This is a translation of a piece by Vicenç Navarro on the specific interests in operation behind Germany’s present drive for austerity in peripheral countries. (I have to admit, the ‘Gipsy’ acronym is a new one on me, but it does exist: there is a Centre for European Policy Studies paper by Daniel Gros entitled Adjustment Difficulties in the GIPSY Club – ‘Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and ItalY’) I am not sure I share his contention that the likely outcome of Germany's insistence on austerity for the periphery will be the disappearance of the European Union. Rather, I think that if things carry on in the way he describes, we will see a political union of authoritarian kleptocratic oligarchies that still goes under the name of the European Union, but stripped of any of the let's-all-be-friends pastel propaganda that sugar-coated the European Union in bygone days.
A brief note on the nationalisms –German and anti-German- cited by Navarro in his article. There is an article in the Irish Times today by commentator John Waters, which, with characteristic aloofnesss and preposterousness, makes reference to ‘the Germans, who have now managed to dispense with the thin veneer of democracy that previously graced the EU’.
And even if we were to commit the habitual barbarism of taking ‘the Germans’ to mean ‘German elected representatives’, and ‘democracy’ to mean ‘representative democracy’, which is what it normally means in Ireland, how does the accusation of dispensing with democracy tally, for instance, with the failure of the German parliament to ratify the Fiscal Treaty? This is not to claim that Germany is some sort of exemplary democracy, but it is worth pointing out that the coarsening ignorance of such remarks, when widely broadcast, have an impoverishing effect on public political discourse.
The nature of the EU crisis makes it easier to speak casually of ‘the Irish’, ‘the Germans’, and ‘the Greeks’ and so on, glossing over conflicts within member states and obscuring common interests held by populations across member states. Among other things, speaking in this way is a handy way of denying that the capitalist system is in crisis, with its ready-made vocabulary for simplifying a crisis of sprawling complexity to a question of mere incompatibility between national caricatures.
From the point of view of ruling elites, this simplification is a handy tool for steamrollering awkward questions about democratic failure and for disciplining the population. Consider, for example, Labour Party minister Ruairi Quinn’s claim, in the early days of the first Greek bailout, that ‘we’ (i.e. ‘the Irish’) “instead of learning to behave like Germans we continued to act like Italians, or should I say Greeks”.
It is also an important factor in socialising guilt for the financial crisis: ‘we’ –on account of some essential national characteristic (land hunger, residential property lust, congenital immaturity, ginger hair)- behaved badly; therefore ‘we’ deserve to be punished, both through the withdrawal of wages and public services, and through the imposed burden of private debt, which, if ‘we’ had been more careful, would not have befallen ‘us’.
The austerity policies that the German government led by Chancellor Angela Merkel is imposing on the peripheral Eurozone countries, called Gipsy in the Anglo-Saxon world, is driving them to a disaster (there is no other way of defining it). A large number of economists have been emphasising this fact (though this number has been very low in Spain), showing that the great recession that these countries are suffering is primarily due to these austerity policies. The reality is that the spreading of this disaster can even affect the German economy itself. One way would be by making it impossible for the peripheral countries to pay their debts, public and private, to German banks. It was the Finance Minister of the Merkel government himself who warned that the collapse of the Greek economy and its exit from the euro would have a very negative effect on the European financial system, centred on the German banking sector.
In actuality, a key objective of the austerity policies imposed by the Merkel administration on peripheral countries and their governments is to force them to pay what they owe to German banks. If these austerity policies are continued, the German banking system itself can be affected very negatively. This reality is ignored by those mainstream media columnists who, somewhat frivolously, claim that the Merkel government wants to ‘expel’ Greece from the euro.
Now, the persistence with austerity policies, despite the risk it poses to the German banking sector, also brings it great benefits. That is, the enormous crisis of peripheral countries is benefitting the German banking sector and the German State which, under the Merkel government is heavily influenced, not only by the banking sector, but also by the German industrial exporting sectors that are increasingly exporting to countries outside the Eurozone. Thus, German State bonds, in light of the deep crisis of confidence in the markets (assisted by the policies of the ECB which contribute to this lack of confidence, with the consequent rise in interest rates for public debt), become a safe investment, highly in demand. Thus there exists a flow of capital towards the German financial system, as a result of the crisis in the peripheral Eurozone countries.
Something similar is happening in the industrial sector. As German economist Frank Hoffer indicates, the decline in the automobile industry in peripheral countries, as with Fiat, positively affects the German automobile industry, as with Volkswagen. Hence austerity policies contribute to the immense dominance of German financial and industrial capital and the German State, which, in the long term, will have a high political cost, since this domination is being established at the cost of the other countries that are resisting these impositions. The case of Greece is an example of this. From this comes the rebirth of nationalisms, both German and anti-German, which can break up the European Union itself. It is not the viability of the euro but the viability of the European Union that is being called into question by these austerity policies, since the promotion of these policies is very quickly diluting the culture of European cohesion (which was always very limited), and replacing it with the culture of nationalisms that led to the First and Second World Wars, which the European Union sought to prevent.
Hence German figures who have shown their commitment to the European project, such as the former Chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, have criticised the German Chancellor for placing German business interests above the European project, to the point that they can destroy it. There will be no World War III, but what could happen is that the European Union and not only the euro might disappear. But it would not be the disappearance of the euro (contrary to what is said, its survival is not in danger) that would destroy the European Union, but the disappearance of the European Union that would bring about the disappearance of the euro.
This is a translation of a piece by Vicenç Navarro, originally published on the 11th of May. One wonders whether Navarro has still too benign an opinion of Draghi's artistic tastes.
The President of the European Central Bank, Mr Mario Draghi, during his visit to Barcelona for the meeting of the Bank’s governing council, made certain declarations to ingratiate himself with Catalonia, referring to Dalí as an inspiration for the Europe that was being established in our continent. And Catalonia’s mass media (the majority of which is conservative in persuasion), apparently flattered by such a declaration, published these declarations with implicit applause.
I have to assume that Mr Draghi’s observation about Dalí was the result of ignorance, since were this not the case his declarations would be enormously alarming. Dalí was a fanatical defender of Spanish fascism. Although Dalí’s fascist sympathies are known in artistic circles where rigour ensures credibility (see the excellent biography of this painter written by Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, Faber and Faber 1997), they are practically unknown to the majority of the general public. The conservative forces that dominate the majority of mass media in Spain have kept this dimension to Dalí quiet. His known relationship with the dictatorship in power in Spain is trivialised by attributing his closeness to the dictator to his desire to avoid paying taxes and to hide his great wealth, a widespread practice, even today, among the Catalan bourgeoisie. According to this version, Dalí tried to be on good terms with power in order to avoid the exchequer of the Spanish state. And given that all rich people did it, there was nothing to reproach Dalí for.
But his identification with the dictatorship was much more intense and profound than what is broadcast in the media. Dalí never helped the Republican government during or after the fascist military coup. As Ian Gibson points out, Dalí wrote positively about José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, the Spanish fascist party. And in his speeches he used the fascist narrative, attributing to Spain an imperialist mission as the inspirer of a new civilisation. He supported the alliance of Franco with Hitler and Mussolini against the allies, and shared an admiration towards these figures as a brake on international Bolshevism. Profoundly antisemitic, he praised the historic function of Christianity, claiming that all art ought to be based on this religion. Close to a Spanish Catholic Church that had clear fascist sympathies, and to the Vatican of Pio XII, Dalí defended the dictator from criticism and contempt expressed by the majority of the international artistic community towards this figure, becoming his highest defender, a defence that reached sickening levels when, months before his death, the dictator signed the death sentence for five political prisoners who were members of the antifascist resistance. Dalí defended and applauded the execution of the five antifascists, claiming that in reality, Franco (whom at that moment he had defined as one of the greatest Spanish people ever to have existed) ought to have shot many more. Professor Malefakis of Columbia University in New York, and an expert on Fascism in Europe, has documented the level of cruelty of that regime, emphasising that for every murder committed by Mussolini, Franco carried out ten thousand. That dictator was the Spaniard who killed more Spanish people (and more democrats) in the history of Spain. One should not be surprised, then, that Dalí, at the end of the dictatorship, should have fleed Spain. A bomb was even discovered under his seat in the restaurant he used to visit.
