Neoliberalism's broken mirror
- comments on "The fourth world war has begun"
Daniel Bensaïd
Sub-commandante Marcos's communiqué assembles a collage of the undeniable miseries inflicted by neoliberalism on the planet. The New World Order announced with triumphant fanfare following the fall of the Berlin Wall is as unjust, violent, irrational, and chaotic as the old. The logic of inequality inherent in market globalisation gives rise to identity crises and introversions: people and societies are turning their back on any future for humanity that is really universal It consumes any social gains, dismantles all institutions, destroys all regulatory mechanisms, without replacing them with better institutions at either the regional or the global level.
The result is a world fractured into shining, reflective fragments.
A puzzle made of pieces that don't fit together, Marcos would say.
This is the age of networks. But, like those literal networks of railroad tracks in the beginning of the century, these financial and electronic networks. these information superhighways, are knit together in a loose stitch, that links the powers of commerce, of banking, and of industry and connects world capitals, but lets much fall through the gaping holes in the net: grey zones, suburbs, and waste grounds that are, in this case, sometimes countries or whole continents, abandoned along the side of the road. Here, a fertile concentration of wealth and power, there, an expanding desert: development is as lopsided as it ever was. This is the implacable law of the global market and of the unremitting competition of all against all.
The resulting crisis is deeper and longer lasting than classical economic crises. It ushers in a true crisis of civilisation, that is, a crisis of everything that humanity holds in common, or that links people together. The spread of unemploy ment and exclusion from productive work on a planet-wide scale shows that work itself, increasingly complex and socialised, can no longer be reduced to "mere" abstract labour power measured in discrete units of time.
The increase in ecological disasters shows that it is becoming impossible to reduce the long-term implications for energy resources and for the ecosystem in the same short-term calculus of the market. The productive forces set in motion by the new technological revolution are no longer held in check by the straight-jacket of the profit motive.
The world is shrinking. But in the wealthy countries, those that - even yesterday - dreamed of perpetual progress, of an ever-ascending growth, now fear tomorrow will be worse, for themselves and for their children.
"Neoliberalism is a new war for the conquest of territory," writes Marcos. "The ending of the Third World War -meaning the Cold War - in no sense means that the world has gone beyond bipolar divisions and found stability under the domination of a single victor."
Marcos goes further: "a Fourth World War has begun." A "world war that is totally total". That this system is critically unstable is incontestable: from the Balkans to northern India stretches a convulsive wave of endemic armed conflicts. But, as for a "Fourth World War...?" Well, that all depends on what you mean by war.
The forms of war themselves have always changed according to the social relations they reflected, according to the structure of the state, and according to the orgacover feature * nisation of the world as a whole. The French revolution and the rise of the nation state marked the shift from dynastic to national wars, which were fought no longer by armies but by whole peoples. The modern age of imperialism has also been marked by an escalation towards total war, shown in the two world wars and by the ever more powerful and indiscriminate weapons of destruction. The neutron bomb, meant to destroy people while preserving property, is the ultimate symbol of the summit of this logic. It perfectly captures the spirit of capitalism.
After the uneasy balance of the Cold War and nuclear terror (a cold war that certainly did not prevent the local proliferation of vicious "hot" wars or of exhausting, bloody civil wars), the collapse of the Soviet Union inaugurates a new geostra-
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The Gulf War and the New World Order
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tegic situation, revealed in a new level of intensity in various conflicts dreamed up by the Pentagon, in the Gulf War, and in various neo-colonial "humanitarian" missions.
Lucien Poirier, one of the theorists of the French nuclear "deterrent" frankly admits it: "The fact of nuclear arms and the Cold War had created a unique type of world system." But now we are "engaged in a transformation of the political and strategic universe," and we are "as yet unable to accurately describe this phenomenon." This forces us to "recognise the limited rationality of any strategic act." (Lucien Poirier, Le chantier strategique, Hachette, Poche Pluriel, 1997). The strategy vacuum
Napoleon once defined strategy as the art of being the stronger in a given place and at a given time. But today, what is the place, since there are now multiple centres of power, and power is so diffuse? And what is the time, since conflict stretches out over time, without coming to a conclusion? The field and the outcome of battle become unclear, because the "new order" yet unborn is, for now, as Marcos says, an order "in a thousand pieces" or "a broken
. The new redistribution of territories and new power structures are barely
Never in the past have such head-overheels changes been accomplished with ease. It took the European upheavals of 1848, the bloody partitioning of colonies, wars of independence, and two world wars. Today we seem to have fast-forwarded into a kind of constant war, already begun and without sign of ending, a war whose front is fractured into a series of local conflicts with global implications.
Reversing the Clauswitzian relationship, diplomacy today is the pursuit of war by peaceful means.
When Marcos speaks of this "Fourth World War", perhaps he hopes to seize and identify this moment of reversal. Are we now all condemned to live on a war footing, in the chaos of a foreseen and unavoidable catastrophe?
