Demanding the Impossible (11 page)

All I can tell you is that the Marxist dream of there being
one
big agent of social change is illusory, just like the traditional Marxist answer to those who fought for the rights of women, ecology, or racism. Can’t you see that all these depend on capitalism? I still think that
capitalism
is the key problem. But nonetheless I don’t think that we have one agent, as it was historically predestined to be. As Hegel already knew, “absolute democracy” could only actualize itself in the guise of its “oppositional determination,” as terror. So this kind of mirror image of a reliance on Marx is their political deadlock. So, when Naomi Klein writes, “Decentralizing power doesn’t mean abandoning strong national and international standards – and stable, equitable funding – for health care, education, affordable housing and environmental protection. But it does mean that the mantra of the left needs to change from ‘increase funding’ to ‘empower the grassroots’,” one should ask the naive question:
How?
How are these strong standards and funding – in short, the main ingredients of the welfare state – to be maintained? What would “multitude in power” (not only as resistance) be? How would it function?

Again, the agents of change are, as I describe them, somewhat related to my idea of different
proletarian positions
.
It means those people who are deprived of their substance, like ecological victims, psychological victims, and, especially, excluded victims of racism, and so on. It is effectively surprising how many features of slum-dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are “free” in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic proletariat (“freed” from all substantial ties, dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations of the state); and they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, “thrown” into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-forms.

Speaking of proletarian positions, added to the failure of multitude as an agent for change, it is not easy to capture the image of this term. An instant reactive image to this ambiguity might be slum-dwellers. How would you illustrate it? How do you think this abstract notion could involve the revolutionary potential? Or, as you once put it, was it a purely contingent drift, something which simply emerged “because, among all these possibilities, there was the possibility to emerge” (as Varela put it), or can we risk a more precise evolutionary account of its prehistory?

SŽ:
My big hope is what happens in
slums
. I spoke with my Brazilian friends who told me how the government is playing dirty at this point. Of course what predominates in slums is an inner mafia – gangsters or religious sects, etc. But, from time to time, various kinds of new social rebel, less progressive, start to organize themselves. At least in Brazil, do you know what, as they told me, always happens at that point? All of a sudden drugs become available. The police consciously allow drug-related crime, and this criminal activity puts political awareness on the back burner. It’s a very dirty game. After every political mobilization in the slums, drugs are available. But it’s those in power who do it.

Do you remember the
coup d’état
against Solidarno´s´c in Poland? And again in Poland, after Wojciech Jaruzelski’s
coup d’état
in 1980? All of a sudden, drugs were readily available, together with pornography, alcohol, and Eastern Wisdom manuals, in order to ruin the self-organized civil society. My friends from Poland told me it wasn’t just communist repression. After the
coup
, communists allowed something very primitive but effective to happen. Of course they oppressed political activity, but at the same time it was very easy to get hold of drugs and pornography. They even supported Buddhist transcendental meditation. All this was just to distract younger generations from political activity. Religion, drugs, and sex are good just to depoliticize.

This is why Badiou is right in denying to the enthusiastic events of the collapse of the communist regimes the status of an Event. This way, one can continue to dream that revolution is round the corner: all we need is authentic leadership, which would be able to organize the workers’ revolutionary potentials. If one is to believe them, Solidarno´s´c was originally a worker’s democratic socialist movement, later “betrayed” by its leadership, which was corrupted by the Church and the CIA. There is, of course, an element of truth in this approach: the ultimate irony of the disintegration of communism was that the leaders revolt.

So maybe there is potential in the slums. Mike Davis may well be correct when he argues that “there’s a consensus, both on the left and the right, that it’s the slum peripheries of poor Third World cities that have become a decisive geopolitical space.” This would be, for me, a true miracle:
politicization of the slums
. You know why? Slums are interesting because people are thrown into them without any regard to ethnic division or given unity. People there are usually from mixed levels of life. Also the only way to unite them would have been a more political one and I think this is why I still have some sympathy for Hugo Chávez. In spite of all the stupid things he did, he was the first one who really included people from slums, like
favelas
, in political-social life.

Even in Brazil they want other countries to help them in a humanitarian way, but this isn’t humanitarian help, because one doesn’t politically mobilize them. I’m not talking here as a naive revolutionary, but rather as a kind of conservative, because, I claim, if we don’t do this, then we come closer and closer to a kind of
permanent emergency state
, where parts of society in the slums will be invisible and there will be a kind of low-level civil war.

Like in France where, you remember, there were car-burning rebels in Paris about three years ago. This I think is a model of today’s form of revolt: a bad one. It was a very mysterious thing. It wasn’t some conservative Islamist movement, and it didn’t have any ideology. The first thing young people in the suburbs burned were their own mosques and cultural centers. It was a kind of pure protest
without a program
. It was, quoting Roman Jakobson in linguistics, the notion of “phatic communication.” The goal is not to pass information but just to signal, “Hi, I’m here.” The point is just to tell you this. There was no positive message of wanting more justice or dignity. It was a big explosion of violence. But the message was, basically, “Hi, we are here.” It is a dangerous situation when young people just have this
abstract discontent
.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, a guy whom I don’t like much, told me that Sarkozy, at that time Interior Minister, sent not only police but also social workers to the site, and he even organized Muslim priests to go to these young people and ask them “What do you want?” And they didn’t get an answer – they didn’t express any demands, just an abstract discontent and pure explosion. Isn’t this a set sign of Western European societies? That you get this kind of pure explosion of violence, which cannot even formulate a minimal utopian program. Here, again, this is a dangerous moment.