One imagines Draghi, the President of the European Central Bank, was not aware of these facts, and shared the idealisation of Dalí that also exists in our country. (Only a few months ago, the biggest theatre in Barcelona –the Liceo- dedicated an entire opera to him, and Cadaqués, where the Catalan bourgeoisie goes on summer holidays, has a statue of Dalí in its main square). To correct his ignorance, I have sent Mr Draghi Ian Gibson’s book on Dalí. It would be desirable for him to read it since the policies the European Central Bank is imposing (and I say imposing because none of the austerity policies that the governments, including the Spanish government, are implementing in response to the pressure of the ECB, appeared in any electoral programme) are stimulating the appearance of fascism in the European Union. The harshness of its austerity policies and its hostility towards the working class, with its insistence on lowering wages and eliminating social protection (in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mr Draghi said that the European social model was finished), is helping to create the type of Europe that Dalí desired and admired. The enormous desperation and pain that these policies are creating has generated a hostility towards European establishments, including the financial system headed by the European Central Bank, which, if it is not channelled through progressive and democratic forces, can end up in fascism for which the ECB, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (the biggest instigators of these policies) will be responsible. The case of France is but one example.
This is a translation of a piece by Pablo Bustinduy, originally published in Madrilonia. It occurred to me while translating it how little the notion of debt has been present in the Fiscal Treaty Referendum campaign, or at least what I have seen of it.
The reason the Irish State is under a bailout programme is because its lenders did not believe it had the capacity to repay the level of bank debt it had committed to pay under the banking guarantee. And thus the central contentious point of the debate thus far, narrowed down in these terms so as to depoliticise the debate as much as possible has been the question of where the money is going to come from for the next bailout. But somehow this appears disconnected from the overwhelming problem of debt! As well as this there are the conditions imposed by the treaty itself: the whole point of having a constitutionalised 'debt brake' is not to put a limit on the amount of debt as such, but to ensure that insuperable legal priority is given to the repayment of debts over anything else, for instance hospitals, schools, welfare spending...so that political pressure to raise spending in these areas is rendered ineffective.
The 'politics of the ongoing bailout', as De Sousa Santos puts it, in the case of Ireland involves a gradual normalising of the immense debt burden, generated through the private speculative activity of Ireland's banking and property elites, and now heaped on the shoulders of the population of Ireland. One prominent economist recently declared that he was tired of the 'Not Our Debt' 'meme', apparently because the debt had indeed been formalised as 'our debt'. As the article a bit further down will show, this drift into accepting these debts as legitimate burdens will not make the task of servicing them any lighter: in fact, the logic of debt is boundless when it comes to enforcing dispossession and subjugation. It is not until every marrow has been sucked dry, every protection cast to the wind, that the logic of debt will come to an end, and not even then. The point then, should be to blow the logic of debt to bits.
The situation is looking grimmer by the day in Spain as regards its banking sector and how the public will end up shouldering the burden of a NAMA-style arrangement for bad banking loans. The main concern at the moment is Bankia, now part nationalised by the Spanish government. Bankia, which has been turfing people out of their homes as if there were no tomorrow, until very recently was headed up by Rodrigo Rato.
Rato was Finance Minister in the right-wing government of José Maria Aznar, and subsequently went on to become Managing Director of the IMF, preceding Dominique Strauss-Kahn in the job. And now it looks like the debt taken on on account of Bankia and other banks may drive the Spanish State into the clutches of the IMF, who, along with the ECB and the EU, will see to it that Spain is looted on behalf of the same goons who have caused the crisis. Although, with the presence of former IMF boss Rato on the board of Bankia, one is reminded of the following from Animal Farm:
"No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
'-Perspective can play tricks. What you see from down below as a disaster can be clearly perceived up here as an opportunity.'
Breaking Debt
At the end of each year a new deficit. After the lapse of four or five years a new loan. And every new loan offered new opportunities to the finance aristocracy for defrauding the state, which was kept artificially on the verge of bankruptcy – it had to negotiate with the bankers under the most unfavorable conditions.
Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850
Some weeks back, the IMF delivered an apocalyptic message about the unsustainability of our pension system. “Living longer is good, but it carries a considerable financial risk”: this was how their Monetary and Capital Markets Department’s Director explained that the rise in life expectancy in rich countries will mean an unsustainable burden on the current investment models. It scarcely matters that the very premise of the sentence is a lie, and that in the Ländern of the East of Germany, where exactly these solutions suggested by the IMF were applied (cutbacks in payment, delay in the retirement age, flexibilised labour rights), life expectancy of the citizens with the lowest incomes has fallen in the past decade from 77.9 to 74.1 years.
The ideological obscenity of the sentence is on its very surface, in how naturally it confuses two movements that appear antagonistic and in opposition to each other. On the one hand, the sentence places life against finance (that symptomatic and confrontational ‘but’: living is fine, just as long as it does not interfere with the logic of the markets), as two factors of an inverse relation. On the other, it is near unconsciously categorical in saying that life is in itself a financial object, and not any object, but the favourite form of speculative grammar: a risk. Together, these two movements describe a fundamental fact about our present: wherever life ceases to be productive it becomes a potential threat. When social force does not allow itself to be integrated or subsumed within financial logic, life itself becomes an interference that must be neutralised.
The government continues to camouflage this process beneath the logic of sacrifice, and it claims it is excluding immigrants without a residency permit from the right to health (just as it destroys labour rights, the university, research and welfare) in order to win the confidence of the markets. The markets, any time they get caught with an open microphone, explain with complete sincerity what they think of this sacrifice: whilst Goldman Sachs explained that we were living at ‘the best moment in a generation’, Carmel Asset Management claimed in black and white, in a report on the state of the Spanish economy, that ‘Should the Spanish crisis flare up in 2012 as we expect, we can generate a 300% return on the annual premium’.
The reality is that the bankruptcy of the State is a business opportunity for the financial casino of derivatives, where huge sums of money are bet against the very survival of a country which, since the property bust, has ceased to be profitable. The moral: the blood of the sacrifices is real, but the ideological fiction that sustains them, all that cheap rhetoric about austerity, national emergency and the confidence of the markets, is a grotesque construction that is incapable of sustaining its own weight.
This is why trying to mix the two stories, the financial one and the one about the political and social future of the country, is to refuse to understand the very essence of the problem. There is no longer an "exit" to the crisis; what there is is a fundamental incompatibility between the two logics fighting each other for their own survival. As long as the real terms of the conflict are not taken into account, as long as it goes unrecognised that this incompatibility is neither fleeting nor coincidental, but the very heart and the decisive fact of our present, we will do nothing apart from go down time and time again the same sick spiral of debt- until there is nothing left to sacrifice.
The key is really in understanding that debt is not an economic concept, but a paradigm of rule. Debt is the logic that directs the sacrifice: dismantle what remains of Fordist systems of social protection in exchange for absolutely nothing. Debt is the horizon of this conflict between financial capital and social life that cannot be sewed together, and hence does not propose any solution or project for society at all, apart from the unlimited reinforcement of mechanisms of coercion and repression of everything that stands in its way. It is the authoritarian drift that turns retirees and girls at secondary school into the "enemy", it produces death by rubber bullets, it incentivises snitching on one's neighbour and not only does it enable the police to repress bodies, but it also generates its own discourse and imposes its own objectives on itself.
