by Samir Amin
I am going to speak here of democratization, not of democracy. The latter, reduced as it is to formulas imposed by the dominant powers, is a farce [...] The electoral farce produces an impotent pseudo-parliament and a government responsible only to the IMF and the WTO, the instruments of the imperialist triad’s monopolies. The democratic farce is then capped off with a “human-rightsish” discourse on the right to protest—on condition that protest never gets close to mounting a real challenge to the supreme power of the monopolies. Beyond that line it is to be labeled “terrorism” and criminalized.
1. The Democratic Fraud Challenges Us to Invent Tomorrow’s Democracy
Universal suffrage is a recent conquest, beginning with workers’
struggles in a few European countries (England, France, Holland, and
Belgium) and then progressively extending throughout the world. Today,
everywhere on the planet, it goes without saying that the demand for
delegating supreme power to an honestly elected, multiparty assembly
defines the democratic aspiration and guarantees its realization—or so
it is claimed.
Marx himself put great hopes on such universal suffrage as a possible
“peaceful path to socialism.” Yet, I have noted that on this score
Marx’s expectations were refuted by history (cf. Marx et la démocratie).
I think that the reason for the failure of electoral democracy to
produce real change is not hard to find: all hitherto existing societies
have been based on a dual system of exploitation of labor (in various
forms) and of concentration of the state’s powers on behalf of the
ruling class. This fundamental reality results in a relative
“depoliticization/disacculturation” of very large segments of society.
And this result, broadly designed and implemented to fulfill the
systemic function expected of it, is simultaneously the condition for
reproduction of the system without changes other than those it can
control and absorb—the condition of its stability. What is called the
“grass roots,” so to speak, signifies a country in deep slumber.
Elections by universal suffrage under these conditions are guaranteed to
produce a sure victory for conservatism, albeit sometimes a “reformist”
conservatism.
This is why never in history has there been real change resulting
from this mode of governance based on “consensus” (i.e. the absence of
change). All changes tending toward real social transformation, even
radical reforms, have resulted from struggles waged by what, in
electoral terms, may appear to be “minorities.” Without the initiative
of such minorities, the motive force of society, no change is possible.
Such struggles, engaged in by such “minorities,” always end up—when the
alternatives proposed are clearly and correctly defined—by carrying
along (previously silent) majorities and may by universal suffrage
receive ratification, which arrives after—never before—victory.
In our contemporary world “consensus” (its boundaries defined by
universal suffrage) is more conservative than ever. In the centers of
the world-system the consensus is pro-imperialist. Not in the sense that
it implies hatred or contempt for the other peoples who are its
victims, but in the everyday sense that the permanence of the flow of
imperialist rent is accepted because that is the condition for overall
social reproduction, the guarantor of its “opulence” in contrast to the
poverty of the others. In the peripheries, the responses of peoples to
the challenge (pauperization resulting from the process of
capitalist/imperialist accumulation) is still muddled, in the sense that
they are fated always to carry with them a dose of retrograde illusions
of a return to a better past.
In these conditions, recourse to “elections” is always conceived by
the dominant powers as the best possible way to rein in the movement, to
end the possibility that the struggles become radicalized. In 1968 some
said that “elections are for assholes,” and that view was not
unconfirmed by the facts. An elected assembly, right away—as today in
Tunisia and Egypt—serves only to put an end to “disorder,” to “restore
stability.” To change everything so that nothing changes.
So should we give up on elections? Not at all. But how to bring
together new, rich, inventive forms of democratization through which
elections can be used in a way other than is conceived by the
conservative forces? Such is the challenge.
The Democratic Farce’s Stage Scenery
This stage scenery was invented by the Founding Fathers of the United
States, with the very clearly expressed intention of keeping electoral
democracy from becoming an instrument that could be used by the people
to call in question the social order based on private property (and
slavery!).
With that in mind, their Constitution was based on (indirect)
election of a president (a sort of “elective monarch”) holding in his
hands some essential powers. Presidential election campaigns under these
conditions naturally gravitate to “bipartisanism,” which tends
progressively to become what it now is: the expression of a “single
party.” Of course, ever since the end of the nineteenth century this has
represented the interest of monopoly capital, addressing itself to
“clienteles” that view themselves as having differing interests.
The democratic fraud then displays itself as offering “alternatives”
(in this case, the Democrats and the Republicans) that cannot ever rise
to the level required by a real alternative (offering the possibility of
new, radically different, options). But without the presence of real
alternative perspectives democracy is nonexistent. The farce is based on
“consensus”(!) ideology, which excludes by definition serious conflicts
between interests and between visions of the future. The invention of
“party primaries” inviting the whole electorate (whether its components
are said to be leftist or rightist!) to express its choices of
candidates for the two false adversaries accentuates still further that
deviation so annihilating for the meaning of elections.
