common places

Joanne Richardson

This is the first of a three-part series of essays: (1) the radical left in the postcommunist epoch; (2) the neoliberal & the neofascist right in Romania; (3) protest movements, social forums and the myth of civil society. 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 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 antiauthoritarians. 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 of 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.

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