Faced with an infinite regression in cutbacks, faced with this dystopia of violence and misery, the idea of mass rebellion comes to the fore. In an interview published in Madrilonia, the anthropologist David Graeber explains that the first known word to mean "freedom" is amargi, which in Sumerian means "free of debts". Debt is a political grammar that must be attacked at its root, torn apart, broken into a thousand pieces. The battle is not over debt: it is over what will happen when we break its spell and reset society's timer to zero.
This weekend will see mobilisations in the Spanish State and beyond (there will be a demonstration in Dublin, at the Spire on Saturday at 2pm) one year on from the 15th May demonstrations that gave birth to what is now referred to as 15-M. I will try and write a couple of pieces from my own viewpoint this week.
But first of all, a translation of a piece by John Brown on the current moment of electoral upheaval in France and Greece, and the relevance of 12-M in this regard.
Yesterday, in two European countries, one big and powerful and the other smaller and more marginal in terms of continental power, electoral consultations took place. In the big country, once again the solemn drivel of the politics of representation was heard, with two candidates outdoing each other in ridiculousness, speaking in the name of "the French" and shamelessly emitting phrases like "the French want", "the French think" etc. The big hexagonal country is an old centre of European power. It is being hit by the crisis but, for the moment, this has not turned into the social disaster that the countries of Southern Europe have encountered, especially the smallest and most marginal of them, Greece. Hence, it is still possible to play at representation, at a game of mirrors between right and left in which the different components of capitalist rule decide whether to give greater importance to the market or the State, to equality or freedom of enterprise. All within a splendid continuity between the two poles of a system which is never questioned according to these categories, because they are part of it. Whoever thinks that a capitalist regime is called into question by reinforcing the State or improving juridical equality between citizens ignores the fact that the generalised market that is characteristic of capitalism is the product of statist activity, and that equality of contract is the basic condition for the existence of the market. As Michel Foucault reminded Chomsky in their memorable Dutch television debate in 1971, a regime cannot be fought according to its own concepts and values.
Hence, the representative left can only represent, at best, a working class that forms part of the framework of capitalism, of its specific mode of distribution of wealth. Its role in class struggle is pure mystification, of hiding the antagonisms behind the common values of the system presented as "democratic" values or "values of the Republic" with the pompous voice used to proclaim big lies.
In the powerful hexagon, the presidential elections have been won, via a small margin of difference over the outgoing president, by François Hollande, a leader of the Socialist Party who set forth a programme that was moderately critical of austerity policies and who proclaimed his desire to modify the European Stability Pact. What he proposes, instead of austerity, is "growth". Hollande will probably not take long in going back on his promises and returning to the 'realism' that consists of accepting austerity and cutbacks, perhaps in the name of growth. In France there is still a margin for lying with some success and also for cutting public spending and salaries. As long as this margin exists it will still be possible to have the puppet show of the two candidates, on the right and left, with their "populist" acolytes on the right and left who, between State and market, bring a third character into the farce: the people (pueblo). This people that irrupts as the Other of the market in the left discourse of Mélenchon or the Other of the State in the semifascist populism of Le Pen's daughter. As if the people were not the unification by the State and in the State of the disperse agents of the market. Populisms are not a way out of the labyrinth of mirrors of representative politics in which an outside space simply does not exist, nowhere beyond representation that is not mere "terrorist" criminality, and even this is a mystified exterior, a false exterior entirely designated by power and from it. The class struggle cannot be represented, only those mirrors in which the false antagonism between State and market, between the people of the left and the guardian people of nattional essences, is reflected. As in the final scene of the film The Lady from Shanghai by Orson Welles, the protagonists shoot against their images in a labyrinth of mirrors and by shooting at their own image they kill the other.
Capitalism with a liberal flavour kills capitalism with a socialist flavour or vice versa. Meanwhile, they trot out the fascist bogeyman, previously fed via a studied State xenophobia so that the majority options, which are respectable and not 'populist', can present the most brutal policies as a 'lesser evil'..by comparison with what would happen if the fascists were to win. The existence of a fascist bloc allows the parties of the regime to be fascists themselves through accusing the 'populists' on the extreme right of being so. Good cop bad cop.
Greece had elections yesterday too, but their course and their results are very different to those of France. The officialist (oficialista) European press has presented the results of the Greek elections as a strong advance for the 'radical' left and a reversal for the two big protagonists of Greek bipartidism, the socialists of Pasok and the right-wing Nea Dimokratia. However, something even more serious has occured: it has been shown that, once it gets to a certain point, democratic representation of neoliberal capitalism becomes impossible. The two big parties who defend austerity and the payment of the debt, Pasok and ND only enjoy under 33% of the votes: the rest of the forces represented in the Greek parliament are, by contrast, radically hostile to these policies which are driving the country into ruin and impoverishing the popular classes and the middle layers. This has not prevented the regime from doing everything possible in order to stop the Greek citizens from expressing their discontent: not only was it not possible to consult the population about the austerity measures in a referendum (the mere attempt at doing so cost Papandreou his job), but, in order to prevent the expression of minority positions, the minimum percentage for obtaining deputies was raised from 3% to 5% of the vote, which meant in the latest elections excluding 19% of the electorate, a percentage of votes greater than that obtained by Nea Dimokratia, the party that received the most votes. Not only this: the bonus for the party that won the most votes was raised just before the elections to 50 seats, so that Nea Dimokratia with 18.9% (just 2% more votes than Syriza, the left coalition that got 16.8%) receives, thanks to this generous 'gift', 108 deputies compared to Syriza's 52. This blatant legal rigging, which was intended to guarantee 'governability' and allow a government of 'national salvation' made up of Nea Dimokratia and Pasok, the minority parties that represent the politics of austerity against which the voters expressed themselves clearly and resoundingly, was almost successful. The final results have not allowed for this solution, since not even with this legal electoral fraud could the parties of the "mnimonio" (the memorandum on austerity policies imposed by the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF) reach an absolute majority. Austerity becomes unenforceable by democratic means. This is the big difference between Greece and France. In Greece, with yesterday's results it will be near impossible to form a government since, although Syriza has obtained an excellent result, it will be impossible for it to get sufficient support. The Communist Party, which already opposed unified lists with the 'social democrats' of Syriza because they were too 'Europeanist' will not accept any kind of post-electoral coalition. Elsewhere, a cartoonish but terrible Far Right, Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) has entered parliament with policies that oppose immigration policies but also those of the "Junta" (the hispanic name used in Greece for the dictatorship of the colonels) of the "mnimonio" (memorandum). The function of this formation is for the moment similar to that of Marine Le Pen in France and that of other far rights: to enable the neoliberal and xenophobic radicalisation of the majority parties that can present fascism as a "greater evil", even though their militias are already on the streets acting against immigrants...
The elections that ought to have served to give legitimacy to the rule of financial capital through austerity and the payment of the debt have not achieved this objective in Greece. Austerity and debt are today unrepresentable, and so too is the resistance of the multitude against these policies. The mirrors have broken conclusively, although it is possible that there may be some playing with that large splinter that the far right constitutes. In the coming days anything can happen: if there is no majority to support the rescue plan and the imposed austerity measures that come with it, there could quickly arise a suspension of funding from Europe and the IMF and a suspension of payments by Greece. It is very likely too that the country will have to leave the euro, with the attendant repercussions on the other weakened countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland etc.) and on the zone as a whole. Greece today finds itself in a situation that recalls Germany in the 1940s. The causes are similar: Weimar Germany was destroyed by the payment of a brutal war debt imposed by the victors of the first world war. Keynes had already warned the war reparations commission of the disastrous consequences of this policy. Against the impossibility of a revolution due among other things to the deep division of the lefts and the sectarianism of the German Communist Party, an ugly and resentful little boor, as ridiculous as the leaders of Chrisí Avgi, ended up taking power. We know the rest of the story.
