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Bajo los puentes de París, de Reyes Mate
En toda sociedad hay dos partes, la de los pobres y la de los ricos. El noble arte de la política consiste en hacerlos convivir, asunto nada fácil, señala, porque los ricos quieren imponer sus reglas y los pobres, los únicos interesados en reglas comunes, no tienen fuerza para hacerlas valer.
Solo desde el margen, es decir, desde la pobreza podrían pensarse reglas justas de convivencia porque el secreto de los que viven al margen es saberse marginados y eso, la marginación, no podía ser el precio de la convivencia.
El secreto de los pobres es la conciencia de la falsa universalidad del sistema de los ricos. Eso era evidente en la edad de bronce del capitalismo, cuando se trabajaba para vivir y se vivía para trabajar.
Los pobres son, en su desamparo, peligrosos. La pobreza ha sido el humus en el que han nacido los episodios de agitación social más definitivos. La experiencia de pobreza, en los unos, y el espectáculo de la miseria, en los otros, han sido el detonante de la indignación social. Las utopías de un mundo mejor o las teorías revolucionarias, incluidas las marxistas, solo han fructificado en terrenos abonados con la indignación provocada por el espectáculo de seres impotentes y humillados.
En un momento como el actual en el que la izquierda necesita la complicidad de la derecha para subsistir -¿cómo pagar si no la factura del Estado de bienestar o la protección al desempleo?- los pobres son el resto de una tradición crítica que se ha quedado sin claros contenidos. Son el índice de un fracaso. No solo del fracaso de un sistema empeñado en identificar los intereses de una minoría social con los de toda la sociedad, sino del fracaso de la política occidental que nació con la idea de encontrar reglas de juego que valieran para el partido de los ricos y de los pobres. Esa confianza estaba fundada en la experiencia de la humanidad, expresada en los mitos más antiguos, de que la pobreza no es algo natural, ni merecido, ni irremediable, sino que es un empobrecimiento del hombre por el hombre. Lo natural, desde la Biblia a Rousseau, es la igualdad. La política quiere hacer cohabitar al rico y al pobre porque entiende que hay una relación nada inocente entre pobreza y riqueza. Cuánto terror de tanto pacifista, de José María Izquierdo
¿Los mercados son de izquierdas?, de Andrés Villena
Parece difícil ignorar la relación existente entre desigualdad, financiarización de la economía y crisis sistémicas. En este sentido, las mencionadas reflexiones nos sugieren aceptar estos fenómenos como inevitables y adaptar las siglas al escaso margen que nos queda. ¿Saldremos del neoliberalismo cambiándole simplemente el nombre, o tenemos alternativas reales para que no sean las finanzas las que dicten las prioridades de cada sociedad?
La igualdad de sexos, una meta aún lejana, de Bonifacio de la Cuadra
La sociedad, todavía liderada por hombres, no hace esfuerzos para alcanzar la igualdad. Y cuando los reclaman las mujeres en las empresas, suele contestárseles que el ámbito es el sector público. En realidad, el sector privado resulta afectado por la prohibición constitucional de la discriminación y por los efectos del mandato a los poderes públicos para que promuevan la igualdad. Late entre los hombres la convicción de que las mujeres ya están en muchos sitios. ¿A dónde más quieren llegar? ¿Qué necesidad hay de que estén en un consejo de administración si estos órganos directivos vienen funcionando normalmente sin apenas mujeres y no pasa nada?
Frente a las cuotas obligatorias de presencia femenina en puestos empresariales de mando, se argumenta que el criterio óptimo de selección es el mérito y la capacidad. Pero existen empresas con una cantidad mayor de mujeres que de hombres -procedentes en ambos casos de una Universidad paritaria en donde el rendimiento femenino supera al masculino- y, sin embargo, el ascenso de las mujeres a los cargos directivos es muy minoritario.
Uno recuerda las viejas excusas para que las mujeres tuvieran, hace 40 años, el camino cerrado a la milicia, la ciencia, la judicatura: no eran funciones propias de ellas, entre otras cosas por su diferente constitución física y mental. Por eso, uno no está dispuesto a aceptar hoy barreras destinadas -como ocurrió con las de hace 40 años- a ser eliminadas por la realidad. Conforme avanzamos algo en la equiparación hombre-mujer, muchos hombres se sienten cansados, sin necesidad de seguir avanzando más.
Contra esa actitud, creo que es bueno poner la mirada en una meta igualitaria lejana, un tanto utópica todavía. En el ámbito del deporte, por ejemplo, no nos debemos conformar con que ya haya mujeres en las secciones de deportes de los medios de comunicación. Planteo la utopía de una selección nacional de fútbol mixta, imposible para hoy día, dada la prohibición de la FIFA y la falta de preparación física femenina. Pero desde luego, me niego a admitir que las mujeres carecen de constitución física para ese deporte, porque esa historia ya nos la colocaron para impedirles el acceso a la milicia o a la Guardia Civil. Y aporto el dato de que en los colegios -en los mixtos, claro- ya aprecio que espontáneamente chicos y chicas juegan juntos al fútbol con total normalidad. The Un-Shock Doctrine, by Slavoj Žižek
Although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, facilitated by global market conditions (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists, but an urgency imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse. For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.
