by Santiago Zabala,
Gianni Vattimo
Dec 19, 2016
The great American philosopher
Richard Rorty predicted almost twenty years ago the “election of
‘strongman’ . . . someone willing to assure [voters] that, once
he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen,
and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”[1] This is Donald Trump. But Rorty predicted
a president not only with these characteristics but also one with a plan very
similar to Trump’s: “One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains
made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals,
will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into
fashion. . . . All the resentment which badly educated Americans
feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find
an outlet.” This outlet, Rorty explained, was going to be a consequence of the
Left’s tendency to give “cultural politics preference over real politics.” But
what does all this have to do with Marxism in the twenty-first century and, in
particular, with our weak—or hermeneutic—version of it?
Rorty’s criticism of the Left,
as well as Negri’s and Hardt’s trilogy and the horrifying events of 9/11, were
factors that led us to write Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (2011), which
the philosopher Eduardo Mendieta compared to a manifesto. Negri’s and Hardt’s texts were full of
metaphysical notions (“empire,” “multitude,” “commons”) too abstract to call
for practical activism, and this vacuum was exposed, beginning on 9/11. Those
terrible acts did not mark a single day “that changed the world” but rather led
to the intensification of military and financial policies already underway.
This intensification, which we call “framing” in the book, is evident in the
military occupation of the Middle East, including drone warfare, and the
mass-surveillance systems that Edward Snowden revealed, as well as in certain
actions of the Obama administration, which continued or expanded these policies
and oversaw the bailout of massive financial institutions and the relentless
use of drones against civilian targets. To a certain extent, Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton embody Rorty’s characterization of “cultural politics” or the
“cultural left” that lacked a leftist economic agenda; they ignored the
declining economic condition of American workers that was a consequence of the
globalization they lauded. With no political voice speaking to or on behalf of
the concerns of labor, workers turned against the technocratic policies of the
cultural elite and either opted out of politics or followed the demagoguery of
right-wing populist leaders such as Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and others.
While Rorty did not call on the Left to become “Marxist” or “communist” again,
we believe this is the only way to respond to the abdication of the left and
political and moral bankruptcy of what were once the progressive leftist
parties.
Since 2011 we are often asked,
“Are you communists?” Our answer is always the same: “No, we are hermeneutic
communists.” At that point, people generally look at us with suspicion and
confusion—suspicion, because no one is supposed to be communist anymore, and
confusion because “hermeneutics” is an alien concept for most. Until now,
everyone talked about Soviet, Cuban, or Chinese communism; no one spoke of a hermeneutic
communism. The difference does not simply rest in the absence of an anchoring
location, because in the book we refer to a particular region (Latin America);
it has to do with the nature of hermeneutics, which brings philosophical
weakness to communism through interpretation. This is the meaning of the book’s
subtitle, From Heidegger to Marx. Today, after metaphysics, we can return
to Marx through hermeneutics, a philosophical approach that operates without
the assumption of metaphysical truth and without the impositions and violence
that accompany such positions. Thus, hermeneutic communism is a “weakening” of the strong structures of metaphysics,
modernity, and ideology. The motto of the book, rephrasing Marx’s famous
statement from Theses on Feuerbach, is, “The philosophers have only
described the world in various ways; the moment now has arrived to interpret
it.”
With the global triumph of
capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, communism lost both its effective
power and any ability to justify the metaphysical claims that characterized its
original Marxist formulation as the ideal of development, which inevitably
draws toward a logic of war. Today, these ideals and logic based on eternal
growth are what characterize and guide our framed democracies. The weakened
communism we are left with in the twenty-first century does not aspire to
construct a perfect state—i.e., it does not envision another Soviet Union—but
instead proposes democratic models of social resistance outside the
intellectual paradigms that dominated classical Marxism. Marxism has gone
through a profound deconstruction that has contributed to dismantling its rigid,
violent, and ideological claims in favor of democratic edification. The
weakening of its scientific pretexts for unfettered development allows
communism to finally unite its constituency.
The supporters of weak
communism are the weak, that is, all those who are not framed within “the iron
cage of capitalism,” as Max Weber used to say—those at its margins. These are
the denizens of the slums and underdeveloped nations who, despite the fact they
represent three-quarters of the world’s population, face existential
annihilation through economic and military oppression. In response to this
situation, social movements in South America in the Nineties began to fight
back by electing representatives from their own class (including Morales,
Chávez, and others) in order to defend the weak and apply much-needed social
reforms. Although these progressive Latin American leaders never called
themselves “communists,” much less “hermeneutic communists,” they put in place
communist policies that proved much better at defending their economies from
crises than the strategies used by any other country in the West. And they
supported ethnic pluralities, such as the recognition of indigenous rights,
which can be interpreted as a hermeneutic fusion of horizons.
