Democracy and Its Discontents: Conversation with Agon
Hamza
In this interview to PWD, Agon Hamza talks to Kamran Baradaran about
democracy. The word democracy today acts as a key to a broad convergence.
Everyone agrees on the word, despite differing ideologies, although its
implications and the world in which this democracy finds meaning is
controversial.
Much has changed since Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis and his claim to the
authoritarian victory of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, the idea remains that
democracy ultimately has the upper hand and is endorsed by recent social
movements (from the Arab Spring to the BLM). It seems that in today’s era,
which proclaims itself post-ideological, there is nothing more futile than
talking about democracy. Despite all the developments we have witnessed in
the last decade, one can probably argue that that the mark of democracy is
still the dominant emblem of our Kafkaesque world.
According to Jean-Luc Nancy, May 68 initiated a calling into
question of democracy's self-assurance (The Truth of
Democracy, Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas, Fordham University Press, 2010). Over the
years, however, we have once again witnessed a new wave of
protests. As David Harvey puts in his newest book, “The AntiCapitalist Chronicles”, huge outburst of political struggles
around the world in the fall of 2019 – from Santiago to Beirut,
Paris, Quito, Hong Kong, India, and well beyond – suggests that
there is something chronically wrong in the world. Can these
developments be seen as a new attempt to re-define the idea of
democracy?
A.H. The protests, riots, uprisings and other forms of rebellions
against the agents of capitalism are in principle necessary. However,
there are a few problems one should always bear in mind. The first
problem, as I see it, is that in the last instance, popular outbursts,
revolts and protests are somehow always-already integrated within
the logic of ruling ideology. That is to say, the ruling ideology is
remarkably successful in appropriating both the demands and the
methods of revolts. We all remember Presidents Obama call to the
protesters of the “Occupy” movement – he wanted to engage in a
dialogue with them; whereas President Clinton urged the
government to listen to the people’s demands. I think that the
moment those in power are ready to negotiate, or ready to listen to
our demands, something is inherently wrong or lost in our very
reasons for protest. This means that our demands are already within
the logic of ruling ideology. Of course, provided that protests or
rebellions have managed to outline a basic, general idea of why are
they taking the streets, which, sadly is rarely the case.
In the last instance, we can argue that the terms and the terrain of
the political and ideological struggles of the Left are decided by its
enemies. The case of Syriza is exemplary: while it is a radical Left, it
set itself the aim of “saving capitalism from itself”.
The other element is that of which Slavoj Žižek has warned long ago:
not to fall in love with ourselves. Of course, this is very tempting to
fall in love with ourselves when it is thousands or more of us in the
streets, chanting or fighting the police, breaking some windows,
burning some cars or injuring some policemen... In fact, it is nearly
impossible not to fall in love with the “heroic” figure of yourself. I
think that is perfectly legitimate, as there is nothing wrong with a
“healthy” dose of narcissism. But, the danger lies precisely in this: In
the self-sufficiency of protesting. Protests, riots, or even the
revolution (if I am permitted in using this term which, frankly
speaking, nobody knows what it means in the second decade of the
21st century) are in themselves insufficient. If I can draw a parallel
here, only to illustrate my point. It is very fashionable to take part in
uninformed political debates online, and pretend they have anything
with actual political work. This doesn’t mean that political opinions
are bad, but we have political opinions for the sake of pleasure, as
well as to relief anguish. All these are very legitimate reasons, but it
is crucial not to confuse this with politics. The truth of protests
relies on what comes after them, that is to say, what changes in our
everyday life, as well as what form of social and political
organisations remains once the life is back to normal – what kind of
new normality is created?
I do not want to sound overly pessimistic – although there is hardly
anything to be optimistic or hopeful about – and I would like to
mention Chile. After a year or so ago, protests and street revolts
resulted in a referendum on a new constitution, which just a couple
of weeks or so ago was voted with an overwhelming majority.
There is another dimension to this form of doing politics. The all too
comfortable position of self-organization movements, which lack a
central body or authority to regulate their movement, and their
(frequent) refusal of the idea of the party or of the taking over of
state power, as such movements are always reduced to some form
of civil society movement that tries to exert pressure onto those in
power. According to Žižek, it is “the tetrad of people-movementparty-leader”[1] that can accomplish the next step; that is to say, we
need a strong body or authority to reorganize or restructure our
entire social and political life, from making the harsh and difficult
decisions to implementing them. In this regard, Žižek puts forward
another highly polemic thesis: although “anticapitalism cannot be
directly the goal of political action – in politics, one opposes
concrete political agents and their actions, not an anonymous
‘system,’ nevertheless, it should be its ultimate aim, the horizon of
all its activity.”[2] This strategy can be summarized by
distinguishing between two types of politics: we should leave
Politics (with a capital P) for thinking, and in this way we will be
able to be more realistic about what politics (with a small p) can in
fact accomplish. This does not mean that we shouldn’t do it, but it
means that though pragmatism today is in line with the inherently
corrupted and dirty work of politics, we should have no illusions
there. The best example here of what Žižek himself would not go for
is the former president of Brazil, Lula da Silva; one should rather go
for Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Lula is the best example of confusing
Politics with politics, that is to say, in his use of real-politics he was
quite successful, until the moment he referred to politics as Politics,
for example referring to basic rent not as a step in a larger socialist
program but as its accomplishment. Aristide presents a more or less
successful story: with his constant references to Christianity and
liberation theology, he managed to safeguard the truly
emancipatory dimension of Politics, while at the same time engaging
on the work necessary to assure immediate victories for the people.
Because the transcendental status of politics was safe through
Christianity, Aristide could get his hands dirty without it leading to a
corrosion of the very ideals that led him to action. In this way, he
showed that nothing gets done in corrupted countries without
politicians and militants engaging with the actually existing logic of
corruption, but the crucial move was that he proved that this could
be done without corrupting Politics as such in the process. In other
words, it is part of a true political act to distinguish between Politics
and politics, and to show that “corruption” is not a true political
category but a particular way of structuring the relation between
the law and the lawful transgression of a situation. There is no
emancipatory potential in denouncing corruption itself. When we
shed the Left’s illusion of its own righteousness, we can clearly see
that the situation in which the Left finds itself when it takes the
power is not optimistic.
There is an old joke from the defunct German Democratic
Republic. A German worker gets a job in Siberia. Aware that his
mail will be intercepted and read by censors, he tells his
friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter you receive from me is
written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink,
it is false." After a month, his friends receive the first letter,
written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are
full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly
heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are
many beautiful girls eager to have affairs - the only thing
unavailable is red ink." As far as the question of democracy is
concerned, does this not grasp our situation? Doesn't the coup
against Albin Kurti's government in Kosovo show the
limitations of formal democracy and its inability to address the
political situation in the world today, namely the missing of the
red ink?
A.H. Louis Althusser once said that you cannot see everything from
everywhere. I am within the situation, so my analysis on this issue
will be from within that perspective. But, where one is on the inside,
maybe one can have a different view on the totality. Let’s see.
Perhaps some preliminary reflections would be in order. The party
politics, with its mostly parliamentary basis, is not the adequate
perspective on the specificities of the totality in Kosova. This
presupposes a nation-state, something which Kosova is not. So the
game that is played is that which pretends that some stable rules
already exist in the background, and we are pushed back to the
starting point time and again. Then, the rules falter, and elections
are re-scheduled again. This has been the case till now.
One of the main problems is that, I do not think we know what it
really means to do party politics in an inconsistent state, which is
not a nation-state, precisely because there is a certain inconsistency
to the electoral game. It becomes untrustworthy. Perhaps even the
popular supports stops having the same meaning when
representation is not to a stable level to power. I think this is
something we have to think about very seriously.
In a sense, this explains – up to a certain point – the reasons of the
coup against Kurti’s government. In fact, this coup came to be
known as the ‘first corona coup.’ However, I think the reasons are
slightly more complicated. Kurti’s government marked a certain
break from the ruling ideology, logic and trends established in this
country since 1999. It was a government based on a leftist and
progressive program and agenda. This is in itself a big obstacle for
the big capital. It is only a sign of how far to the right the political
scene, globally, has moved when even a modest social-democratic
government is unacceptable.
This year was the year of elections in the USA. President Trump
appointed a special envoy for Kosova-Serbia dialogue. His envoy is
his close aide, Richard Grenell, who served as a US ambassador to
Germany and for a short period an acting director of national
intelligence. Grenell is perhaps the best exemplifier of what is wrong
with Trump and is far-right policies. A highly incompetent, ignorant,
arrogant, bully who choses no methods in achieving his goals. He
put immense pressure on Kurti’s junior coalition partner and this
lead to the coup. It was executed by the local actors, but certainly it
was orchestrated by Trump’s administration.
Trump needed an immediate “success” in international politics, to
help his image as a peacemaker. He and his envoy organized a
meeting in the White House in September, between Kosova’s prime
minister and Serbian president, in which they signed an agreement,
which was not really an agreement, it wasn’t a peace treaty neither,
but a letter of intent towards the US. It is a letter of absurdities,
which will have both serious and severe political consequences for
Kosova. And, Trump used this throughout his campaign, falsely
claiming that Albanians and Serbs have been killing each other until
September of this year. His is an administration which has no
consideration for history nor factual truths.
Kurti and his government were an obstacle for his projects.
I think that in a certain sense, this government had to fall. With this
coup, in Kosova a certain era has ended. I do not belong to those
who mourn the past or develop a nostalgia, or even a melancholic
approach to the past. From the perspective of the present, we can
even say that the coup was inevitable, and as such, it opened up the
space for a new beginning for Kurti and his movement. To be clear,
we cannot use the same political, methodological or conceptual
apparatus in the present. Between June (when the new government
was elected) and now, a lot has happened. But, more importantly, a
certain political epoch ended then.
Here I would also like to add another issue. I am not saying this
under the banner of political realism. Far from it. I, like others, truly
believe in political change and frankly, we are all very desperate for
it. But, the left has no good theory or discourse to account for or
analyse its own failures. We are very good at denouncing the others.
The outcome of this is either depression or resentment of the left
itself. Maybe, the answer to this is that of Frank Ruda: to act as if the
worst has already happened.
The idea of immediate and direct democracy has become very
popular in intellectual space. Communal and local democratic
organizations are often considered as an alternative to the
state-based political organization. However, the problem is that
this non-representative dream lacks the potential to
universalize itself. Do we need a strong and regulative
institution to undo the alienated forms of symbolic order? How
are we to re-invent the relation between democracy and the
idea of a large-scale mechanism?
A.H. The people, as a democratic body, are not a political agent by
definition. I don’t think we should count all too much on the “power
of the people.” the direct participation of the people in the
horizontal self-organized movements should not be mandatory.
People have the right in apathy, or in the laziness of the collective
life. The bureaucratical life, from taking decisions for the collective
to implementing them, should be organized by the politicians who
are always-already militants, organized in a central body, called the
Party.
The whole question of bureaucracy as a form of life lies on
representation versus inclusion. The communist Party-form
organization, in a Jamesonian militarized form, should not represent
the people, but rather include everyone in it. This inclusion in fact
overcomes the problem of the duality of powers (state versus party)
exactly because there is no party-state, but rather a party instead of
a state. Furthermore, not only the duality of representation versus
inclusion, but also the representation versus participation is solved.
The abolition of the present can be carried out only by collective
political engagement. Indeed, politics is not the ‘practical’
dimension, before everything politics is a register of thought. The
relation between thinking (i.e. philosophy) and politics is very
complex, but let us suffice by the following proposition: the
transformation of thought inevitably produces effects in politics.
The effects of the theoretical (philosophical) work have even a
greater effect in the world than the practical work. It transforms the
very foundations in which the world actually exists and within
which politics takes place. The revolutionarization of the former, the
latter will necessarily transform itself. In other words, pure thinking
and politics are inseparable. Marx's famous response to Proudhon's
The Philosophy of Poverty was to return the message in its inverted
form: The Poverty of Philosophy. Today, when the value of thinking
has become itself measured by the standards of the incessant
activity and production that organize all forms of labour, it might be
time to supplement Marx's position. The crisis of the left is no longer
the crisis of idealism, of a "poor" philosophy disconnected from the
material basis that conditions it – ours is a poverty of philosophy, a
blatant absence of any form of thinking subtracted from the
imperative of compulsive activity. A "return to philosophy" has,
then, a crucial role today: one, it is a means to reinvent the critical
powers needed in order to interpret the world. In Hegel’s own
words, “philosophy is its own time apprehended in thoughts.”
Furthermore, the decision to affirm the critical and transformative
power of philosophical thinking also allows us to shed light in our
contemporary predicament from a renewed perspective, one in
which the crisis of the Left, more than the crises of capitalism,
become our main concern. Considered from the standpoint of our
“poverty of philosophy”, it suddenly becomes possible to recognize
the imposture at the heart of some of our diagnoses of our enemies
and struggles: for example, the supposition, shared by most of the
Left today, that we live in post-ideological times, in which all that is
left for us to do is to act, or - in its most current version - the idea
that “neo-liberalism” names our true enemies, a conclusion which all
too comfortably allows us to bypass the production of new critical
resources, and therefore confront our current lack of any robust
conceptual framework, given that our adversary is conveniently cut
off from its complex political-economic grounding. Paradoxically,
today, the impasse of philosophy alone marks, within the Left, our
most important tasks: 1) the task to develop a more profound and
comprehensive account of the Left’s failures in the 20th Century and
2) the task to think the problem of political organization anew,
The problem however is, to paraphrase Žižek, how are we to
revolutionize an economic and political system which itself is
revolutionary? Or in the terms of Robert Kurz and Moishe Postone:
wherefrom are we to think this political process if the contradiction
between the Left and capitalism is overdetermined by Capital itself?