Jean Monnet, a true anti-democrat is honored today in Brussels, where
his intentions to copy the U.S. model were fully understood, as the
founder of the “new European democracy.” Monnet deployed all his
efforts, which were scrupulously implemented in the European Union, to
deprive elected assemblies of their powers and transfer them to
“committees of technocrats.”
To be sure, the democratic fraud works without big problems in the
opulent societies of the imperialist triad (the United States, Western
Europe, and Japan) precisely because it is underwritten by the
imperialist rent (see my book The Law of Worldwide Value). But
its persuasive authority is also bolstered by the consensus
“individualist” ideology; by the respect for “rights” (themselves
acquired by struggles, as we are never told), and by the institution of
an independent judiciary (even though that of the United States is
partially based—as in most of the “sovereign” states—on elected judges
who have to finance their election campaigns by appealing to the ruling
class and its opinion-makers); and by the complex structure of the
pyramidal institutions charged with guaranteeing rights.
Historically, continental Europe has not long experienced the calm
waters of the democratic farce. In the nineteenth century (and even up
to 1945) struggles for democracy, both those inspired by the capitalist
and middle-class bourgeoisies and those expressing the working masses,
ran up against resistance from the anciens régimes. Hence their
chaotic pattern of advances and retreats. Marx thought that such
resistance was an obstacle fortunately unknown in the United States. He
was wrong, and underestimated the extent to which, in a “pure”
capitalist system (like that of the United States in comparison to
Europe) the “overdetermination” of political processes, that is to say
the automatic conformity of changes in the ideological and political
superstructure to those required for management of society by the
capitalist monopolies, would inevitably lead to what conventional
sociologists call “totalitarianism.” This is a term that applies even
more to the capitalist imperialist world than anywhere else. (I here
refer back to what I have written elsewhere about “overdetermination”
and the openings which it makes available.)
In nineteenth century Europe (and also, though to a lesser degree, in
the United States) the historical coalitions put together to ensure the
power of capital were, by the force of circumstance—the diversity of
classes and of sub-classes—complex and changeable. Accordingly,
electoral combats could sometimes appear to be really democratic. But
over time, as the diversity of capitalist coalitions gave way to the
domination of monopoly capital, those appearances dwindled away. The Liberal Virus (as one of my books is titled) did the rest: Europe aligned itself more and more on the U.S. model.
Conflicts among the major capitalist powers helped cement the
components of the historical coalitions, bringing about, by way of
nationalism, the domination of capital. It even happened—Germany and
Italy being particularly exemplary—that “national consensus” was made to
replace the democratic program of the bourgeois revolution.
This deformation of democracy is now virtually complete. The
Communist parties of the Third International tried in their way to
oppose it, even though their “alternative” (modeled on the USSR)
remained of questionable attractiveness. Having failed to build lasting
alternative coalitions, they ended up capitulating—submitting to the
system of democratic electoral farce. So doing, the part of the radical
left consisting of their heirs (in Europe, the “United Left” grouping in
the Strasbourg parliament) gave up any perspective of real “electoral
victory.” It is happy to survive on the second-class seats allotted to
“minorities” (at most 5–10% of the “voting population”). Transformed
into coteries of elected representatives whose sole concern—taking the
place of “strategy”—is to hang on to these wretched places in the
system, this radical left gives up on really being anything of the sort.
That this plays into the hands of neofascist demagogues is, in these
conditions, unsurprising.
A discourse styling itself “postmodernist,” which quite simply
refuses to recognize the scope of the democratic farce’s destructive
effects, incorporates submission to it. What matter elections, they say,
what counts is elsewhere: in “civil society” (a muddled concept to
which I shall return) where individuals are what the liberal virus
claims them—falsely—to be, the active subjects of history. Antonio
Negri’s “philosophy,” which I have criticized elsewhere, is an
expression of this desertion.
But the democratic farce, unchallenged in the opulent societies of
the imperialist triad, does not work in the system’s peripheries. There,
in the storm zone, the established order does not enjoy any legitimacy
sufficient to stabilize society. Does the possibility of a real
alternative then reveal itself in the watermark of the paper on which
the “Southern awakenings” that characterized the twentieth century (and
which go on making their way in the twenty-first century) are written by
history?
Theories and Practices of the Vanguards and of the Enlightened Despotisms
The current storm is not synonymous with revolution, but is only the potential carrier of revolutionary advances.
Not simple are the responses of the peripheral peoples, whether
inspired by radical socialist ideals—at first, anyway (Russia, China,
Vietnam, and Cuba)—or by national liberation and social progress (in
Latin America, in Asia and Africa during the Bandung period). They
bring, to varying degrees, components with a universalist and
progressive outlook together with others of a deeply retrogressive
nature. To unravel the conflicting and/or complementary interferences
among these tendencies will help us to formulate—further on in this
text—some possible forms of genuine democratic advances.