He also writes: "the result of the explosion is not a pile of smoking ruins, or thousands of dead bodies, but a neighbourhood added to one of the commercial megalopolis of the new planetary hypermarket, and a labour force reshaped to fit in with the new planetary job market."
For the moment, the result of this conflict's expansion in space and in time is not an apocalypse but the daily devastation of a planet handed over to the mercy of market deregulation and the displacement of whole populations; displacement in the double sense that they are thrown not onlv into the whirlwind of refugee flows, but also into places where they have no space, no place, no city in which they are acknowledged citizens.
The instant mobility of capital, the globalisation of production, the unceasing migration of financial speculation, the increasing multinationalisation of companies all eat away at the sovereignty of nations. The power of nation states dissipates in two directions, towards the bottom with the increasing privatisation of public space, gang warfare, and organised mafias; and towards the top with the creation of supranational financial, juridical, and military powers. National reorganisation
So far, this is only a tendency, and one whose final success we would be mistaken to presume. Capital, even in its globalised form, remains dependent on the nation state's apparatus, on its military and financial might, to support its conquests and guarantee its profits. The United States proved this in a spectacular fashion with the Gulf War. The plan for European Unity is explicitly one of a strong Europe that can achieve the critical mass of a modern empire. If world leadership is multipolar, imperialism nonetheless remains, founded on an unprecedented concentration of wealth, technology, and patents.
Nation states have thus not been simply effaced by globalisation. Rather, they are, as Marcos says carefully, "forced to redefine their identity" But are "megalopolises replacing nations?" No, not just that. New functions, new limits, and new perspectives are being assigned. "Entire countries are becoming departments of the neoliberal mega-enterprise. Neoliberalism thus produces, on the one hand, destruction and depopulation, and, on the other, the reconstruction and reorganisation of regions and nations".
This statement is pertinent. It leads, in the case of Mexico, to facing its local imperial neighbour and the effects of the free trade agreement, to the defence of national sovereignty as the right of a people to choose their own future and way of life. Although they accuse the Zapatistas of fomenting Mexico's fragmentation, it is the businessmen of Tabasco or Chiapas who dream of secession in order to profit from the oil resources: "The Zapatistas, for their part, feel it is necessary to defend the nation state in the face of globalisation, and that the attempts to break Mexico into fragments are being made by the government, and not by the just demands of the Indian peoples for autonomy."
Against the new forms of subjection and dependence, and against the temptations of separatism or dislocation, this project of "reconstructing the nation", allied with the twin legitimacy of the struggle for independence and the Mexican Revolution of 1911, seems absolutely just.
The problem for those of us who live in the exclusive club of wealthy nations is different. Here in France, our rulers are engaged in the construction of a new imperial power. We must imagine demands, rights, and goals that bridge the gap between the national tradition and the creation of a new continental space. Vive la république
In France, we must renew the dynamic of the universal republican ideal (that of the universal - not national- declaration of the rights of man); in other words, we must break the connection between the Republic and the nation.
Republicanism is still a vast, unrealised project. A true republic is a political community of citizens, it is not attached to the nation like a snail is to its shell. It is a spirit, a future, an envisioned or imagined republic that is never attained. The republican aspiration carries echos of permanent
At the moment when, battered by globalisation, the links between a territory, a market, and a state unravel, a moment when political, social, legal, ecological spaces no longer coincide, the republican principle allows us to imagine a sliding scale of sovereignty, with a new distribution of powers and responsibilities and many levels of decision making
"In this new war, politics, as the organiser of the nation state, no longer exists. Now politics solely serve to manage the economy, and politicians are now merely company managers."
Globalisation's retoric is, in fact, a retoric of resignation, a process of depoliticisation where the part of our future that is not the result of fate disappears between the fatal impact of economic
Adolfo Gilly, Helena Hirata, Carlos M. Vilas and the PRT (Argentina) [40 pages]
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INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION:
André Gunder Frank and Salah Jaber [72 pages A4]
18 International Viewpoint #299
"laws" and the consolations of humanitarian moralism.
Any submission to "contraints" has an impact on the will to change the world. The current interest shown by young people in Che Guevara derives in part from this general idea that he embodies the absolute antithesis of this resignation, of these abdications, and of any abandonment of all that is truly human in humankind.
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INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION Populism in Latin America
The economy and money are not selfWilled fetishes, but the expression of social relations we ourselves invent. Their supposed "laws" are revealed today in all their absurdity. Why, when we are able to produce more in less time, does misery and poverty flourish all around us? Why does the New York Stock Market fall when employment rises? Why does technology produce unemployment instead of increasing leisure time for all? Why do some claim work is disappearing when there are so many needs to be met, to be transformed, and even to be invented? These questions are not economic. They're political. And there is nothing more urgent than rehabilitating politics -not that of the politicians, with their doubled characteristics in more than one domain; with dual languages, double lives, as duplicitous as the commodities they serve - but the profane politics of collective self-determination in a world without gods and fetishes.
They say we have no model. But the future is never made according to plans. It invents itself as it transpires. A real utopia is growing irresistibly in the very soil of resistance and daily struggles all over the world. The crumbling of the bureaucratic regimes, far from leaving us orphaned vis à vis any "model", clears the pathways to the future.
