The American far right has
spotted a gap in the European market, as the continent buckles from the fallout
of mass migration and austerity. For liberals to maintain control, they must
ally themselves with the radical left.
Recently, it has been widely
reported that Steve Bannon plans to establish a group to coordinate right-wing
nationalist populists all around Europe. Based in Brussels, "The
Movement," as the body is called, will research and write policy
proposals, commission polling, and share expertise on messaging and data
targeting. It already employs 80 people and its ultimate goal is nothing less
than to radically change the political landscape of Europe, by sidelining the
liberal consensus and replacing it with my-country-first anti-immigrant nationalism.
Right now, US public opinion
is obsessed with alleged Russian meddling into their electoral process – but
just imagine if Putin were to send someone to Washington to act like Bannon in
Brussels. Thus, here we encounter the old paradox: the separatist forces of
disunity are better at establishing their transnational unity than the forces
of international solidarity. No wonder liberal Europe is in a panic.
We are bombarded by the idea
that today, in the early 21st century, the precious liberal legacy of human
rights, democracy and individual freedoms is threatened by the explosive rise
of "fascist" populism, and that we should gather all our
strength to keep at bay this threat. This idea should be resolutely rejected on
two levels. First, populism didn't hit Earth like a comet (as Joschka Fischer
wrote about Donald Trump): its rise is more like a crack in the earth, a flow
of lava streaming out – and it is the result of the disintegration of the
liberal consensus and the inability of the Left to offer a viable alternative.
The first step in fighting populism is, therefore, to cast a critical glance at
the weaknesses of the liberal project itself – because populism is a symptom of
this weakness.
Illusory free will
Second and more important, the
real danger resides elsewhere. The most dangerous threat to freedom does not
come from an openly authoritarian power, it takes place when our unfreedom
itself is experienced as freedom. Since permissiveness and free choice are
elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer
appear as infringing on subject's freedom: it has to appear as (and be
sustained by) the very self-experience of individuals as free.
There are a multitude of forms
where unfreedom appears in the guise of its opposite: when we are deprived of
universal healthcare, we are told that we are given a new freedom of choice (to
choose our healthcare provider); when we no longer can rely on a long-term
employment and are compelled to search for new precarious work every couple of
years, we are told that we are given the opportunity to re-invent ourselves and
discover unexpected creative potential that lurks in our personality; when we
have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become "entrepreneurs
of the self," acting like a capitalist who has to choose freely how
he will invest the resources he possesses (or borrowed) – into education,
health, travel.
Constantly bombarded by
imposed "free choices," forced to make decisions for which
we are mostly not even properly qualified (or possess enough information
about), we more and more experience freedom as a burden that causes unbearable
anxiety.
Furthermore, most of our
activities (and passivities) are now registered in some digital cloud which
also permanently evaluates us, tracing not only our acts but also our emotional
states; when we experience ourselves as free to the utmost (surfing the web
where everything is available), we are totally "externalized" and
subtly manipulated.
The digital network gives new
meaning to the old slogan "personal is political." And it's
not only the control of our intimate lives that is at stake: everything is
today regulated by some digital oversight, from transport to health, from
electricity to water. That's why the web is our most important commons today,
and the struggle for its control is THE struggle today. Albeit an underreported
battle.
Off the shelf
The enemy is the combination
of privatized and state-controlled commons, corporations (Google, Facebook) and
state security agencies (NSA). This fact alone renders insufficient the
traditional liberal notion of representative power: citizens transfer part of
their power to the state, but on precise terms (this power is constrained by
law and limited to very precise conditions in the way it is exercised, since
the people remain the ultimate source of sovereignty and can repeal power if
they so decide. In short, the state with its power is the minor partner in a
contract which the major partner (the people) can at any point repeal or change,
basically in the same way each of us can change the supermarket where we buy
our provisions.
Liberalism and its great
opponent, classical Marxism, both tend to reduce the state to a secondary
mechanism which obeys the needs of the reproduction of capital. So, they both
thereby underestimate the active role played by state apparatuses in economic
processes. Today (perhaps more than ever) one should not fetishize capitalism
as the Big Bad Wolf that is controlling states: state apparatuses are active in
the very heart of economic processes, doing much more than just guaranteeing
legal and other (educational, ecological…) conditions of the reproduction of
capital.
In many different forms, the
state is more active as a direct economic agent – it helps failing banks, it
supports selected industries, it orders defense and other equipment – in the US
today than ever before. Around 50 percent of production is mediated by the
state, while a century ago, this percentage was between five percent and 10
percent.
Old rope
One has to be more specific
here: the digital network that sustains the functioning of our societies as
well as their control mechanisms is the ultimate figure of the technical grid
that sustains power today – and does this not confer a new power to the old
Trotsky idea that the key to the State lies, not in its political and
secretarial organizations, but in its technical services? Consequently, in the
same way that, for Trotsky, taking control of the post, electricity, railways,
etc., was the key moment of the revolutionary seizure of power, is it not that
today, the "occupation" of the digital grid is absolutely
crucial if we are to break the power of the state and capital?
In the same way as Trotsky
required the mobilization of a narrow, well-trained "storming party,
of technical experts and gangs of armed men led by engineers" to
resolve this "question of technique," the lesson of the
last decades is that neither massive grassroots protests (as we have seen in
Spain and Greece) nor well-organized political movements (parties with
elaborate political visions) are enough. Instead, we also need a narrow strike
force of dedicated "engineers"(hackers, whistle-blowers…)
organized as a disciplined conspiratorial group. Its task will be to "take
over" the digital grid, and to rip it from the hands of corporations
and state agencies which now de facto control it.
WikiLeaks was just the
beginning, and our motto should be a Maoist one: let a hundred of WikiLeaks
blossom. The panic and fury with which those in power, those who control our
digital commons, reacted to Assange is a proof that such an activity hits the
nerve. There will be many blows below the belt in this fight – our side will be
accused of playing the enemy's hands (like the campaign against Assange for
being in the service of Putin), but we should get used to it and learn to
strike back with interest, ruthlessly playing one side against the other in
order to bring them all down. Were Lenin and Trotsky also not accused of being
paid by Germans and/or by the Jewish bankers? As for the scare that such an
activity will disturb the functioning of our societies and thus threaten
millions of lives, we should bear in mind that it is those in power who are
ready to selectively shut down the digital grid to isolate and contain
protests. Indeed, when massive public dissatisfaction explodes, the first move
is always to disconnect the internet and cell phones.
Or, to put it in the
well-known terms from 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism
needs the brotherly help of the radical Left.
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