The historical Marxisms of the Third International (Russian
Marxism-Leninism and Chinese Maoism) deliberately and completely
rejected any retrograde outlook. They chose to look toward the future,
in what was in the full sense of the term a universalist emancipating
spirit. This option was undoubtedly made easier, in Russia, by a long
preparatory period in which the (bourgeois) “Westernizers” vanquished
the “Slavophile” and “Eurasian” allies of the autocracy; in China, by
the Taiping Uprising (I here refer you to my work: The Paris Commune and the Taiping Revolution).
At the same time, those historical Marxisms committed themselves to a
certain conceptualization of the role of “vanguards” in social
transformation. They gave an institutionalized form to that option,
symbolized as “The Party.” It cannot be said that this option was
ineffective. Quite to the contrary, it was certainly at the origin of
the victory of those revolutions. The hypothesis that the minority
vanguard would win support from the immense majority proved to be well
founded. But it is equally true that later history showed the limits of
such effectiveness. For it is certain that maintenance of centralized
power in the hands of these “vanguards” was far from uninvolved in the
subsequent derailment of the “socialist” systems that they claimed to
have established.
Did “enlightened despotism” constitute the theory and practice of
those historical Marxisms? One can say so only on condition of
specifying what were and—progressively—became the aims of those
“enlightened despotisms.” In any case, they were resolutely opposed to völkisch
nostalgia. Their behavior in regard to religion—which they viewed as
nothing but obscurantism—testifies to that. I have expressed myself
elsewhere ( “L’internationale de l’obscurantisme”) about the
qualifications which need be appended to that judgment.
The vanguard concept was also broadly adopted elsewhere beyond those
(Chinese and Russian) revolutionary societies. It was the basis for the
Communist parties of the whole world as they existed between 1920 and
1980. It found its place in the contemporary national/populist
third-world regimes.
Moreover, this vanguard concept gave decisive importance to theory
and ideology, implying in turn putting similar importance on the role of
(revolutionary) “intellectuals” or, rather, of the intelligentsia.
“Intelligentsia” is not synonymous with the educated middle classes,
still less with the managers, bureaucrats, technocrats, or professoriate
(in Anglo-Saxon jargon, the “elites”). It refers to a social group that
emerges as such in some societies under specific conditions and becomes
then an active, sometimes decisive, agent. Outside Russia and China,
analogous formations could be recognized in France, in Italy, and
perhaps in other countries—but certainly not in Great Britain, the
United States, nor generally in northern Europe.
In France, during most of the twentieth century, the intelligentsia
held a major place in the country’s history, as, for that matter, is
recognized by the best historians. This was, perhaps, an indirect effect
of the Paris Commune during which the ideal of building a more advanced
stage of civilization beyond capitalism found expression as nowhere
else (see my article on the Commune).
In Italy the post-fascist Communist Party had an analogous function.
As Luciana Castillana lucidly analyzes it, the Communists—a vanguard
strongly supported by the working class but always an electoral
minority—were actually the sole makers of Italian democracy. They
exercised “in opposition”—at the time—a real power in society much
greater than when associated with “government” subsequently! Their
actual suicide, inexplicable otherwise than as result of the mediocrity
of their post-Berlinguer leadership, buried with them both the Italian
State and Italian democracy.
This intelligentsia phenomenon never existed in the United States nor
in Protestant Northern Europe. What is called there “the elite”—the
terminology is significant—scarcely comprises anyone but lackeys
(including “reforming” ones) of the system. The empiricist/pragmatist
philosophy, holding the entire stage as far as social thought is
concerned, has certainly reinforced the conservative effects of the
Protestant Reformation—whose critique I stated in Eurocentrism.
Rudolf Rocker, the German anarchist, is one of the few European
thinkers to have expressed a judgment close to mine; but since Weber
(and despite Marx) it is has been fashionable to unthinkingly celebrate
the Reformation as a progressive advance.
In the peripheral societies in general, beyond the flagrant cases of
Russia and China, and for the same reasons, the initiatives taken by
“vanguards,” often intelligentsia-like, profited from the adhesion and
support of broad popular majorities. The most frequent form of those
political crystallizations whose interventions were decisive for the
“Southern Awakening” was that of populism. A theory and practice scoffed
at by the (Anglo-Saxon style, i.e., pro-system) “elites,” but defended
and accordingly rehabilitated by Ernesto Laclau with solid arguments
that I will very largely make my own.
Of course, there are as many “populisms” as there are historical
experiences that can be called such. Populisms are often linked to
“charismatic” figures whose “thought” is accepted, undiscussed, as
authoritative. The real social and national advances linked to them
under some specific conditions have led me to term them
“national/populist” regimes. But it must be understood that those
advances were never based on ordinary “bourgeois” democratic
practices—still less on the inception of practices going still further,
like those possible ones which I will outline further on in this text.
