"Far from being a mechanical consequence of capitalist development, the rallying of the forces of resistance and subversion of the order established by capital is an incessant task recommenced in daily struggles, and whose results are never definitive." - Daniel Bensaïd "This daily struggle already constitutes concrete advances towards the revolution’s fulfillment." - Georg Lukacs "The close and intimate contact with the practical problems of the daily struggle, and with the comrades who directly face them, serves as an unerring corrective to any tendency there might be to deal with these problems in an abstract or purely doctrinaire fashion." - James P. Cannon "History comes alive when the masses have been prepared by the daily struggle at the point of production to burst out spontaneously to storm the heavens." - Raya Dunayevskaya
Immediate Riot, Historical Riot, Event and Truth by Alain Badiou
These are excerpts from Alain Badiou's "The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings" that help conceptualize the transition from an immediate riot to a historical riot, as steps from riot to revolution.
Today, there are riots throughout the world, from workers ' and peasants ' riots in China to youth riots in England, from the astonishing tenacity of crowds under gunfire in Syria to the massive protests in Iran, from Palestinians demanding the unity of Fatah and Hamas to Chicano sans-papiers in the United States .There are all sorts of riots , often very violent, but sometimes barely hinted at, mobilizing either specific social groups or whole populations. They are prompted by governments ' and/ or employers ' decisions , electoral controversies , the activities of the police or an occupying army, even by simple episodes in people's existence . They immediately take a militant turn or develop in the shadow of a more official protest. They are blindly progressive or blindly reactionary (not every riot is up for grabs . . . ) . What they all have in common is that they stir up masses of people on the theme that things as they are must be regarded as unacceptable.
We can distinguish between three types of riot, which I shall respectively call immediate riot, latent riot and historical riot.
Immediate Riot
An immediate riot is unrest among a section of the population , nearly always in the wake of a violent episode of state coercion . Even the famous Tunisian riot, which triggered the series of ' Arab revolutions ' in early 2011, was initially an immediate riot (in response to the suicide of a street vendor prevented from selling and struck by a policewoman).
Some of the defining characteristics of such a riot possess a general significance , and consequently an immediate riot is often the initial form of an historical riot.
First of all , the spearhead of an immediate riot, particularly the inevitable clashes with the forces of law and order, is youth. Some commentators have regarded the role of ' youth' in the riots in the Arab world as a sociological novelty, and have linked it to the use of Facebook or other vacuities of alleged technical innovation in the postmodern age. But who has ever seen a riot whose front ranks were made up of the elderly? As was evident in China in 1966-67 and France in 1968, but also in 1848 and at the time of the Fronde, during the Taiping Rebellion - and, ultimately, always and everywhere - popular and student youth form the hard core of riots . Their capacity for assembly, mobility and linguistic and tactical invention, like their inadequacies in discipline, strategic tenacity and moderation when required, are constants of mass action. Moreover, drums , fires , inflammatory leaflets , running through the back streets , circulating words , ringing bells - for centuries these have served their purpose in people suddenly assembling somewhere , just as sheep-like electronics does today. In the first instance, a riot is a tumultuous assembly of the young, virtually always in response to a misdemeanour, actual or alleged, by a despotic state . (But riots show us that in a sense the state is always despotic; that is why communism organizes its withering away. )
Next, an immediate riot is located in the territory of those who take part in it. The issue of the localization of riots is , as we shall see, quite fundamental . When a riot is restricted to the site where its participants live (most often the crumbling districts of cities) , it stops there, in its immediate form . It is only when it constructs - most often in the city centre - a new site, where it endures and is extended, that it changes into an historical riot. An immediate riot, stagnating in its own social space, is not a powerful subjective trajectory. It rages on itself; it destroys what it is used to. It lets fly at the meagre symbols of the ' wealthy ' existence it is in contact with every day - particularly cars , shops and banks. If it can, it destroys the sparse symbols of the state, thus demolishing its very weak presence : virtually abandoned police stations , unglamorous schools , community centres experienced as paternalistic plasters on the running sores of neglect. All this fuels the hostility of POL-style public opinion towards the rioters : ' Look! They 're destroying the few things they've got ! ' Such opinion does not want to know that, when something is one of the few 'benefits' granted you, it becomes the symbol not of its particular function, but of the general scarcity, and that the riot detests it for that reason . Hence the blind destruction and pillaging of the very place the rioters live in, which is a universal characteristic of immediate riots. For our part , we shall say that all this achieves a weak localization , an inability of the riot to displace itself.
