Traian Bãsescu comes to SF/ an Indy Romania perspective

( Note: For this interested in recent developments in street level activism, tactical media, and wide-spectrum left thinking, Joanne Richardson is also editor of the new Autonomedia book, ANARCHITEXTS. Features an incredible assemblage of eastern european underground voices and networks that will instantly make you feel rejuvenated by collective ingenuity. Available at Modern Times Bookstore.)
http://www.mtbs.com
http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/


The Radical Left in the Postcommunist Epoch
Joanne Richardson (jori [at] riseup.net)

This is the first of a three-part series of essays written for Indymedia
Romania by a member of the editorial collective. It argues that the
radical left begins from an affirmation of the real democratization of the
economy, politics and culture, which means rejecting both postcommunism
and communism. This democratization is based on a unity of principles, not
on sharing identical visions, practices or goals.


They say we had a revolution in Romania. Ceausescu was executed. And with
his death, a society of bureaucratic privilege and control over the
economy, politics, culture and most details of daily life began to wither
away. According to the cliché that now passes for a self-evident truth,
the left = communism = totalitarianism = antidemocratic. After 1989,
public opinion was unified in praising the new “right” wing government
that came to power in the wake of Ceausescu’s regime because whatever was
not communist had to be on the side of freedom and democracy. But then it
turned out that Iliescu was a small doll inside a Ceausescu matrioshka,
and the Social Democratic Party (PSD) was a minor facelift of the old
“left” since it exploited the economy for its own advantage, it rigged
free elections and referendums, and it had the media very firmly in its
claws. So now, in 2005, public opinion is in agreement again. The new
“right” wing opposition to PSD that came to power (the alliance of the
Liberal and the Democratic Parties, also known as the alliance of justice
and truth) is praised because whatever is not leftist/PSD must be on the
side of freedom and democracy. Especially since this new right supports
privatization more than its predecessor, advocating state deregulation in
favor of the invisible brain of the market, which will, if left to its own
devices, bring about more economic prosperity for everyone. And utopia is
just around the corner, in 2007.

But a strange contradiction plagues public consciousness. The Great
Romania Party (PRM) is also a party of the “right,” to be precise: the
extreme right. And this confounds the clichéd definitions because in this
context an overdose of the right (an excess of freedom and democracy?)
becomes synonymous with an authoritarian, antidemocratic and xenophobic
worldview that blames the minorities and foreigners for everything that
stands in the way of realizing its homegrown nationalist utopia. This
“alternative” utopia, which yearns for the simplicity of a vanished past,
is founded on the purity and divine mission of the Romanian soul, which
will, if left to its own devices, prove capable of resisting all the evil
conspiracies perpetrated by Israel, American popular culture and the new
bureaucracy in Brussels. So does “right” mean democratic and globalist or
authoritarian and nationalist? Or is this a false dilemma distracting us
from more profound questions?

>>> NEOLIBERALISM & THE POSTCOMMUNIST CONDITION

For decades a deep crisis about the meaning of the left and the right had
been boiling, and after 1989 it spilled to the surface. The crisis was
nowhere as prevalent or as extensive as among the populations of the
former communist countries. Many activists and theorists from North and
South America and Western and Northern Europe shared a history and
understanding of the left (anarchism, antiauthoritarianism, feminism, the
cultural movements against consumer culture, the student movement and the
creation of antiuniversities, ecological struggles …) that differed from
the doctrines of Marxism-Leninism and the policies of the actually
existing communist states. With a few lonely exceptions, this alternative
history was missing in the “eastern bloc.” Systematic disinformation
campaigns by the communist apparatus assured that the “left” was
understood simply as its own de facto power by suppressing its much
broader meaning throughout history. This one-sided view of the left, which
was the legacy inherited from the communist past, was compounded by a new
mystification enforced by the neoliberal present – a strange understanding
of what the “postcommunist” transition was all about. In retrospect,
creating a widespread confusion about the meaning of the left and right
seems to have been the ideological goal of postcommunism, even though it
tried so hard to portray itself as free of all ideologies. On the surface,
“postcommunism” was just a neutral description, a geographical marker that
referred to those countries that used to be communist. During the 1990s it
was used interchangeably with “transition” to talk about places that were
in an intermediary stage of transiting from communism to something else.
But beneath the surface, the postcommunist label was an important element
of the new language of neoliberalism, and was heavily weighed down by
unexamined prejudices and value judgments. The transition in question did
not simply refer to an amorphous limbo, but to a process with clearly
defined outcomes. It meant a transition from political dictatorship and
planned economy to the model societies of the West, with their conjugal
pillars of electoral democracy and the “free” capitalist market.