At this moment, only a powerful reaction at a European level against the policies of austerity can prevent the return of barbarism from our continent. We need a Europe that is a true space of productive co-operation for the multitude, a space of democracy and freedom and not a mere odious debt recovery agency managed by an oligarchy and a racist immigration policy. Not every country can allow itself the spectacle of the great "republican" puppet show that France enjoys; they can't even do it within France. Greece shows us that social domination through debt cannot be represented democratically. To preserve democracy, it is urgent to put an end to economic policies that hide less and less their character of true political domination. This, however, cannot be done within the frame of the nation-States: the sovereignist nostalgia represented by fascism and to a certain extent by the 'populisms' is today a trap. It is only at a European level that there can be solutions to problems that moved away from the national level some time ago. By shutting ourselves into "our" States we will find ourselves with a capitalist rule that is ever more brutal and we will be ever more incapable of confronting it. Another European construction is necessary and urgent. The 12M will be much more decisive to this end than the elections of the 6th of May.
Translation ('The 1% sacrifices our rights to save their privileges. THEY ARE LIVING BEYOND OUR MEANS'). Poster from social movement Juventud Sin Futuro (Youth without Future).
"I was part of an unhelpful culture of deference and silence in society and the church, which thankfully is now a thing of the past" - Sean Brady
A thought experiment. Suppose Sean Brady had called the police and brought a halt to the abuse. Suppose that soon after, he left the priesthood, he emigrated, and his intelligence and thoughtful demeanour enabled him to become a politician of great power and influence, drawing on religious traditions of social justice and prophetic ministry.
Suppose then he was on the verge of becoming president of the United States and he stood in front of a Catholic Lobby in the United States declaring his unstinting support for a Catholic State in the Middle East that was operating a brutal and vicious colonial regime, stripping the indigenous population of their land, their material wealth, their well-being, and in many cases their lives, through arbitrary detention, house demolition, aerial bombing and torture.
Suppose he exalted the faith, family and culture of such a regime, and said the establishment of the Catholic State –which had been achieved through the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population- was just and necessary, and rooted in centuries of struggle and decades of patient work. Suppose once he had been elected president to widespread acclaim, that when that State massacred hundreds of non-Catholics with its warplanes and pounded their hospitals and homes with bombs, Sean Brady refused to say anything to stop it.
Suppose he commanded the destruction of villages with predator drones. Suppose he then joked about using predator drones on young men who might go near his daughters. Suppose he authorised assassinations of the citizens he was elected to represent. Suppose he maintained a site that held people under indefinite imprisonment without trial. Suppose he imprisoned someone who made information public that exposed the monumental crimes in which he was implicated, and held that person in indefinite solitary confinement for months on end.
Suppose, after all this, and after all this information being easily accessible in the public domain, Sean Brady was invited back to Ireland as President of the United States, and the Irish State locked the capital city down, the entirety of the country's media celebrated his arrival without a glimmer of a reference to any of the activities mentioned above, and he was greeted by tens of thousands of adoring supporters, lauded as a hero, and welcomed as a returning exile. (Suppose that such was the concern on the part of the State broadcaster to present him as well as possible that it resulted in a priest getting wrongfully accused of rape)
If all this happened, what would we say about the dominant morality in Ireland, and about the culture of silence and deference that the real Sean Brady says has gone?
Of course all this did happen –give or take a few biographical details and changing a few nouns and adjectives- but it happened with Barack Obama. But there is a huge difference in public reaction to the what Brady did and failed to do decades ago and the arrival of Barack Obama to Ireland last year.. Brady’s actions are subjected to intense scrutiny and widespread coverage (as they should be), and there are wide-ranging discussions of the implications of what Brady did. There are calls, on the part of prominent politicians, for Brady to resign because he is unsuitable for the role of Catholic primate. These calls are made in a personal capacity, less it be thought that there is some sort of overlap between servants of the State and Church loyalties (heaven forbid), but everyone knows that these are official calls, made covertly.
On the other hand, with Obama, the same public representatives who now call for Brady’s resignation because of his complicity in harrowing abuse are the ones who greeted Obama so enthusiastically last year, when the State had a jubilant parade in the presence of the commander in chief of the US armed forces. They had the chance to make public calls for an end to the imperial violence perpetrated by the State of which Obama is the head while he was visiting, but –like Sean Brady when faced with the chance to say something about the abuse he knew that was happening- they said nothing. Nothing to Obama, nothing to the public.
Nor for that matter did they get asked about it by any of the news agencies currently pursuing the Brady story. So we don’t have much of an idea about what justifications they would offer for their complicity and silence, or whether they might seek to contextualise Obama’s role as a sanguinary imperialist in sympathetic terms.
Why is this so? How come the Catholic Church is subjected to scrutiny for its criminal and allegedly criminal behaviour, and its operatives rightly subjected to intense probing for their failure to act on their knowledge of heinous crimes, whereas others come under no such scrutiny, not only for their refusal to say anything about the grossest of abuses but for their activities in glorifying the perpetrators, and the perpetrators themselves are often celebrated?
Let me try and suggest a few reasons why. Although the Catholic Church still has a major influence on Irish society, not only in terms of its current control of many aspects of the education system, including the maintenance of private schools for the cultivation of local elites, high level civil servants and business people who belong to Opus Dei and other Catholic associations, and the interconnectedness across the highest echelons of the Irish Church and PR and media organisations, to name three, it obviously no longer has the same position of dominance.
The loss of influence applies, among other places. to the legislative sphere, and that of moral instruction. Where moral instruction for the purposes of social control previously emanated from pulpits and the widespread presence of priests and religious orders, it now comes via the mass media. There are very few, if any, explicit rules and exhortations; rather, there is a continuous reproduction of examples of proper moral conduct -in terms of physical appearance, obedience, enthusiasm for hard work, and so on.
The cardinal rule is obedience to the dictates of the market system; to be specific, an unquestioning acceptance that the way society is run and ordered is the way it ought to be, and –aside from the removal of a corrupt politician here, a barrier to business there, or the privatisation or outsourcing of some public service - nothing should be done to mess with the formula, lest the markets unleash their wrath.
This means that the really influential figures of authority and moral instruction are those mediated figures whose success has been validated by the market system. To name some groups- local tycoons like Michael O’Leary (recall, for instance, Eamonn Dunphy’s Late Late Show suggestion that Michael O’Leary ought to negotiate with the Troika on behalf of Ireland); economists who claim to know how the market system works and uphold the validity of its sustaining ideas; and people who circulate in the world of Foreign Direct Investment, long considered the lifeblood of Irish society. The last category includes the bosses of multinational firms and industrial development officials, and it also includes, to give a specific example, former Fine Gael Taoiseach John Bruton. Bruton, now chairman of a lobby group for the Irish Financial Services Centre, was interviewed on RTE yesterday in exchanges that were strikingly deferential, and accepting of Bruton's viewpoint that the interests of the IFSC were the interests of society as a whole.
In a society where people have largely accepted the legitimacy of the kinds of hierarchical structures that normally exist in the capitalist workplace –think about how the game show ‘The Apprentice’ naturalises the notion that what is good and proper is to work your way to the top, and that the person at the top is the one to listen to- there is no urgent need for an official or semi-official Church to undertake moral policing on behalf of the boss class, or to operate as an exemplary hierarchical force.