Such was the case in Ataturk’s Turkey, probably the initiator of this
model in the Middle East, and later in Nasser’s Egypt, the Baathist
(Iraqi and Syrian) regimes in their initial stages, and Algeria under
the FLN. During the 1940s and 1950s, under different conditions, similar
experiments were undertaken in Latin America. This “formula,” because
it answers to real needs and possibilities, is far from having lost its
chance of renewal. So I gladly use the term “national/populist” for
certain ongoing experiments in Latin America without neglecting to point
out that on the level of democratization they have incontestably
entered on advances unknown to those earlier “national/populisms.”
I have put forward analyses dealing with the reasons for the success
of advances realized in this domain by several Middle-Eastern countries
(Afghanistan, South Yemen, Sudan, and Iraq) which appeared more
promising than others, and also the causes of their tragic failures.
Whatever the case, one must be on guard against generalizations and
simplifications like those of most Western commentators, who look only
at the “democracy question” as boiled down to the formula that I have
described as the democratic farce. In the peripheral countries the farce
sometimes appears as a fantastic burlesque. Without being “democrats”
some leaders, charismatic or not, of national/populist regimes have been
progressive “big reformers.” Nasser was exemplary of these. But others
have scarcely been anything but incoherent clowns (Khaddafi) or ordinary
“unenlightened” despots (quite uncharismatic, to boot) like Ben Ali,
Mubarak, and many others. For that matter, those dictators initiated no
national/populist experiments. All they did was to organize the pillage
of their countries by mafias personally associated with them. Thus, like
Suharto and Marcos, they were simply executive agents of the
imperialist powers which, moreover, hailed them and supported their
powers to the very end.
The Ideology of Cultural Nostalgia, Enemy of Democracy
The specific limits of each and of all national/populist experiments
worthy of the name “populist” originate in the objective conditions
characterizing the societies comprising the periphery of today’s
capitalist/imperialist world—conditions obviously diverse. But beyond
that diversity some major converging factors shed some light on the
reasons for those experiments’ successes and then for their
retrogressions.
That aspirations for a “Return to the Past” persist is not the result
of thoroughgoing “backwardness” (as in the usual discourse on this
subject) among the peoples involved. Their persistence gives a correct
measure of the challenge to be confronted. All the peoples and nations
of the peripheries were not only subject to fierce economic exploitation
by imperialist capital: they were, by the same token, equally subjected
to cultural aggression. With the greatest contempt the dignity of their
cultures, their languages, their customs, and their histories were
negated. There is nothing surprising in these victims of external or
internal colonialism (notably the Indian populations of the Americas)
naturally linking their political and social liberation to the
restoration of their national dignity.
But in turn, these legitimate aspirations are a temptation to look
exclusively toward the past in hope of there finding the solution to
today’s and tomorrow’s problems. So there is a real risk of seeing the
movements of awakening and liberation among these peoples getting stuck
in tragic blind alleys as soon as they mistake retrogressive nostalgia
for their sought-for highroad of renewal.
The history of contemporary Egypt illustrates perfectly the
transformation from a necessary complementarity between a universalist
vision open to the future, yet linked to the restoration of past
dignity, into a conflict between two options formulated in absolute
terms: either “Westernize!” (in the common usage of that term, implying
denial of the past) or else (uncritically) “Back To The Past!”
The Viceroy Mohamed Ali (1804–1849) and, until the 1870s, the
Khedives, chose a modernization that would be open to the adoption of
formulas reflecting European models. It cannot be said that this choice
was one of “Westernization” on the cheap. The heads of the Egyptian
state gave the highest importance to modern industrialization of the
country as against merely adopting the European model of consumer
markets. They committed themselves to assimilation of European models,
linking it with renewal of their national culture to whose evolution in a
secular direction it would contribute. Their attempts to support
linguistic renovation bear witness to that. Of course, their European
model was that of capitalism and no doubt they had no accurate
conception of the imperialist nature of European capitalism. But they
should bear no reproach for that. When Khedive Ismail proclaimed his aim
“to make Egypt into a European country,” he was fifty years ahead of
Ataturk. He saw “Europeanization” as part of national rebirth, not as a
renunciation of it.
The inadequacies of that epoch’s cultural Nahda (its
inability to grasp the meaning of the European Renaissance), and the
retrograde nostalgia embodied in its main concepts—on which I have
expressed myself elsewhere—are no mystery.