The way this marriage between democracy and the market has recently been
portrayed is only partly indebted to the liberal philosophy that inspired
the modern revolutions in America and France, which abolished monarchical
sovereignty and resurrected that strange being which had haunted politics
from the time of ancient Athens and Rome – the citizen. Citizenship in the
Greek city-states had meant direct participation in public assemblies to
debate and decide collectively about laws and affairs in the public
interest. But the modern notions of citizenship leaned more toward the
legalistic, constitutional framework of the Roman Republic than the
Athenian model of deliberative democracy. The authors of the American
Constitution distinguished republicanism, understood as a government of
majority rule through elected representatives, from “pure democracy,”
understood as “a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who
assemble and administer the government in person.” They considered a pure
democracy to be both impractical in a large society and politically
dangerous. And so liberal democracy came to be defined primarily in legal
and administrative terms, as the equal rights of citizens before the law
and as the freedom of individuals to choose their representatives.
Classical liberalism portrayed democracy and the market as linked, but
indirectly, through their separation into autonomous spheres which assured
that they moved in parallel but according to different rules. The
political order of things was characterized by human rights, freedom of
expression, freedom of association, universal suffrage (eventually), and a
multi-party government of representatives. The economic order of things
was characterized by private property, freedom of enterprise, and wars of
competition. Since democracy was reduced to political administration and
economics was a separate sphere dictated by different principles and other
invisible hands, the modern citizen became the naked contradiction of
history: politically free to vote and simultaneously trapped in economic
bondage. Democracy and the market were a strange, incompatible couple
since the principles of freedom of choice that guided the political sphere
were immediately invalidated in the economic sphere, where no one elected
their bosses or chose the rules of factory discipline. The recognition of
this contradiction gave birth to social struggles that attempted to
achieve a more equitable balance between the economy and politics by
calling upon the state to protect citizens whenever their rights were
threatened by the market. These struggles included extending the right to
association and free expression into the factories through the
legalization of unions and strikes, and demanding, against the logic of
the capitalist market, that people should be guaranteed rights to basic
necessities like water, food, housing, medical care and education. Liberal
theorists and politicians gradually recognized that economic rights were
also needed to give a concrete substance to political rights.

But today there is something very different about the way the ideas of
democracy and the market are linked together. The separation into
autonomous spheres has vanished, and not because of the recognition of a
more profound homology between them or because of the desire to resolve
the contradictions resulting from their union. It has vanished because
democracy has been completely swallowed up by the market. Neoliberalism -
as the ideology of the global corporations which rule the world and seek
to conserve their economic and political privilege - portrays the market
as the ultimate goal of life and as the universal law that has replaced
all ethical principles. The neoliberal universe is a world in which every
action is a market transaction and everything exists only to serve the
market. Nations are markets for investment, cultures are commodities to be
traded, and market persons with market values live in order to market
themselves to each other. This is the reason why there has been such a
recent inflation of interpretations of the world according to market
metaphors. Margaret Thatcher portrayed universities as businesses selling
knowledge and judged the public university system in England inadequate
for turning a profit. Adrian Bold, the chief architect of Bucharest,
argued that the city must become a better advertising slogan: “Bucharest
has an image problem … it doesn’t help attract investors.” A few years
ago, the government of Argentina described the entire country as a
gigantic business firm and asked what was the best course to maximize
profits. In this version of market fundamentalism, the market has become
the necessary and sufficient condition for democracy, and democracy, in
the last instance, will always lead to the market.

As a political worldview and a specific set of economic policies, such as
price liberalization, state deregulation, and privatization of public
goods and services, neoliberalism did not arise by chance no matter how
natural and inevitable its supporters try to make it appear. It originated
during the cold war with a group of conservative American think tanks that
spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, lobbying and
enforcing their agenda. The three most important of these think tanks -
the Heritage Foundation (whose board includes the brother of the
president), the American Enterprise Institute (whose board includes the
wife of the vice president) and the Cato Institute (led by the former CEO
of Enron) – have tremendous political influence and also serve as media
watchdogs, retaliating against television stations and newspapers whenever
the press says something they don’t like. The expansion of neoliberalism
from the US to the rest of the world was made possible by supra-national
institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and
the World Trade Organization. These institutions assure that developing
nations will fall into step with the Washington Consensus - by giving
loans that require “structural adjustments” such as decreasing domestic
expenditures, increasing exports, privatizing state services, cutting
health and education, and even changing the constitution if necessary
(like Mexico did in 1992) - and they maintain not a “free” global market
but a system of trade inequalities by imposing tariff barriers that are up
to four times higher for poor countries than for wealthy nations.

Seen in its historical context, neoliberalism is a continuation of the
cold war anticommunist propaganda, reinterpreted after 1989 to mean that
all forms of state regulation are totalitarian, therefore any communist
regime, and, by extension, any social democracy or welfare state, is
inevitably doomed to failure. Postcommunism is not invoked as a
geographical label or a factual description of countries where communism
has ended, but as the necessary premise justifying the neoliberal
worldview. It is an expression of fatality and historical necessity, just
as much as communism ever was. The conclusion that democracy can only be
attained by “liberating” the market from the tyranny of the state is
something like the story about the musical competition in which the first
contestant was so bad that as soon as she stopped singing the judges gave
the prize to the second contestant without hearing a single note. Whether
this “liberation” of the market is synonymous with democracy, understood
even in the most limited sense as being in the interest of the majority of
people, depends on who and what is being liberated.

