αποφάσεων, η διαδικασία τελικά φετιχοποιείται. Η όλη υπόθεση μπορεί να οδηγήσει στην ξένωση, καθώς αυτοί με την μεγαλύτερη αντοχή ή τον πιο άνετο χρόνο μπορεί να ασκήσουν σ’ ένα υπέρμετρο βαθμό επιρροή στη διαδικασία λήψης αποφάσεων. Ένα άλλο αντιληπτό πρόβλημα σχετικά με τη συναίνεση στη λήψη των αποφάσεων είναι ότι μόνο οι πιο άτολμες, αβέβαιες ή χλιαρές προτάσεις καταλήγουν να περάσουν. Είτε αυτό είτε ότι μόνο αόριστες ανακοινώσεις ενάντια στην “απληστία” ή την “αδικία” περνάνε, επειδή ακριβώς η έννοια των όρων αυτών παραμένει ακαθόριστη. Η δομή της συναίνεσης, το να περνάνε δηλαδή προτάσεις με τις οποίες οι περισσότεροι θα συμφωνούσαν εκ των προτέρων, τείνει να ευνοήσει τις πιο κοινότοπες ιδέες, και μου φαίνεται μια εγγενώς συντηρητική προσέγγιση. Έχουν οι κριτικές αυτές κάποια ορθότητα σχετικά με το κίνημα του Occupy;

DG: Δεν μπορείς να δημιουργήσεις μια δημοκρατία απ’ το τίποτα, χωρίς να υπάρξουν αρκετά μπερδέματα. Κοινωνίες που το κάνουν αυτό εδώ και πολύ καιρό έχουν βρει τις λύσεις σε αυτά τα προβλήματα. Γι’ αυτό μου αρέσει να μιλώ για το παράδειγμα της Μαδαγασκάρης, όπου το κράτος διαλύθηκε, αλλά δεν μπορείς πραγματικά να το θέσεις έτσι. Οι άνθρωποι συνέχισαν ακριβώς όπως και πριν, διότι είχαν συνηθίσει στην λήψη αποφάσεων με βάση την συναίνεση. Το έκαναν εδώ και χίλια χρόνια. Αυτή τη στιγμή έχουν μια στρατιωτική κυβέρνηση. Όμως, απο άποψη λειτουργίας της καθημερινής ζωής σε μια μικρή κοινότητα, όλα γίνονται δημοκρατικά. Πρόκειται για μια αξιόλογη αντίθεση στην δικιά μας κοινωνία,φαινομενικά πιο δημοκρατικής από άποψη των μεγαλύτερων υποδομών μας. Πότε ήταν η τελευταία φορά που μια ομάδα είκοσι Αμερικανών (εκτός του OWS) κάθισαν και πήραν αποφάσεις συλλογικά επί ίσοις όροις;

Ναι, έχετε δίκιο: θα έχεις μόνο ευρείς και ενθουσιώδεις λύσεις εάν φέρεις τα πάντα στη Γενική Συνέλευση. Για το λόγο αυτό έχουμε ομάδες εργασίας, που τους εξουσιοδοτούμε να εκτελούν ενέργειες, και να τους ενθαρρύνουμε να σχηματίζονται αυθόρμητα. Αυτή είναι μια άλλη από τις βασικές αρχές σχετικά με τη συναίνεση και την αποκέντρωση. Σε έναν ιδανικό κόσμο, η αδυναμία στο να βρεθεί συναίνεση σε μια μεγάλη συνέλευση θα πρέπει να πείσει τους ανθρώπους να μην φέρνουν έτοιμες αποφάσεις μπροστά σε αυτήν, εκτός και αν είναι αναγκασμένοι. Αυτός είναι στην ουσία ο τρόπος σύμφωνα με τον οποίο έπρεπε να λειτουργεί.

RW: Σε ποιο βαθμό θεωρείτε ότι ο στόχος της πολιτικής θα έπρεπε να είναι ελευθερία από την αναγκαιότητα της πολιτικής; Είναι η ηθική ακόμα δυνατή σε έναν κόσμο που δεν έχει αλλάξει; Ο Theodor Adorno παρατήρησε, στα Minima Moralia, ότι “Δεν υπάρχει σωστή ζωή μέσα στην ψεύτικη.” Με άλλα λόγια, μπορούμε ακόμη και μιλάμε για ηθική με την αριστοτελική έννοια της ενάρετης ζωής εντός της κυριαρχίας του ψευδούς; Ή αυτό απαιτεί έναν πρότερο πολιτικό μετασχηματισμό;

DG: Πιστεύω ότι αυτό το είδος της ολοκληρωτικής λογικής καταλήγει στο ν’ απαιτεί μια ολοκληρωτική ρήξη. Ίσως μετά την επανάσταση να μπορούμε να φανταστούμε μια ρήξη, δυνάμει της οποίας εμείς τώρα πλέον ζούμε σε μια κοινωνία εντελώς διαφορετική, αλλά όλοι γνωρίζουμε πως αυτό δεν πρόκειται να συμβεί μέσω μιας απόλυτης ρήξης. Και αν πραγματικά υιοθετήσουμε αυτήν την Εγελιανή λογική, αρχίζει να φαίνεται ότι εν τέλει δεν είναι καν δυνατό. Αυτό οδηγεί σχεδόν αναγκαστικά σε βαθύτατα τραγικά συμπεράσματα και σε μεγάλη πολιτική παθητικότητα, όπως πράγματι συνέβη με την Σχολή της Φρανκφούρτης. Δεν νομίζω ότι η πολιτική μπορεί να εξαλειφθεί. Και όπως ακριβώς δεν μπορεί να επιτευχθεί η τέλεια ζωή, η διαδικασία που στοχεύει σε αυτήν είναι η καλή ζωή.