That is not to say that an immediate riot stops at one particular site . On the contrary, we observe a phenomenon dubbed contagion: an immediate riot spreads not by displacement, but by imitation . And this imitation occurs in sites that are similar, even largely identical, to the initial focal point.
It is only in discovering the means for an extension which cannot be reduced to an imitation that a riot assumes an historical dimension . Basically, it is when an immediate riot extends to sectors of the population which, by virtue of their status , social composition, sex or age, are remote from its constitutive core that a genuine historical dimension is on the agenda . The entry onto the stage of ordinary women is invariably the first sign of such a generalized extension . An immediate riot, if one stops at its initial dynamic , can only combine weak localizations (at the site of the rioters) with limited extensions (through imitation) .
Finally, an immediate riot is always indistinct when it comes to the subjective type it summons and creates . Because this subjectivity i s composed solely o f rebellion, and dominated by negation and destruction , it does not make it possible dearly to distinguish between what pertains to a partially universalizable intention and what remains confined to a rage with no purpose other than the satisfaction of being able to crystallize and find hateful obj ects to destroy or consume.
In as much as it is immediate, a riot cannot really purify itself. Hence, in among the destruction of hated symbols , the profitable pillaging, the sheer pleasure in smashing what exists , the j oyous whiff of gunpowder and guerrilla warfare against the cops, one cannot really see clearly. The subject of immediate riots is always impure . That is why they are neither political nor even pre-political . In the best of cases - and this is already a good deal - they make do with paving the way for an historical riot; in the worst, they merely indicate that the existing society, which is always a state organization of Capital , does not possess the means altogether to prevent the advent of an historical sign of rebellion in the desolate spaces for which it is responsible.
Historical Riot
Learning from the striking novelty of the riots in the Arab countries - especially their endurance, their determination, their unarmed tenacity, their unforeseen independence - we can, I believe, first of all propose a simple definition of an historical riot: it is the result of the transformation of an immediate riot, more nihilistic than political , into a pre-political riot. The case of the Arab countries then teaches us that for this the following are required.
1 . A transition from limited localization (assemblies' attacks and destructive acts on the very site of the rebels) to the construction of an enduring central site, where the rioters install themselves in an essentially peaceful fashion, asserting that they will stay put until they receive satisfaction . Therewith we also pass from the limited and, in a sense, wasted time of the immediate riot, which is an amorphous , high-risk assault, to the extended time of the historical riot, which instead resembles old sieges of a town, except that it involves laying sie ge to the state . In reality, everyone knows that destruction cannot last, except in 'major wars ' : an immediate riot can hold out for between one and five days at the most. In its monumental site, even when surrounded and harassed by the police, or on the main avenues it ritually occupies on a set day of the week, with the crowd constantly growing, an historical riot holds out for weeks or months.
2. For that to happen there must be a transition from extension by imitation to qualitative extension . This means that all the components of the people are progressively unified on the site thus constructed : popular and student youth, obviously, but also factory workers , intellectuals of all sorts , whole families , large numbers of women , employees , civil servants , even some police officers and soldiers , and so forth . People of different religious faiths mutually protect the others ' prayer times ; people o f conflicting origin engage in peaceful discussion as if they had always known one another. And a multiplicity of voices , absent or virtually absent from the clamour of an immediate riot, asserts itself; placards describe and demand; banners incite the crowd .
At this point the threshold of historical riot is crossed: established localization, possible longue duree, intensity of compact presence, multifaceted crowd counting as the whole people . As Trotsky, who was conversant with the subject, might have said : ' The masses have mounted the stage of history.'
It was also necessary to make a transition from the nihilistic din of riotous attacks to the invention of a single slogan that envelops all the disparate voices : ' Mubarak, clear off!' Thus is created the possibility of a victory, since what is immediately at stake in the riot has been decided. At the antipodes of destructive desires for revenge, the movement can persist in anticipation of a specific material satisfaction : the departure of a man whose name - a short while before taboo, but now publicly condemned to ignominious erasure - is brandished .
A riot becomes historical when its localization ceases to be limited, but grounds in the occupied space the promise of a new, long-term temporality; when its composition stops being uniform , but gradually outlines a unified representation in mosaic form of all the people ; when, finally, the negative growling of pure rebellion is succeeded by the assertion of a shared demand, whose satisfaction confers an initial meaning on the word ' victory' .
Historical riots stir up and alter historical possibilities , to the extent that the meaning which their initial victories will retrospectively assume will in large part determine the meaning of our future .
What is an intervallic period? It is what comes after a period in which the revolutionary conception of political action has been sufficiently clarified that, notwithstanding the ferocious internal struggles punctuating its development, it is explicitly presented as an alternative to the dominant world, and on this basis has secured massive, disciplined support. In an intervallic period, by contrast, the revolutionary idea of the preceding period, which naturally encountered formidable obstacles - relentless enemies without and a provisional inability to resolve important problems within - is dormant. It has not yet been taken up by a new sequence in its development. An open, shared and universally practicable figure of emancipation is wanting. The historical time is defined, at least for all those unamenable to selling out to domination, by a sort of uncertain interval of the Idea.
The riot is the guardian of the history of emancipation in intervallic periods. [...] As guardians of the history of emancipation in an intervallic period, historical riots point to the urgency of a reformulated ideological proposal , a powerful Idea, a pivotal hypothesis , so that the energy they release and the individuals they engage can give rise, in and beyond the mass movement and the reawakening of History it signals , to a new figure of organization and hence of politics . So that the political day which follows the reawakening of History is likewise a new day. So that tomorrow is genuinely different from today.
Riot, Event, Truth
All this can much more readily be integrated into a major new political Idea, in accordance with what I have called 'movement communism ' , which is specific to all movements of this kind, than into electoral artifices - a trap set by the old historical oppressor.
I can summarize all this in a language at once more abstract and simpler. In a world structured by exploitation and oppression masses of people have, strictly speaking, no existence . They count for nothing. In today's world nearly all Africans , for example, count for nothing. And even in our affluent lands the majority of people, the mass of ordinary workers , basically decide absolutely nothing, have only a fictional voice in the matter of the decisions that decide their fate . Only a simultaneously remote and ubiquitous oligarchy manages to link successive episodes in people 's lives via a unified parameter - namely, profit, off which that oligarchy lives.
Let us call these people, who are present in the world but absent from its meaning and decisions about its future, the inexistent of the world . We shall then say that a change if world is real when an inexistent of the world starts to exist in this same world with maximum intensity. This is exactly what people in the popular rallies in Egypt were saying and are still saying : we used not to exist, but now we exist, and we can determine the history of the country. This subjective fact is endowed with an extraordinary power. The inexistent has arisen. That is why we refer to uprising: people were lying down, submissive ; they are getting up , picking themselves up, rising up. This rising is the rising of existence itself: the poor have not become rich; people who were unarmed are not now armed, and so forth . Basically, nothing has changed . What has occurred is restitution of the existence of the inexistent, conditional upon what I call an event.
As a reopening of history, the event is heralded by three signs , all of them immanent in massive popular demonstrations : intensification, contraction and localization . These are the pre-political elements , the awakening of History by riots that go beyond an immediate riot and its potent nihilism . With them begins the labour of the new truth which, in politics , is called ' organization' .
An organization lies at the intersection between an Idea and an event. However, this intersection only exists as process , whose immediate subject is the political militant. The militant is a hybrid being, since she is what a riotous movement that has once again been seized hold of by the Idea can give birth to. The Idea was republican for decades , 'naively' communist in the nineteenth century, and state communist in the twentieth century. Let us provisionally suggest that it is dialectically communist in the twenty-first century. Its true name will arrive in the margins of the rebirth of History.
How is militant hybridization accomplished as fidelity to the event? That the historical value of the Idea is first if all attested by the riot is certain . That the political value of the riot is attested by the organization which is faithful to it, and faithful to it because for it the riot affirms the Idea, is no less certain .
A politics regards as eternal what the riot has unearthed in the form of the existence of an inexistent, and which is the sole content of a rebirth of History. To do this , it is necessary that in the light of the Idea, which abstractly unites militants , the organization retains traces within itself of what made for the creative power of the historical riot: contraction, intensification and localization.
Classically, contraction (whereby a small minority is the genuine existence of the whole of the riot) is guarded by strict rules of membership of the organization . A formal demarcation is created between those who are of it and those who are not, which is as powerful as the demarcation during a riot between those who are there and those who stay at home .
Intensification is preserved by militant activism , a life devoted to the demands of action, a subj ectivity that is keener and more sensitive to circumstances than one which has reverted to routine existence .
Localization will be guarded by firm rules of conquest of the sites where one is present (a particular popular market, an African workers ' hostel , a factory, a tower block on some housing estate, and so on) .
This set constitutes the militant dimension of a particular type of organization, which was called ' communist party '.
This is an enormous problem for today: inventing a revolutionary political discipline which, although heir to the dictatorship of the True born with the historical riot, does not follow the hierarchical , authoritarian and quasi-mindless model of armies or storm troopers.
Anyway, it remains the case that, by formalizing the constitutive features of the event, organization makes it possible for its authority to be preserved . It might be said that with this formalization a transition is in a sense made from the real to the symbolic , or from desire to the law. Organization transforms into political law the dictatorship of the true from which the reality of the historical riot derived its universal prestige.
A political organization is the Subject of a discipline of the event, an order in the service of disorder, the constant guardianship of an exception . It is a mediation between the world and changing the world; it is , in a sense, the worldly element of changing the world, because organization deals with the subjective question : 'How are we to be faithful to changing the world within the world itse!j?' This becomes : How are we to weave in the world the political truth whose historical condition cf possibility was the event, without it being able to be the realization of this possibility? How are we to inscribe politically, as active materiality under the sign of the Idea, a reawakening of History?
What I call the question of organization , or the discipline if the event, is the possibility of an efficacious fragmentation of the Idea into actions , proclamations and inventions attesting to a fidelity to the event. All in all, an organization is something that declares itself collectively adequate to the event and the Idea alike, in a duration which has once again become that of the world . This moment of organization is by far the most difficult. It requires particular collective attention, because it is the moment of divisions as well as the one when the enemy (the guardian of slumbering History) seeks to re gain the upper hand . If this moment is missed, the rebirth of History is nothing more than a brilliant anecdote , and politics remains apathetic.
The process I call ' organization' is therefore an attempt to preserve the characteristics of the event (intensification, contraction and localization) , when the event as such no longer possesses its initial potency. In this sense organization is , in the subjective latency where the Idea holds itself, the transformation of evental power into temporality.
If the event, the historical riot, is a break in time - a break in which the inexistent appears - organization is an outside-time in time, which creates the collective subj ectivity wherein the existence taken on by the inexistent in the light of the Idea is going to challenge the conservative power of the state , guardian of all temporal forms of oppression .