Price liberalization has meant removing price controls and limitations set
by the government, which had assured that things like housing, utilities
and transportation remained at a level that was affordable to the poorest
and most numerous segments of society. The liberalization of prices on low
income housing in the US during the 1980s, coupled with the cutting of
federal subsidies, led to a dramatic increase in homelessness. Reagan
answered his critics on national television with his notorious
blame-the-victim approach, claiming that the homeless are homeless by
choice and the government should stay out of it. The liberalization of
prices in the former communist countries after 1989 led to triple and
quadruple digit inflation, placing food, housing, electricity and heat
beyond affordability for a large number of people. Even an observer as
neutral as the World Bank admitted that after experiencing an astronomical
rate of inflation due to price liberalization, more than half of the
Russian population was living below the minimum level of subsistence at
the turn of the millennium.

State deregulation is a strange euphemism. It doesn’t really mean the
removal of government regulations, since the market is always regulated.
It means changing the previous regulations, which had included minimal
protections for the interest of citizens, to new regulations that protect
the interests of big business and pave the road for monopolies. One of the
most spectacular examples of “deregulation” in the US has been the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, which overturned the laws of the Federal
Communication Commission, which was created in 1934 to assure that the
mass-media serves the public interest and is safeguarded against
commercial monopolies. The new legislation removed the limitation on the
maximum number of 40 radio stations that could be owned by the same
company. The effect was huge consolidations. Clear Channel, whose top
executive is a business partner of G.W. Bush, acquired more than 1,200
radio stations across the US. Clear Channel recently became infamous for
banning their radio stations from playing songs by the Dixie Chicks after
a member of the musical group publicly criticized Bush’s policies. After
1996, the ownership limitations on television stations and newspapers were
also “deregulated,” which resulted in the spectacular media mergers of the
new millennium that now allow a handful of media corporations (Time
Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation, Vivendi) to control almost
everything that Americans read, hear and see. Similar media deregulation
has already spread to Europe and parts of Asia.

Privatization is usually associated with selling state-owned enterprises
and public services - banks, heavy industry, telecommunications,
railroads, gas, electricity, water, postal service, prisons, schools and
hospitals – to private people, if by private people we understand
corporations with billions in assets. Although privatization is usually
invoked as a necessary step in breaking the state monopoly in order to
foster more competition, greater efficiency and lower costs, the effects
are frequently the opposite. The privatization of water in Bolivia, which
was sold by the government to the American company Bechtel, meant that the
people in Cochabamba who had built the city’s water irrigation system with
their own hands were required to pay exorbitant prices - equal to a
quarter of their monthly salaries - to the foreign company that bought the
rights to their water. The citizens of the city, who organized massive
demonstrations and a general strike in protest of the privatization,
explained that from their point of view the problem was very simple: “The
Bolivian government would rather respond to the directives of the World
Bank than take into account what the people themselves consider to be
their needs … We, with respect to water, want to decide for ourselves:
this is what we call democracy.” Many of the things which used to be
public - cultural works passed down through history, the knowledge stored
in libraries and museums, the land of public parks and the resources of
nature – are being plundered and sold off as private assets, which means
they will no longer be used for the benefit of the large majority of
people but for the profit of a small, wealthy minority. Privatization is a
hypocritical name for this process.

The neoliberal definition of “liberating” the market is not about freedom
for most people who participate in the market, but about winning freedoms
for the wealthiest corporations who dominate the market at the expense of
dismantling the safeguards achieved by previous social struggles - like
welfare programs, job safety regulations, price controls and environmental
protections. In this sense, neoliberalism bears little resemblance to the
liberal philosophy of the Enlightenment, which was based on ideas of
citizenship and social contracts, and assumed that governments were under
popular control and had certain duties and responsibilities towards the
citizens who elected them. By contrast, the transnational corporations
driving the process of globalization are unelected and unaccountable
private powers that have no sense of duty or responsibility except to
their investors. It’s not that nation-states have vanished in this
picture, as proponents of globalization have celebrated, but that states
have been restructured and networked with each other to support the
interests of transnational business rather than citizen’s social and
economic rights. Neoliberalism may be invoked as a step forward in the
march of progress because it has deterritorialized the state, but it is
more honest to see it as a regression to the days of robber baron
capitalists and social Darwinists who believed the only rule of the market
was the survival of the fittest members of the species. The difference is
that now we’re being sold the idea that nothing exists outside this
market.

Postcommunism has played an important role in reinforcing neoliberal
political theories about the separation of state and market and
corresponding economic policies of liberalization, deregulation and
privatization. But aside from its political and economic dimensions,
postcommunism is also a normalizing discourse about disease and health
that harbors a tacit ethical imperative. This is obvious from the most
condescending metaphor of “shock therapy” that was used to describe the
policies of the transition during the 1990s. Homo socialisticus was judged
crazy, and like a mental patient beyond the point of no return, it needed
to be etherized on a table and electroshocked in order to be brought back
to a state of “normalcy.” Today most self-respecting Romanian
intellectuals have internalized this language of pathology and never get
tired of talking about normalization. Envious of people from “normal”
countries and denouncing their own miserable fate, they affirm that we in
the East really are crazy like they say and we eagerly await the day when
we will finally become normal. It would be nonsense to deny that remnants
of the past such as bribes and favors, an incomprehensible bureaucracy,
and a completely inefficient service sector continue to thrive and are
responsible for many of the problems of the present. But what’s hidden
behind “postcommunism” and the language of “normalization” is the
assumption that everything that’s going wrong today is purely the product
of hangovers from the communist past. The visible defects of the
transition to capitalism are attributed to the defects of communism; they
are not viewed as flaws of capitalism but as flaws of not having enough
capitalism and of not having it quickly enough. It’s assumed that the
defects cannot be the result of a “shock therapy” that crippled many
industries, created a new class of oligarchs, resulted in a decline in
living standards and life expectancy, and led to inflation, unemployment,
homelessness, mass migration, and the most spectacular drop in GDP ever
seen, from which more than half of the former communist countries have
still not yet recovered. And the defects cannot be the result of the
strange logic of leading economists of the US Treasury, the World Bank and
the IMF, who reasoned that it was necessary for the planned economies (of
their former enemies) to hit absolute bottom, endure a complete shock,
drag their populations through the “valley of tears,” in order to rise
from their ashes and finally catch up with the prosperity of the West. In
the center of global capitalism the dissatisfaction is greater and the
criticisms of neoliberal policies is more intensely felt. The dismantling
of social safety nets, the abolition of price controls and the
privatization of public goods and services are recognized as the leading
problem since there is no dark and disreputable past to pin the blame on.
But in the postcommunist periphery all the problems of the present are
experienced as the lack of a proper global capitalist market, not as its
excesses.

The imbalanced megaphone of the mass-media amplifies this confusion by
feeding people the idea that democracy is synonymous with global
capitalism and by portraying all critiques of this best of all possible
worlds as nostalgia for communist dictatorship or as the terribilism of
youth. Any critique of capitalism and its neoliberal mutation produces an
instant hysteria in the press and among prominent intellectuals. A recent
article appearing in Romania Libera denounced the antiglobalization,
syndicalist and environmental movements as symptoms of a pathological
desire to return to communism and a rejection of the democratic principles
common to open societies
(http://romania.indymedia.org/ro/2005/07/921.shtml). Dorina Nastase of
CRGS, one of the main organizers of an event in Bucharest that called
itself the “Romanian Social Forum,” responded to criticisms that this
so-called social forum was a bureaucratic, elitist affair that invited the
neoliberal politicians currently in power, that it was organized from
above without any grassroots participation from below, and that it lacked
openness and transparency because it did not have any publicly available
information - by denouncing her critics as “Stalinists”
(http://romania.indymedia.org/ro/2005/05/829.shtml). Labeling a call for
openness, transparency, and participative democracy a symptom of a return
to the “Stalinism” of the Ceausescu era not only flies in the face of the
most elementary rules of definition and logic, but it ignores the
immediate Romanian context. The Ceausescu regime may have been
totalitarian (because it controlled all aspects of daily life) and
bureaucratic (because it was based on a chain of substitutions and
privilege), but it was not exactly “Stalinist” since Ceausescu broke with
the patronage and directives of the Soviet Union in the 1960s. But small
details like this have a way of getting lost in an attempt to paint the
big ideological picture, which, having memorized by heart all the clichés
of American cold war discourse, can only distinguish between two possible
alternatives: there is capitalism on the one hand and everything else is
Stalinism.