Πιστεύω ότι από άποψη ηθικής, αυτό είναι το ζήτημα. Δεν μπορώ να φανταστώ έναν κόσμο στο οποίο εμείς δεν είμαστε επαναστάτες, δεν επαναστατικοποιούμε τις σχέσεις μεταξύ μας και δεν επαναστατικοποιούμε την κατανόησή μας για το τί είναι δυνατό. Αυτό δεν σημαίνει ότι — ίσως κάποια μέρα σύντομα, ας ελπίσουμε — δεν θα πετύχουμε κάποια μέρα έναν κόσμο όπου τα προβλήματα που υπάρχουν σήμερα θα είναι ιστορίες με τις οποίες θα τρομάζουμε τα μικρά παιδιά. Αλλά αυτό δεν σημαίνει ότι κάποια στιγμή θα ξεπεράσουμε την ανάγκη να επαναστατικοποιούμε τους εαυτούς μας. Και η διαδικασία με την οποία συμβαίνει αυτό είναι η καλή ζωή.

RW: Τελικά είναι το ίδιο το κίνημα ο σκοπός; Θα έπρεπε αυτή η διαδικασία να γίνει αυτοσκοπός;

DG: Θα πρέπει να γίνει. Εννοώ, τι άλλο υπάρχει στη ζωή;
_________________________________________
1. David Graeber, “The Shock of Victory,” in Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (New York: Minor Compositions, 2010), 17.
2. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, in Collected Works, Volume 10: 1849–1851 (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 70. Available online at Marxist.org
3. See Platypus’ discussion at the 2009 Left Forum: Dialectics of Defeat: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression. Available online at Platypus Dialectics of Defeat 
4. David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 7.

The movement as an end-in-itself? An interview with David Graeber

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January 31st, 2012

Ross Wolfe

Platypus Review 43 | February 2012

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On  December 16, 2011, Ross Wolfe interviewed David Graeber, Reader at Goldsmiths College in London, author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), and central figure in the early stages of the #Occupy Wall Street Movement. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.

Indie folk singer Tea Leigh at #Occupy

Ross Wolfe: There are striking similarities between the #Occupy movement and the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. Both began in the last year of a Democratic presidency, were spearheaded by anarchists, motivated by discontents with neo-liberalism, and received the support of organized labor. As an active participant in both the anti/alter-globalization and the #Occupy movements, to what extent would you say that #Occupy is a continuation of the project inaugurated at Seattle? What, if anything, makes this movement different?

David Graeber: I think a lot of the people involved in the globalization movement, myself included, felt this was a continuation of our efforts, because we never really felt the globalization movement had come to an end. We’d smash our heads against the wall every year, saying “Oh yes, this time we’re really back. Oh wait, maybe not.” A lot of us gradually began to lose hope that it was really going to bounce back in the way we always thought we knew it would. And then it happened, as a combination of tactics of trying to create prefigurative models of what a democratic society would be like, as a way of organizing protest or actions that were directed against an obviously undemocratic structure of governance.

At the same time, I think one reason why the tactics seem appropriate in either case is because, in a way, we’re talking about two rounds of the same cycle of really the same debt crisis. One could make the argument that the world has been in one form of debt crisis or another since the seventies, and that for most of that time, the crisis was fobbed off onto the global South, and to a certain degree held off from the North Atlantic, countries and places with the most powerful economies, which more or less use credit as a way of staving off popular unrest. The global justice movement ultimately was a quite successful form of popular uprising against neoliberal orthodoxy, Washington Consensus, and the tyranny of the debt enforcers like the IMF and the World Bank. It was officially so successful that the IMF itself was expelled from large parts of the world. It simply can’t operate at all in many spaces within Latin America anymore. And it eventually came home. So it’s the same process: declaring some kind of financial crisis which the capitalists themselves are responsible for, and demanding the replacement of what are termed “neutral technocrats” of one type or other, who are in fact schooled in this kind of neoliberal orthodoxy, who’ve been in the economy for wholesale plunder on the part of financial elites. And because #Occupy is reacting to the same thing as the Global Justice Movement, it’s not surprising that the reaction takes the same form: a movement for direct democracy, prefigurative politics, and direct action. In each case, what they’re saying is that the tools of government and the administration are inherently corrupt and unaccountable.

RW: Against the malaise that followed from the dissolution of the anti/alter-globalization movement after 9/11, you argued that the primary reason for its eventual defeat was that it did not know how to handle the shock of its early victories, its participants had become “dizzy with success” along the way. “[O]ne reason it was so easy for [the global justice movement] to collapse, was…that once again, in most of our immediate objectives, we’d already, unexpectedly, won.”[1] In other words, for you the path to defeat was largely paved by victory. In an uncanny way, this appears to mirror, albeit from the opposite direction, Karl Marx’s counter-intuitive understanding of June 1848. Marx wrote that “only the June defeat has created all the conditions under which France can seize the initiative of the European revolution. Only after being dipped in the blood of the June insurgents did the tricoleur become the flag of the European revolution—the red flag!”[2] For Marx, then, the path toward victory was seen to be paved by defeat. How, if at all, are these two seemingly opposite views related? Do they mutually exclude one another, or are they perhaps complementary? Is it proper or even possible to speak of a “dialectics of defeat”?[3]

DG: That’s an interesting analogy. One would have to ask: “Was Marx right?” He said that defeat was necessary for the ultimate victory, but it’s not clear that that victory ultimately did occur. It’s certainly true that certain sorts of defeat can be mythologized, and may turn into victory, or things that seem like defeats on the field are in fact victories that you didn’t realize you had. I think that happens quite regularly in revolutionary history. In a way, tactical defeat is almost randomly related to strategic victory. There’s no predictable pattern, kind of like Immanuel Wallerstein’s idea of the series of world revolutions starting with the French revolution, the world revolution of 1848, which didn’t achieve tactical victory anywhere, but radically transformed the way governments operated in Europe. That’s where you get universal education, redistricting, etc.

RW: The French Revolution even failed internally, insofar as it was turned into an empire by Napoleon. But it still helped spread the nationalist and liberal/republican ethos.

DG: Absolutely. There were institutional, concrete forms that came out of that that have remained with us ever since. Same thing with 1917: It only was successful in Russia, but it had almost as much of an effect on other countries as it did at home. Nothing was the same afterwards. Basically, Wallerstein argues that 1968 was a similar revolutionary moment, sort of along the lines of 1848. He’s now talking about the world revolution of 2011. But it really isn’t clear which model this is going to resemble.