Indeed, a growing feature of the post-Fordist workplace is the continual subjection to employer propaganda –whether in e-mail circulars of ‘one big family’ stories, internal advertising focusing on the uniqueness of the employee’s workplace and how highly each employee is valued, corporate social responsibility success stories- that takes the place of the kind of instruction that Churches ought to give: family, gratitude, charity, and so on.
In this scenario the traditional church appears as a relic from less worldly times, and when some unpleasant detail emerges about the rotten deeds of someone in the church hierarchy, there are few obstacles for the mass media to pursue this detail to its ultimate denouement. Much of the media coverage is anti-authoritarian in tone, with widespread criticism for the Church hierarchy.. This, by the way, by no means entails the 'aggressive secularist' apocalypse foretold by the likes of the Iona Institute. In fact, the laity and even sections of the priesthood are treated sympathetically. Moreover there is no deep-set ideological opposition to the existence of a Catholic Church. If anything, the preference on the part of the boss class would be for a Church that reinforced the dominant market ideology, which of course includes the celebration of charitable donation instead of codified rights.
There is no particular contradiction between religious worship and subordination to the dictates of the market, as shown by the recent history of the United States. Mainstream media opinion appears to be seeking a chastened Catholic Church, not a decimated one. The fact that the dramatis personae of this morality play are so clearly defined (innocent victims; unworldly priest with outmoded views on sexual relations and reproduction; secular bourgeois subjects who want full rigours of law applied to the protection of children from predators; politicians who want separation of Church and State) means that there is little risk of other parts of Irish society getting contaminated or called into question in the process.
The Church and the State are treated as entirely separate entities, with the State –which ensures the proper operation of the capitalist economy and enforces the regime of private property- operating as the enforcer of moral excellence, and the Church as the agent of vice. However, when a scandal involving the Church also entails some sort of association with local political, financial and media elites, as is the case with the Magdalene Laundries, where the Church-approved slave labour was used to serve Government departments and Dublin businesses, hotels and golf clubs, such scrutiny is patchy at best. (A thorough public investigation of this scandal would entail looking at questions of who benefited, and who continues to benefit, from the power accumulated on account of the creation of a workforce of female slaves that operated for many years as a powerful instrument of social control. As it is, there has been no statutory inquiry or compensation scheme instituted, nor has there been any apology or reparations. There is no public outcry about this.)
So the Church will not be allowed to melt into air in the manner of a deceased cardinal's hat. Consider the support for Brian D'Arcy. Here was a man who was censured by his employer for public utterances about his employer that his employer did not like. But in fact there are many thousands of people in Ireland who would not be in a position to express negative opinions about their employer in public, since to do so would mean that they would lose their livelihood. Why should priests expect special treatment then? Basically, because the role of the priest as a public voice is still considered important by ruling elites, but the notion that people in general should be able to freely criticise their employers in public without fear of retribution would be considered outlandish by the same people.
In short, then, since the crimes and misdemeanours of operatives of the Catholic Church have no obvious relation to the circulation of commodities, and since there is nothing in them that tarnishes the standing or undermines the authority of the actual ruling class, they can be explored in depth and their implications endlessly discussed. Beyond that, just as Edmund Burke believed the laws of commerce were the laws of nature and consequently the laws of God, complete deference to the rule of 'the markets' and its gendarmes is the norm, whatever the destruction wrought from diligent obedience to the Invisible Hand.
The increasingly authoritarian Spanish government, on account of the ECB’s visit, and mindful of the increasingly widespread awareness that the ECB is indeed operating as an Executive Committee of the Bourgeoisie, has suspended the Schengen agreement, providing a timely illustration that the primary freedom accorded by European Union member states is the free movement of capital, followed by the freedom of capital to move labour.
There will be protests (and, if the immediate history of protest in Barcelona is anything to go by, there will be agents provocateurs).
Translation:
WE DON'T CARE
3M ECB SUMMIT
WHATEVER YOU DO
WE WILL PUT AN END TO
YOU
Below is a translation of a letter of accusation made by the Assamblea de Treballadors/es en atur de Barcelona i la Coordinadora d’assambleas i co.lectius de Treballadors/es en atur de Catalunya – the Barcelona Unemployed Workers’ Assembly and the Collective Unemployed Workers’ Assemblies of Catalonia, which is circulating widely on social networks.
We, the unemployed, accuse you of the poverty that strikes 115 million people in Europe, of the rampant unemployment which threatens to rise above 6 million in the Spanish State and which reaches 25 million in Europe; of the cuts to social, labour and citizen rights that place under risk the health and the lives of the majority; of ruining the education system and of the policies that narrow the access of the sons and daughters of the people to university; of shredding rights to self-determination, of degrading democracy, and of threatening civil liberties under the growing shadow of an authoritarian State; of imposing your technocrat cronies, seasoned amid the sewers of financial speculation, onto the rule of nations.
You behave like little gods by virtue of your so-called independence, in deciding day after day the present and future of the 99% of the citizens. Today you turn on the tap of credit and tomorrow you turn it off, so as to put pressure on governments and oblige them into applying the policies of adjustment and cutbacks in social spending. But in reality you are the servants of the banks and speculators, who have promoted you to the job, and to whom you guarantee the repayment of their loans.
You believe you are wise men, but in reality you are fools who do not learn the lessons of economic history, drugged as you are by neoliberal ideology. So blind are you that your obedience to “price stability” and your contempt for full employment are driving Europe into depression and collapse.
You are meeting these days in Barcelona, a city whose inhabitants consider you “personae non gratae”, and so you will be surrounded by a colossal police detail organised by your servile governments of Spain and Catalonia.
None of this will free you from judgement for your odious acts. The people, as on other occasions, will bring down the gods, and sooner or later you will have your Nuremburg.
Listen to the voice of the suffering people, change your policies radically, end your paranoia over social spending and deficit reduction, and put the wealth of the elites at the service of social rights and full employment. If you do not dare, at least have the dignity to resign and dissolve.
One of the things you might notice, with regard to the Stability Treaty referendum campaign in Ireland, is the way the issue is presented as a purely Irish affair.
To a certain degree this is an outcome of the nature of a constitutional referendum: it falls on those people living in Ireland who live in the Republic and who fall under the category of Irish citizen to vote on whether or not the treaty should be ratified. Thus, however scrupulous the rules regarding media coverage in terms of equal airtime given to proponents of either side of the argument, there are certain political considerations systematically left out.
For one: does the opinion of those people living in Ireland who do not hold the status of Irish citizen count for anything? In terms of how the referendum is presented to us, and in keeping with the overwhelming tendency in Irish political discourse, it does not, even though many of these people are likely to be those worst affected by the regime established by the Treaty.
Two, the Irish citizens defined as being able to choose between the two options are impelled to weigh up their considerations, through the media coverage, in terms of what is ‘best for Ireland’, or what is ‘best for the State’, with all the polymorphous vagueness that that term entails in the context of Irish political discourse. It is worth bearing in mind here that the underpinning logic here is largely the same logic formalised and enforced by the EU Economic governance “Six-Pack” – the standardisation of rules on deficits, public debt, and public expenditure and so on, enforced from above by the European Commission, which the Stability Treaty seeks to constitutionalise. Whilst these rules give the impression of a collaborative undertaking, in reality they amount to a race to the bottom, in terms of wages and labour rights and concessions afforded to speculative investment; a downward convergence based on competition between states, under the primacy of finance capital, not solidarity across the different peoples who live within the borders of the European Union. The question of ‘what is best for Ireland’, then, assumes all this as naturally existing fact.
