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Politics without Politics - Anselm Jappe Featured

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Feb 1 2013 02:32

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A critique of Anselm
Anselm Jappe rejects the traditional concept of politics and Jappe's essay, "Who Is
proposes a post-political politics appropriate for the crisis To Blame?"- Roland
conditions of our time, a politics whose task is to at least preserve Simon (Excerpt)
the possibility for future emancipation against the dehumanization From El Viejo Topo:
imposed by the commodity and is based on a combination of non- interview on "curtailing Towards a union of organizers
representational direct action, the rehabilitation of the idea of economic growth"- From the Twin Cities IWW's blog, The Organizer,
sabotage, and anti-capitalist theory that transcends the fixed Anselm Jappe db contests the sentiment that anyone's
boundary between praxis and theory, without succumbing to the Preface to Credit unto workplace is impossible to organize and gives
temptation to seek immediate results by yielding to traditional Death- Anselm Jappe some examples of some preliminary steps one
political attitudes and methods. Voters strike- Octave could...
Mirbeau
Politics without Politics Anselm Jappe What will we do if the
system can no longer
At first, the primacy of politics was the trademark idea of the fhrer jurist, create jobs? An
Carl Schmitt. But for some time now the radical left has hitched its wagon to interview with Anselm
a return of the political in which politics is supposed to be in and of itself the Jappe Alexandra
opposite of the market. Must we be convinced, then, that opposition to Prado Coelho
capitalism, or to its contemporary derivatives, passes for what is commonly
called politics? It is obvious that nothing would have changed if Royal had
School students protest austerity photo
been elected instead of Sarkozy. And even if the Trotskyists, who have taken
Attached files gallery, Italy, October 5th 2012
the place of the social democrats who became liberals, were to share power in
On October 5th, thousands of school students
France, the world would not be turned upside down. In Germany, the Party of
in Italy took to the streets to protest against the
Democratic Socialism participates in regional governments; in Italy,
government's austerity measures.
Rifondazione Comunista has its cabinet posts; even the Italian centri sociali,
Demonstrations were held in cities across Italy
often considered the crme de la crme of the struggle, send some deputy
under the...
mayors to city hall. Everywhere, these representatives of the radical left end
up supporting neoliberal policies. Do we need, then, to form truly radical
parties, parties that will not founder in such swamps? Or are the reasons for
these betrayals structural; does every instance of participation in politics
inevitably lead to surrender to the market and its laws, regardless of any Follow @libcomorg 27.5K followers
subjective intentions to the contrary?

It is thus fitting to pose a preliminary question: what do we mean by the term,

politics? Here we encounter a confusion similar to the one that bedevils Info
labor and its critique. Criticizing labor makes no sense at all if it is identified The libcom library contains nearly 20,000
with productive activity as such, which is undoubtedly an established fact articles. If it's your first time on the site, or
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content. Thus conceived, labor is a historical phenomenon that pertains
exclusively to capitalist society and that can be criticized and eventually
abolished. Thus, the labor that all the actors on the political stage, left, right
and center, want to save is labor as understood in this restricted sense.
Likewise, the concept of politics must be clearly defined. If it is identified with
collective action, with the conscious intervention of men in society, with love
for the world (Arendt), it is obvious that no one can be opposed to it and that
a critique of politics could only be conceived as mere indierence with
respect to the world. But those who commonly advocate a return to politics
have a much more specific idea of what politics is, the politics whose alleged
disappearance causes such serious crises of abstention. The ritual evocation
of politics as the only possible way to change the world is the core concept
of todays left, from the Bourdieuist sociologists to Multitudes, from ATTAC to
the radical electoral left. Despite their explicit intention to create a
completely dierent politics, they repeatedly succumb to realism and the content forum. If you don't have permissions to
lesser evil, participate in elections, respect the outcomes of referendums,
discuss the possible evolution of the Socialist Party, seek to make alliances
and to conclude a historic compromise. In opposition to this desire to play
the gameand almost always as representatives of some interestwe
must recall those movements and historical moments of radical opposition that
engaged in anti-politics: from the historical anarchists to the artistic avant-
gardes, from certain movements in the global south, such as Critica radical in
Fortaleza (Brazil), to the wildcat strike of May 68 in France and the continuous
state of insubordination in the Italian factories during the 1970s. This anti-
politics is just as remote from the refusal of conscious intervention as the
anti-art movements, the rejection of art in the case of the Dadaists, the
Surrealists or the situationists, which was not a rejection of artistic means, but
to the contrary was conceived as the only way to remain faithful to the original
intentions of art.
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But can anyone think that politics is the social sphere that would allow us to
put limits on the market? That politics is democratic by nature and opposed
to the capitalist economic world, where the law of the strongest rules?

Modern capitalist society, based on the commodity and universal competition,

needs a dimension that assumes responsibility for those public structures
without which it could not exist. This dimension is the state, and politics, in the
modern (and restricted) meaning of the term, is the struggle to assume control
over the state. But this sphere of politics is not external or an alternative to the
sphere of the commodity economy. To the contrary, it is structurally dependent
on it. In the political arena, the object of contention is the distribution of the
fruits of the commodity systemthe workers movement has essentially played
this rolebut not its existence. The visible proof: nothing is possible in politics
that has not been previously funded by commodity production, and
whenever the latter goes o the rails, politics becomes a clash between armed
gangs. This kind of politics is a secondary regulatory mechanism within the
fetishistic and unconscious system of the commodity. It does not represent a
neutral dimension or a conquest that the opposition movements would have
seized from the capitalist bourgeoisie. For, in eect, the latter is not necessarily
hostile to the state or the public sphere; everything depends on the historical
stage.

The contemporary advocates of politics betray their original intention to take

action because they reduce this action to readjustments of a machine that
they accept as such. Today, action must confront situations that are too
serious to be faced with the old political methods. From now on, we proceed
within the framework of a veritable anthropological regressive mutation, which
is the result of more than two centuries of capitalism and, at the same time, of
its programmed self-destruction, as has become evident over the last few
decades. This regression is leading to barbarization. With the constant
occurrence of incidents such as the one involving those adolescents who,
horsing around and laughing, used a cell phone to record a video of a girl
classmate who had just been run over by a bus so they could later upload the
video to YouTube, it is somewhat insucient to invoke unemployment,
precarious jobs or the failure of our schools as an explanation. I submit instead
that we are witnessing a generalized anthropological regression (which is not
to say that it is uniformly manifested), which appears to be the product of a
profound collective psychological disorder, the consequence of the fetishism of
the commodity and of the relation the latter imposes on the way the individual
interacts with the world. In the face of this crisis of civilization no one can
honestly propose any eective short-term remedies. Indeed, precisely because
the situation is so serious, one reinforces the evil by saying: we have to take
action quickly and it does not matter what form it assumes, we do not have
time for debate, praxis is worth more than theory. In this era of financial and
molecular capitalism, we cannot settle for forms of opposition from the Fordist
era.

A precondition for reestablishing the perspective of action is to make a final

and clear break with all politics in the institutional sense. Today, the only
possible form of politics is radical separation from the world of politics and
its institutions, of representation and delegation, in order to invent and replace
it with new forms of direct intervention. In this context, the most useless thing
we can do is to debate with people who still want to vote. Those who, almost
one hundred forty years after the introduction of universal surage, still flock to
the ballot boxes, only deserve the words proclaimed by Octave Mirbeau1 in
1888, or Albert Libertad2 in 1906. The conquest of universal surage was one
of the great battles of the historic left. The right wing voter, however, is not
such a fool: sometimes he gets the little he expects from his candidates, even
when it is not even in the ocial platform of his party (for example, toleration of
tax evasion and violations of labor laws). His representatives do not betray him
too much; and the voter who only votes for the candidate who is going to give
his son a job or obtain some subsidies for the farmers in his district is, after all,
the most rational voter. Much more imbecilic is the left wing voter: although he
has never obtained what he has voted for, he persists. He has obtained neither
the great change nor the crumbs. He allows himself to be lulled to sleep by
mere promises. That is why those who voted for Berlusconi in Italy were by no
means fools: they were not just seduced by their television networks, as their
opponents would have us believe. They obtained limited, but very real, benefits
from their government (and above all from its laissez-faire policies). But to
continue to vote for the left when it has already been in the governmentand
here we can only see how correct Mirbeau actually isapproaches the realm
of the pathological.

The rejection of politics thus conceived is not the product of an aesthetic

taste for extremism. Confronted by the anthropological regression that
threatens us, to appeal to Parliament is like trying to quell a hurricane with a
protest march. The only realistic proposalsin the sense that they could
eectively change the course of eventsare of the following kind: the
immediate abolition, starting tomorrow, of all television. Is there a party in the
world that would dare to embrace such a proposal? What measures have been
adopted during the last few decades that could really slow down the advance
of barbarism? It will be said that a few small steps are better than nothing. But
where have such steps been taken? Thirty years ago, the most courageous
elements proposed legislation that would mandate one day per week without
television. Today, we have hundreds of television channels. If nothing has been
accomplished to impede this continuous degeneration, this means that the
goals and methods were erroneous and that we have to go back to the
drawing board. And it is self-evident that this cannot be done by treating the
public with kid gloves, nor by holding televised conferences.

There are some examples of anti-political action: the anti-GMO volunteer

harvesters, especially those who operate at night, thus reestablishing the
connections with the tradition of sabotage, instead of pandering to the media,
and those actions that have the objective of preventing the surveillance and
biometric tracking apparatus from causing harm. We might also cite the
residents of Val di Susa, in the Italian Alps, who have on various occasions
blocked the construction of a high-speed train line in their mountains. This
predominance of defensive struggles is not necessarily an indication of the
absence of a broader perspective. To the contrary, these struggles against the
worst harmful phenomena help to keep the path to such a perspective open.
It is necessary to at least preserve the possibility for future emancipation
against the dehumanization imposed by the commodity, which exposes us to
the danger of permanently foreclosing the possibility of any alternative. This
clears the way to opportunities for new fronts and new alliances. There are
issues, such as the expropriation from individuals of their own biological
reproduction, currently publicized under the rubric of technologies of artificial
fertilization, in relation to which the positions of the modernist left are fully
consonant with the insane schemes of technological omnipotence of
contemporary capitalism compared to which even the positions of the Pope
seem to acquire a certain air of rationality. The opposite of barbarism is
humanization, a concept that is real enough, but hard to define. One possible
kind of politics that is possible today would consist in the defense of the
minor victories that have been historically achieved on the road to
humanization and in opposition to their abolition. Contemporary capitalism is
not just the economic injustice that one always finds at the center of
discussion, and its list of misdeeds is not even complete with the
environmental catastrophes that it causes. It is also a dismantlinga
deconstructionof the symbolic and psychological foundations of human
culture, which is especially evident in the process of de-realization that has
been launched by the electronic communications media. With regard to this
dimension of the problem, it is of no importance whether it is Sarkozy or Royal,
Besancenot or Le Pen whose face appears on the computer screen.

We have to reinvent a practice without surrendering to the demand to do

something and do it quick, which always leads to a new version of things that
were already tried and found wanting. The real problem is the general
confinementa confinement that is above all mentalin the fetishistic forms
of existence, aecting the alleged adversaries as well as the supporters of the
commodity system.3 The struggle to break with these forms that are anchored
in everyones minds, to deprive money and the commodity, competition and
labor, the state and development, progress and growth, of their innocent air,
depends on those theoretical struggles situated beyond the fixed opposition
between theory and praxis. Why does the analysis of the logic of the
commodity or patriarchy have to be mere theory, while any workers strike,
and any demonstration by students who are protesting because the university
is not providing them with sucient preparation for success on the labor
market are viewed, for their part, as praxis or as politics?

Before acting, men think and feel, and the way they act derives from what they
think and feel. Changing the way men think and feel is already a form of action,
a form of praxis. Once there is a clear consciousness, at least among a
minority, of the goals of an action, the latter can rapidly unfold. We need only
recall May 68, at first glance surprising, but actually silently prepared by lucid
minorities. On the other hand, we have often seenand most of all in the
Russian Revolutionwhere even the best opportunities for action lead when a
real preliminary theoretical clarification is lacking. Such a clarification does not
necessarily take place in books and meetings, yet it must be present in
peoples minds. Instead of identifying politics with the public institutions of
commodity society, one could identify it with praxis in general. But this praxis
must not be abstractly opposed to theory. The theory that we are talking about
here is not the servant of praxis, nor its preparation, but an integral part of it.
Fetishism is not a set of false representations; it is the ensemble of forms
such as moneyin which life really unfolds within a capitalist society. Every
step forward with regard to theoretical understanding, as well as its
dissemination, is therefore in itself a practical act.

Of course, that cannot be enough. The future forms of praxis will certainly be
very diverse and will also involve defensive struggles at the level of material
reproduction (such as the struggles against precarious work and against the
destruction of the Welfare State). While it is necessary to break with the
politics that only proposes to defend, within the framework of the market, the
interests of social categories constituted by the fetishistic logic of the market
itself, along the lines of purchasing power, it is still nonetheless necessary to
prevent capitalist development from destroying the basis of survival for large
sectors of the population and generating new forms of poverty, which are often
more the result of exclusion than exploitation. Thus, to be exploited these days
has become almost a privilege compared to the fate of the masses of those
who have been declared superfluous because they are not profitable (that
is, they cannot be used profitably in commodity production). The reactions of
the superfluous, however, assume many dierent forms and may themselves
tend towards barbarism. The fact that one is a victim does not confer any
guarantee of moral integrity. Today, more than ever before, one fact becomes
of the utmost significance: individuals behavior in response to the vicissitudes
of life in capitalism is not the mechanical result of their social situation, their
interests or their geographical, ethnic or religious background, or their gender
or their sexual orientations. We cannot predict anyones response to
capitalisms collapse into barbarism. This is not because of an allegedly
generalized individualization concerning which the sociologists fall all over
themselves praising so as not to have to speak of the increasing
standardization that it conceals. But the dividing lines are no longer created by
capitalist development. Just as barbarism can arise anywhere, in the high
schools of Finland and the African shantytowns, among the bobos and the
gangbangers in the ghetto, among high-tech soldiers and unarmed rebels, so
too can resistance to barbarism and the impulse for social emancipation arise
anywhere (although with so much diculty!), even where one would least
expect it. While no single social category has answered the call of those who
seek the agent of social emancipation, opposition to the inhuman conditions of
life under capitalism nonetheless always reemerges. This landscape that is
teeming with false friends and unexpected helpers constitutes the terrain,
necessarily only vaguely discerned for the moment, upon which all political
recomposition must now take place.

[Translated into English in January 2013. Based on the Spanish translation of

Anselm Jappe, Crdit Mort: La dcomposition du capitalisme et ses critiques,
ditions Lignes, Fcamp, 2011. Spanish translation by Diego Luis Sanromn:
Crdito a muerte: La descomposicin del capitalismo y sus crticos, Pepitas de
calabaza, Logroo, 2011]

1. Theres something that astounds me enormously. In fact, I'd even say that
it stupefies me, and thats that at this scientific moment when I'm writing,
after countless experiences, after daily scandals, there can still exist in our
dear France [] one voter, one single voter that irrational, inorganic,
hallucinatory animal who consents to put a halt to his aairs, his dreams,
and his pleasures in order to vote in favor of someone or something. If we
think about it for just one instant, is this surprising phenomenon not one fit
to confuse the most subtle philosophers and confound reason? Where is
the Balzac who can give us the physiology of the modern voter, or the
Charcot who will explain the anatomy and mentality of this incurable
lunatic? [] They voted yesterday, they'll vote tomorrow, and they will
always vote. Sheep go to the slaughter; they say nothing and they hope for
nothing. But at least they dont vote for the butcher who will kill them and
the bourgeois who will eat them. More beastly than the beasts, more
sheepish than the sheep, the voter names his butcher and chooses his
bourgeois. He has made revolutions to conquer this right. [] As I told you,
good man, go home and go on strike (Published in Le Figaro, November
28, 1888, and republished in O. Mirbeau, La Grve des lecteurs, Montreuil-
sous-Bois, LInsomniaque, 2007. English translation available online at:
http://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/mirbeau/voters-strike.htm). One
hundred years after this call for a voters strike, it is still possible, and
necessary, to repeat the same arguments. Except for a couple of names,
one could print the text from which these lines are excerpted and distribute
it as a pamphlet; no one would notice that it was not written today but in the
early days of the Third Republic. It is obvious that, over the course of more
than a century, voters have learned nothing. This fact is certainly hardly
encouraging.

2. The criminal is the voter. [] You make the choice, you the voter, you, who
accept what exists; you, who, by way of your ballot, sanction all your
misery; you, who, by voting, consecrate all your servitude. [] You are a
threat to us, free men, anarchists. You are just as dangerous as the tyrants,
as the masters to whom you deliver yourselves, who you elect, who you
support, who you feed, who you protect with your bayonets, who you
defend with brute force, who you praise with your ignorance, who you
legitimate with your ballots and who you impose upon us through your
imbecility. [] If candidates lusting for mandates and bursting with stupidity,
scratch your back and pinch the ass of your paper sovereignty; if you
 become intoxicated on the incense and promises in which you are steeped
by those who have always betrayed you, who deceived you before and who
will deceive you again tomorrow; it is because you are like them. [] Go
ahead, vote! Have faith in your delegates, believe in those you have voted
for. But stop complaining. The yokes you bear, you took upon yourself. The
crimes that you suer, you commit. You are the master, you are the criminal,
and, ironically enough, you are also the slave and the victim. See: A.
Libertad, Le Culte de la charogne. Anarchisme, un tat de revolution
permanente (1897-1908), Marseilles, Agone, 2006.

3. On the other hand, one of the new realities that we must confront today is
the fact that anticapitalist praxis resides in the blurring of borders between
supporters and enemies of the system and in the dissemination of
fragments of critical thought among numerous individuals who
simultaneously participate in the ordinary business of this world: they read
Marcuse and work for an advertising firm, they manage a business and they
donate money to the Zapatistas, they claim to be anarchists and work as
administrators of some kind. One has to live, of course, but one does not
want to be taken for a bobo, either. This involves a veritable Mithridatism
against the pangs of conscience that might upset ones existence.

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