This made me think of what neoliberalism is really about: It’s a political movement much more than it is an economic movement, which is a reaction to those series of victories won by social movements in the sixties, whether the anti-war movements, feminism, the counterculture, and so on. That became a kind of a sanction, in achieving political victory by preventing any social movement from feeling that it had been successful in challenging capitalism in any great, empowered way, or providing any sort of viable alternative. So it became a propaganda war that was continually hierarchized, over creating an actually viable capitalist system. The way the Iraq War was conducted is another great example of that. It’s very clear that the real obsession on the part of the people planning the war was to overcome what they called “the Vietnam syndrome,” i.e., the wave of anti-war demonstrations in the sixties that had really prevented the U.S. from deploying large ground forces in any kind of major land war for 30 years. In order to get over that, they needed to fight the war in a way that would prevent widespread opposition and resistance at home. What they calculated was that “body count is everything,” therefore they had to create rules of engagement such that few enough American soldiers would die that there would be no mass uproar in the form of an anti-war movement. Of course, in order to do that, their rules of engagement meant that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians died, which in turn pretty much ensured they couldn’t win the war. But it seemed more important to them to prevent the anti-war movement than to win the war.

Of course, the anti-war movement of the last decade was put in a terrible situation by the attacks of 9/11, an attack on U.S. soil on a scale that hadn’t ever happened. Now, it’s also true that there’s a pattern where 9/11 came at a very opportune moment, and had it not been for that attack, they probably would have tried to come up with some other excuse for an overseas war. Because it seems that when you finally see a grassroots political movement, whether it’s the civil rights movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the global justice movement, or any kind of glimmering, that is what happens. The remarkable thing to me is how immediately the ruling class panicked and felt that they had to make massive concessions and invariably seem to commence some sort of overseas war. It seems like they’ve trapped themselves in something like a box. It’s clear that we’ve got a situation here in America, but it’s not really clear who they’re going to attack, or who they could attack overseas.

RW: One of the central debates within #OWS is over the degree to which the movement remains ideologically inclusive and open to all. From early on, the demonstrations at Liberty Plaza drew a number of neoliberal ideologues: Ron Paul supporters, Tea Partiers, and right-wing conspiracy theorists. While their visibility within the movement has perhaps diminished in recent weeks, they remain an undeniable, if marginal, presence at #Occupy events. Some have rejected the very idea of being placed along the political spectrum of “left” and “right,” as they both consider these categories to be too constrictive and fear that identification with one or the other risks alienating potential supporters. Would you say the language of “right” and “left” still has any utility with respect to #Occupy Wall Street? Does #Occupy represent a new popular movement on the Left?

DG: There is an unfortunate tendency to identify “the Left” not as a set of ideals or ideas but of institutional structures. A lot of individualists, anarchists, insurrectionists, and primitivists see the Left as the various leftist political parties, labor unions, what we would generally call “the verticals,” and I can see why one would feel rather chary about wanting to identify himself with these. But at the same time, we’ve been hearing at least since the end of World War II that the difference between right and left is no longer relevant. It’s something that’s said about every five years in making some great pronouncement. And the fact that they have to keep doing it so regularly shows that it isn’t true. It’s sort of the way that people keep making these grand declarations that the whole narrative of progress is gone. They make that about once every generation. But why would they have to announce this every generation if it was actually gone? So I think that these concepts remain.

The Tea Party was also claiming that they weren’t a right-wing group and that they were a broad populist rejection of the structure of the existing political order, in the same way that people want to see #Occupy Wall Street. But one is a very right-wing populist rejection, while the #Occupy movement is inspired by left-wing principles. And a lot of it has to do not even with one’s attitude towards market economics but corporate capitalism. It has this utopian ideal about what capitalism should be, which is actually far more utopian than any conception of what socialism, or whatever else would exist for the Left, would be. So the ultimate utopias of the Tea Party and #Occupy are profoundly different, which indicates a difference in their basic orientations. And #Occupy Wall Street is, in the end, anti-hierarchical. And I think that’s the key. The Right is not, in the end, anti-hierarchical. They want to limit certain types of hierarchy, and promote other types, but they are not ultimately an egalitarian movement. So I think that ignoring that broad left legacy is kind of silly. It strikes me as patently dishonest. I understand that it is sometimes tactically useful to throw as broad a net as possible, because there actually is a lot of common ground. Many right-wing populists have certain sincere objections to, for example, the monopolization of culture, or the fact that there is objectively a cultural elite. A certain social class monopolizes those jobs whereby you get to engage or pursue forms of value that aren’t all about money. The working classes have an overwhelming hatred of the cultural elite and a celebration of the army, to support our troops. It comes down to the fact that if you come from a working-class background, you have a very slim chance of becoming a successful capitalist, but there’s really no possibility that you could become a drama critic for The New York Times. I think it would be wonderful if we could find a way to appeal to such people in a way that wouldn’t be patronizing. But still, rejecting this split between the Right and the Left entirely, strikes me as going in completely the wrong direction.

What we have is this terrible synthesis of the market and bureaucracy which has taken over every aspect of our lives. Yet only the Right has a critique of bureaucracy. It’s a really simple-minded critique, but the Left really doesn’t have one at all.

RW: Some have characterized the #Occupy movement as sounding the alarm for “class war.” They cite the now-ubiquitous #Occupy Wall Street motto, “We are the 99%!” as evidence of this fact. As the ostensible originator of this slogan, do you believe that #Occupy Wall Street is an outward manifestation of the latent class struggle underlying civil society? Whatever its rhetorical effect, does this metric provide an adequate framework for the analysis of class struggle?