>>> A RADICAL DEFINITION OF THE LEFT

The wisdom of market society is to enslave us precisely when we believe we
are absolutely free in our choices. And it doesn’t matter if what we
choose is a soft-drink or a predictable form of behavior. Consuming
ideology, like the need to consume anything at all is what counts. The
content is increasingly irrelevant so long as we distance ourselves from
our own desires and thoughts by loosing ourselves in an identification
with stereotypes and one-dimensional scripts. The stereotypes about the
left and right are an example of a fatality that has become a pretext for
not thinking and an excuse for passive resignation. In the middle of this
chaos it’s too easy to throw up our hands and decide to refuse talking
about the left and the right anymore because the words have become
hopelessly confused and compromised. This refusal is the most prevalent
answer adopted by Romanian “postmodern dandies” who proclaim they want
“absolutely nothing to do with being ‘right’ or ‘left’” because they have
become enlightened and “FREED from passe ideologies”
(http://romania.indymedia.org/ro/2004/11/510.shtml). This freedom is
usually synonymous with internalizing the most basic banalities about
individuality, uniqueness, multiplicity and difference from the language
of television advertising. On the contrary, the present confusion should
be used as an opportunity for reflection, a starting-point for rejecting
the dominant clichés and simplistic categories and asking again what is
expressed by “left” and “right” in their most radical sense. And “radical”
has nothing to do with being extremist or harboring a predisposition
toward violence or dogmatically refusing to listen to opposing ideas. It
means, as it should be clear from the etymology of the word, being close
to the root of the thing, understanding the problem on its most
fundamental level.

When “left” and “right” were first used as political categories in the
Legislative Assembly at the onset of the French Revolution their meaning
was absolutely simple. Those who sat on the right side of the room were
the royalists defending the privileges of the crown and church and those
who sat on the left opposed the power of the aristocratic elites and
called for democratic rights for the more numerous and less economically
privileged. The political situation has changed countless times since then
and the elites who now hold power are no longer aristocrats or priests.
But the basic distinction remains. In the simplest possible terms to be on
the “left” means to criticize the economic privilege and political power
of an elite minority who exploits the rest of the population and to affirm
the right of the more numerous and less privileged for self-determination
– in other words, the real democratization of the economy, politics and
culture.

A real democratization of the economy means that the people who produce
and consume goods should set the rules of production, the prices of goods
and the conditions of exchange. This is impossible in a global capitalist
market, which is not a “free” market but a cartel of transnational
monopolies – what Manuel de Landa calls “antimarkets” - that manipulate
the laws of supply and demand and use advertising to create false desires.
While celebrations of the actually existing “free” market are either
really naïve or extremely opportunistic, the Marxist prejudice that all
markets and all forms of exchange are inherently bad is equally stupid.
Free markets would be good. Unfortunately they exist in very few places,
and as anachronistic exceptions to the dominant rule. When we buy cheese
at a local market directly from the farmer who produces it, this
approximates, as much as is possible under the current system of
production, a free exchange without intermediaries. And this is very
different from shopping for Kraft American cheese at the Metro or Billa
chain. When the producers of free software go to meetings to show their
products and exchange them with each other, without money as a general
equivalent or advertising and manipulation, simply offering practical
information about which software corresponds to which needs, this is a
free market. And this is very different from buying a Microsoft operating
system that forces us to use their browser and their media player and
prevents us from choosing any alternative. There is nothing free either
about the labor conditions under which the Microsoft code was produced or
the repressive restrictions on how we are allowed to use it. There are
many economic alternatives that promote non-coercive modes of production
and free exchange, from non-profit cooperatives, to solidarity based
economies, factories occupied and managed by workers, fair trade
initiatives, and local area trading systems.

But it is not enough to create isolated economic alternatives; it is also
necessary to struggle to break the current monopoly by corporations and
governments over the political power of decision-making. It has already
become a cynical truism that elections are not in the hands of individual
voters but are controlled by the huge corporate sponsors of political
campaigns and by the mass-media, which instead of being an independent
“fourth estate” that safeguards the public interest is using its
broadcasting platform to protect its own pockets. Since the owners of the
largest transnational media monopolies also own electronic, military, and
entertainment industries as well as the largest chunk of the privatized
water market, they have a direct interest in preserving the current system
by selling the idea that “there is no alternative.” When the market is
ruled by monopolies, the government is auctioned at the highest bidder,
and the media exists to stifle free expression and the free flow of
information to its own advantage, it’s normal for most people to feel
distrustful and alienated from a process of political decision-making that
has nothing to do with their interests. A real democratization of politics
would mean a politics of direct expression in which we can voice our
opinions and choices every day instead of electing representatives
(proxies, intermediaries and substitutes who claim to speak in our names)
once every 4 or 5 years. A system in which we have the power to govern
ourselves would make professional politicians, as a particular class
chosen to misrepresent our interests, obsolete. Non-hierarchical
communities and neighborhood assemblies around the world, which make all
their decisions by gathering to discuss their interests, debate competing
proposals, and reach agreement by consensus, have already shown that
direct democracy is not a utopian fantasy.