Indeed, it is precisely this retrograde outlook which was to take
hold over the national-renewal movement at the end of the nineteenth
century. I have put forward an explanation for this: with the defeat of
the “modernist” project that had held the scene from 1800 to 1870 Egypt
was plunged into regression. But the ideology that tried to counter that
decline took shape in this retrogressive period and was marked by all
the birth defects implicit in that fact. Moustapha Kamel and Mohamed
Farid, the founders of the new National Party (Al hisb al watani),
chose back-to-the-past as the focal point of their combat—as their
“Ottomanist” (seeking the support of Istanbul against the English)
illusions, as well as others, reveal.
History was to prove the futility of that option. The popular and
national revolution of 1919–1920 was not led by the Nationalist Party
but by its “modernist” rival, the Wafd. Taha Hussein even adopted the
slogan of Khedive Ismail—“Europeanize Egypt”—and to that end supported
the formation of a new university to marginalize Al Azhar.
The retrograde tendency, legacy of the Nationalist Party, then
slipped into insignificance. Its leader, Ahmad Hussein, was in the 1930s
merely the head of a minuscule, pro-fascist, party. But this tendency
was to undergo a strong revival among the group of “Free Officers” that
overthrew the monarchy in 1952.
The ambiguity of the Nasserist project resulted from this regression
in the debate over the nature of the challenge to be confronted. Nasser
tried to link a certain industrialization-based modernization, once
again not on the cheap, with support to retrograde cultural illusions.
It mattered little that the Nasserists thought of their project as being
within a socialist (obviously beyond a nineteenth century ken)
perspective. Their attraction to völkisch cultural illusion was
always there. This was demonstrated by their choices concerning the
“modernization of Al Azhar,” of which I did a critique.
Currently, the conflict between the “modernist, universalist” visions
of some and the “integrally medievalistic” visions of others holds
center-stage in Egypt. The former are henceforward advocated mainly by
the radical left (in Egypt the communist tradition, powerful in the
immediate years after Second World War) and getting a broad audience
among the enlightened middle classes, the labor unions, and, even more
so, by the new generations. The back-to-the-past vision has slipped even
further to the right with the Muslim Brotherhood, and has adopted its
stance from the most archaic conception of Islam, the Wahhabism promoted
by the Saudis.
It is not very difficult to contrast the evolution that shut Egypt
into its blind alley to the path chosen by China since the Taiping
revolution, taken up and deepened by Maoism: that the construction of
the future starts with radical critique of the past. “Emergence” into
the modern world—and, accordingly, deploying effective responses to its
challenges including entrance onto the path of democratization,
guidelines for which I will put forward further on in this text—has as
its precondition the refusal to allow retrograde cultural nostalgia to
obscure the central focus of renewal.
So it is not by chance that China finds itself at the vanguard of
today’s “emerging” countries. Nor is it by chance that in the Middle
East it is Turkey, not Egypt, that is pedaling in the race. Turkey, even
that of the “Islamist” AKP, profits from Kemalism’s earlier breakaway.
But there is a decisive difference between China and Turkey; China’s
“modernist” option is supposed to reflect a “socialist” perspective (and
China is in a hegemonic conflict with the United States, that is to
say, with the collective imperialism of the Triad) conveying a chance
for progress. While the “modernity” option of today’s Turkey, in which
no escape from the logic of contemporary globalization is envisaged, has
no future. It seems successful, but only provisionally so.
In all the countries of the broader South (the peripheries) the
combination of modernist and retrogressive tendencies, obviously in very
diverse forms, is to be found. The confusion resulting from this
association finds one of its most striking displays in the profusion of
inept discourses about supposed “democratic forms in past societies,”
uncritically praised to the skies. Thus independent India sings praises
to the panchayat, Muslims to the shura, and Africans
to the “Speaking Tree,” as though these outlived social forms had
anything to do with the challenges of the modern world. Is India really
the biggest (in number of voters) democracy in the world? Well, this
electoral democracy is and will remain a farce until radical criticism
of the caste system (a very real legacy of its past) has been carried
through to the end: the abolition of the castes themselves. Shura remains the vehicle for implementation of Sharia (Islamic canonical law), interpreted in that word’s most reactionary sense—the enemy of democracy.
The Latin American peoples are today confronted with the same
problem. It is easy, once one realizes the nature of Iberian internal
colonialism, to understand the legitimacy of the “indigenist” demands.
Still, some of those “indigenist” discourses are very uncritical of the
Indian pasts at issue. But others are indeed critical and propose
concepts linking in a radically progressive way the requirements of
universalism to the potential to be found in the evolution of their
historical legacy. In this regard, the current Bolivian discussions are
probably able to make a rich contribution. François Houtart (El concepto de Sumak Kawsay)
has made an enlightening critical analysis of the indigenist discourse
in question. All ambiguity vanishes in the light of this remarkable
study, which reviews what, as it seems to me, is probably the totality
of discourse on this subject.