DG: I don’t think of it as an analysis so much as an illustration. It’s a way of opening a window on inequality. Of course, a slogan doesn’t ever answer the real structural question of how social classes get reproduced. What a slogan does is point you to how you can start thinking about a problem that you might not have even known existed. It’s been remarkably effective at that, for two reasons: one, because it points out just how small the group of people who have been the beneficiaries of the economic growth, of our productivity has been. They basically grabbed everything. Also, the slogan has successfully made #Occupy inclusive in a way that other social movements have had trouble with before. So I think that’s what was effective about it. Obviously there are infinite shades of difference between us, and class is a much more complicated thing than just the fact there is a certain group of people that is super rich or has a lot of political power. But nonetheless, it provides people with a way to start talking to each other about what they have in common, thus providing the form in which the other things can come to be addressed. You have to start with what you have in common. And that’s one thing we’ve had a really hard time doing up till now.

RW: Most within the #Occupy movement recognize the raw fact of dramatic social inequality, but disagree over the method to pursue in looking to resolve this problem. Many hope that #Occupy will provide the grassroots political momentum necessary to pass a set of economic reforms, which typically would come by way of legislation passed through the existing channels of government. Others see #Occupy as potentially revolutionary, as pointing to something beyond the merely “economic.” These two perspectives seem to indicate radically different directions this movement might take. Would you characterize this movement as “anti-capitalist”? Should it be? If so, what is the nature of its “anti-capitalist” politics?

DG: I’ll start by saying that the people who were originally involved in the creation of #Occupy were overwhelmingly anti-capitalist, very explicitly. Whether we thought we were going to be able to overthrow capitalism in one go, well, obviously no. We’re working toward that as an ultimate goal. That’s why it’s key to have an effect that will genuinely benefit people’s lives. #Occupy certainly doesn’t contradict that revolutionary impulse, and helps move us in a direction towards greater freedom and autonomy, by which I mean freedom from the structures of both the state and capitalism. Now, to create broad alliances along those lines, you’d have to be very careful about your organizational and institutional structures. Because one of the things that is revolutionary about the #Occupy movement is that it’s trying to create prefigurative spaces in which we can experiment and create the kind of institutional structures that would exist in a society that’s free of the state and capitalism. We hope to use those to create a kind of crisis of legitimacy within existing institutions.

Of course, I can only speak for myself. But most of the people I was working with, who were putting the vision together, had this belief in common: that the great advantage we had was that people across the political spectrum in America shared a profound revulsion with the existing political system, which they recognize to be a system of institutionalized bribery that has very little to do with anything that could be meaningfully called democracy. Money clearly controls every aspect of the political system. Thus, we would only had to delegitimate a system that has already almost entirely delegitimated itself. We adopted what amounts to a “dual power strategy.” By creating autonomous institutions that represent what a real democracy might be like, we could provoke a situation for a mass delegitimation of existing institutions of power. Obviously, the ones that are the most violent are the hardest to delegitimate. In American society, for various ideological reasons, people hate politicians, but they have been trained to identify with the army and police to a degree that is hardly true anywhere else in the world. There’s been relentless propaganda to create sympathies for soldiers and policemen, ever since the cowboy movie turned into the cop movie. I think that it would be a terrible mistake to go from these prefigurative structures to running some sort of political candidate. But even the idea of turning into a lobbying group pursuing a specific reformist agenda is wrongheaded. The moment you engage with a system, you’re not only legitimating it, you’re delegitimating yourself, because your own internal politics become warped. Even accepting money has pernicious effects. But the moment you’re interfacing with vertically organized structures of power, which are ultimately based on coercion, it poisons everything. By actively delegitimating the structure, we are in a position, perhaps as a side effect of our actions, to create the forms that will actually be of the most benefit to ordinary people.

RW: One division that emerged early on among the occupants concerned the need to call for demands. You have in the past rejected the idea of politics as policy-making, feeling that demands focused on electoral reform or market regulations would only steer the movement in a conservative direction. If not demands, what kind of “visions and solutions,” as you’ve put it, do you think the #Occupy movement should provide?

DG: There is a profound ambiguity in the language of protest politics. I always point to the grammar of signs or slogan. Someone says “Free Mumia” or “Save the whales.” But who are you asking to do that? Are you talking about pressuring the entire system do so? Or are you calling on us as a collectivity to pressure them to do so? So yes, one could make the argument that the distinction between “visions,” “demands,” and “solutions” is somewhat arbitrary.

When we were first putting together the idea for #Occupy Wall Street, there were some who argued that we could make a series of demands that are part of the delegitimation process, by making demands for things that are obviously commonsensical and reasonable, but which they would never in a million years even consider doing. So it would not be an attempt to achieve the demands, but rather it would be a further way to de-structure the authority, which would be shown to be utterly useless when it came to providing what the people need. What we’re really talking about here is rhetorical strategies, not strategies of government, because #Occupy Wall Street does not claim to take control of the instruments of power, nor does it intend to. In terms of long-term visions, one of our major objectives has already been achieved to a degree which we never imagined it could have been. Our goal was to spread a certain notion of direct democracy, of how democracy could work.

For spreading the idea, the occupation of public space was very fruitful. It was a way of saying, “We are the public. Who could possibly keep us out of our space?” They adopted a Gandhian strategy. By being studiously non-violent, a group of people who couldn’t possibly pose a threat to anyone might bring out how much the state is willing to react with extreme violence.  Of course, the problem with the Gandhian strategy has always been that you need the press to cover it that way. One reason the window-breaking in Seattle happened was that a majority of the people involved had been forest activists who had previously used exclusively Gandhian tactics — tree-sitting, chaining themselves to equipment to prevent the destruction of old-growth forests, etc. The police reaction was to use weaponized torture devices. So these activists had decided that Gandhian tactics don’t work; they had to try something else. Now suddenly the Gandhian approach has been relatively successful. There has been this window, and it’s interesting to ask yourself: “Why?”

RW: One of the tropes of #Occupy Liberty Plaza was that its participants were working together to build a small-scale model what an emancipated society of the future might look like. This line of reasoning posits a very intimate connection between ethics (changing oneself) and politics (changing the world). Yet it is not difficult to see that most of the services provided at Liberty Plaza were still dependent on funding received from donations, which in turn came from the society of exchange: Capitalism. Since the means for the provision of these services can be viewed as parasitic upon the capitalist totality, does this in any way complicate or compromise the legitimacy of such allegedly prefigurative communities?

