[Nettime-bold] RE: <nettime>the myth of democracy and reactivism

["Kermit Snelson" <ksnelson@subjectivity.com>]

> The suggestion that some kind of society that can naturally
> evolve outside of the nation-state schema, that would be a
> "society in which we wish to live" simply by _not_ being a
> nation-state, this simple state-denial, embodies an even
> greater idealism than the ideal of democracy. This particular
> anti-state brand of idealism seems to carry with it all the
> problems of right-wing born again Christian idealism, or even
> neo-liberal free market idealism, for me to feel comfortable
> with it.

This is a profound observation.  It may, in fact, be the key to
understanding the September 11 attacks and their possible effect on the
future of activism.

The term "democracy" has been around since the fifth century BC.  So as a
concept, or "myth", it far predates Christianity, the nation-state and
especially capitalism.  And no, democracy hasn't always been the exclusive
propaganda weapon of capitalism.  Remember the German Democratic Republic?

Of course, "democracy" meant different things to Pericles, Jefferson, JFK
and Walter Ulbricht.  But the main idea remains the same:  that the many
should rule instead of the few, or the one.  Battles have been fought to
redefine "many" or "rule", but the definition itself has remained
non-negotiable.  If you believe that the many should rule instead of the
few, then you are a democrat.  If you do not, then look for possible
soulmates under "monarchy" or "aristocracy."  There are certainly other
choices.

Centuries of political theory and experience have established that democracy
has three natural enemies:  mob rule, empire and war.  And these three are
not unrelated.  In fact, they usually work as one insidious system through
which democracies are destroyed, just as Athens was destroyed by the
Peloponnesian War.  The same thing is probably happening to us right now.
And today's "anti-state brand of idealism", allied with neo-liberalism and
worse, is riding all three of these to yet another Spartan victory.

It apparently did not occur to anybody until the modern industrial period to
come up with a theoretical justification for mob rule.  According to this
argument, the "many" are the actual engine of economic production.  As such,
their economic and political activity can establish a political order
autonomously from any institution, much less government.  Therefore, any
government is superfluous and parasitic, established to enrich the few by
the labors of the many through a legal monopoly on confiscation by physical
force.  For a popular exposition of this argument, I'd recommend either Ayn
Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" or Hardt and Negri's "Empire", depending on the
style of hectoring you prefer.  For a less popular but more intellectually
rigorous treatment, read Georges Sorel's 1908 masterpiece "Reflections on
Violence," a major influence on Mussolini and probably the angriest attack
on democracy and the nation-state ever written.

Empire is, of course, the subjection of entire nations to external rule.  It
is antithetical to the principle of national sovereignty.  And such a
destruction of the nation-state is a development that Negri welcomes.  Much
of his book is dedicated to a rather technical discussion of the legal
theory of transnational sovereignty, including that which led to the UN.
But his main model for a legal World Order is not the UN but a
"deterritorialized" version of the US Constitution.  And although his book
contains nearly sixty pages of footnotes, he does not cite a single one of
the legal scholars or their patrons in the United States who have been
working on precisely that idea for over fifty years.  Probably because they
are exactly the same people who founded NATO, and who are leading the charge
of neo-liberal globalism today.  Given the target market for his book,
acknowledging them as the inspiration for his argument would probably hurt
sales.  (I suppose he was justified in feeling safe to cite with approval
Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, even though the first was a leading
theoretician for the Third Reich and the second was the teacher of Allan
Bloom and many other icons of the modern American right.)

But isn't the point of Negri's book to show how Empire may be resisted?
This is where we get into the kinship between the "anti-state brand of
idealism" and religious fundamentalism, and where we discover that his
opposition to democracy extends not only to support for mob rule and empire,
but democracy's third natural enemy:  war.

Negri is obscure about a lot of things, but he makes it very clear that,
like Sorel a century ago, he bases his strategy for resistance on the
development of early Christianity and its conquest of the Roman Empire.
After all, perhaps the single most influential legal case of all time
involved an application of Roman imperial law to one of its provincial
jurisdictions; namely, between an imperial Roman court and the Jewish
Sanhedrin in Jerusalem.  But there is a more important parallel between what
Negri considers to be the history of ancient Rome and what he considers to
be our situation today:  namely, that neither Empire successfully
incorporated its proletariat.  In both the Roman Empire and in ours, there
is a residue, part slave and part free, that has no status, no legitimacy,
no part in Empire.  And as this unconquered, unpacified, un-politicized
power finally disrupted the entire legal structure of Rome and caused it to
fall, so will this class be the means for the fight against the Empire of
today.

So early Christianity is the model for today's resistance on behalf of the
world's oppressed, a new Children's Crusade that has written in blood an
"Acts of the Martyrs" for our time on the ancient streets of Genoa.  What is
most frightening about this reasoning is not its messianism, not its
ecstatic invocation of St. Augustine's "City of God", that blueprint for the
theocracy of the Middle Ages, nor its glorification of poverty (in the
person of St. Francis of Assisi at the end of the book), but his attribution
(again following Sorel, whom he is apparently ashamed to cite) of the
ultimate moral value and ontological status of acts of purifying violence
and "just war" against metaphysical corruption.  "Just war", he says on page
13, has become "an activity that is justified in itself ... The resurrection
of the concept of just war may be only a symptom of the emergence of Empire,
but what a suggestive and powerful one!"  And on page 21, he concludes with
a chilling analogy between the "birth of Christianity in Europe and its
expansion during the decline of the Roman Empire" and a new basis for
"theory and practice" based on "an ontological basis of antagonism--within
Empire, but also against and beyond Empire, at the same level of totality."

I am aware, of course, that most activists couldn't care less about Negri.
The problem is that the mass media marketing machine (Time, Newsweek, The
New York Times, London Review of Books, The New Republic, etc.) has ensured
that such ideas have sold well and are widely accepted among activists, even
if not fully understood.  And as a result, well-intentioned people are
likely to be misled and neutralized until historical events shame them.  The
past is full of similar cases.  Eugenics, for instance, was once perfectly
respectable in countries such as the United States and Great Britain.
Membership in a Eugenics Society was considered the ultimate sign of a
progressive intellectual.  It was considered a humanitarian application of
modern scientific methods to ease human suffering.  And then Hitler came
along and lent some clarity as to what such ideas really amount to.

Now, somebody very much like Hitler has come along again.  And suddenly,
breaking windows at a downtown Starbucks doesn't look so good.  And a
popular, imprisoned guru in Italy who writes about martyrs and saints and
the purifying effect of violence in the name of the world's dispossessed
against a corrupt, worldly empire is starting to sound a lot like a certain
millionaire caveman in Afghanistan.

So where does that leave activism today?  I think what needs to change is to
realize that things haven't changed that much.  Social change, like a viable
business, can't spontaneously result from recent developments in network
technology.  It still takes hard work, organization and a respect for the
evidence of reality and the ability to reason rigorously from it.  Most of
the issues that have been raised on the streets over the past two years are
technical and will require scientific expertise to solve.  Global warming?
Sustainable agriculture in the developing world?  Debt relief?  Drug
patents?  These are all problems that require considerable technical
expertise to solve.  Waving signs, chanting slogans and throwing rocks won't
do a thing.  Those who really care about these issues should pick one,
develop real knowledge about it and become valuable to one of the many
organizations that are actually working on it.

If the goal is to overthrow capitalism, then I'd suggest studying the
example of someone who managed to do it.  Lenin, for instance.  In the
twenty or so years of political activity that led up to the October
Revolution, he also came across people who argued that participating in
democratic electoral politics was a waste of time.  He disagreed, and wrote
a book about them.  He called it "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile
Disorder."  If there's anything worth studying in Lenin's written work
today, it is his documentation of how to build a successful revolution.
Amazingly enough, he discovered that doing so requires the very opposite of
a decentralized, deterritorialized network that "autonomously" creates a
politics of "deploying myths against symbols."  Instead, it requires a
highly centralized, cadre-based organization of hard-nosed materialists.
Atoms, not bits.  It wasn't accidental that Marx's very first serious
writing, his doctoral dissertation, was on the ancient Greek atomists.

It is very important that today's activists stop applying to politics the
same kind of "myth over matter" thinking that has failed so spectacularly in
the Internet business.  It's one thing to see the NASDAQ collapse, but quite
another to see the World Trade Center do so.  Atoms are much more important
than bits.  Our enemies aren't just "deploying myths against symbols."  They
are also deploying 767s and anthrax against our families and neighbors.
Things have gotten very real, and so should we.

Kermit Snelson


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