Ignorance and lack of information always serves the interests of those in
power, which is why the first priority of every authoritarian regime is to
silence those who are outspoken and to prevent as many people as possible
from attaining knowledge. A real democratization of culture means first of
all that the flow of information (news, public archives and documents) and
the production of creative works (literature, film, music, software)
should not be controlled by any political authority or economic monopoly.
But since a culture of consumption can neutralize dissent just as much as
totalitarianism, a real democratization would also mean that the
production of culture should not be the exclusive privilege of a caste of
“experts” for a multitude of spectators, but something that can be created
by everyone. During the revolts against consumer culture in the 1960s, the
most radical slogan of the social movements became that everyone can be an
artist. In the different landscape at the turn of the millennium the new
slogan has become the familiar Indymedia banner that everyone can be the
media. Indymedia was born from the recognition that mass-media is
controlled by powerful elites and that although it claims to serve the
democratic interest of the public to be informed, its real interests,
sources of financial support, hierarchical leadership and decision making
processes are all hidden behind closed doors. The idea was to provoke
social change by eliminating the difference between producers and
consumers of media (anyone can post on the open publishing newswire) and
by making the production and decision making process entirely transparent
(everything is publicly archived on the internet). It is these two
principles of open participation and transparency that have been behind
many recent initiatives to transform the way in which culture is produced,
from neighborhood art projects to the free/open source software movement.

>>> THE REJECTION OF MARXISM

Out of all of these considerations, an indecent question arises: has the
left, understood in this radical sense, ever really existed as more than
isolated experiences and islands of poetic adventure? And if the various
regimes of actually existing communism were (and still are) very far from
these descriptions, then what do we call them? Rather than denounce them
as “not really” leftist or as the betrayal or failure of the leftist
project of democratization, it is more important to ask why the ideas they
advocated, like the citizenship championed by the American and French
Revolutions and the democratization of the economy predicted by Marx and
the intelligentsia of the Russian Revolution, didn’t materialize. The
theories that inspired these revolutions were inhabited by profound
contradictions. They advocated democratization but only for a fragment of
the population or in only in one of the interconnected spheres, like
politics without the economy or the economy without politics. Universal
citizenship - except for those without property, black slaves, indian
tribes, women and anyone else who might be considered an “enemy” of the
new democratic republic. The democratization of the economy directly by
the workers who produce - but through a strange detour: the centralization
of political decision-making power in the hands of a small dictatorship of
intellectuals. The bourgeois left was a political project of
democratization that was economically on the right; the communist left was
an economic project of democratization that was politically on the right.
Neither posed the question of democracy in its most radical aspect.

The radical left must openly reject Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist,
Maoist and Guevarist regimes and their sympathizers as brutal deformations
of the ideal of democratization. But it must go further than this and also
reject Marxism and the countless attempts to save Marx, to return to Marx,
to find a Marx beyond Lenin, or even a Marx beyond Marx. Cornelius
Castoriadis wrote in 1964 that Marxism had become an ideology in the
Marxist sense of the word - “a set of ideas that relate to a reality not
in order to shed light on it and to change it, but in order to veil and to
justify it in the imaginary.” Forty years later, this seems even more
true. This is not to deny that there are useful ideas to be found in
Marx’s texts, just as there are in the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Hegel or
Machiavelli, if we open them up to analysis and expose their most
dangerous prejudices. But somehow Marx gets spared careful criticisms from
his intellectual fans who appropriate him with religious devotion, as if
his writings are the repository of absolute truth. It is necessary to
acknowledge that many ideas usually attributed to Lenin and his successors
as “deviations” from the true gospel of Marxism, like the two stage theory
of communism, actually belonged to Marx. In his early Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts and also in the later Critique of the Gotha
Programme, Marx describes a first, transitional stage of communism, during
which exploitation will be abolished but most of the defects of capitalism
– like monetary exchange, centralization of production, a politics of
coercion, and repressive state institutions like the army, police, and
prisons - will have to be preserved. The dialectical prediction is that
this will be followed by a second stage in which the concentration of
hierarchical power in the institutions of the state will wither away. This
theory of communism is based on the supposition that it is possible to
democratize the economy through a transitional stage (a state of
emergency) in which the political centralization of power would be in the
hands of the leaders who control the state apparatus.

Bakunin was the first to point out that this two stage hypothesis was
inherently contradictory: “This sham people’s government would be no other
than the completely despotic rule of the masses by a new and very small
aristocracy of ‘scholars.’ The Marxists realize the contradiction in this,
and … console themselves with the thought that this dictatorship will be
temporary and short-lived. They say that this sort of governmental yoke,
this dictatorship, is an essential step leading to the attainment of
complete freedom for the people … We reply that no dictatorship can have
any other aim except to perpetuate itself, and that it is capable of
instilling and fostering only slavery in the masses that endure it.”
Bakunin argued that a transitional stage of state planning and
centralization would pave the way for the formation of a new “bureaucratic
class” which would never simply agree to wither away, and that the
promised second stage of communism would never arrive. And Marx and
Engels, who saw Bakunin as their loudest rival in the First International,
did whatever they could to silence his criticism and bring about his
“excommunication,” as Marx himself called it in a private letter to Engels
in 1869. The realpolitik of intrigue and conspiratorialism perpetrated by
Marx and Engels against the anarchists during the First International has
been widely documented; it culminated in a sham trial at the Hague
Congress in 1872, during which Bakunin was expelled on charges of
conspiring against the International and attempting to establish a secret
organization because Marx suppressed the evidence he possessed of
Bakunin’s innocence. Marx and Engels’ efforts to centralize the power and
influence of their own faction in the First International by whatever
means necessary was not an aberration of their theories, as some devoted
Marxists have tried to apologize, but its practical emanation.