DG: I think the “capitalist totality” only exists in our imagination. I don’t think there is a capitalist totality. I think there’s capital, which is extraordinarily powerful, and represents a certain logic that is actually parasitic upon a million other social relations, without which it couldn’t exist. I think Marx veered back and forth on this score himself. He did, of course, support the Paris Commune. He claimed that it was communism in action. So Marx wasn’t against all experimental, prefigurative forms. He did say that the self-organization of the working class was “the motion of communism.” One could make the argument, if you wanted to take the best aspects of Marx (though I think he was deeply ambivalent on this issue, actually) that he did accept the notion that certain forms of opposition could be acted out prefiguratively. On the other hand, it’s certainly true that he did have profound arguments with the anarchists on this matter, when it came to practice.

I think that the real problem is Marx’s Hegelianism. The totalizing aspect of Hegel’s legacy is rather pernicious. One of the extremely important disagreements between Bakunin and Marx had to do with the proletariat, especially its most advanced sections, as the necessary agent of revolution, versus the peasants, the craftsmen, or the recently proletarianized. Marx’s basic argument was that within the totality of capitalism, the proletariat are the only ones who are absolutely negated and who can only liberate themselves through the absolute negation of the system. Everyone else is some kind of “petit-bourgeois.” Once you’re stuck with the idea of absolute negation, that opens the door to a number of quite dangerous conclusions. There is the danger of saying that all forms of morality are thrown out the window as no longer relevant. You no longer know what form of morality will work in a non-bourgeois society, thus justifying a lot of things that really can’t be justified.

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s much more sensible to argue that all social and political possibilities exist simultaneously. Just because certain forms of cooperation are only made possible through the operation of capitalism, that consumer goods are capitalist, or that techniques of production are capitalist, no more makes them parasitical upon capitalism than the fact that factories can operate without governments. Some cooperation and consumer goods makes them socialist. There are multiple, contradictory logics of exchange, logics of action, and cooperative logics existing at all times. They are embedded in one another, in mutual contradiction, constantly in tension. As a result, there is a base from which one can make a critique of capitalism even at the same time that capitalism constantly subsumes all those alternatives to it. It’s not like everything we do corresponds to a logic of capitalism. There are those who’ve argued that only 30–40% of what we do is subsumed under the logic of capitalism. Communism already exists in our intimate relations with each other on a million different levels, so it’s a question of gradually expanding that and ultimately destroying the power of capital, rather than this idea of absolute negation that plunges us into some great unknown.

RW: The version of anarchism that you subscribe to stresses this relationship of means to ends. You’ve written that “[anarchism] insists, before anything else, that one’s means must be consonant with one’s ends; one cannot create freedom through authoritarian means; in fact, as much as possible, one must oneself, in one’s relations with one’s friends and allies, embody the society one wishes to create.”[4] It seems that you tend to endorse a “diversity of tactics” approach to direct action. If one insists upon a strict identity of means and ends, might not a violent course of action violate the principle of attaining a non-violent society?

DG: The idea of the identity of means and ends particularly applies to the way revolutionaries deal with one another. You have to make your own relations with your fellow comrades, to be an embodiment of the world you wish to create. Obviously, you don’t have the liberty to make your relationship with the capitalists or the police into an embodiment of the world you wish to create. In fact, what I’ve found ethnographically is that this boundary has to be very clearly maintained. People used to criticize the global justice movement because it would use terms like “evil,” but really what that word indicated was a borderline. There are certain institutions that we can at least deal with, because they’re not fundamentally inimical to what we’re trying to do. There are others that are irredeemable. You just can’t talk to them. That’s why we refused to deal with the WTO. “Evil” meant, “we can’t extend that prefigurative logic to them.” When dealing with people who are “in” the circle of our prefigurative practice, you have to assume everyone has good intentions. You give them the benefit of the doubt. Just as (and this is another anarchist principle) there’s no way better to have someone act like a child than to treat him as a child, the only way to have someone act like an adult is to treat him as an adult. So you give them the benefit of the doubt in that regard, as well-intentioned and honest. But you have to have a cutoff point. Now, what happens at that cutoff is where all the debate takes place. What would one do in a free society if he saw people behaving in ways that were terribly irresponsible and destructive?

RW: While the democratic ideology it represents has certainly helped popularize the #Occupy movement, many have complained that within the consensus decision-making model, process ultimately becomes fetishized. The entire affair can be massively alienating, as those with the greatest endurance or the most leisure time can exert an inordinate amount of influence the decision-making process. Another perceived problem with consensus decision-making is that only the most timid, tentative, or lukewarm proposals end up getting passed. Either that, or only extremely vague pronouncements against “greed” or “injustice” get passed, precisely because the meaning of these terms remains underdefined. The structure of consensus, passing proposals that most people agree upon already, tends to favor the most unambitious ideas, and seems to me an inherently conservative approach. Do these criticisms have any legitimacy with regard to the #Occupy movement?

DG: You can’t create a democracy out of nothing without there being a lot of kinks. Societies that have been doing this over the long term have come up with solutions to these problems. That’s why I like to talk about the example of Madagascar, where the state broke down, but you couldn’t even really tell. People carried on as they had before, because they were used to making decisions by consensus. They’d been doing it for a thousand years. At the moment they have a military government. But in terms of the day-to-day operation of everyday life in a small community, everything’s done democratically. It’s a remarkable contrast to our own society, ostensibly more democratic in terms of our larger structures. When was the last time a group of twenty Americans (outside of #OWS) sat down and made a collective decision in an equal way?

Yes, you’re right: you’ll only get broad and tepid solutions if you bring everything to the General Assembly. That’s why we have working groups, empower them to perform actions, and encourage them to form spontaneously. This is another of the key principles in dealing with consensus and decentralization. In an ideal world, the very unwieldiness of finding consensus in a large group should convince people not to bring decisions before this large group unless they absolutely have to. That’s actually the way it’s supposed to work out.