I do not see an easy solution in this. But, we have to remember one
of the basic theses of Marx, according to which capitalism is not
defined by the type of state, whether it be democratic socialist,
socialist centralist, or otherwise. What defines capitalism as a mode
of production are capitalist relations of production.
I remain very cautious, if not suspicious, of the term democracy. All
too often its function is to organize the social, political and
ideological consensus. I fail to see in which conjunctures or societies
the signifier democracy has an emancipatory function.
One of the problems of the left, I think, is that it is caught in an
impossible situation. It perpetually tried to solve the problems of
capitalism. It will be very disappointing for them when they are
reminded that to date, nobody has solved the problems produced by
capitalism better than capitalism itself. Marx's famous dictum that
“humanity only poses to itself problems that it can solve” deserves
to be read in this light. A Leftist alternative should, in this line of
thinking, try to formulate within its own field the problems that it
would like to resolve.
Mechanisms based on capitalist realism have established a kind
of political nihilism in the world, and based on that, the idea of
any change in the current coordinates seems meaningless and
absurd. In this context, the promise of democracy was not
fulfilled and instead the society of the spectacle celebrated its
victory as a form of agnotocracy, a structure ruled by the
production and dissemination of ignorance. Does this mean
that democracy should be set aside as the declining shell of the
bourgeoisie?
A.H. I will take a detour via Marx here. Marx’s writings have a
complicated relation to politics itself. Even though scansions like the
one proposed by Louis Althusser - dividing the “humanist” from the
“scientific” phases in his work - are surely useful, none of these
proposals substitute the historical scansions which confronted Marx
throughout his life: a first “event”, when in 1842 he found himself
“in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as
material interests”[3] regarding the case of forest thefts and the
division of landed property; the failure, in 1848, of the so-called
“Springtime of the Peoples” and the subsequent proclamation of
Louis Bonaparte as emperor; the 1857 financial crisis - arguably the
first worldwide economic crisis - with its social and political effects
in Britain; and the emergence of the Paris Commune in 1871.
Each of these events brought about important changes to Marx’s
thinking. The “young hegelianism” of his student years were
shattered in 1842 by the intrusion of the problem of survival, of
men’s need to produce their own means of subsistence - a question
which oriented Marx's early critique of private property and his take
on man’s universality as a concrete consequence of our
transformative relation to nature in general and our own nature in
particular. A whole view on work, humanity and the future of the
poor was constructed upon this first critique of private property.
But Marx’s writings on the limits of right and the state were later
confronted by the failure of the 1848 revolutions - and, especially,
by the emergence of a new emperor through the very democratic
means supposed to bring the working class’s interests into direct
conflict with the bourgeoisie’s. The critique of political economy
acquired a new place in the following years of Marx’s studies: rather
than focusing on the relation between civil society and the state, we
see a shift towards the infra-structure of civil society itself, in the
problem of value and commodity production. This is the time of
Marx's deepened critical studies of the classical economists, leading
him to a first presentation of the theory of surplus value, and a
renewal of his political theory. But nothing in the works of classical
bourgeois economists could have anticipated the paradoxical fact
that a crisis in the very economic structure responsible for
exploitation and inequality could serve to reinforce, rather than
destroy, its functioning. This was, however, what the 1857 economic
crisis brought to view. In order to respond to it, Marx had to devise a
new entry point into his critique of political economy - one in which
the “limits” of capital functioned as internal rather than external
ones, a shift with deep consequences for the understanding of value,
production, international relations and the role of the state. It was
surely this new view on the global dimension of capitalism which
made Marx at first irresponsive to the outbreaks of the communes in
1871 - since these confronted the global panorama of Marx’s work
with local political resistance. But if Marx was surely not going to
drop his analysis of the globalized economic network of capitalism,
the new sequence of political struggles in the 70’s did nonetheless
pose the question of the “timelines” of capitalist development: was
industrialization truly a necessary step in the passage from the
communal properties of feudal life to a post-capitalist egalitarian
society? In these years, even though Marx was not to publish any
other works, he furthered his understanding of non-capitalist social
formations - a study emblematic exemplified by his correspondence
in 1881 with the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulitch. Each of these
different sequences in Marx’s thinking brought about important
changes in his conceptual framework.