Three, following on from the previous consideration, the question of ‘what is best for Ireland’ as it is presented effaces any question of class antagonisms within Ireland, and places in its stead the notion of the ‘national interest’. So, for instance, when David Begg –hardly a fire-breathing radical- announced to the Labour Party conference that European solidarity was a defunct concept since places like Greece and Ireland had now become living laboratories for neo-liberal experimentation, the response of Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore, when questioned about this on an RTE current affairs programme, responded that the referendum was not about the interests of any particular group, but the national interest. At least Gilmore is consistent: recall his campaign phrase of ‘One Ireland – of employer and employee’. Moreover, Labour’s referendum campaign has produced posters with an image of a resplendent tricolour dominating the poster and the word ‘Labour’ as a miserable afterthought on the bottom right hand side.
You do not need to be a semiotician to work out what is being said with this image. Thus one of the effects of the referendum campaign has been the mobilisation of nationalist sentiment so as to win consent for neo-liberal punishment. This right-wing nationalist lurch in the Irish context is mirrored elsewhere in Europe. As Costas Douzinas notes of Greece in today’s Guardian, ‘Part of this picture – its most worrying aspect – is the rush to the right by mainstream politicians who, imitating Sarkozy, compete to display their nationalist credentials.’ This form of campaigning will have a grievous effect on the political atmosphere in Ireland: the erosion of labour rights set in train by the Treaty regime will be replaced by claims laid to entitlements as Irish ‘citizens’ to the exclusion of such entitlements for other people –whether guaranteed by political, social or labour rights. Witness, for example, the recent report in the Irish Examiner where ‘Southern regional president of the SVP Brendan Dempsey said he believes there is an unwritten policy to urge homeless EU migrant workers to go back to their homelands’. The scene is set for the punitive character of social welfare policies to be intensified, and along with it, a more generalised racist backlash.
Four, general awareness of life in other European countries is kept to a minimum by the way European politics is mediated. People are not inclined to care much about what goes on –in terms of people’s daily lives, their history, their culture- even in those countries geographically closer to Ireland. Whenever European politics is reported, it is nearly always in terms of crude caricature, and through the prism of the challenges faced by European leaders –the counterparts of the Irish ones- in disregarding the needs and desires of the people they are supposed to represent, or, as the media puts it, ‘the hard work of convincing their electorates’. This is in spite of the fact that there are plenty of people originally from other European countries living in Ireland whose lives form part of the fabric of Irish society. Thus there is practically zero importance afforded to the consideration of what it might mean to think about voting in the referendum on account of a common bond with people living in other European countries. If anything, it is actively discouraged.
Five, the referendum campaign, I fear, obscures rather than casts light on what is actually going on in Europe at the moment. Certainly it naturalises certain things that might otherwise be open to political discussion as faits accomplis: the ramifications of the six pack, for instance, were never subjected to any scrutiny whatsoever in terms of their impact on life for the majority of people in Ireland, or whether such things were desirable. And the debate over whether it is appropriate to bind parliaments to meet a particular set of GDP related targets has obscured entirely the fact that GDP, as an economic measure, largely serves the business class in that it excludes all manner of productive activities (for instance, raising children, domestic work) from consideration with regard to economic policy and includes all manner of unproductive, even destructive ones, for instance, those activities associated with asset price speculation. But most importantly, I feel, it suspends any sense that what is happening right now, while this campaign is underway, is an enormously destructive phase of European capitalism in which all manner of anti-democratic measures are being introduced and rights are curtailed, under the guises of ‘reform’, and ‘stability’.
As the translated article below, by Boaventura de Sousa Santos writing from the point of view of Portugal points out, time is of the essence in activating resistance to the ‘post-socialdemocratic order’ being imposed. A ‘No’ vote would be an essential component of such a resistance, but it has to come with a widening of the political imagination, an awareness of the need for new alliances to be formed, and consciousness of what he names as PREC – the politics of the ongoing bailout, which I think is the frame in which we should perceive the narrowing of the referendum debate down to the question of “where are we going to get the money from?”
There is no European consensus about the fiscal policies or the austerity programmes underway. What there is, however, is a consensus of the right-wing and an ongoing inability of the European lefts to present a credible alternative at the level of each country. As long as this goes on, time is the most uncertain and the most decisive factor in the resolution of the European crisis.
The more it passes, the more we will see a consolidation of the new post-socialdemocratic order thought out long before the crisis and which the right-wing now wants to impose and consolidate over the coming decades. The new order is a heaven for finance capital, a purgatory (this time without an ecclesial blessing) for productive capital and a hell for the immense majority of citizens, a catastrophe for life expectations that until now appeared reasonable and deserved. The catastrophe is being administered in supposedly homeopathic doses so that the paralysis of alternatives lasts more time (today, a cutback, tomorrow a rise in the price of water and energy, the day after, the closure of a service). What can be done to shorten this time?
1.Know where we are headed. The end of convergence is underway. The plan A of the politics of the ongoing bailout (PREC) [In the translated Spanish version ‘política de rescate en curso’] consists of creating the conditions so that the countries in difficulty return to the ‘normality of the markets’. This is only possible at the cost of more wage reductions, more cuts to public spending and the subjection of these countries to a non-negotiable discipline that compromises and empties out their sovereignty. Thus there is a consolidation of aduality between developed and less developed countries in Europe’s interior. Portugal, Greece, Ireland and (perhaps?) Spain will be the Mexico of Europe. If we do not want this Europe, it is urgent to struggle for this to come to an end.
2.PREC can only produce two results: more PREC or expulsion from the euro. News reports and blogs on financial funds predict (they know, because they are the ones who realise the predictions) that, as with Greece, the first bailout is followed by a second one with greater restrictions, more austerity and a certain restructuring of creditor debt. This means that Portugal could be under guardianship for several more years (until 2018?) and, shold this be the case, an entire generation will have lived under a colonial regime disguised as democracy, but controlled, in practice, by a regal firm, Goldman Sachs. If, however, plan A does not work, there is plan B: expulsion from the euro or a solution that produces the same effect. This is something that is already being spoken of as regards Greece. If plan A is devastating for our aspirations as a European country, expulsion from the euro would be no less so due to the conditions in which it would occur, after PREC has destroyed our economic base (which until a little while ago gave indications of a qualitative change in product specialisation), after it has shredded our wealth, our savings, our gold. We might make allowances for the Socialist Party feeling prisoner of PREC 1, but it is inadmissible that it should not declare itself against any PREC 2 or 3. This is its opportunity to make a break from spurious inheritances and start building an alternative.
3.Disobedience within the euro. It seems incredible that, in spite of all this, a non-catastrophic solution for our country has to be found at a European level. But it must be so, even if two very demanding conditions are necessary for it. The first is political actors who explore all the cracks in the system. General international law and the vast majority of international treaties hold derogation clauses in the event of national emergency. This derogation can involve the temporary control of capital and imports, as well as a moratorium on the servicing of debts. Can this disobedience on the part of a small country be punished with immediate expulsion? All this depends on the alliances that are forged on the way. Three things are for sure: whoever does the expelling will still run big risks; someone will have to disobey and someone will have to be the first; it is unthinkable that the Paris-Berlin axis should continue as the only one in the European Union and that it should not be possible to build alliances with other countries, among them, tomorrow, with France itself.
The second condition has to do with the European political system. The approaches that involve the whole of Europe must be formulated at a political level that gives them credibility. As has been seen, this level cannot be the national one. We must, therefore, re-found the European political system with the creation of a single European electoral constituency and transnational lists from which new leaders of a truly democratic Europe emerge. Inside or outside the euro, by choice or by imposition, there will be disobedience; the problem is knowing what level of disaster will be reached.