Extract from Eduard Bernstein's Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie. Text reads: „Das, was man gemeinhin Endziel des Sozialismus nennt, ist mir nichts, die Bewegung alles.“ (What is commonly called the ultimate goal of socialism is nothing to me, the movement is everything.)

RW: To what extent do you think that the goal of politics should be freedom from the necessity of politics? Is ethics even possible in a world that hasn’t been changed? Theodor Adorno remarked in Minima Moralia that “the wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” In other words, can we even speak of ethics in the Aristotelian sense of the good life within the totality of the wrong? Or would this require a prior political transformation?

DG: I think that kind of totalizing logic ends up requiring a total rupture. Perhaps after the revolution we can imagine a rupture, whereby we now live in a totally different society, but we all know it’s not going to happen through a total rupture. And if you really adopt that Hegelian logic, it begins to seem as if it’s not possible at all. It almost necessarily leads to profoundly tragic conclusions and extremely quietist politics, as indeed it did with the Frankfurt School. I don’t think that politics can be eliminated. And just as the perfect life cannot be achieved, the process of moving toward it is the good life.

I think that in terms of ethics that is the case. I can’t imagine a world in which we aren’t revolutionary ourselves, and revolutionizing our relations with one another, and revolutionizing our understanding of what is possible. That doesn’t mean that we will not someday—perhaps someday soon, hopefully—achieve a world whereby the problems we have today will be the sort of things to scare children with stories of them. But that doesn’t mean we’ll ever overcome the need to revolutionize ourselves. And the process by which that comes about is the good life.

RW: So does the movement itself become the goal? Must this process become an end-in-itself?

DG: It has to be. I mean, what else is there to life? |P

1. David Graeber, “The Shock of Victory,” in Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (New York: Minor Compositions, 2010), 17.↑
2. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1851, in Collected Works, Volume 10: 1849–1851 (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 70. Available online at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/index.htm>.↑
3. See Platypus’ discussion at the 2009 Left Forum: Dialectics of Defeat: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression. Available online at <http://www.archive.org/details/PlatypusDialecticsofDefeatLeftForum2009NYC041809>.↑
4. David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 7.↑

The final chapter of Mikhail Lifshits’ The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (1933)

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Here is the final chapter to the Russian philosopher and aesthetician Mikhail Lifshits’ groundbreaking 1933 book The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx.  Lifshits was the closest friend of Georg Lukács in the Soviet Union.  The two met in 1929, and though Lifshits, like Lukács, eventually proved to be an incorrigible conservative and anti-modernist when it came to aesthetics, I’d say that The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx is a valuable text. Consider, for example, its final chapter:

The historical role of the capitalist mode of production is to bring into the sharpest possible focus the contradictions of social progress; at the same time it prepares the ground for the annihilation of all these inequalities and antagonisms. The very division of labour gives rise to contradictions between the three ‘elements’: ‘productive forces’, ‘social relations’, and ‘consciousness’. The social division of labour is not, however, an eternal category. As a class stratification of society it disappears, and as a professional hierarchy it withers away in the transition to communist society.

But what does this transition mean with regard to aesthetic creation? Does it not mean the destruction of all distinctions between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic in art, just as in life the contradiction between the artist and the ordinary mortal is removed? Does not collectivism, generally speaking, suppress all individual originality and talent? Such are some of the bourgeois objections to communism. These objections Marx and Engels dealt with in criticizing Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own. Stirner, one of the founders of anarchism, distinguished between ‘human’ work, which can be organized collectively, and ‘individual’ work, which cannot be socialized in any manner. For who can take the place of a Mozart or a Raphael?

‘Here again, as always,’ wrote Marx and Engels, ‘Sancho [i.e. Stirner] is out of luck in his choice of practical examples. He thinks that “no one can compose your music in your stead, or execute your designs for a painting. Raphaers works can be done by no other.” But Sancho should have known that not Mozart himself, but someone else, largely composed and completely finished Mozart’s Requiem; and that Raphael “executed” only a small portion of his frescoes.

‘He imagines that the so-called organizers of labour wish to organize the whole activity of every individual, whereas it is precisely they who make a distinction between directly productive labour, which must be organized, and labour which is not directly productive. As far as the latter kind of labour is concerned, they do not think, as Sancho imagines, that everybody can work in Raphael’s place, but rather that everybody who has a Raphael in him should be able to develop unhindered. Sancho imagines that Raphael created his paintings independently of the division of labour then existing in Rome. If he will compare Raphael with Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, he will see to what extent the works of art of the first were conditioned by the flourishing of Rome, then under the influence of Florence; how the works of Leonardo were conditioned by the social milieu of Florence, and later those of Titian by the altogether different development of Venice. Raphael, like any other artist, was conditioned by the technical advances made in art before him. by the organization of society and the division of labour in his locality, and finally, by the division of labour in all the countries with which his locality maintained relations. Whether an individual like Raphael is able to develop his talent depends entirely upon demand, which in turn depends upon the division of labour and the consequent educational conditions of men.

‘In proclaiming the individual character of scientific and artistic work. Stirner places himself far below the bourgeoisie. Already in our time it has been found necessary to organize this “individual” activity. Horace Vernet would not have had the time to produce one-tenth of his paintings if he had considered them works which “only this individual can accomplish”. In Paris the tremendous demand for vaudeville and novels has given rise to an organization of labour for the production of these wares, which are at least better, at any rate, than their “individual” competitors in Germany.’ Thus bourgeois society itself makes attempts to organize the higher forms of spiritual labour. ‘Needless to say, however, all these organizations based upon the modem division of labour achieve results which are still very inadequate, and represent an advance only by comparison with the short-sighted self-sufficiency existing until now.’ But we should not confuse this so-called ‘organization of labour’ with communism. In communist society those confounded questions concerning the disparity between highly gifted persons and the masses, disappear. ‘The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in certain individuals, and its consequent suppression in the broad masses of the people, is an effect of the division of labour. Even if in certain social relations everyone could become an excellent painter, that would not prevent everyone from being also an original painter, so that here too the difference between “human” work and “individual” work becomes a mere absurdity. With a communist organization of society, the artist is not confined by the local and national seclusion which ensues solely from the division of labour, nor is the individual confined to one specific art, so that he becomes exclusively a painter, a sculptor, etc.; these very names express sufficiently the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on the division of labour. In a communist society, there are no painters, but at most men who, among other things, so paint.’

Collectivism, far from suppressing personal originality, in reality provides- the only solid ground for an all-sided development of personality. Marx and Engels stated this emphatically in The German Ideology. They knew full well that a new cycle of artistic progress can begin only with the victory of the proletariat, the abolition of private property, the spread of communist relations. Only then can all the forces now exhausted by capitalist oppression be liberated. ‘The destruction of private property is the complete assimilation of all human feelings and characteristics.’ The new society, wrote Marx, in criticism of ‘crude’, leveling communism. does not stand for the ‘abstract negation of all education and civilization’. It does not propose ‘to suppress talent by force’. Quite the contrary, ‘in communist society — the only society in which the original and free development of individuals is no mere phrase — this development is contingent precisely upon the very association of individuals, an association based partly on economic premises, partly upon the necessary solidarity of the free development of all, and finally upon the universal activity of individuals in accordance with the available productive forces. Thus the question here concerns individuals on a definite historical level of development, and not any random individuals…Naturally the consciousness of these individuals with respect to their mutual relations is likewise altogether different, and as remote from the “principle of love” or “dévouement” as from egoism.’

Communist society removes not only the abstract contradiction between ‘work and pleasure’ but also the very real contradiction between feeling and reason, between ‘the play of bodily and mental powers’ and ‘the conscious will’. Together with the abolition of classes and the gradual disappearance of the contradiction between physical and spiritual labour, comes that all-sided development of the whole individual which the ‘greatest social thinkers hitherto could only dream about.’ Only communist society, in which ‘the associated producers regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power’, can establish the material basis for ‘the development of human power which is its own end, the true realm of freedom’. ‘…The shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise.’

According to Marx’s doctrine, therefore, communism creates conditions for the growth of culture and art compared to which the limited opportunities that the slaves’ democracy offers to a privileged few must necessarily seem meagre. Art is dead! LONG LIVE ART! — this is the slogan of Marx’s aesthetics.

You can download the entire book here:

Mikhail Lifshits — The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx

An Interview with the Permaculturist and “Alchemist” Willi Paul, with Ross Wolfe (from April 4th, 2011)

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Ross Wolfe: First things first: an introduction. Perhaps you could tell us a bit about yourself. What kind of work do you do? Could you sketch out, briefly, some of your principal concerns and misgivings regarding modernity?

Willi Paul: My work is to publish and teach thru my network that includes Planetshifter.com Magazine, openmythsource.com – and a new site called sacredpermaculture.net – to support a post crash transition and to help the build a healthy planet for all life on future Earth. I am almost finished with my first two tools for a sacred permaculture: a new symbolic language for the coming tribes and a second myth generator.

Modernity is not a word I use these days but my reaction to the present slate of war making, materialism, greed and lack for human respect is as follows:

Technology will not save us.
Big business really only cares about their profits. The environment is either a greenwash advert or a cost of making profits.
The environment is only here to serve our material needs.
The lack of a common definition and actionizing around the sacred will be our downfall.
All of the traditional religions – west and the east – have failed us and need to be replaced by a global, Nature-base spirituality.

RW: You have mentioned in a comment on my blog that “[a] dire lack of the sacred is the real crisis.” In Rudolf Otto’s 1920 work, The Idea of the Holy, he described the holy or the sacred as that which is numinous, as that which stood under the aspect of the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans. For him, the experience of the sacred included elements of awefulness (literally “filled with awe”), overpoweringness (majestas), and dire urgency. Not only that, but that the feeling was also “wholly other,” as that which feels completely otherworldly, beyond description. At the same time, however, the sacred fascinates the subject who experiences it as well.

Otto diagnosed that the modern age suffered from an acute lack of this feeling of the holy, the sacred, as if the world had been desacralized. So it would seem that your belief that the crisis of our age is its universal profanity has some precedent. In light of Otto’s description, how exactly would you define “the sacred”? How does one experience the sacred? Finally, how does the sacred manifest itself in the world? In objects, practices, or flights of fancy?

WP: My own understanding and practice of the sacred has evolved from my 300+ interviews with thought leaders on PlanetShifter.com Magazine. I seem to be working around the edges of a new definition – please see my model of the sacred:

The best that I can offer today is that the way to the sacred is an integration between new myths, permaculture and several new types of alchemy. To be honest, I am seeking a new sacred, without the dogma, brain-dead ritual or money-centered traditions of traditional religions.

I feel something sacred coming now, perhaps through the soil, the stars or our empowered hearts. We need to work the new sacred and be open to a new consciousness that comes with it. Think Nature as sacred for now.

RW: You have said, furthermore, that “a new alchemy/mythology for a sacred in permaculture has my heart,” that this is one of your primary motivations. Let us begin with the subject of alchemy. What is your definition of “alchemy”? What is its relation to the long alchemical tradition of past ages?

For example, would you agree with the one of the greatest authorities on all things alchemy, the famous alchemist Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, pseudonym Paracelsus, that “[a]lchemy can render poison salubrious”?

Would you furthermore agree with him that the alchemist “understands nature itself as the bearer of a macrocosmic stomach or archeus”?

WP: My leap into things alchemic started with a life changing interview with internationally renowned author, lecturer and alchemist Dennis William Hauck for PlanetShifter.com Magazine.

As my instinct and innovation on this subject evolved, including many sound scape / alchemy experiments, I am now touting the following types of alchemy to support the global leap in consciousness now under way:

Imaginative : This alchemy excites and creates our ideas, conflicts and even prayers in our brains.

Eco : Seeds, soil, plants and animals living, birthing and dying in a inter-related system pulsed by eco alchemy.

Shamanic : This is alchemy transmutates healing through ceremonies and rituals lead by a trained spiritual leader.

Sound or Sonic : The ancient alchemic power of song from cave rants to classical music and rock’n’roll.