They say we've broken down. They assure us the class struggle is over. "But they keep struggling" aside. They tell us that the working class has become invisible, but no one can dare to pretend that the haves, the bourgeoisie, the rich, the fat cats, the powerful -whatever you call them - have disappeared. The working class, today, comprises not only the exploited, but all the oppressed and humiliated, all the "dis-
"excluded from modernism", all the "withouts". without jobs, those without land, those without homes, those without papers, those without anything. That's a lot of
They object that we have no clear strategy. Changing an unacceptable world may be more necessary than ever, but it's impossible. The road to social transforma-
Marcos asks those on the left a serious question.
"To begin with, I ask you not to confuse resistance with political opposition. Opposition does not oppose itself to power but to a government, and its fully-formed shape is that of an opposition party; resistance, on the other hand, cannot be a party, by definition: it is not made in order to govern but to resist."
Marcos highlights these words of Tomas Segovia. They echo the founding texts of the Zapatista Front, articulating a politics of resistance "without aspiring to take power", aiming at the creation of "a political force that doesn't fight to take power but to create, to bring together, and to develop mass movements and civil society".
Struggle for... power?
An anti-power, then. But the development of this anti-power ends -if the powerful allow it to- in a duality of power, in this situation of unstable equilibrium that cannot endure. Because, between two forces, two rights, or two opposing principles, might is right - the strongest prevails. This is the very history of all revolutions, whatever their form.
To be a "political force that does not fight to take power" can therefore be interpreted many different ways.
The first way is as plain wisdom. That is, the statement means that one says one doesn't power because one can't achieve it for the time being, given the relationship of national and international forces. But, since power exists and cannot be ignored we need to gain some time, modify the relationship of forces, build alliances, and enter, one way or another, the domain of institutional politics. Which is what the Zapatista Army did, in its own way, with its declaration on the results of the July 6 election, when it hailed the victory of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in Mexico City and stated that the creation of a "electoral choice for the left "was necessary.
The second, more ambitious interpretation, involves underlining that it is not only a question of taking over an already existing instrument of power, but of utterly transforming the relations of power and the relation between power and
The repeated emphasis on "mandarobedeciendo" (leading while obaying), rather than the usual military principle of "mando-obediencia" (obeying orders) expresses such a goal: giving orders and leadership are only legitimate if they faithfully represent the will from below, of the majority, and if the leaders themselves
. The commanders are responsible
This is logical because such a struggle can be partial, mobilising around this or that demand, with this or that group of people, while the creation of a whole new society is the work of the broad masses, beginning with a molecular process, necessarily larger, of greater scope, more complicated than any decree from a minority, however enlightened.
Here we can see faint traces of the few moments where majority democracy has emerged, briefly embodied in the Paris Commune, in the Soviets of 1905 and 1917, and in all emancipatory experiences of workers' self-management, of popular control, and of participatory democracy. Pockets... of power
The third and final interpretation points to a strategic difficulty. Revolutionaries have something in common with soldiers. It is often said of the latter that they are always behind in war because they try to fight the present war with the tactics of the past war.
Revolutionaries are in a similar situation, for the same reason: you can formulate hypotheses and prepare simulations, but you can't do lab experiments with wars or revolutions, and reality 1s always more complicated than fiction. The diffusion and inconstant nature of goals, the fluidity and elasticity of fronts have all caused problems for today's militaries. No wonder they provoke a similar perplexity for us as revolutionaries.
Thus the metaphoric insistence Marcos places on a strategy of pockets of resistance over outright winning: pockets. Of all sizes, of different colours, of varying shapes. Their sole common point is a desire to resist the 'new world
Nonetheless, this multicoloured and many-faceted resistance would be wrong to ignore power. Power won't ignore them. It acts, manoeuvres, transforms itself, and takes initiatives. The war of attrition certainly wins out over the war of position, as does the patient construction of hegemony with respect to the impatient temptation towards a decisive attack. But resistance necessarily feeds on the hope of a counter-offensive and the overthrow of
"It is urgent that we embark on a discussion of this mega-politics,
"Mega-politics globalises national politics - in other words it ties them to a centre that has world interests and which operates on the logic of the
This mega-politics, in which a ventriloquist's market monologue is the only voice heard, is the negation of real politics, politics as a space of liberty, of deliberation, of controversy, where the fragile links of difference are forged, where diversity joins together, where the many unite. Instead, mega-politics exercise an impersonal power over people and things alike.
Only intergalactic politics could be large enough to take on this challenge. Intergalactic in the sense of a new alias for the old internationalism that must always reinvent itself, still too new to have served us well or poorly.
In the days when they sang the Internationale, the oppressed were a century ahead of the game. But since then, we have had "socialism in one country" "really existing socialism" "socialist internationalist" invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. As a result, the first have become the last. The oppressed are a century (at least) behind capital and commodities.
All the more reason to pick up the pace in the march towards a new internationalism.
To make haste slowly!
To spur on our slow impatience! *
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