>>> UNITY OF PRINCIPLES

As an affirmation that after communism there remains only a single road to
democracy by “liberating” the market and its private interests,
postcommunism should be refuted, but not by trying to recuperate a
libertarian dimension of communism. The meaning of the word “communism”
has become inextricably tainted by the repressive policies of the former
communist regimes. And even if we attempt to step back in history to
recover its more originary meaning for Marx, communism remains chained to
a false premise about the primacy of the economic base and to the
dialectical conclusion that it is necessary to simply transform the
content of this base and the repressive form of the political
superstructure will inevitably disappear. The problem with postcommunism
is not that it rejects the communist past but that it does so
superficially and opportunistically, and that its ultimate aim is not
simply to pass judgment on the history of communism but to cast suspicion
on any new ideas that invoke the common, the public, or the collaborative.
What is truly duplicitous about postcommunism is its depiction of the
“public” as an impersonal machine or a totalitarian monster rather than
actual groups and communities who share common resources and have common
interests, and its attempt to blackmail us into feeling ashamed to express
solidarity with each other or a desire for collaboration. Against the
asocial monadism of market fundamentalism, a real democracy means
recognizing that we do not make the world by ourselves but through
cooperation with others. Postcommunism can be contested by rescuing the
idea of the common from its disrepute and affirming the value of sharing
knowledge and resources, collaborating to find solutions to our common
problems, and reclaiming the public spaces and goods that we are entitled
to.

Although it may be necessary to affirm the common, it’s also not
sufficient. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim that the multitude can
achieve a real unity “on the basis of the common they share and the common
they produce.” The “common” is understood either very broadly by other
autonomists like Paulo Virno – as the “common places” or the shared
linguistic-cognitive contexts of life - or in a narrow, workerist
framework by Hardt and Negri - as the “commonality of labor” of all those
whose biopolitical production is exploited directly or indirectly by
Empire - or even more narrowly by some of their interpreters – as social
movements with divergent interests but a common opposition to
neoliberalism, which allows them to network into temporary alliances on an
issue-by-issue basis. But while it’s true that we have many things in
common with many people - a common language, a common culture, the public
spaces of a city, the fact that we all produce something whether it is
paid or not, or maybe even a resistance to the policies of neoliberalism -
this doesn’t mean that we have similar ideas about how culture, public
space, or resistance movements can be organized and deployed. Simply
pointing to a de facto commonality is not enough. It’s even more
inadequate when this commonality is understood in terms of “being against”
a common enemy, as Hardt & Negri define it in Empire. If unity is defined
through opposition to Empire, then we may find ourselves standing shoulder
to shoulder with neofascists, who may also be against neoliberalism, but
because it is destroying the purity and authenticity of their xenophobic
traditions, or who may also be against the war in Iraq, but because they
consider it to be a Jewish conspiracy. Resistance and opposition are
negative attitudes; they can only arise as consequences of more
fundamental, positive principles.

The problem with many revolutionary traditions has been that they
understood unity too narrowly on the level of content – as a comprehensive
world vision about the exploitation of labor, or homogenous practices and
forms of behavior, or sharing an identical historical goal. The radical
left cannot be synonymous with a dogma, a single model of the good
society, or a unified goal towards which all beings converge. At the same
time, it’s necessary to view unity as more than simply sharing common
spaces, cultures or working conditions – as background principles that
give particular actions a sense of coherence without requiring that people
think or act alike. This means that any definition of the radical left is
essentially empty of content and is more like Kant’s categorical
imperative, which, by analyzing whether a particular action could be
willed by everyone without contradiction, provides a criterion for
reciprocity and respect for other people’s rights. Starting from a
consideration of the meaning of democracy, a common principle, expressed
in the most simple terms, would be: “act as if you - and by extension
everyone else - have an equal right and duty to determine your own life in
all its aspects, from production, to decision-making and social
interaction.” One of the movements that has recognized the need for
expressing unity through shared principles is Indymedia. Despite some
vague and inconsistent formulations in the draft document of the ten
principles of unity
(http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/PrinciplesOfUnity), it’s possible
to discern a few core principles, which are all important elaborations on
the meaning of democracy: (1) the primacy of individuals, cooperation and
solidarity over the utilitarian logic of profit, which treats people as a
means to an end; (2) the open participation of everyone, without
discrimination, in the process of production and decision-making; (3) the
equal participation of everyone, through a decentralized, horizontal
organization that rejects structural hierarchies, leaders and
spokespersons; and (4) the need for transparency, in the form of public
archives, which allows everyone (including outside observers) to enter at
any point in the process and criticize what they disagree with. These
principles are general enough to allow many interpretations, but specific
enough to create a sense of unity and a shared purpose.