Why, then, the Idea of communism? For three reasons, which echo the Lacanian triad of the I-S-R: at the Imaginary level, because it is necessary to maintain continuity with the long tradition of radical millenarian and egalitarian rebellions; at the Symbolic level, because we need to determine the precise conditions under which, in each historical epoch, the space for communism may be opened up; finally, at the level of the Real, because we must assume the harshness of what Badiou calls the eternal communist invariants (egalitarian justice, voluntarism, terror, “trust in the people”). Such an Idea of communism is clearly opposed to socialism, which is precisely not an Idea, but a vague communitarian notion applicable to all kinds of organic social bonds, from spiritualized ideas of solidarity (“we are all part of the same body”) right up to fascist corporatism. The Really Existing Socialist states were precisely that: positively existing states, whereas communism is in its very notion anti-statist.
Where does this eternal communist Idea come from? Is it part of human nature, or, as Habermasians propose, an ethical premise (of equality or reciprocal recognition) inscribed into the universal symbolic order? Its eternal character cannot, after all, be accounted for by specific historical conditions. The key to resolving this problem is to focus on that against which the communist Idea rebels: namely, the hierarchical social body whose ideology was first formulated in great sacred texts such as The Book of Manu. As was demonstrated by Louis Dumont in his Homo hierarchicus, social hierarchy is always inconsistent; that is, its very structure relies on a paradoxical reversal (the higher sphere is, of course, higher than the lower, but, within the lower order, the lower is higher than the higher) on account of which the social hierarchy can never fully encompass all its elements. It is this constitutive inconsistency that gives birth to what Rancière calls “the part of no-part,” that singular element which remains out of place in the hierarchical order, and, as such, functions as a singular universal, giving body to the universality of the society in question. The communist Idea, then, is the eternal demand co-substantial with this element that lacks its proper place in the social hierarchy (“we are nothing, and we want to be all”).
Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Müntzer, including within the great religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalism versus Confucianism, etc.). The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality (for Buddhism we are all equal—in nirvana). It is here that the originality of Western thought becomes clear, particularly in its three great historical ruptures: Greek philosophy’s break with the mythical universe; Christianity’s break with the pagan universe; and modern democracy’s break with traditional authority. In each case, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a new positive order (limited, but nonetheless actual).
In short, the wager of Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to being expressed in short ecstatic outbursts after which things are returned to normal. On the contrary, radical negativity, as the undermining of every traditional hierarchy, has the potential to articulate itself in a positive order within which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. Such is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith can not only be expressed in, but also exists as, the collective of believers. And this faith is itself based on “terror,” as indicated by Christ’s insistence that he brings a sword, not peace, that whoever does not hate his father and mother is not a true follower, and so on. The content of this terror thus involves the rejection of all traditional hierarchical and community ties, with the wager that a different collective link is possible—an egalitarian bond between believers connected by agape as political love.
The question today, now that we know the limitations of that formal procedure, is whether we can imagine a step further in this process whereby egalitarian negativity reverts into a new positive order. We should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including in scientific communities. The way the CERN [acronym for what is now known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research] community functions is indicative here: in an almost utopian manner, individual efforts are undertaken in a collective non-hierarchical spirit, and dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs any material considerations. But are such traces, no matter how sublime, merely that—marginal traces?
In his intervention at the 2010 Marxism conference in London (organized by the Socialist Workers’s Party), Alex Callinicos evoked his dream of a future communist society in which there would be museums of capitalism, displaying to the public the artifacts of this irrational and inhuman social formation. The unintended irony of this dream is that today, the only museums of this kind are museums of Communism, displaying its horrors. So, again, what to do in such a situation? Two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no immediate European revolution, and that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote: “What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?”
Let us return to the situation in Greece in the summer of 2010, when popular discontent brought about the delegitimization of the entire political class and the country approached a power vacuum. Had there been any chance for the Left to take over state power, what could it have done in such a situation of “complete hopelessness”? Of course (if we may permit ourselves this personification), the capitalist system would have gleefully allowed the Left to take over, if only to ensure that Greece ended up in a state of economic chaos, which would then serve as a severe lesson to others. Nevertheless, despite such dangers, wherever an opening for taking power does arise, the Left should seize the opportunity and confront the problems head-on, making the best of a bad situation (in the case of Greece: renegotiating the debt, mobilizing European solidarity and popular support for its predicament). The tragedy of politics is that there will never be a “good” moment to seize power: the opportunity will always offer itself at the worst possible moment (characterized by economic fiasco, ecological catastrophe, civil unrest, etc.), when the ruling political class has lost its legitimacy and the fascist-populist threat lurks in the background. For example, the Scandinavian countries, while continuing to maintain high levels of social equality and a powerful Welfare State, also score very well on global competitiveness: proof that “generous, relatively egalitarian welfare states should not be seen as utopias or protected enclaves,” writes Göran Therborn in “The Killing Fields of Inequality,” “but can also be highly competitive participants in the world market. In other words, even within the parameters of global capitalism there are many degrees of freedom for radical social alternatives.”
Our situation is thus the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.), but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the New just in order to maintain what was good in the Old (education, healthcare, etc.). The journal in which Gramsci published his writings in the early 1920s was called L’Ordine nuovo (The New Order)—a title which was later appropriated by the extreme Right. Rather than seeing this later appropriation as revealing the “truth” of Gramsci’s use of the title—abandoning it as running counter to the rebellious freedom of an authentic Left—we should return to it as an index of the hard problem of defining the new order any revolution will have to establish after its success. In short, our times can be characterized as none other than Stalin characterized the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves.
Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem: the problem of the commons in all its dimensions—the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (“intellectual property”), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem.