Comradely Greetings (5 page)

How can we resolve the opposition between experts and innocents? I don't know. But this I can tell you: the party of the innocents, as in Herod's time, will exemplify resistance. We'll find our own basket and Pharaoh's daughter to help us. Those who keep a childlike faith in the triumph of truths over lies, and in mutual aid, who live their lives entirely within the gift economy, will always receive a miracle at the exact moment they need it.

Nadya

PC-14, Mordovia

Dear Nadya,

I was so pleasantly surprised by the arrival of your letter—the long delay had raised a fear in me that the authorities will prevent our communication.

I was deeply honored, flattered even, by my appearance in your dream. For me, appearing in a dream is forever associated with a precise date—the night of June 25, 1935, when Trotsky in exile dreamt that the dead Lenin was questioning him anxiously about his illness: “I answered that I already had many consultations and began to tell him about my trip to Berlin; but looking at Lenin I recalled that he was dead. I immediately tried to drive away this thought, so as to finish the conversation. When I had finished telling him about my therapeutic trip to Berlin in 1926, I wanted to add, ‘This was
after your death'; but I checked myself and said, ‘After you fell ill …' ”

There is an obvious link with the Freudian dream in which a father who doesn't know that he's dead appears to the dreamer. So what does it mean that Lenin doesn't know he's dead? There are two radically opposed ways of reading Trotsky's dream. According to the first, the terrifyingly ridiculous figure of the undead Lenin who doesn't know that he's dead stands for our own obstinate refusal to renounce our grandiose utopian projects and accept the limitations of our situation: there is no big Other, Lenin was mortal and made errors like everyone else, so it is time for us to let him die, put to rest this obscene ghost haunting our political imaginary, and approach our problems in a pragmatic, non-ideological way. But there is another sense in which Lenin is still alive: he is alive insofar as he embodies what Alain Badiou calls the “eternal Idea” of universal emancipation, the immortal striving for justice that no insult or catastrophe will manage to kill—Lenin lives wherever there are people who still fight for the same Idea.

Is this not our predicament today? And by “our” I mean those who remain faithful to the radical emancipatory (in short, Communist) political vision. Are we to be dismissed as dangerous utopians harboring new catastrophes, or—to quote your wonderful concluding thought—will there always be a miracle at the right moment in the lives of those with a childlike faith in the triumph of truths over lies? We should not be ashamed to evoke here, as you do, the tradition of the “fools for Christ.” Is our position utopian? I am more and more convinced that today's real utopians are
those pragmatic-rational experts who seem to believe that the present state of things can go on indefinitely, that we are not approaching the moment of an apocalyptic choice. If nothing in fact changes, then all of a sudden we will find ourselves living in a much darker society.

You are right to question the idea that “Only the experts can solve our problems.” Maybe there are certain kinds of problems they can solve, but what they cannot do is to identify and formulate the true problems. Experts are by definition the servants of those in power: they don't really THINK, they just apply their knowledge to problems defined by the powerful (How to restore stability? How to crush the protest?, etc.). So when, dear Nadya, you ask: “How can we resolve the opposition between experts and innocents?”, my first answer is that, in a way, it has already been resolved by contemporary global capitalism. That is to say, are today's capitalists, especially the so-called financial wizards, really the experts they claim to be? Or are they not rather stupid babies playing with our money and our fate?

Here I can't help but recall a cruel joke from Ernst Lubitsch's
To Be Or Not to Be
: when the Nazi commanding officer nicknamed “Concentration Camp Ehrhardt” is asked about the camps in occupied Poland, he snaps back: “We do the concentrating, the Poles do the camping.” Something similar holds for the Enron bankruptcy back in January 2001, which can be interpreted as a kind of ironic commentary on the notion of the risk society, and indeed on the much greater financial catastrophes that were to follow. The thousands of employees who lost their jobs and savings were certainly exposed to risk, but without having had any real choice in
the matter—the risk appeared to them like blind fate. Those who, on the contrary, did have a genuine knowledge of the risks involved—as well as the power to intervene in the situation—minimized their exposure by cashing in their stocks and options before the bankruptcy. While it is true, then, that we live in a society of risky choices, it is one in which only some (the Wall Street managers) do the choosing, while others (the people with mortgages) do the risking …

But I would like to raise some questions with regard to your Nietzschean notion of the power of truth and creativity embodied in “the children of Dionysus, floating by in a barrel, accepting nobody's authority.” You rely here on Nietzsche's couple of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: “there are architects of Apollonian equilibrium in this world, and there are (punk) singers of flux and transformation. One is not better than the other … Only their cooperation can ensure the continuity of the world.” Here, I must admit, I see some problems.

First, is it enough to just oppose the two principles and then postulate the need for some kind of balance between them? The least one can add is that there are different kinds of “Apollonian stasis”—Stalinist, fascist, capitalist, etc. For me, the true and most difficult task of radical emancipatory movements is not just to shake people out of their complacent inertia, but to change the very coordinates of social reality such that, when things return to normal, there will be a new, more satisfying “Apollonian equilibrium.” How does contemporary global capitalism fit into this scheme? The Deleuzian philosopher Brian Massumi clearly formulated how today's capitalism has already overcome the
logic of totalizing normality and adopts instead a logic of erratic excess: the more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normalcy starts to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen. This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalism's dynamic. It's not a simple liberation. It's capitalism's own form of power. It's no longer disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it's capitalism's power to produce variety—because markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective tendencies are okay—as long as they pay. Capitalism starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but only in order to extract surplus-value. It hijacks affect in order to intensify profit potential. It literally valorizes affect. The capitalist logic of surplus-value production starts to take over the relational field that is also the domain of political ecology, the ethical field of resistance to identity and predictable paths. It's very troubling and confusing, because it seems to me that there's been a certain kind of convergence between the dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance.

