The real movement which abolishes the present state of things. Starting from this one-in-a-million definition provided by Marx regarding what communism is, we can add that, in the epochal transition within which the Moor lived and acted another issue was quite clear: the State, a decisive political invention of Western and Capitalist modernity, is an enemy entity to be overthrown in the process of liberation of labor from the capital relationship.
This clearly leads to a search of forms of power beyond the State, that
the same Marx hails by pointing to the Paris Commune as the first
experiment of workers' government, even by criticizing its inability to
seize some decisive pivots of state power. It is told that Lenin, on the
72nd night after seizing power, came out and danced beneath the snow in
the Red Square, celebrating the fact that his great revolutionary
experiment was standing one day more than the Commune.
The
direction the Soviet process later took, with the emptying of the power
which turned back to the State from the Soviets, is well-known. And
certainly we won't either discuss about it here, or go through a wide
reflection about the problem of State and power - that is, what the
communist movement framed as the problem of transition.
But
let's move on with the history. Before and near the WW2 catastrophe it
is the reactionaries' turn to declare that "the age of the State is
coming to an end" (Schmitt), after that Weber already identified in the
extension of state administration and bureaucracy the rise of an "iron
cage" that was crushing his beloved entrepreneur bourgeoise values. The
State will be, instead, an useful tool of capture and pacification of
workers' demands in the tumultuous development on the ashes of the world
conflict, whereas the welfare state would serve as a redistribution
reserve during the Glorious Thirties.
With the crisis of that
model in the mid'70s the problem strongly arises again. Whereas Foucault
starts looking to the "State as a simple plight within the history of
governmentality", here comes Neoliberalism, starting to establish an
ideology according to which the State, far from disappearing, must be
bent to a new purpose. The multiplication of conflictual demands (from
workers, black people, women...) could not be contained anymore by that
State form, the planner-State of fordist development. A couple more
decades will be needed in order to bring at full capacity the new system
that, it is good to remind it, finds an early experimentation when the
Chicago Boys run to test their economic theories at the court of
Pinochet.
Thus, while behind the facade of globalization the
idea of the disappearance of the State and of the future of a borderless
world affirms itself, actually a deep transformation is produced,
featuring the States themselves as protagonists. The States
de-nationalize themselves and give up shares of sovereignty for the very
purpose of establishing an institutionalized global infrastructure -
guaranteeing a boundless extension of trade and production, also through
the establishment of new global bodies of political-economical
government.
Instead, in the latest years, we are witnessing to a
kind of "return" of the national State. Actually, within the disarray
that all the political cultures are experiencing, the latter seems to
stay as the sole foothold and perspective point on which to try to
reorganize politics, in spite of the fact that the Political, for many
decades now, relocated itself on multiple levels, escaping from and
exceeding the dichotomies of the modern State.
The political
field that appears to emerge, often portrayed as contrapositional
between globalism and sovereignism, is actually moving, beyond
appearances, entirely within a state rationale. In the first case, they
would follow up the neoliberal path by keeping intertwining an
institutional global infrastructure, where a de-nationalized State
continues to be a driving force of a globalization controlled by powers
that are able to concentrate themselves on "higher" scales. By
simplifying: the perspective, in our context, of the United States of
Europe. In the second case, they aim instead to “go back”, re-equipping
the State with a "full" sovereignty in order to better protect "the
people", another big new entry of the current political phase.
Clearly, in both cases, the line of the labor/capital conflict is either
dissolved, negated, avoided or at most, in the leftish versions, put at
the end and subject to the political issue of State as the sole player
entitled to agency in the current context.
Yet, beyond any
abstract linkages, within these schemes concrete subjects always get
back in. Who, in all of these scenarios, is the first to "be left out"
and to be crushed? Actually in this regard, willing or not, any
political position based on the State as paradigm of political action
cannot but, if there is intellectual honesty, converge on a point. It is
not by any chance that, within the so-called "left populists" too, they
start to talk about the need of "controlling immigration”. A sign that
the situation is not excellent in the great chaos under heaven at all.
Actually, the transnational class composition subjects themselves are
the first to be necessarily excluded and attacked by any political
hypothesis being exclusively based on the State – with its inevitable
correlation of territory, people and inter-national order.