Perhaps the greatest damage done to Spanish republicanism has been the confusion of the Republic with a form of State. Initially, the term republic (res publica) alluded directly to that which is common to all citizens, to that which belongs to everyone and upon which particular rights can be established, including that of private property (proclaimed in Rome, not as an attribute of the individual but rather “ex jure Quiritum”, in keeping with the common right of citizens). Republic means the primacy of what is common over property: for this very reason, the republic is the rule of the free multitude, not of kings or rich people, not of sovereigns or owners of property. There have been and there are, however, republics with a monarchical core: these are the ones constituted based on property whose ultimate aim is the preservation of property and not the safeguarding of the commons. These nominal republics have a statist character, since they were configured as a combination of apparatuses of domination and representation and not as a free space of political intervention for the motley multitude of the citizens. They are, as monarchies are, a type of rule that aspires to transcendence over society.
A republic is, however, something else, a mode of rule that is fused with democracy and as such does not aspire to represent/take the place of the multitude. The multitude is unrepresentable and only in this paradoxical sense is it ‘sovereign’. The combined holders of property, on the other hand, have access to representation; or to put it another way, property holders –separated among themselves on account of their private property- only exist as a grouping in so far as they are represented. The sovereign represents the property holders and submits them to a closed regime of legality that permits freedom of the market and freedom in the market and excludes any political freedom, any exercise of constituent power. The republics of the owners of property –essentially absolutist regimes that can also have a monarchical form- give the name of rule of law to the prohibition of constituent power. It is for this reason they see to it with totalitarian zeal to criminalise any attempt at substantial change of the legal order and any actions beyond the law that is not that of the sovereign itself. This is what we are seeing today in this republic of the property holders led by a monarch that is the Kingdom of Spain, when attempts are made to treat peaceful resistence to authority as criminal violence or to repress any dissent with regard to the capitalist order recognised by the laws and the constitution.
A true republic recognises dissent in its essence, because it is not based, nor can it be based, in any consensual illusion: the republic is the regime of the multitude, the rule of the common. The multitude in itself can only be plural: hence the classical figures of radical republicanism such as Machiavelli or Spinoza always claimed that freedom was not based in the excellence of legislation, but in the correlation of forces between sovereign and multitude and among the different sectors of the multitude. The republic can never forget its foundation, which is the constituent power of the multitude. A republican regime can never be –as the republics of the owners of property intend- the incarnation of the rule of Law beyond which there is only crime, illegitimate violence and terrorism, but is rather a system where the law is flexible and always admits margins for reality, margins for anomaly, for dissent and for disobedience which cannot be regulated and with which every power must negotiate.
The Spanish Republic of 1931 never became a republic of the property holders, above all because the main representatives of the owning classes never wanted it. The Republic was brought about by the popular classes who occupied the Puerta del Sol 80 years before the 15M and threw out a corrupt monarchy that tried to survive in its final years through a dictatorial regime. The popular classes were those who in 34 and 36 saved the Republic against the subversive efforts of the owners of property and, for three years, prevented Franco’s victory. Today, the Republic has to become once again a frame of freedom and democracy, but at the same time a regime of the multitude and the rule of the common. The Republic of the multitude is not a form of State but the very form of self-determination of the multitude as an open and unrepresentable community. To lay claim to the Republic in the Spanish State is to drive a constituent process that opens new possibilities for organisation and relations for the ensemble of individuals and peoples that are today included in this State that Gil De Biedma said was dominated by “every demon”. This is what has allowed today, the 14th April 2012, in various town councils in Euskal Herria and, particularly, in that of Donostia, for the tricolour to be flown, and for a considerable segment of the 15M movement to participate in the demonstrations in favour of the Republic because they consider these the ideal frame for the tough battle for the defence of freedoms that is approaching.
This is the first part of a translation of an interview with Gerardo Pisarello which originally appeared on the Sin Permiso website. There will be several more parts to follow. Pisarello is a professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Barcelona and author of ‘A long Thermidor. The attack of antidemocratic constitutionalism’, which is the topic of this interview.
It's from a couple of months back but I thought it particularly appropriate given the upcoming treaty referendum in Ireland, in which voters are told to vote for elite control over their public finances, withall the dismantling of rights and entitlements that such an arrangement would entail, or face utter devastation.
Allow me to ask you about the title of the book: what ‘long Thermidor’ are you talking about?
The expression refers to the French revolution. In the republican calendar, Thermidor was the month of the coup d’etat against the vigorous democratic movement that succeeded the fall of the monarchy. This coup was carried out to protect the large estates and the politicial and economic elites associated witih them. What the title of the book seeks to highlight is the similarity between that process and other subsequent antidemocratic reactions, beginning with the one that has led to the consolidation of neoliberalism, and in general, the present financialised capitalism.
The subtitle reads: “The attack of antidemocratic constitutionalism”. What constitutionalism is that? Is this term not an oxymoron?
Constitutionalism is an instrument for organising power. To think that this necessarily entails the service of democracy is a mistake. The ancients, Aristotle above all, understood that the material constitution of a society could be democratic or antidemocratic. This tension runs through modern constitutionalism. The American version, for example, was born in large part as a device for holding back the democratising pressures generated by the independence movement. In Europe, the Thermidorian constitutionalism first, and the liberal one after that, also served to preserve the large estates and hold back the demands of popular majorities. And in that liberal antidemocratic tradition we would also have to situate the constitutionalism driven by the Washington Consensus in the 90s. Or the one that is today driven forward by the European Union, in open contradiction of the most important guarantees of the state constitutions.
As if it could be no other way, a central category, real democracy, appears repeatedly in your essay. What do you understand by real democracy? What contradiction does it entail?
I really use the concept of democracy, on its own, in the manner of the historian Arthur Rosenberg. Not as a finished, static regime, but as a movement in favour of political and economic self-government. This idea of democracy has little to do with the dominant liberal conceptions that try to pare it down, at best, to a mere mechanism for selecting elites. But it sits quite well, on the other hand, with the antique, classic notion of democracy, as an egalitarian movement that widens the inclusion of those in the demos. And with the present demands of the indignados as regards real distribution of power, not only in institutions, but also in the market.
Your book comprises an introduction and six chapters. Let’s start with the introduction; you begin it with a homage to Marx and Engels: “A wave of protests is haunting Europe”. What importance do these protests have? What are they protesting against, in your opinion?
These protests, preceded by those of the ‘Arab spring’, can be seen as part of a wave of popular anti-oligarchic revolts. As revolts directed at a shameless variation of rentier capitalism that precaritises, excludes and seems prepared to liquidate any democratic obstacle that gets in its way. Some voices have compared them to the protests that shook the order of the Restoration and that of liberal capitalism in 1830 and 1848. The latter is the year of the ‘spring of the peoples’ and, as you point out yourself, of the Manifesto of Marx and Engels. These are protests that bring together a plurality of classes and actors who do not belong to the plutocracy around an incisive programme of political and social democratisation. In the European or US case we are, undoubtedly, faced with embryonic revolts, with a still very limited impact. However, as the crisis deepens, it is most likely that they will grow and give way to new forms of antagonism and collective action. Meanwhile, they are the only hope of an exit from the neoliberal Thermidor.
You speak of an oligarchic assault on democracy. What do they seek to do with this assault which, in your opinion, is not a new phenomenon? Liquidate citizen freedoms? Wipe out worker conquests?
The financialised capitalism that we are faced with can be considered, in effect, an oligarchic assault on democracy. This entails a deep reconfiguration of the power relations that lead to its political and economic concentration. For the moment at least, the objective does not appear to be the straightforward elimination of public freedoms and social rights, but their greatest possible reduction. It would be a question, then, of maintaining mixed regimes in which oligarchic and democratic elements live side by side, but in which the latter occupy a marginal role. It would be a degraded variation on what the ancients, once again, called isonomic oligarchies. Regimes controlled by minorities that tolerate the existence of certain freedoms, as long as these do not call their rule into question.