Understanding unity to be based on common principles has some important
consequences: (1) It means that the content and goal of any project of
democratization is indeterminate and must be decided in each local context
by interpreting which course of action would best actualize the shared
principles. Anyone who has participated in nonhierarchical groups, in
which everything must be discussed, debated and agreed upon, knows that
this is can be a very long and difficult process. But all promises to
reach democracy through shortcuts have turned out to be deceptive. (2) A
common basis for alliances among movements cannot start with negative
definitions of resistance or opposition; it has to begin from positive
principles. There can be many different reasons for opposing global
capitalism or the logic of profit - church groups may be opposed not
because they affirm people’s capacity for self-determination, but because
they believe everyone is subordinate to the will of God, whose true domain
is beyond the material world. Starting from positive principles makes it
possible to draw distinctions and define the boundaries of collaboration.
The only limits to inclusion in a process of radical democratization are
those whose principles are antidemocratic because they interfere with the
self-determination of others. (3) Shifting the focus to principles makes
it possible to analyze practices based on the axioms that inspire them,
instead of utilitarian considerations of their effects or final goals.
This is similar to saying that the means do not justify the ends – which
was the point of Kant’s test of universalizability. Kant’s focus on the
underlying principles of actions rather than their final justifications,
and his insistence on principles that could be logically affirmed by
everyone, has influenced both liberal theories of human rights and
anarchist ideas of prefigurative politics, which require that the goal of
a radically democratic society of the future should be prefigured on the
level of the particular actions and means that are used to build it in the
present. By contrast, Hegel’s emphasis on the end point of the entire
historical process means that particular actions like slavery, despotism,
or engaging in war could be justified as necessary steps leading to the
final moment of reconciliation. This dialectical utilitarianism has
informed revolutionary theorists from Marx to Mao, and, most recently,
even Negri, who affirms a neoliberal Empire as a necessary sign of
progress and supports the constitution of the European Union as a
transitional stage that will ultimately lead to the absolute democracy of
communism.

Defining unity through shared principles also means admitting that the
idea of a “movement of movements” is a myth. It may be a compelling myth
because it gives social movements an unquestionable belief in their
collective power to transform the world, but it is also dangerous because
it presents a mystical resolution to intractable contradictions. This
“movement of movements” has been celebrated and flattered for its
diversity and even for its contradictions: “we saw in Seattle the groups
that we thought were objectively antagonistic, contradictory to each
other, were actually acting in common. The trade unionists, the
environmentalists, the gays and lesbians, church groups, the anarchists,
the communists, they were actually working together yet keeping their
differences.” (Michael Hardt, in a debate at the 2003 WSF). But there’s an
important difference between being united by common principles, even
though ideas about practices and goals may differ profoundly, and being
united through an opposition to the WTO, which creates a superficial sense
of commonality among groups (like church activists, anarchists and
communists) whose principles are otherwise in fundamental contradiction.

The dissonance between the different movements was easier to overlook
during the demonstrations against the WTO, IMF, World Bank, G8 or the war
in Iraq because of the negative orientation of the protests. It has become
hard to dismiss during the social forums, since the focus has shifted to
discussing constructive alternatives to neoliberalism. There is one thing
that cannot be said politely: the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the new
movements has become a magnet attracting fossils of authoritarian
communism - refounded Leninist parties, aging Trotskyists, and juvenile
fans of Che Guevara who identify with the machismo of militancy - which
were presumed to have disappeared into insignificance. During social
forums in which groups like Rifondazione Comunista (Florence) or the
Socialist Workers Party (London) tried to dominate the organization, many
antiauthoritarian groups expressed their dissent by creating autonomous
spaces and staging protests against those who tried to play the leaders.
The myth of a “movement of movements,” which is said to be united despite
its differences because of a defective logic that judges the enemy of an
enemy to be a friend, has become the best tactic for seizing power by
ideologues of social control who seek legitimacy by portraying themselves
as acting side by side and in harmony with the other movements. It is
essential for the radical left to refuse alliances with movements whose
principles and actions are antidemocratic. These include not only
neofascist extremists who dream nightmares of ethnic purity, but also
religious groups who anchor their resistance to neoliberalism on a
hierarchical chain of being and on the ultimate authority of a divine
power in everyone’s lives, and authoritarian communists who still talk of
vanguards and transitional stages of unfreedom, even if they’ve learned to
do it in an updated jargon of political correctness. This refusal is not
an expression of sectarianism, but a desire for an all-inclusive
democracy, which applies to everyone without exception, and without any
intermediary steps that would sacrifice the present on the altar of the
future.