Our endorsement of the Chávez
government in Venezuela led some critics to suggest we made an error like that
of Bloch, who praised the East German regime in The Principle of Hope.
These critics cite the dismantling of Chávez’s reforms as evidence of our
wrong-headedness, as if the fact that two political orders were both superseded
by reactionary changes meant that the two had any other similarity. This
argument, which relies again on assuming the metaphysical truth of progress,
does not erase the nature of Chávez’s reforms any more than it can equate two
radically different “socialist” governments. However, the economic and social
crisis that Venezuela is experiencing under the leadership of Nicolás Maduro
certainly raises a question: are we witnessing the dissolution of the Chávez
myth or, on the contrary, the continuing terrible power and dominance of
capitalist-framed democracies?
Chávez still functions as a
myth, symbol, and reference for the global Left not only because of the
successful social, economic, and educational policies he implemented but also
because he supported other progressive governments in the region. One
interesting example is the former president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff. As soon
as Lula designated her as the best candidate to guide the Workers Party and
Brazil into the twenty-first century, Chávez supported her. Now that she has
been overthrown by a capitalist coup, one must speculate on the level of
involvement of those framed democracies. “And such speculation,” as Mark Weisbrot recently suggested, “is not unreasonable in
Brazil, where Washington intervened in 2005 in support of a
legislative effort aimed at undermining the Workers’ Party government.” Dilma
had also railed against US meddling in Petrobras, as revealed in the Snowden
files. While we can discuss infinitely whether Chávez is a myth or a model, as
we prefer to view his legacy, there is no doubt that the ongoing crisis in
Venezuela and in other Latin American countries is caused by foreign intervention via economic sanctions. Independent of the
recent economic and political crisis in the region, Chávez's achievements
in reducing extreme poverty are unquestionable; this is one of the few subjects on which
Chávez’s supporters and critics can agree.
While it might sound
paradoxical, although we took Latin American progressive governments as a model
for our Western neoliberal democracies, the book was not written for them but
rather for us. The hermeneutic communism that we see as still developing in
Latin America has not ended with the passing of its charismatic leaders or
recent installation of right-wing governments in Argentina and Brazil. Instead,
it began there.
What is extraordinary today
for us, almost six years after the publication of Hermeneutic Communism, is
that the inception of radical democracy and social initiatives has reached
Europe. We are not referring to the Indignados or Occupy movements, but rather
to those who transformed these movements into political parties, such as Podemos in Spain. Like the late Hugo Chávez, Pablo Iglesias has called for radical social
reforms in favor of the weak and has railed against U.S. hegemony, issuing
calls for Spain to leave NATO and revoke the agreement that allows the United
States to keep military bases in Morón (Seville) and Rota (Cádiz). The rise of
Podemos did not occur only because its leaders (Iglesias, Juan Carlos Monedero,
and Íñigo Errejón)
traveled to, researched, and admired Latin America and the Bolivarian
revolution, but also because the Spanish Socialist Party has lost all
credibility. Its recent crisis must be interpreted as the embodiment of what
Rory warned against: the cultural left’s practice of giving “cultural politics
preference over real politics.” Podemos proves that not all populist parties are the same. We must also not discount
the significance of the election of Pope Francis. The election of a Latin
American Pope who has begun a progressive reform of the Vatican is symbolic of
an epoch where the “weak” might finally begin to take part in the distribution
of power.
But how can hermeneutic
communism help us when Trump and Farage use right-wing populism to usurp the
power and focus of the workers? First of all, it is important to remember the
strength of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and interpret it as a
sign of a future where the weak finally find representation once more through
traditional parties. Our goal today is not to demand that the left stay away
from “cultural politics.” It is to invite social movements to create or join
political parties that can allow the weak to emerge and to exercise their power
by uniting. Unless the voices of the weak resound from the slums of our
postcolonial cities and are made to echo in the halls of power through genuine
representation, it will be impossible to overcome the deadlock imposed by our
neoliberal democracies. Instead of the metaphysical communism of failed and
totalitarian states, we need a hermeneutic version, one that does not repeat
their errors. The revival and reinvigoration of Marxism and Marxist theory we
see in thinkers such as Jodi Dean and Slavoj Žižek, as well as in this Colloquy,
is an invitation to reconsider its potentialities.
[1] R.
Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), 90.
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