Horner's Corner

What to do after the occupations of Wall Street and beyond – the protests that started far away, reached the centre and are now, reinforced, rolling back around the world? One of the great dangers the protesters face is that they will fall in love with themselves. In a San Francisco echo of the Wall Street occupation this week, a man addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate as if it was a happening in the hippy style of the 60s: "They are asking us what is our programme. We have no programme. We are here to have a good time."

Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called "class struggle essentialism" for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles, capitalism is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not "Main Street, not Wall Street", but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions – not questions of what we do not want, but about what we do want. What social organisation can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What organs, including those of control and repression? The 20th-century alternatives obviously did not work.

While it is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of the "horizontal organisation" of protesting crowds with egalitarian solidarity and open-ended free debates, we should also bear in mind what GK Chesterton wrote: "Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid." This holds also for politics in times of uncertainty: the open-ended debates will have to coalesce not only in some new master-signifiers, but also in concrete answers to the old Leninist question, "What is to be done?"

The direct conservative attacks are easy to answer. Are the protests un-American? When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.

Are the protesters violent? True, their very language may appear violent (occupation, and so on), but they are violent only in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi was violent. They are violent because they want to put a stop to the way things are – but what is this violence compared with the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

They are called losers – but are the true losers not there on Wall Street, who received massive bailouts? They are called socialists – but in the US, there already is socialism for the rich. They are accused of not respecting private property – but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if the protesters were to be destroying it night and day – just think of thousands of homes repossessed.

They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990 – and remember that communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism. The success of Chinese communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons – the commons of nature, of knowledge – which are threatened by the system.

They are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. They are not dreamers; they are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything, but reacting to how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice but goes on walking; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. The protesters are just reminding those in power to look down.

This is the easy part. The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them but are already working hard to dilute the protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, those in power will try to make the protests into a harmless moralistic gesture.

In boxing, to clinch means to hold the opponent's body with one or both arms in order to prevent or hinder punches. Bill Clinton's reaction to the Wall Street protests is a perfect case of political clinching. Clinton thinks that the protests are "on balance … a positive thing", but he is worried about the nebulousness of the cause: "They need to be for something specific, and not just against something because if you're just against something, someone else will fill the vacuum you create," he said. Clinton suggested the protesters get behind President Obama's jobs plan, which he claimed would create "a couple million jobs in the next year and a half".

What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of concrete pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, as it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly new.

The reason protesters went out is that they had enough of the world where recycling your Coke cans, giving a couple of dollars to charity, or buying a cappuccino where 1% goes towards developing world troubles, is enough to make them feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, they saw that for a long time they were also allowing their political engagements to be outsourced – and they want them back.

The art of politics is also to insist on a particular demand that, while thoroughly "realist", disturbs the very core of the hegemonic ideology: ie one that, while definitely feasible and legitimate, is de facto impossible (universal healthcare in the US was such a case). In the aftermath of the Wall Street protests, we should definitely mobilise people to make such demands – however, it is no less important to simultaneously remain subtracted from the pragmatic field of negotiations and "realist" proposals.

What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on enemy's turf; time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be taken from us – everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our "terror", ominous and threatening as it should be.

TV PBS interview with Zizek here.
Fast Tube by Casper

On Al Jazeera here

From:

The Guardian on Facebook.

At the Hayward Gallery, South Bank, London is a wonderful exhibition by an artist of joyful, subversive power.

Pipilotti Rist (her first name his an amalgam of the two names she was called by family and friends respectively -’Pipi’ and ‘Lotti’) produces video installations that are sometimes minute (tiny screens, embedded in walls, floors, objects) sometimes huge (immersive experiences in which you seem to be at once viewer and image) and all sizes in between. A lot has been written about this artist, so I’ll keep my remarks quite brief. She is new to me. Anyway, the thing is to go and experience her marvellous work, not to read about it.

First Thoughts and feeling prompted by Pipilotti Rist’s Eyeball Massage -very tentative and partial, and missing a whole lot out, of course:

*Dreams It’s a cliche to say watching film is like dreaming, or that a dream one had was like a film, but these videos that migrate into handbags, packing cases and wombs: who is dreaming them? Rist’s work seems to be neither simply autobiographical (although it is her we see, in various guises, in most of the films) nor disconnected from her experience as a dreaming body. Here the videos seem to dream, or to invite us to merge their dreams with us.

*Shapes. The objects and shapes we move through, round or into in this exhibition -veils, sea shells, handbags, cradles, etc, seem to stand as analogues for bodies, and it is the body and its senses that seem to be the key to all we experience. The art is feminine: I would find it hard to imagine this being made by a male artist. Why? The female (Rist’s) body is the subject, and so are her dreams. The feminine -the feminism -is in the form of the works, not some ‘message’ to be found in them. The form is the content: in her joyful wisdom, Pipilotti Rist has created art that we need for the 21st century, a kind of expansive, unalienated experience rooted in a woman’s embodied dreaming. In place of the male subject who ‘stands for’ or ‘stands in for’ all of humanity, here it is a woman’s body that is the human form, inclusive, singular and universal. A woman who is the human subject.

*Pleasure. this exhibition is deeply pleasurable – a real massage. In it caressing warmth it seems to challenge the idea that the only kind of opposition to reification and alienation has to be a militant dysphoria.

*Machines of representation: They may be like dreaming things, but they are still machines and she never lets go of this awareness, and consequently, neither do we. We have an experience, highly mediated, of a physical immediacy. In what ways are we like these machines that make pictures?

* Within you, without you: We sometimes peer into small things to see videos, sometimes walk or sit in large spaces, surrounded by images and sounds. Ultimately the inside/outside organ/epidermis, building/world sets of alternations embraces the Hayward building itself, and then, as smoke filled bubbles, generated from the roof the of the building, floats far beyond.

*Sound. Sound: ambient music, shrieking, laughter, singing (including lip-synching to pop songs)..is a part of the experience of being in these affective spaces.

*Anxiety The main exception to the above might be her giant installation Suburb Brain. I won’t try to describe it, but the mouth we see and hear talking seems to be like that of an analysand, in which what is said (statements) seem overloaded, almost at times bending and failing under a weight of affect. There is questioning and anxiety here, felt through the staging, the saying, the multiple signifiers.

*Machine and body, nature and culture. Always interwoven, in all she does.

*Beyond the single dreaming subject. The videos dream for us, perhaps, in an inter-passive, inter-subjective manner. Rooted in the body, her films seem to evoke an experience that transcends the single subject that is structured and divided by language.

* Hysteria -a kind of productive, happy  hysteria? if this is possible, we find it here. And the exhibition has a kind of delirium.

*Play. There is a kind of utopian promise in play, and there is a strong play element in Pipilotti’s work. I think it links us to our childhood and to another world of pure, absorbed, non instrumental activity. I was particularly taken by her lip synch performance to Kevin Coyne’s Jacky and Edna (‘You called me Jacky’). The sight and sound of this is something I’ll remember for a long time.

*Go and see her work, go and be in her work.

An article on Rist:

Pipilotti Rist: We all come from between our mothers legs | Art and design | The Guardian.

Film of Rist in conversation here.

For more on play, childhood and utopia see  here and here.

Average bonuses for directors of FTSE 350 companies have risen by 187% since 2002, without a corresponding rise in share prices, new research suggests.

The High Pay Commission said on Monday that average annual bonuses were worth 48% of salary in 2002, but are now 90%.

Commission chairman Deborah Hargreaves said it was a “myth” that big bonuses meant companies performed better.

Read more at:

BBC News – Bosses’ bonuses up by 187% since 2002, report suggests.

Pay for the directors of the UK’s top businesses rose 50% over the past year, a pay research company has said.

Incomes Data Services (IDS) said this took the average pay for a director of a FTSE 100 company to just short of £2.7m.

The rise, covering salary, benefits and bonuses, was higher than that recorded for the main person running the company, the chief executive.

Their pay rose by 43% over the year, according to the study.

A statement from IDS said that that figure suggested that “executive largesse is evenly spread across the board”.

Base salaries rose by just 3.2%, although that was above the median rise recorded by IDS this week for average pay settlements of 2.6% for private sector workers.

The latest consumer price inflation figures showed inflation at 5.2%.

Directors’ bonus payments, on average, rose by 23% from £737,000 in 2010 to £906,000 this year.

The Unite union has called executive pay “obscene” and has called for shareholders to be given more power to hold directors accountable.

The union’s general secretary, Len McCluskey said: “The Government should strongly consider giving shareholders greater legal powers to question and curb these excessive remuneration packages.

“Institutional shareholders need to exercise much greater scrutiny and control of directors’ pay and bonuses.

“It’s obscene and it shows that the City has learnt nothing during the financial troubles of the last four years.”

‘Complex’ packages

“I think it is very hard to justify these sorts of pay increases,” Deborah Hargreaves, chair of the High Pay Commission, told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme.

“When you think the average pay is going up 1% or 2%, it’s not even meeting price rises. These pay packages have become so complex that executives don’t even understand it themselves.

“We have got a closed shop here and someone needs to break it open.”

Brendan Barber, the TUC’s general secretary, said: “Top directors have used tough business conditions to impose real wage cuts, which have hit people’s living standards and the wider economy, but have shown no such restraint with their own pay.

“Reform should start with employee representation on remuneration committees, which would give directors a much-needed sense of reality.”

Steve Tatton, who edited the IDS report, said: “Britain’s economy may be struggling to return to pre-recession levels of output, but the same cannot be said of FTSE 100 directors’ remuneration.”

Mr Tatton said that while closer scrutiny of pay awards was expected in future, “remuneration committees will have to make sure that they are able to provide full and thorough justifications for the bonuses awarded.”

From:

BBC News – Directors’ pay rose 50% in past year, says IDS report.

Much has already been said about the riots already, so I’ll keep this brief. What concerns me is the poor quality of much of the comment by the Mediocracy (very much including the BBC), and the politicians who trotted  into the studios in the aftermath of the ‘disturbances’.  The thing that struck me most about the coverage and the commentary was the sheer crudity of the ‘analysis’. Essentially, what seemed to go wrong was the failure of commentators to hold more than one thought in their heads at a time, and then  link those thoughts. It’s not that this is particularly hard to do; rather, that they  can’t or won’t do it. Is this a matter of ability or ideology? You decide.

(1) Reasons and Causes.

Why riot? why loot? A lot of the immediate comment, during and immediately after the riots described the rioters as ‘mindless’. This puzzles me. If a person smashes a window and steals a plasma screen TV he has a reason. He isn’t mindless (or feral: another way of making him appear subhuman). You might not like his reason, and you may think him a nasty piece of work, but there you are. He wants the TV. At this point you may make your moral judgments. If, however, you stop at that point you’ve not done a good job of grasping what is going on.

If you look at the areas in which the riots predominated, they were  mainly in areas of high unemployment. If you look at the profiles of those arrested, you find a very high number of unemployed, indeed of NEETS (not in  employment,  education or training). Rather few members of the Oxford Bullingdon club seem to have been involved in these outbursts of violence, at least this time. So clearly something is going on here that involves more than what is ‘in the head’ of the window smasher. But just because he can’t necessarily say what that something  is doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant.

Finding a correlation between deprivation and behaviour isn’t the same as establishing cause, but it doesn’t take a PhD in Sociology to see that in the mix, somewhere, is a problem emanating from the kind of society we have. And in case we’ve forgotten, this society is one with the lowest social mobility since 1961 and levels of inequality that are not only worse than most of our comparable neighbours but getting worse. So we have the reason the rioter might give and the possible causes of the phenomenon. One doesn’t cancel out the other; both need to be kept in mind.

(2) Ethics, Politics and the Economy.

When you praise and blame you assume agency (you think the person could have done otherwise). So you blame the thief for smashing the window and stealing the TV. Quite right. But this won’t do if you want to have an approximately adult conversation about why and how the riots erupted in August 2011 here, and not in say, Berlin or Prague. If you do think about it, you are going to have to consider  the politics of the situation, and that will lead you, I submit, to confronting the neoliberal policies that both main parties have been consciously pursuing for the last 30 years or more: debt fuelled consumerism, the denigration of public service, the marketisation of huge swathes of social life and yes, no getting away from it, the massive increase in inequality. These neoliberal  policies have been embraced with a special enthusiasm by the current lot in power, and it is an irony that has been commented on before that just as neoliberal economics start to send the world economy over the edge of doom, so the neoliberal scythe gets sliced  into whats left of our social services, and all in the name of deficit reduction. Of course, you may not want to think about it, but if not, I suggest you avoid talking about Mindless Youth on TV or in the newspapers as people like our Home Secretary Theresa May did.

What are those social services for? Primarily, they direct resources from the community towards those things individuals cannot be expected to provide for themselves (healthcare, education, pensions etc). The theory was supposed to be that the better off in the community ought to pay proportionately more than the less well off towards these services via something called progressive taxation. Some things are more important than individual enrichment. This includes the recognition that we live together in one society, and then acting on that insight through the elementary social solidarity represented by redistribution from the haves to the have-nots. Now this principle has been challenged, and even breached. The result is greater social inequality, and the result of that is social problems in almost all areas of of life (as Wilkinson and Pickett documented in their book The Spirit Level. There’s plenty of evidence in that book that inequality makes life worse for everyone, and if you care about evidence, you’ll find it laid out there). So we get, for example, the obscene outcome in which a hedge-fund manger ends up paying proportionately  less tax than his office cleaner.