The contribution—a negative one—of retrograde cultural illusion in
relation to the construction of the modern world, such as it is, cannot
be attributed primarily to the peoples of the periphery. In Europe,
outside its northwestern quadrant, the bourgeoisies were too weak to
carry out revolutions like those of England and France. The “national”
goal, especially in Germany and Italy and, later, elsewhere in the
eastern and southern parts of the continent, functioned as means of
popular mobilization while screening off the nature of such nationalism
as a compromise, half bourgeois/half ancien régime. The
retrograde cultural illusions in these cases were not so much
“religious” as “ethnic,” and were based on an ethnocentric definition of
the nation (Germany) or on a mythologized reading of Roman history
(Italy). Fascism and Nazism—there is the disaster that illustrates the
arch-reactionary, surely anti-democratic, nature of völkisch cultural nostalgia in its “national” forms.
2. The Universalist Alternative: Full and Authentic Democratization and the Socialist Perspective
I am going to speak here of democratization, not of democracy. The
latter, reduced as it is to formulas imposed by the dominant powers, is a
farce, as I have said (in “The Democratic Fraud Challenges Us to Invent
Tomorrow’s Democracy”—see above). The electoral farce produces an
impotent pseudo-parliament and a government responsible only to the IMF
and the WTO, the instruments of the imperialist triad’s monopolies. The
democratic farce is then capped off with a “human-rightsish” discourse
on the right to protest—on condition that protest never gets close to
mounting a real challenge to the supreme power of the monopolies. Beyond
that line it is to be labeled “terrorism” and criminalized.
Democratization, in contrast, considered as full and complete—that
is, democratization involving all aspects of social life including, of
course, economic management—can only be an unending and unbounded
process, the result of popular struggles and popular inventiveness.
Democratization has no meaning, no reality, unless it mobilizes those
inventive powers in the perspective of building a more advanced stage of
human civilization. Thus, it can never be clothed in a rigid,
formulaic, ready-to-wear outfit. Nevertheless, it is no less necessary
to trace out the governing lines of movement for its general direction
and the definition of the strategic objectives for its possible stages.
The fight for democratization is a combat. It therefore requires
mobilization, organization, strategic vision, tactical sense, choice of
actions, and politicization of struggles. Undoubtedly these forms of
activity cannot be decreed in advance starting from sanctified dogma.
But the need to identify them is unavoidable. For it really is a matter
of driving back the established systems of power with the perspective of
replacing them with a different system of powers. Undoubtedly any
sanctified formula of the revolution which would completely and
at once substitute the power of the people for the capitalist order is
to be abandoned. Revolutionary advances are possible, on the basis of
the development of real, new, people’s powers that would drive back
those power centers that continue to protect the principles underlying
and reproducing social inequality. Besides which, Marx never expounded
any theory of “the great day of revolution and definitive solutions”; to
the contrary, he always insisted that revolution is a long transition
marked by a conflict between powers—the former ones in decline and the
new powers on the rise.
To give up on the question of power is to throw out the baby with the
bathwater. Only someone of extreme naïvete could ever believe that
society can be transformed without destroying, albeit progressively, the
established system of power. As long as the established powers remain
what they are, social change, far from dispossessing them, leaves them
able to co-opt it, to take it over, to make it reinforce, rather than
weaken, capitalist power. The sad fate of environmentalism, made into a
new field for the expansion of capital, bears witness. To dodge the
question of power is to place social movements in a situation in which
they cannot go on the offensive because they are forced to remain on the
defensive in resistance to the attacks of the power-holders who, as
such, retain the initiative. Nothing astonishing, then, in Antonio
Negri, the “prophet” of that modish anti-power litany, fleeing back from
Marx to St. Francis of Assisi, his original starting point. Nor
anything surprising in that his theses should be played up by the New York Times.
I will here put forward several major strategic objectives for the
theoretical and political discussion about social and political
struggles (inseparable one from the other), which must perpetually
confront the practical problems of those struggles, of their successes
and failures.
First of all, to reinforce the powers of workers in their workplaces,
in their daily struggles against capital. That, it is said, is what
they have trade-unions for. Indeed, but only if the unions are real
instrumentalities for struggle—which they scarcely ever are any more,
especially the “big unions” that are supposedly powerful because they
group together large majorities among their target groups of workers.
Such seeming strength derived from numbers is really their weakness,
because those unions believe themselves bound to make only “consensus”
demands that are extremely modest.
What reason is there to be astonished that the working classes of
Germany and Great Britain (called “strong union” countries) have
accepted the drastic downward adjustments imposed by capital over the
course of the last thirty years whereas the “French unions,” grouping as
members only minorities of the class and thus supposedly “weak,” have
better (or less badly) resisted such adjustments? This reality simply
reminds us that organizations of activists, by definition minoritarian
(since it is impossible that the class as a whole should be made up of
activists), are more able than “mass” (and thus made up largely of
non-activists) unions to lead majorities into struggle.