Digital : Electronic learning and feeling working with computers including chat text, email and documents.

Community : People working with people: transforming attitudes, sharing ideas and making plans.

Earth : Planetary consciousness building and human evolution on a universal scale.

I would hasten to add here that most of the “stone to gold alchemy” of the past has no interest to me now. Alchemy is transmutation on many levels, a process and not the end result. To me alchemy is a new glue for the revolution.

RW: Moving on to the other element of your statement, let us address the topic of mythology. It was the three Tübingen seminary roommates Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin who first called for the establishment of a new mythology to replace the old, now that the Scientific Revolution had disenchanted nature. They drew up drafts of an early philosophy of mythology. Only Schelling ended up seeing it through, thirty years later.

In Weber’s use of the term, “[I]ncreasing intellectualization and rationalization does not mean increasing general knowledge of the conditions under which we live our lives…It means the knowledge or belief that if we only wanted to we could learn at any time that there are, in principle, no mysterious unpredictable forces in play, but that all things — in principle — can be controlled through calculation. This, however, means the disenchantment of the world. No longer, like the savage, who believed that such forces existed, do we have to resort to magical means to gain control over or pray to the spirits.”

Though capitalism has its metaphysical and fetishistic character in the form of commodities, it has generally led to a further disenchantment of the world. Nothing is sacred to it. Is this why you propose, as many have before, a new mythology? What would this new mythology look like? A potpourri of deities picked and chose from past mythologies, or the invention of entirely new deities? Does it require a story, or mythos?

WP: You can read my six new myths and call me to the carpet for a debate! Children can now write the new myths, using digital and other alchemy. There is no intelligentsia in my mythic vision. The old classic myths are withered and are at best examples of story structure and other authoring principles. Clearly Joseph Campbell’s mythic tools are still as vibrant as ever – initiation, journey and the hero.

As my model clearly shows, new myth + permaculture (a primarily source for new symbols, songs, stories, heros, etc.) + the new alchemies produce the new sacred.

RW: Your work seems to draw heavily upon Bill Mollison’s Gaia Manifesto, as well as a book he authored on permaculture. As you yourself have written, “To me, permaculture is more than design principles like those in sun angles, crop selection, drainage patterns or roof top grasses, and must include a spiritual connection so I journeyed to discover how the Mollison’s ideas juxtapose with the my work in the new alchemy, new Nature-based myths and the search for the sacred.”

Why do you think that some permaculturalists engage in their work without this inchoate feeling of the sacred, without a spiritual dimension? Do you believe that they can ever truly practice permaculture without these components? Would you encourage them to explore the more spiritual side of permaculture, in terms of myth-making and alchemical experimentation?

WP: My new relationship and recent video conversation with Permaculture Editor Maddy Harland has revealed an interesting controversy in the permaculture movement. It seems that many permaculturists in the UK want to stay away from the spiritual aspect of the field due to a concern with the conservative land use laws and government zoning process. I also understand that some do not wish to be seen as Burning Man types.

My position on the sacred in permaculture and the long-term security of the plant have been address already here.

RW: You have furthermore claimed that “[m]agic and mystery remain as dynamic and positive a force for many moving forward.” What do you mean by magic and the mysterious properties of things? How exactly are they registered as a force? Are they demonstrably magical and mysterious? And do they not admit of scientific explanation, which would thereby demystify and disenchant them?

WP: Any “force” that gets us to an sacred, beyond the idiocy in politics, the greed in war making, and the crap on TV is worth considering, yes? It is true that my sacred comes with new beliefs (not science) about environmental protection, imagination (i.e. magic) and the rest of the new consciousness. Humans have much to experience – in a hurry!

RW: You yourself have posed the following questions: “Isn’t Nature inherently sacred to many? Is sacred in Nature a lens that we use to protect her? Obviously Nature is not sacred at all in many traditional religions – she is just a collection of raw materials to use up before the planet blows up and God call some of us to go to Heaven!”

How do you account for those religions that treat Nature as just a source of raw materials to be utilized by mankind? How must the alchemical permaculturalist orient himself (or herself) to these religions? As false? As blasphemous?

WP: We need to get on the same page, forgive the sins of our Fathers and get on with the task of building a new, post-crash future. We need everybody to make this happen. I hope that the hard-core permies will soon be traveling to the backyards of the world to turn over the sod and educate us on the soil alchemies.

We are running out of time.

RW: To what extent do you believe that nature is a thing-in-itself that inherently remands our “respect”? Inversely, to what extent do you believe nature can be fundamentally transformed by the will and technologies of men, who have gained such mastery over the natural world?

WP: I keep hearing me thinking this these days: Nature will survive the crash but it’s the human that will be extinct soon with some practical and global process to a new sacred.

Men + technology = profit + environmental destruction. Period.

RW: Is the central problem of our age spiritual, or does it have to do with the structure of our society? Might the spiritual crisis you detect not be an ideological representation of an underlying problem in our socioeconomic substructure?

WP: Well, to be redundant, profit is the over-arching problem here. I can’t wait to see the rich folks in Hillsborough bartering their processions in the post-crash economy!

RW: Closing now, would you like to add a few words in light of our discussion and interview thus far? What is the overall message you would like to convey to our readers about man’s relationship to nature?

WP: Many in my circle view the current smoldering meanderings from the old myths as in dire need of a refreshed power center – free from the burden of the withering storylines in old plots, online game slaughters, and our twittering kindergardens. My quick scan of mythic sites includes the home page of the Institute for Cultural Change (formerly the Foundation for Mythological Studies), which does mention sustainability, as well as MYTHOS for Creatives, working a global culture-based view. And, of course, Joseph Campbell Foundation is still blessed with the Hero’s Journey and Initiation from Mr. Campbell. But myth needs a new spiritual search engine to go with the Internet. This new story base and vision map is permaculture and the new alchemy and sense of the sacred that comes with it.

— from the April 2011 Joseph Campbell Foundation web site (jcf.org) posting: “Mother, Sun, and the Compost Pile: Integrating Permaculture with the New Alchemy, New Mythologies, and the Sacred” by Willi Paul, Associate