I have undertaken this detour for a specific reason. I think this
enables us to explore Žižek’s understanding of institutional and
party politics, or more precisely the crisis of the Left in two
dimensions: first, the problem of its notion, and second, one of the
main ideological and political paradigms that characterizes the Left
today. Žižek’s assertion that we must “get our hands dirty” is of
crucial importance but nevertheless not sufficient (and he is well
aware of this). Party politics, which functions under the constraints
of the state, finds its limits not only in the structure of the state
apparatuses but also in the discourse of the Left itself. The protests
in Europe and other parts of the world are the best examples of the
poverty of our discourse and analysis of our predicament, that is to
say, it renders visible very clearly the traps in which we are caught.
We are fighting wrong enemies: the Left is criticizing neoliberalism
and its effects, instead of capitalism. When faced with the limits of
neoliberalism as a critical category, we jump into the safe moralizing
position: ‘of course the problem is capitalism, but we have to have a
name in order to grasp and criticize what is going on today.
Neoliberalism designates our situation.’ Here we encounter the pure
ideological mystification of our predicament: far from being a
critical concept, neoliberalism is an ideological category/tool of
analysis. And this is where the Left stands today: in a desperate
attempt to articulate itself, its positions, and its emblems, in order to
convince itself and others that this is what leftism is. Paraphrasing
Lacan’s statement about desire, in Subversion of the Subject, we
should rather maintain that leftism is not articulable, because it is
always articulated (within the situation). That’s why true leftists are
not afraid to get their hands dirty: if leftism is always articulated,
then it can articulate itself through whatever other name is needed –
neoliberal, conservative, totalitarian, radical, whatever – such that
the only trace indicating that a trajectory was in fact a leftist one will
be that the adjectives it will gather may be contradictory of one
another. What in Badiou’s mathematical ontology is called a “generic
set,” a trajectory that treats a situation so immanently that no
intensional property, can be ascribed to name its totality.
It seems like we are going to go through a night of the living dead,
where mostly forces that have no political efficacy fighting to remain
alive and pretend like they have a grip on the political reality. I think
this will be a very depressive time for leftist. For leftism is now a
social disease – it is the way a certain social class will try to avoid
recognizing itself as just boring old working class people. Think of
the left in the USA with regard to Trump. I think Americans are just
very ashamed to be reminded that they are as screwed up as we are.
I mean, it is not so much what is happening that is frightening them,
but the fact it is compossible with what they were doing two or
three months ago.
Notes:
[1]: Slavoj Žižek, “Answers without Questions,” in The Idea of
Communism, vol. 2, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2013), 188
[2]: Ibid., 195
[3]: Karl Marx, Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy
available
at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critiquepol-economy/preface.htm
Agon Hamza, Ph.D. in philosophy is Assistant Professor of political
philosophy at the graduate program of Institute of Social Sciences and
Humanities. He is the author of Reading Marx (Polity, 2018; with Frank
Ruda and Slavoj Žižek), Althusser and Pasolini: Philosophy, Marxism, and
Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and From Myth to Symptom: The Case of
Kosovo (Kolektivi Materializmi Dialektik, 2013; with Slavoj Žižek). In
addition, he is the editor of Althusser and Theology: Religion, Politics and
Philosophy (Brill, 2016) and Repeating Žižek (Duke University Press,
2015), as well as coeditor, with Frank Ruda, of Slavoj Žižek
and Dialectical Materialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He is founder
and co-editor (with Frank Ruda) of the international philosophy
journal Crisis and Critique. Currently he is working on two books,
entitled Reading Hegel (with Slavoj Žižek and Frank Ruda, forthcoming
with Polity), and Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of
Marxism (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan). Dr. Hamza was a
political advisor to Albin Kurti, former Prime Minister of the Republic of
Kosovo, and the leader of the political party Vetëvendosje.
Kamran Baradaran is an author, critic, musician, translator and
journalist. He has translated works of philosophers including Jean
Baudrillard, Antonio Gramsci, Paul Virilio and Slavoj Žižek into Persian.
In the field of literature, he has translated works of Giles Cooper, Hector
Munro, and Luigi Pirandello. Baradaran has also published a book on
Écriture féminine Feminine Writing; Improvisation in the Mist.