Another possible field of struggle to establish new forms of power is
that of local government. I certainly want to avoid hasty
generalizations in this area—either by affirming that decentralization
is always a gain for democracy or, on the other hand, that
centralization is needed to “change the power-structure.”
Decentralization may well be co-opted by “local notables,” often no less
reactionary than the agents of the central power. But it can also, as a
result of the strategic actions of progressive forces in struggle and
of local conditions—sometimes favorable, sometimes unfavorable—fill out
or substitute for general advances in the creation of new popular power
structures.
The Paris Commune understood this and so projected a federation of
Communes. The communards knew that on this question they were carrying
forward the tradition of the Mountain (Jacobins) of Year One (1793). For
the latter, contrary to what is unreflectingly said (how often do we
hear that the Jacobin “centralists” completed the work of the
Monarchy!), were federalists (is the Fête de la Fédération to be
forgotten?). “Centralization” was the later work of the Thermidorian
Reaction, capped off by Bonaparte.
But “decentralization” is still a dubious term if it is counterposed
as an absolute to another absolute, that of “centralization.” The
challenge confronting the struggle for democratization is to link the
two concepts to each other.
The problem of multiple—local and central—power centers is of crucial
importance for those countries that, for various historical reasons,
exist as heterogeneous agglomerations. In the Andean countries, and more
generally in “Latin America”—which ought to be termed Indo/Afro/Latin
America—the construction of specific power structures (“specific” here
denoting that they are endowed with areas of genuine autonomy) is the
necessary condition for the rebirth of the Indian nations, without which
social emancipation has scarcely any meaning.
Feminism and environmentalism are likewise fields of conflict between
social forces whose perspective is that of overall social emancipation
and the conservative or reformist power centers consecrated to the
perpetuation of the conditions for perpetual reproduction of the
capitalist system. It is certainly out of place to treat them as
“specialized” struggles, because the apparently specialized demands that
they put forward are inseparable from overall social transformation.
However, not all movements that consider themselves feminist or
environmentalist see matters that way.
Coherent linkage of struggles in the diverse fields mentioned here—as
well as others—requires constructing institutionalized forms of their
interdependence. It is a matter, again, of displaying creative
imagination. There is no need to wait for permission from the actual
laws to start setting up institutionalized systems (informal, maybe
“illegal”), by permanent and de facto compulsory employer/employee
negotiation, for example, to impose equality between men and women, or
to subject all important public or private investment decisions to
thorough environmental review.
Real advances in the directions here advocated would create a duality
of powers—like that which Marx envisioned for the long socialist
transition to the higher stage of human civilization, communism. They
would allow elections by universal suffrage to go in a direction quite
different from that offered by democracy-as-farce. But in this case, as
in others, truly meaningful elections can take place only after victory,
not before.
The propositions put forward here—and many other possible ones—have
no place in the dominant discourse about “civil society.” Rather, they
run counter to that discourse which—rather like “postmodernist” ravings à
la Negri—is the direct heir of the U.S. “consensus” ideological
tradition. A discourse promoted, uncritically repeated, by tens of
thousands of NGOs and by their requisite representatives at all the
Social Forums. We’re dealing with an ideology that accepts the existing
regime (i.e. monopoly capitalism) in all its essentials. It thus has a
useful role to play on behalf of capitalist power. It keeps its gears
provided with oil. It pretends to “change the world” while promoting a
sort of “opposition” with no power to change anything.
Three Conclusions
1.) The virus of liberalism still has devastating effects. It has
resulted in an “ideological adjustment” perfectly fitted to promoting
the expansion of capitalism, an expansion becoming ever more barbaric.
It has persuaded big majorities, even among the younger generation, that
they have to content themselves with “living in the present moment,” to
grasp whatever is immediately at hand, to forget the past, and to pay
no heed to the future—on the pretext that utopian imaginings might
produce monsters. It has convinced them that the established system
allows “the flourishing of the individual” (which it really does not).
Pretentious, supposedly novel, academic formulations—“postmodernism,”
“postcolonialism,” “cultural studies,” Negri-like animadversions—confer
patents of legitimacy to capitulation of the critical spirit and the
inventive imagination.
The disarray stemming from such interiorized submission is certainly
among the causes of the “religious revival.” By that I refer to the
recrudescence of conservative and reactionary interpretations, religious
and quasi-religious, ritualistic and “communitarian.” As I have
written, the One God (monotheism) remarries with alacrity the One Mammon
(moneytheism). Of course I exclude from this judgment those
interpretations of religion that deploy their sense of spirituality to
justify taking sides with all social forces struggling for emancipation.