One can supplement this analysis in many directions. For instance, the very process of creating “liberated territories” outside the domain of State has itself been reappropriated by capitalism. Exemplary here are the so-called “Special Economic Zones”: geographical regions within a (usually) Third World state enjoying more liberal economic laws designed to attract greater foreign investment—low or zero taxes, free flow of capital, limitation or prohibition of trade unions, no minimum wage requirement, etc. The SEZ label covers a whole range of more specific zone types such as Free Trade Zones, Export Processing Zones, Free Zones,
Industrial Estates, Free Ports, Urban Enterprise Zones, etc. With their unique combination of “openness” (as free spaces partially exempt from state sovereignty) and closure (discipline unencumbered by legally guaranteed freedoms), which renders possible the heightened exploitation, these Zones are the structural counterparts of the celebrated communities of “intellectual labor”; they are the fourth term in the tetrad of high-tech intellectual labor, gated communities, and slums.

What happens then, when the system no longer excludes the excess, but directly posits it as its driving force—as is the case when capitalism can only reproduce itself through a continual self-revolutionizing, a constant overcoming of its own limits? Then one can no longer play the game of subverting the Order from the position of its part-of-no-part, since the Order has already internalized its own permanent subversion. With the full deployment of “late capitalism” it is “normal” life itself which, in a way, becomes “carnivalized,” with its constant reversals, crises, and reinventions, such that it is now the critique of capitalism, from a “stable” ethical position, which increasingly appears as the exception. Of course, the egalitarian-emancipatory “deterritorialization” is not the same as the postmodern-capitalist one, but the latter nonetheless radically changes the terms of the struggle insofar as the enemy is no longer the established hierarchic order of a State. How, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is one of a constant self-revolutionizing?

More than a solution to the problems we are facing today, Communism is itself the name of a problem: of the difficult task of breaking out of the confines of the market-and-state
framework, a task for which no quick formula is at hand: “It's just the simple thing that's hard, so hard to do,” as Brecht put it in his “In Praise of Communism.”

The key here is to maintain a proper sense of orientation, and it's here that I totally agree with your profound insight that the fundamentalists are merely “the tip of the iceberg. There's a powerful antifascist dictum that ‘the fascists do the killing, the authorities the burying.' ” This is the crucial point always to bear in mind when those in power try to deflect our critical energies towards different forms of (religious, nationalist …) fundamentalism: from the Tea Party in the US to the West Bank settlers in Israel and the Orthodox nationalists in Russia, “fundamentalists” are, for all their apparent passion, ultimately puppets used and manipulated by the cold logic of state power. The task is not to crush them, but to try to redirect their passion against those who use and manipulate them. Did you notice how the religious fundamentalists in the US took over the very form of Leftist popular protest (grassroots self-organization against State power) and redirected it against the Leftist tradition?

But, my dear Nadya, I feel a certain sense of guilt in writing these lines: who am I to explode in such narcissistic theoretical outbursts when you, as a concrete individual, are exposed to very real empirical deprivations. So please, if you can and want to, do let me know about your situation in the prison: about the daily rhythm, about (maybe) the small private rituals which make it easier to survive, about how much time you have to read and write, about how the other prisoners (and the guards) treat you, about your contacts with your child … I have always thought that true heroism
lies in these apparently small ways of organizing one's life so as to survive in crazy times without losing one's dignity.

With all my love, respect, and admiration, my thoughts are with you!

Slavoj

Dear Slavoj,

You really think “today's capitalism has already overcome the logic of totalizing normality”? I say maybe it hasn't—maybe it just really wants us to
believe
it has, to accept that hierarchization and normalization have been exceeded.

You mention places where the legal rights that limit exploitation are suspended in the name of the world capitalist order. At this very moment, I write you from a Special Economic Zone. Seeing it with my eyes, feeling it on my skin.

As a kid I wanted to work in advertising. I had a whole romance with it. So now I know how to evaluate advertisements and commercials. I get the finer points. I even
appreciate the things that by definition they have to keep silent about.

Late capitalism's anti-hierarchic and rhizomatic posture amounts to good advertising. You and Brian Massumi are right to point out that capitalism today has to
appear
loose, even erratic. That's how it captures affect—the affect of the consumer. When it comes to manufacturers (especially the ones who aren't located in high-tech business parks) this ‘velvet' capitalism can afford to change its stripes. But the logic of totalizing normality still has to continue its work in those places whose industrial bases are used to shore up everything dynamic, adaptable, and incipient in late capitalism. And here, in this other world hidden from view, the governing logic is one of absolutely rigid standards, of stability reinforced with steel. Erratic behavior is not tolerated from workers here; homogeneity and stagnation rule. No wonder authoritarian China has emerged as a world economic leader.