At
any rate, the political crux of debate to be engaged - beyond the more
or less laughable, more or less dangerous nostalgia for a lost Nomos of
the Earth, or for a welfare state whose nature of historical exception
is not still understood, by keeping considering it as a rule to be
restored, instead - it is not an ideologic state-phobia, but to
emphasize an overall shrinking even of a political imagination, if not
of analytical tools...risking to end up as useful idiots of the battle
of the have-nots, for example by pitting "white" workers against migrant
labor.
After all, unfortunately, this certainly is not new; if
we think, for example, to the historical exclusion of blacks and
migrants from US unions, to the mistrust against the Irish in Engels'
studies on Manchester, just as in the tendency to adopt the scheme of
the eternal backwardness of the non-western people. For example, let's
think about how - even now - episodes like the Algerian war of
liberation are not being considered as an anticipation and a return of
the political in the European Communist movement - but as the epilogue
of a colonial history, forever and always to be exclusively played by
the white man.
Also starting from these considerations, the
sinister blunders about the need of taking sides within a hostile
political field such as the one between globalism/sovereignism (or, if
you want, between neoliberal global State and populism/protectionism)
and the delusions of being able to build hegemony on a ground which is
already built and defined by the enemy - especially in the lack of
conflicts, result to be extremely off track.
It would be a lot
more useful instead, rather than indulging this blame game or
fantasizing about conquering the State, to put on some lenses able to
try to look at the class behaviors and explicit conflicts, in order to
intertwine new theories and new hypotheses of subversion. In this way it
is difficult to negate that in the latest years territorial conflicts
always articulated themselves along lines of secession, avoidance or
independence from States. From Chiapas to Rojava, through the ZAD and
the No Tav struggles.
In the same way it would be short-sighted
not to emphasize that, still in our context, the most important
struggles were played by a migrant composition, from logistics to
housing. Or that the line of color was one of the decisive components to
understand such conflicts as those in the banlieues, the UK Riots,
Black Lives Matters...lest we forget that the continuous process of defy
and crossing of the borders by the migrants, its temporal continuity,
is a form of class social movement itself. On the other hand it is
actually a part of this class courage to be valorized later, in the
conflicts in our territories.
Therefore, if the left had
abandoned workplaces for decades, should it get them back now against
these class components? But the shortsightedness, or false
consciousness, gets even further. The workers of the Chinese factories
would be an example of class struggle... but aren't they, exactly, the
product of those conflicts, of the mammoth internal migration in China
in the last two decades? As if (from a historical point of view) the
mass-worker was not, after all, a completely migrant subject - produced
by the uprooting from countryside (country-city migration) and by the
internal migrations from south to north? It is not exactly at the
crossroads between uprooting of labor and meeting with new capitalist
conditions that, often, the greatest conflicts are produced?
Of course these musings do not resolve the problem about how politically
activate other class components - which are at the moment enslaved,
silent and totally immersed in enemy political fields - too. Surely, it
is not a matter of setting up a "migrant party"!! No romanticization of
migrants is in play here, or even less individuation in them of a new
revolutionary subject per se. More humbly, it is a matter of looking at
the ongoing conflicts and to the government tools in place in order to
bend them. It is the divide et impera of the battle of the have-nots led
from above to be, by now, one of the most powerful along them. To think
to play it by taking its control is sincerely an unsustainable
position, that often produced monsters through history. Even if with the
current power balances it looks it is producing more freaks than
monsters.
In order to conclude, it is really that much
desirable to go back to the State and its politics as a "better"
alternative to neoliberalism? And again, really these two blocks are in
an actual and irreconcilable contraposition? And are we going to take
sides, as comrades, on this same playground? Probably there are other
question we need to ask ourselves in the coming years, maybe "lower"
ones, but surely more attached to struggles and conflicts, to our world
that is. How can the multiplication of borders that divides and rules
our class-part can be broken and reversed? How can we build enduring
forms of power in the dis-order of the current territories? How can a
new class conflict leverage be applied within the fragmented, divided,
disputed planetary metropolis in which we live? How to build new
solidarities, connections and contagion effects for the coming
transnational movements?
InfoAut
Länk: https://www.infoaut.org/english/is-state-better-than-neoliberalism
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