Hegel noted that in a community in which the market ruled, one would get winners and losers, and that some of those losers would feel themselves to be excluded from society. They might come to constitute  a rabble, as he put it (there is no mention of ‘feral’  that I can find in the Philosophy of Right).  Now it is surely not beyond the wit of even our politicians to connect  social and economic policies and the actions some people end up performing. You don’t have to be Hegel to be able to do this, although it seems that you do have to be more intelligent than Theresa May, MP.

So while an explanation couched in terms of the  reasons for an action aren’t identical to  one that considers the causes of actions it ought to be possible to grasp that there are connections between them. Indeed, they might be be describing the same phenomenon from different ends, as it were. Create an alienated, commodity driven environment in which people are goaded to buy more stuff and simultaneously denied the means to acquire it legally and you might end up with the guy who smashes a window and takes the TV because he can.

 

 

 

Slavoj Žižek on the meaning of the riots

 

Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that his time was over. The same holds for the continuing financial crisis. In September 2008, it was presented by some as an anomaly that could be corrected through better regulations etc; now that signs of a repeated financial meltdown are gathering it is clear that we are dealing with a structural phenomenon.

We are told again and again that we are living through a debt crisis, and that we all have to share the burden and tighten our belts. All, that is, except the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is taboo: if we did, the argument runs, the rich would have no incentive to invest, fewer jobs would be created and we would all suffer. The only way to save ourselves from hard times is for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. What should the poor do? What can they do?

Although the riots in the UK were triggered by the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, everyone agrees that they express a deeper unease – but of what kind? As with the car burnings in the Paris banlieues in 2005, the UK rioters had no message to deliver. (There is a clear contrast with the massive student demonstrations in November 2010, which also turned to violence. The students were making clear that they rejected the proposed reforms to higher education.) This is why it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside organised social space, who can express their discontent only through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’.

There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he pushes in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards find nothing; it is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves. The guards were missing the obvious truth, just as the commentators on the riots have done. We are told that the disintegration of the Communist regimes in the early 1990s signalled the end of ideology: the time of large-scale ideological projects culminating in totalitarian catastrophe was over; we had entered a new era of rational, pragmatic politics. If the commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era is true in any sense, it can be seen in this recent outburst of violence. This was zero-degree protest, a violent action demanding nothing. In their desperate attempt to find meaning in the riots, the sociologists and editorial-writers obfuscated the enigma the riots presented.

The protesters, though underprivileged and de facto socially excluded, weren’t living on the edge of starvation. People in much worse material straits, let alone conditions of physical and ideological oppression, have been able to organise themselves into political forces with clear agendas. The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?

Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’**: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of capitalism: although by virtue of being global it encompasses the whole world, it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological constellation in which people are deprived of their ways of locating meaning. The fundamental lesson of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East: there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’, no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper. The global dimension of capitalism represents truth without meaning.

The first conclusion to be drawn from the riots, therefore, is that both conservative and liberal reactions to the unrest are inadequate. The conservative reaction was predictable: there is no justification for such vandalism; one should use all necessary means to restore order; to prevent further explosions of this kind we need not more tolerance and social help but more discipline, hard work and a sense of responsibility. What’s wrong with this account is not only that it ignores the desperate social situation pushing young people towards violent outbursts but, perhaps more important, that it ignores the way these outbursts echo the hidden premises of conservative ideology itself. When, in the 1990s, the Conservatives launched their ‘back to basics’ campaign, its obscene complement was revealed by Norman Tebbit: ‘Man is not just a social but also a territorial animal; it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality.’ This is what ‘back to basics’ was really about: the unleashing of the barbarian who lurked beneath our apparently civilised, bourgeois society, through the satisfying of the barbarian’s ‘basic instincts’. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of ‘repressive desublimation’ to explain the ‘sexual revolution’: human drives could be desublimated, allowed free rein, and still be subject to capitalist control – viz, the porn industry. On British streets during the unrest, what we saw was not men reduced to ‘beasts’, but the stripped-down form of the ‘beast’ produced by capitalist ideology.

Meanwhile leftist liberals, no less predictably, stuck to their mantra about social programmes and integration initiatives, the neglect of which has deprived second and third-generation immigrants of their economic and social prospects: violent outbursts are the only means they have to articulate their dissatisfaction. Instead of indulging ourselves in revenge fantasies, we should make the effort to understand the deeper causes of the outbursts. Can we even imagine what it means to be a young man in a poor, racially mixed area, a priori suspected and harassed by the police, not only unemployed but often unemployable, with no hope of a future? The implication is that the conditions these people find themselves in make it inevitable that they will take to the streets. The problem with this account, though, is that it lists only the objective conditions for the riots. To riot is to make a subjective statement, implicitly to declare how one relates to one’s objective conditions.