So the principal task of the twenty-first century is to politicize and discipline – the “destructured masses” of slum-dwellers. Today’s historical situation does not compel us to drop the notion of the proletariat, of the proletarian position; on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian
cogito
, deprived of its substantial content. For this reason, the new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. The ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure – in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially a
Homo Sacer
, and the only way to stop actually becoming one is to act preventively.

So what we find in “really existing slums” is, of course, a mixture of improvised modes of social life, from religious “fundamentalist” groups held together by a charismatic leader and criminal gangs up to seeds of a new “socialist” solidarity. The slum-dwellers are the counter-class to the other newly emerging class, the so-called “symbolic class” (managers, journalists, and PR people, academics, artists, etc.). What we should be looking for are signs of new forms of social awareness that will emerge from the slum collectives: they will be the seeds of the future.

You mentioned Chávez and slums of
favelas
famous for having the highest crime rates in the world. What went wrong there? The “Bolivarian Revolution” seemed so promising, with Chávez’s participatory ideas concerning oil money and the slums, but they ended up with such negative consequences.

SŽ:
I don’t know the exact causes. But although Chávez wanted people to participate, the problem was the way local self-organization was connected to the state. Why? It became brutally hard to get money and help from the state. It wasn’t purely local self-organization; it was self-organization subordinated to the state in order to get money. And because of this, of course, it exploded into corruption, into inefficiency, etc. It just showed us that when we combine local self-organization and the state, it becomes authoritarian, and you can end up with a dangerous mix of
populist violence
.

Another dangerous game is the following one: Chávez tries to ignore the problem of violence. I heard they somehow prohibited the reporting of revolts in the media because a much darker thing is happening there. This is what my leftist friends told me: Chávez thought that those who are horrified by violence are mostly from the middle classes. The idea is that poor people are exerting more violence against the middle classes. But since Chávez considered the middle classes to be his enemies, his idea was this: “Fuck them. Let’s have a little bit of violence!” He played a very dangerous game here.

Chávez is lost steam. It is a real tragedy. Because he played these populist games, he neglected the physical infrastructure. The machinery of oil extraction is falling apart, and they are compelled to pump less and less. Chávez started well in politicizing and mobilizing the excluded, but then he fell into the traditional populist trap. Oil money was a curse for Chávez, because it gave him space to maneuver rather than confront the problems. But then he had now he must confront them. He had enough money to patch things up without solving problems. For instance, Venezuela has experienced a massive brain-drain to Colombia and other places: it is, in the long term, a catastrophe. I am distrustful of all these traditions, “Bolivarianism,” etc. – it’s all bullshit.

I have a very leftist friend who told me how this really looks. He told me he was in a middle-class restaurant with friends in the center of Caracas. Three or four of Chávez’s fanatic guards came in and started to shout and laugh at a woman. Nobody said anything. They were totally intimidated, in a state of constant terror. You know, I’m saying something very bourgeois, not Marxist, but it’s true that Lenin was aware of this: you need an effective middle class that can organize production and societal development. Without this, you can do nothing good. What Chávez was doing is horrible.

All revolutions have this kind of
original sin
. For example, in Cuba, do you know what one of Castro’s sins was? In 1958, when Castro was already holding the eastern part of the island of Cuba and had made the final pushes to get Havana, he knew that the main object was to get the elite behind him. The purely Spanish, not mestizos, not mixed: the intellectuals, doctors, and so on. And he played the racism card more or less openly. Remember that the dictator whom Castro overthrew was Batista, who is a half black mestizo. And Castro’s propagandists spread rumors to all those elite loyal Hispanics: “Allow us to take power and black slaves will no longer rule you.” It’s true now if you look at the structure of the Cuban elites; of course there are a couple of symbolic impotent black figures. But when you turn on the TV, count the faces, and look at how many blacks you see there. We can see that a pure Hispanic elite rules that society. You can see a couple of women to fill the quota, making it appear better, and there are some ministerial posts occupied by women, but they are the ones that a macho society typically gives to women, like healthcare or education. These are for women and, in practice, for blacks. Remember, you would never have guessed that in Cuba pure Hispanics are in the minority; the majority consists of mestizos and then pure blacks.

Incidentally, in Brazil it’s the same. Look at all the elite there. Even leftists around Lula, they are all white. You would never have guessed that black people make up over 40 percent of the population in Brazil. And typically, in Lula’s government, there was one black guy, and he was a minister of culture, a silly post. He was put there for the sake of appearances, and was allowed just to organize his concerts and propaganda and whatever. They don’t allow him to have any real power. Unfortunately, one has to pay the
price
for a political choice.

As you mentioned the car-burning rebels in Paris, the leftist revolutionary gesture is someway typically stigmatized as a violent one. So the problem of violence in the process of revolution must be critical, especially in your context. How do you understand, within this framework, the violence of the French banlieues? What is your definition of violence? What, today, is the relation between violence and politics? Can any violence be justified for any reason?