But the former are dominant, the latter a minority and often
marginalized. Other, no less reactionary, ideological formulas make up
in the same way for the void left by the liberal virus. Of this,
“nationalisms” and ethnic or quasi-ethnic communalisms are splendid
examples.
2.) Diversity is, most fortunately, one of the world’s finest
realities. But its thoughtless praise entails dangerous confusions. For
my part, I have suggested making conspicuous the heritage-diversities
which are what they are, and can only be distinguished as positive for
the project of emancipation after being critically examined. I want to
avoid confusing such diversity of heritage with the diversity of
formulations that look toward invention of the future and toward
emancipation. For in that regard there is as much diversity both of
analyses, with their underlying cultural and ideological bases, and of
proposals for strategic lines of struggle.
The First International counted Marx, Bakunin, and followers of
Proudhon within its ranks. A fifth international will likewise have to
choose diversity as its trump suit. I envisage that it cannot “exclude”:
it must be a regroupment of the various schools of Marxists (including
even marked “dogmatists”); of authentic radical reformers who
nevertheless prefer to concentrate on goals that are possible in the
short term, rather than on distant perspectives; of liberation
theologians; of thinkers and activists promoting national renewal within
the perspective of universal emancipation; and of feminists and
environmentalists who likewise are committed to that perspective. To
become clearly conscious of the imperialist nature of the established
system is the fundamental condition without which there is no
possibility of such a regroupment of activists really working together
for a single cause. A fifth international cannot but be clearly
anti-imperialist. It cannot content itself with remaining at the level
of “humanitarian” interventions like those that the dominant powers
offer in place of solidarity and support to the liberation struggles of
the periphery’s peoples, nations, and states. And even beyond such
regroupment, broad alliances will have to be sought with all democratic
forces and movements struggling against democracy-farce’s betrayals.
3.) If I insist on the anti-imperialist dimension of the combat to be
waged, it is because that is the condition without which no convergence
is possible between the struggles within the North and those within the
South of the planet. I have already said that the weakness—and that is
the least one can say—of Northern anti-imperialist consciousness was the
main reason for the limited nature of the advances that the periphery’s
peoples have hitherto been able to realize, and then of their
retrogression.
The construction of a perspective of convergent struggles runs up
against difficulties whose mortal peril to it must not be
underestimated.
In the North it runs up against the still broad adhesion to the
consensus ideology that legitimizes the democratic farce and is made
acceptable thanks to the corrupting effects of the imperialist rent.
Nevertheless, the ongoing offensive of monopoly capital against the
Northern workers themselves might well help them to become conscious
that the imperialist monopolies are indeed their common enemy.
Will the unfolding movements toward organized and politicized
reconstruction go so far as to understand and teach that the capitalist
monopolies are to be expropriated, nationalized in order to be
socialized? Until that breaking point has been reached the ultimate
power of the capitalist/imperialist monopolies will remain untouched.
Any defeats that the South might inflict on those monopolies, reducing
the amounts siphoned from them in imperialist rent, can only increase
the chances of Northern peoples getting out of their rut.
But in the South it still runs up against conflicting expressions of
an envisioned future: universalist or backward-looking? Until that
conflict has been decided in favor of the former, whatever the Southern
peoples might gain in their liberation struggles will remain fragile,
limited, and vulnerable.
Only serious advances North and South in the directions here
indicated will make it possible for the progressive historic bloc to be
born.
List of suggested additional readings
- Hassan Riad, L’Egypte nassérienne (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964).
- Samir Amin, La nation arabe (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1976).
- —, A Life Looking Forward, Memoirs of an Independent Marxist (London: Zed Books, 2006).
- —, L’éveil du Sud (Paris: Le temps des cerises, 2008). The reader will find there my interpretations of the achievements of the viceroy Muhammad Ali (1805–1848) and of the Khedives who succeeded him, especially Ismail (1867–1879); of the Wafd (1920–1952); of the positions taken by Egyptian communists in regard to Nasserism; and of the deviation represented by the Nahda from Afghani to Rachid Reda.
- Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (NY: Metropolitan Books, 2009).
- The best analysis of the components of political Islam (Rachid Reda, the Muslim Brotherhood, the modern Salafists).
Concerning the relationship between the North/South conflict and the
opposition between the beginning of a socialist transition and the
strategic organization of capitalism, see:
- Samir Amin, La crise, sortir de la crise du capitalisme ou sortir du capitalisme en crise? (Paris: Le Temps des Cerises, 2009).
- —, The Law of Worldwide Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).
- —, The World We Wish to See (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
- —, “The Trajectory of Historical Capitalism and Marxism’s Tricontinental Vocation,” Monthly Review, 62, no. 9 (February 2011).
- Gilbert Achcar, Le choc des barbaries. Bruxelles (Paris: Complexe, 2011)
Source: Monthly Review
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