You rely on Benjamin and you speak of brushing history against the grain. What does that move consist of? How does one brush against the grain?
In my opinion it involves two things. On the one hand, break with the linear, flat visions of history, those that see in it an ascendant, almost necessary evolution, towards ever greater freedom and rationality. It is a matter of showing that history, on the contrary, as a conflictive and open stage, marked out by great tragedies and rebellions, but stripped, at any rate, of any direction fixed a priori. On the other, to brush history against the grain demands questioning history as explained from above, from the exclusive perspective of power and its products. This involves reflecting the print of the people from below. Of those oppressed for economic, sexual, ethnic reasons. Those who are victims of the relations of ruling power, but who also resist and articulate alternative forms of power.
You may have noticed, if you keep an eye on politics in Ireland, that resistance to austerity has gone up a couple of notches, most significantly in the form of the Household Tax boycott, and in the demonstrations that have accompanied this campaign. You may also have noticed, if you still bother to watch the news or read the papers, that the consequences of such a declaration of disobedience, in terms of the democratic legitimacy of the government, have been mostly ignored.
The response from the ruling parties and the regime's media has been:
to vilify those people who have gone out and protest (see Alan Shatter's claim that protesters should 'get a life'; the Sunday Independent's racist smear that those involved were foreigners who had no right to participate in democratic activity);
ignore the fact of popular disobedience altogether and present the non-payment as some sort of monumental administrative cock-up (a near sublime example was the publication of a piece in the Irish Times by behavioural economists concerned with incentivising payment that consigned the question of democratic legitimacy to a domain beyond the known universe);
frame the disobedience as a drama that can be neatly consigned to the power contests of representative democracy: thus the people who refuse are an undifferentiated and unthinking mass, largely inspired by delinquent representatives who seek to further their career, who in turn are pilloried by the right-wing press (to repeat: all the press in Ireland is right-wing). One might cite the recent Independent profile of Richard Boyd Barrett (which insuated that protest is merely an affectation of people who cannot come to terms with their own privilege), but a more illustrative example was the Frontline feature on the Household Tax boycott, where one of the audience members who was participating in the campaign was cut off by presenter Pat Kenny, who deemed that this person's point of view was unimportant since Joan Collins, a TD who was on the panel, could speak for the movement;
ratchet up the authoritarian threats. Of note here are Leo Varadkar's initially absurd and desperate threat to cut people's water off should they not pay the charge, and the subsequent intimations, on the part of Phil Hogan and Enda Kenny, that water -a basic human right that the previous Irish government refused to recognise by abstaining from the UN General Assembly- would be cut off.
In a country with a press dedicated to democratic inquiry, and not one that rests largely in the hands of oligarchs who benefit handsomely from the privatisation of public infrastructure and the commodification of natural resources, one might expect some degree of critical analysis of what by any standard is a deep democratic crisis. Instead, the cracks are being systematically papered over, in the hope that the commotion will eventually die down.
The whole point of the phrase 'papering over the cracks' assumes that the laws of physics cannot be defied forever. But is politics best understood in terms of the laws of physics? Here I am reminded of the splendid illustration by Spanish cartoonist El Roto, which appeared recently in El País.
The image provides such rich interpretative possibilities that I feel uncomfortable applying it narrowly to this situation. But in this context it does pose some useful questions. In his address at Wall Street, Slavoj Zizek appealed to a device he often uses to illustrate the present juncture:
We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What we are doing is just reminding those in power to look down...
El Roto's cartoon seems to take Zizek's image into account. But 'those in power' show no sign of being concerned with looking down. Nor do they show any sign of what 'we' are doing. And there is nothing in the drawing to suggest that the ruler -or the regime- is about to fall.
We could easily pose this in terms of a question: what is it that makes us expect that downfall will naturally come about once what sustains the regime -supposedly, in our societies, democratic consent- gives way? Indeed, El Roto may be suggesting that rather than it being a case of us looking at those in power with the hopeful expectation that they might return our gaze and, if not oblige our wishes, at least obey the law of physics, we become transfixed by the spectacle those in power put on show for us, of their seeming ability to defy our natural expectations, through displays of impassive cruelty and disdain.
One cannot be in doubt about the authoritarian turn of the bailout-era Irish government and the naked contempt for democracy that is unfolding, in the actions of its representatives and in the press that serves it. But, we should not be transfixed by it. As the piece below suggests, we are talking about a moment of a 'precious margin for action', in which the terrain is, as another writer points out, 'ripe with possibility'. And that means, among other things, exposing the cracks by taking to the streets this May, starting with the May Day Rally on May 1.
The history of the 20th century was the history of democratic progress. It was also, and not by chance, the history of the progress of movement politics. Both processes can be seen, in fact, as interlinked. It could not be any other way: democratisation, for the simple fact that a democratic regime is one founded on citizen participation, cannot be realised without collective action (which is necessarily contentious when democracy has not yet been established). Collective action, for its part, needs to operate democratically in order to sustain itself over time (there is a worse enemy for a movement than repression from the outside: the absence of democracy among those who drive it). In sum: without democratisation there can be no movement, and without a movement there can be no democratisation.
It is something different, however, that collective action institutionalised in a particular political regime (for example, elections based on the present electoral law) should be considered enough to guarantee democratic rule, and not, on the contrary, the means of curtailing the very bases of democracy - the present electoral law, in fact, allows for something like 30% to allow an absolute majority to impose its policies. Or that the lack of mechanisms for accountability to the citizens should permit absurdities such as governing without giving the slightest explanation, or what is even worse, by providing explanations that are simply embarrassing.The limits of so-called liberal democracy
When the institutional capacity of a regime exhausts its sources of legitimacy, there inevitably appear contentious forms of collective action which problematise de-democratisation. This is what 15M was. But it is no less inevitable that those who benefit from the corruption of the regime and its deconstitution (in original, deconstitución) should reach for the resources at their disposal to sink the social mobilisation.
Here is where we find ourselves today: faced with the strategy of tension, faced with the desperate search of the recovery of a social control that escapes the grasp of the party of order everywhere when the party of democratisation rebels against the regime. Rule is enforced, once again, according to the ABC of the theory of the absolutist State. As Jorge Moruno reminded us only yesterday:
For whoever disobeys, the condition of war; they will no longer be considered subjects, but enemies. The Schmittian dialectic of such Hobbesian inspiration is reborn in the very heart of the liberal matrix, leaving democracy to one side so that it can, finally, reveal the ruler in its purely dictatorial character. Wherever dictatorship cannot be imposed on a mass scale, autocrats need to open fissures in the regime of guarantees that allow them to generalise a culture of emergency.
A slow installation of dictatorship
Dictatorship has to be experienced today at a molecular level before it can corrupt the guarantees of the democratic regime in a generalised manner. The old Nazi lesson of the Weimar years reappears today, reformulated with the same tactics as always (the dehumanisation of the enemy, the preventive violation of the private sphere, etc), only updated for the great democratising success of movement politics in the 20th century, and unleashed from within liberal democracy. We must urgently recall Poulantzas when he said that fascism is nothing more than capitalism under state of exception.
We are speaking of a selective dictatorship, a regime of power that can feed on the limited democracy that is liberal democracy as long as the multitude does not flood its institutional frame through generalised practices of disobedience. This regime of liberal democracy itself has been historically contingent on the power of the multitude, which is functionally inoperative, for this reason, under neoliberal rule.
Let no-one be confused, however; the destruction of liberal democracy at the hands of autocratic liberalism takes time. This is the precious margin for action in which the politics of the movement must unfold: by steering clear of repertoires that serve the strategy of tension (such as burning waste containers for the sake of it), but without stepping back an inch from the practice and extension of those other repertories that shift fear to the other side until installing the process of absolute democracy, the political regime of the commons.