We live in cynical times, and it’s easy to imagine a protester who, caught looting and burning a store and pressed for his reasons, would answer in the language used by social workers and sociologists, citing diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood. He knows what he is doing, then, but is doing it nonetheless.

It is meaningless to ponder which of these two reactions, conservative or liberal, is the worse: as Stalin would have put it, they are both worse, and that includes the warning given by both sides that the real danger of these outbursts resides in the predictable racist reaction of the ‘silent majority’. One of the forms this reaction took was the ‘tribal’ activity of the local (Turkish, Caribbean, Sikh) communities which quickly organised their own vigilante units to protect their property. Are the shopkeepers a small bourgeoisie defending their property against a genuine, if violent, protest against the system; or are they representatives of the working class, fighting the forces of social disintegration? Here too one should reject the demand to take sides. The truth is that the conflict was between two poles of the underprivileged: those who have succeeded in functioning within the system versus those who are too frustrated to go on trying. The rioters’ violence was almost exclusively directed against their own. The cars burned and the shops looted were not in rich neighbourhoods, but in the rioters’ own. The conflict is not between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, the conflict between society and society, between those with everything, and those with nothing, to lose; between those with no stake in their community and those whose stakes are the highest.

Zygmunt Bauman characterised the riots as acts of ‘defective and disqualified consumers’: more than anything else, they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology – so much, perhaps, for the ‘post-ideological society’. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive. It is impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force; it is envy masked as triumphant carnival.

The riots should be situated in relation to another type of violence that the liberal majority today perceives as a threat to our way of life: terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. In both instances, violence and counter-violence are caught up in a vicious circle, each generating the forces it tries to combat. In both cases, we are dealing with blind passages à l’acte, in which violence is an implicit admission of impotence. The difference is that, in contrast to the riots in the UK or in Paris, terrorist attacks are carried out in service of the absolute Meaning provided by religion.

But weren’t the Arab uprisings a collective act of resistance that avoided the false alternative of self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism? Unfortunately, the Egyptian summer of 2011 will be remembered as marking the end of revolution, a time when its emancipatory potential was suffocated. Its gravediggers are the army and the Islamists. The contours of the pact between the army (which is Mubarak’s army) and the Islamists (who were marginalised in the early months of the upheaval but are now gaining ground) are increasingly clear: the Islamists will tolerate the army’s material privileges and in exchange will secure ideological hegemony. The losers will be the pro-Western liberals, too weak – in spite of the CIA funding they are getting – to ‘promote democracy’, as well as the true agents of the spring events, the emerging secular left that has been trying to set up a network of civil society organisations, from trade unions to feminists. The rapidly worsening economic situation will sooner or later bring the poor, who were largely absent from the spring protests, onto the streets. There is likely to be a new explosion, and the difficult question for Egypt’s political subjects is who will succeed in directing the rage of the poor? Who will translate it into a political programme: the new secular left or the Islamists?

The predominant reaction of Western public opinion to the pact between Islamists and the army will no doubt be a triumphant display of cynical wisdom: we will be told that, as the case of (non-Arab) Iran made clear, popular upheavals in Arab countries always end in militant Islamism. Mubarak will appear as having been a much lesser evil – better to stick with the devil you know than to play around with emancipation. Against such cynicism, one should remain unconditionally faithful to the radical-emancipatory core of the Egypt uprising.

But one should also avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause: it’s too easy to admire the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. Today’s left faces the problem of ‘determinate negation’: what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over? In this context, the manifesto of the Spanish indignados, issued after their demonstrations in May, is revealing. The first thing that meets the eye is the pointedly apolitical tone: ‘Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic and social outlook that we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.’ They make their protest on behalf of the ‘inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.’ Rejecting violence, they call for an ‘ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.’ Who will be the agents of this revolution? The indignados dismiss the entire political class, right and left, as corrupt and controlled by a lust for power, yet the manifesto nevertheless consists of a series of demands addressed at – whom? Not the people themselves: the indignados do not (yet) claim that no one else will do it for them, that they themselves have to be the change they want to see. And this is the fatal weakness of recent protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.

The situation in Greece looks more promising, probably owing to the recent tradition of progressive self-organisation (which disappeared in Spain after the fall of the Franco regime). But even in Greece, the protest movement displays the limits of self-organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no central authority to regulate it, a public space where all are allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on. When the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond mere protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was not a new party or a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness.

** Actually, this idea was first articulated by Hannah Arendt. As usual, she goes uncredited for an idea that has a high relevance to our present discontents.

via Slavoj Žižek · Shoplifters of the World Unite · LRB 19 August 2011.

More on the riots here.

Something on class and education in the UK here.