First Measures of the Coming Insurrection - Softcover

Hazan, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783604093 ISBN 13: 9781783604098

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd, 2015

Synopsis

We have witnessed a beginning, the birth of a new age of revolt and upheaval. In North Africa and the Middle East it took the people a matter of days to topple what were supposedly entrenched regimes. Now, to the west, multiple crises are etching away at a ‘democratic consensus’ that has, since the 1970s, plagued and suppressed any sparks of revolutionary potential. It is time to prepare for the coming insurrection.

In this bold and beautifully written book, Eric Hazan and Kamo provide a short account of what is to be done in the aftermath of a regime’s demise: how to prevent any power from restoring itself and how to reorganize society without a central authority and according to the people’s needs. They argue that neither a leadership reshuffle, in the guise of constitutional progress, nor a transition period between a capitalist social order and a communist horizon will do.

First Measures of the Coming Insurrection is more than the voice of a new generation of revolutionaries; it is the manual for the coming global revolution.

About this title

About the Author

Eric Hazan is a writer, historian and founder of the independent publishing house La Fabrique. His books in English include The Invention of Paris (2012) and A People's History of the French Revolution (2014).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

First Measures of the Coming Insurrection

By Eric Hazan, Kamo, Patrick Camiller

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2013 La Fabrique éditions
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78360-409-8

Contents

A moment to bring us up to date, 
1 It is right to rebel, 
2 Creating the irreversible, 
3 There's everything to play for, 

CHAPTER 1

IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL

It is therefore madness without equal To try to involve ourselves in correcting the world. Molière, The Misanthrope, Act 1, Scene 1

Right across this planet, there are three basic kinds of government under which people live. In the first, a particular group (often called a party) holds all the power, elections are rigged, the media are muzzled, and opponents are behind bars or vanish without trace. It is a situation that applies in many former or present 'communist' countries and in others that have emerged from colonial rule and continue their past rulers' brutality in various guises. In the second category, the regime is unstable and threatened with stones or guns – as in today's Syria or the Democratic Republic of Congo. The third type comprises what are usually called 'democracies': elections take place at fixed dates, parliaments adopt laws, and governments manage public affairs. The richest countries periodically send their leaders to discuss the future of the world at secure places cordoned off by large numbers of police. The rest receive heaps of praise when they show that they have assimilated 'democratic' values while accepting the plunder of their resources and the reduction of their people to beggars.

The boundaries between these categories are not always sharply drawn: some major countries – Algeria, Iran, Russia – have features of both the first and the third, while others can pass suddenly from one to another, as Mubarak's Egypt did recently from the first to the second. And the countries of the 'Bolivarian revolution' – Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia – form something like a group of their own, in which some are willing to place their hopes.

Over time a zone of obligatory deference has formed around the word 'democracy'. Born at the heart of the West, it is a system of government that helps the rest of the world to join in by various means. All leaders, from the most emollient social democrats to the worst despots, feel compelled to affirm their attachment to democracy. It is incontestable because it is the regime of liberty, which an insidious shift then identifies with liberal values, free trade, free competition and neoliberalism. Since the end of the 'people's democracies', now a baneful memory, democracy has been inseparable from capitalism in its various aliases, and we shall therefore speak in this text of democratic capitalism.

Democratic capitalism has imposed itself as the ultimate, definitive form of social existence, not only in the ideology of the ruling class but even in the popular imagination. But its legitimacy rests on a tripod, each of whose legs is worm-eaten or seriously cracked. The first is the constant rise in living standards supposedly leading to the formation of a universal middle class – a process that first took shape with Fordism (wage increases in line with productivity, so that the workers can buy more and keep the wheels of industry turning) and the different variants of social democracy since the New Deal, the Popular Front and postwar British labourism. Today, that pillar exists only in the head: that is, in the forecasts of finance ministries and international agencies, which are constantly belied by the facts and keep being revised downwards despite all the massaging of figures.

The second pillar is the peace that capitalism is supposed to have brought to the planet after 'the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century'. One need scarcely be an expert in geopolitics, however, to see wars all around us: civil wars of an intensity that varies according to time and place (muted in Europe, fierce in the Middle East); terrible African wars against a backdrop of minerals, diamonds and famine; forgotten guerrilla wars in Burma and the Philippines; never-ending wars in Afghanistan, Somalia and Palestine. Are all those wars tribal, ethnic and religious? Behind each one, democratic capitalism is busy defending its economic and strategic interests, its oil, mining and agribusiness. Democratic capitalism has lost all credibility as the great pacifier, as the global Leviathan.

The most rotten of the three pillars is 'democratic legitimacy' based on universal suffrage. After all, nations are led by the men and women the people have elected, and if they are unhappy they have only to choose others the next time round. François Arago, an old Republican, already put forward this argument when he was shelling the barricades in the Latin Quarter in June 1848: universal suffrage has spoken, the people should not take up arms against those it has chosen.

But despite the etymology, despite the articles of constitutions asserting the sovereignty of the people, power nowhere belongs to the demos. That has been evident for a long time, but now there is something new as well. Today, power does not belong either to the caste of politicians who, by tradition, allocate ministerial and administrative posts to themselves in accordance with an electoral timetable. That kind of politics is no longer more than an empty form. Since 'the crisis', the masked reality lying unsaid beneath the surface has appeared in the light of day: the economy is directly political; power, to use the coy formula, is nothing other than 'the power of the markets', whose fears, whims and demands are expressed in banner headlines and commented on by all manner of experts (the expert being the emblematic figure of our times). Markets: that sounds reassuring. What is more peaceful than going to the market? The word maintains anonymity with regard to what it covers up, disguising all the aspects through which we participate in our own dispossession. We often read in the newspapers that 'the markets are worried', or even 'alarmed'. The public reaction would probably be less placid, less resigned, if things were spelled out clearly: those who are unhappy or alarmed are the directors of major banks and insurance companies, the managers of funds – not only pension funds but also speculative 'hedge funds', private equity funds – and the totally unregulated 'shadow banking system'.

There may be clashes of interest among the components of private finance, but these still form a single totality ('the markets') since all their top personnel have certain opinions in common. Trained in the same school of thought, reading the same texts, meeting in the same forums, they share the same vision of what is good for the world, and especially for themselves.

Moreover, there is a complete osmosis between private finance and national governments, central banks and the European Commission. This involves a dual mechanism of highly official lobbying and revolving doors. In France, the big career move for finance ministry inspectors is to join the top echelons of private banks, with a tenfold or twentyfold salary increase. This explains, for example, the shameful retreat of the Socialist government from Hollande's electoral promise of banking reform – a policy that was supposed to separate 'investment business' from deposit account functions, so that money belonging to savers would no longer be mixed up with the toxic sums resulting from financial deregulation. But the finance inspectors who planned its implementation were not keen to upset their future employers. Money in deposit accounts will therefore continue to cushion the speculative disasters of liberalized finance.

'The markets' have come to take direct control of the most highly indebted countries. In order to ensure that Greece remains in the eurozone, the 'troika' (European Union + International Monetary Fund + European Central Bank) has established there its own de facto rule that does not respect even the appearances of democracy. Cyprus recently suffered the same fate, and Portugal, Spain and Italy are under the supervision of this new Holy Alliance. If 'the crisis' reveals anything, it is less the greed of 'the markets' than the political subjection of all countries to the logic of economics.

In France, the beginning of the break-up of the established regime can be dated to the moment, in 1983, when the Socialists made their turn to la rigueur: that is, when they decided that the job of government was no more than to go with the flow of things. It was thus a Socialist (the late Pierre Bérégovoy) who organized the deregulation of finance in 1986. Since then, successive governments have merely taken note of the degradation in the material and subjective areas under their charge, content to create ministries whose names alone – 'recovery of production', 'national identity', 'economic solidarity', 'regional equality' – seem designed to ward off reality.

To say that the resulting system is cynical, unjust and brutal is not enough. To protest, demonstrate or petition is to accept by implication that improvements are possible in the face of the crisis. But what is called 'the crisis' is an essential political tool for management of the productive population as well as of those surplus to requirements. The discourse of crisis has spread in all the industrial countries and is constantly relayed by the media and the state apparatuses. 'Combating the crisis' and 'waging war on terror' naturally go hand in hand, both being based on the same elemental reflex, the fear of chaos.

After all the cheap credit to keep the poor quiet, after the bursting of various financial bubbles in the wake of soaring debt, 'the markets' are now demanding austerity in the hope that it will allow them to recover their stake at the expense of the general population (a process known as 'return to financial equilibrium'). Governments adopt the famous Thatcherite formula TINA (There Is No Alternative) and follow the directives of 'the markets', using the spectre of catastrophe to blackmail people into the necessary sacrifices.

People are not fooled, however; the patter of economists arouses nothing but jeers. One summit meeting after another, held to overcome 'the crisis', is greeted with striking indifference. Hatred of the Brussels bureaucracy is general, as is contempt for domestic politicians of every stripe. 'Domestic': yes, that's a good term for the garrulous staff in charge of running the everyday affairs of the country, with the servile task of getting everyone to accept the decisions taken by the real masters.

Scorned and hated though it is, democratic capitalism is not seriously under attack. There is talk of correcting its defects, making it fairer, more bearable, more 'ethical' – which is contrary to its operating principle, especially since the 'handling' of the crisis is based on low wages and organized insecurity. Nowhere is there any question of exposing it to the fate of oppressive regimes in the past, of seeing it off once and for all.

Nothing can be expected of the far left, whose rhetoric has been inaudible for a long time now; its vitality is exhausted, its idea of happiness completely deadly. Its worthiest militants – those who will join the right side when the time comes – no longer really believe in the fossilized Trotskyism common to most of the far left organizations and grouplets. They are where they are out of loyalty, faute de mieux, waiting for something to turn up. In France, the bragging of the Parti de gauche [PG; Left Party] has a certain echo, but its members will soon realize that to sing the Marseillaise, to don the Phrygian cap and to dismiss banlieue rebels as fools does not amount to a programme, any more than Gambetta can be said to resemble Blanqui.

The indignados and the Occupy movement led to a certain awareness among types of individual who until then had been politically somnolent. That was not insignificant but hardly earth-shaking: democratic capitalism has seen their like before, and anyway it regards such movements with benevolent amusement.

The riots or near-riotous demonstrations in France, England, Greece and Sweden were less well received. On the right, the image was of hooligans mainly bent on looting fashionable stores. On the left, the emphasis was on the lack of political thinking behind the events. Such rejection is a sign of unease – justified, moreover, because those responsible for keeping order know where such popular bursts of energy might lead if they were organized and coordinated. It was to avoid the latter that, in all the 'democratic' countries, unusually severe sentences were handed down to 'ringleaders' chosen at random, in emergency conditions that had nothing in common with basic legality.

In the last few years, a number of discussion meetings have been held in London and Paris around 'the idea of communism'. The books that came out of them are useful, since they have helped to make it possible again to utter the word communism without apologizing for it. But, unless we are mistaken, the aim has never been seriously to propose the overthrow of democratic capitalism, to work here and now for the revolution (another word under a curse). Faced with an intolerable system that is cracking at the seams, this silence or strange absence is a feature of the present situation that deserves special consideration.

Reasons of a psychological or even anthropological nature have often been advanced to explain the seeming patience of the population: the privatization of existence, the transformation of 'people' into self-entrepreneurs, is supposed to have depoliticized the masses and to have made any prospect of revolutionary change illusory. The idea is not new: Castoriadis noted that 'in the societies of modern capitalism, political activity properly so called is tending to disappear', that 'radical political conflict is more and more disguised, stifled, deflected, and ultimately nonexistent' ('The Suspension of Publication of Socialisme ou Barbarie', June 1965). Shortly afterwards, the barricades on rue Gay-Lussac in Paris showed what should be thought of that.

Another explanation for the 'apathy' is globalization: since all countries are caught in the web of the planet-wide economy, it serves no purpose to get worked up in one particular corner; the web will swiftly quell any movement of local revolt through the simple force of inertia that a large whole imposes on its constituent parts. Probably this was the kind of argument that the ageing Metternich chewed over on his way into exile, concealed in a laundress's wagon. With the countries of Europe firmly set in the cement of the Holy Alliance, he thought, the fall of Louis Philippe should never have unleashed fire and blood across the continent; it was against all logic that the springtime of the peoples, in March 1848, should have hurled duchies and kingdoms around like playthings, all the way from Denmark to Sicily.

To blame globalization for people's 'listlessness' today is to treat them as a collective idiot, to display ignorance of history and present realities, to forget the serial collapse of Arab regimes known for the efficiency of their police and the loyalty of their armies.

In the desolate world of democratic capitalism, the insurrection will not fail to envelop the whole rickety structure of Europe, whether it starts out in Spain or Greece, France or Italy. The transmission will take place not by contagion – revolution is not an infectious pathogen – but by the effect of a shock wave, as the late lamented John Foster Dulles, father of the celebrated domino theory, once foresaw. The countries one might consider more stable – by virtue of their traditions, their apparent good health or their distance from the epicentre – will be paralysed as the wave advances: the reasons why it is right to rebel are so numerous, and have been evident for so long, that no government will find the legitimacy enabling it to crush the insurrection by brute force. One success will bring others in its wake; the boldness of some will increase tenfold the preparedness of their neighbours to act.

What we must try to understand is not some (nonexistent) 'depoliticization' but the prevailing scepticism about the idea of revolution. The very word, happily trotted out to sing the praises of a new vacuum cleaner, arouses pitying smiles when it is used to speak of the overthrow of the established order. One of the reasons for this has to do with the demise of barracks communism. To be sure, the leaders of the Soviet Union had long appeared as a gang of brutal bureaucrats, and life in that country as an unenviable fate, so that nothing much changed in that respect when the end came in 1989. As Mario Tronti summed it up in La politica al tramonto (Turin 1998), 'three years, from 1989 to 1991, were needed to confirm bureaucratically a death that had already occurred some time before. The socialist systems outlived the end of socialism.' Nevertheless, however aberrant the form of social organization in the USSR and the 'people's democracies', it liked to think of itself as different and claimed to be standing up to American imperialism. Deeply implanted in many a head was the idea that communism might have succeeded in different hands and in different circumstances. But that disappeared at the same time as the Soviet regime itself. The void that this created was like a period of mourning: you can feel relieved at the departure of a loathsome being yet also feel his absence as a lack. And all of a sudden the idea of revolution, linked to a whole set of images from the Smolny Institute and the Aurora cruiser, through Mayakovsky's voice and the communal housing designed by constructivist architects, to Eisenstein's October and Trotsky's armoured train, found itself buried along with 'actually existing socialism'.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from First Measures of the Coming Insurrection by Eric Hazan, Kamo, Patrick Camiller. Copyright © 2013 La Fabrique éditions. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Zed Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783604093
• ISBN 13: 9781783604098
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144