After re-watching Adam Curtis' documentary The Century of the Self I was spurred on to do some research on the use of Psychoanalysis for the manufacture of consent and the making of consumerism culture and I encountered this concise exposition in Cabinet magazine of the two major and influential proponents who succesfully instrumentalized Freudian psychoanalysis for commercial and right-wing political purposes. I haven't seen a lot written on them yet in literature dealing with the subject of psychoanalysis and politics, but, considering these figures laid the basis for the modern PR industry, I think the (Freudian and Lacanian) left can draw important lessons from them:
from Cabinet Magazine Issue 44 24 Hours (Winter 2011/12)
In the early 1950s. the United States produced half the world's goods and possessed two-thirds of its machinery; the resulting prosperity and automation increased standards of living and swelled the middle-class.' Sociologists such as David Riesman and C. Wright Mills began to worry less about poverty than about the conformist suburban nature of the American dream. and the corrupting and alienating results of affluence. The "new little men," wrote Mills in White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), were "cheerful robots" and "political eunuchs," cogs in a bureaucratic machine that they didn't feel they were able to change. In The Lonely Crowd (1950), Riesman painted a similar portrait of an apathetic, status-obsessed, socially anxious citizenry dominated by the "marketing mentality."
Advertisers honed methods to exploit these anxieties and feed the fifties' orgy of consumption. Since 1940, America's gross national product had soared more than 400%. and the average citizen had five times as many discretionary dollars to spend on luxuries as in the previous decade. By the late 1950s, to compete for this spending power, corporations directed nearly $12 billion toward advertising (up from $2 billion in 1939) and three-quarters of the largest advertising companies used "depth techniques": in a crowded marketplace, businesses came to rely on techniques inspired by psychoanalysis to make their products more seductive to the masses, to ignite customers' desires, and make them buy things that they didn't really need or even know they wanted.
In the United States, psychoanalysis had long had a fluid relation with business and commerce. Indeed, you might say that psychoanalysis first came to America coupled with its commercial usage. Freud's Vienna-born American nephew, the publicist Edward Bernayswhose mother was Freud's sister. and whose father was Freud's wife's brother-founded the country's first public relations firm in 1919, and consciously used his uncle's idea of a latent but powerful sexuality as a form of subliminal seduction to manipulate the masses. Freud spent time with Bernays during his 1909 tour of America and became fond of him, but Ernest Jones dismissed him as "an American 'sharper' and quite unscrupulous."2 Bernays was instrumental in the publication of American editions of Freud's writings, and he was always on the lookout for different ways in which psychoanalysis might be popularized and exploited for profit-he tried, unsuccessfully, to get his uncle to write a column for Cosmopolitan magazine. During his stay, Freud had been exposed to, and amused by, the aggressive marketing that Bernays was to make his own-he saw an advertisement outside an undertaker's that read, "Why live, when you can be buried for $10?"'
Bernays visited Freud after the World War I and proved a quick study. He returned determined to adapt his uncle's ideas about sex to the realm of American commerce, setting up a public relations office and creating campaigns that were designed to appeal directly to the unconscious desires of consumers. In 1929, he employed the analyst A. A. Brill to come up with a sales strategy for American Tobacco aimed at recruiting female smokers. Bernays boasted in his autobiography that this "may have been the first instance of [psychoanalysis's] application to advertising:·• Brill advised casting cigarettes as "torches of freedom" in the battle for women's liberation, and Bernays staged a march of debutante smokers down Fifth Avenue to impress this idea in the public mind. It was the first of many such campaigns of mass suggestion. With his office on Wall Street Bernays successfully bridged the old and new worlds of psychoanalysis. In 1933, Life joked that he had "probably made more money out of applied psychoanalysis than all Vienna ever saw."5
By the mid-1950s, the corporate hero of applied psychoanalysis was Ernest Dichter, a man who had fled Europe to escape the Nazis. He went on to turn the commercialization of dreams into a fine science. Indeed, Dichter was sometimes described as "the Freud of Madison Avenue,"" one of the great mass psychoanalysts of our era," and "Mr. Mass Motivations Himself." Through his psycho-detective work, Dichter promised the "mobilization and manipulation of human needs as they exist in the consumer," or, put bluntly, the "translation of sex into sales." Dichter-who came up with Esso's slogan "Put a Tiger in Your Tank" -has been credited with inventing focus groups, overdraft coverage for checking accounts, and the idea of placing sweets near supermarket checkouts"ln a 1956 article entitled "Put the Libido Back into Advertising," Dichter wrote, "Libido is a basic life force, a pulsating, virulent invisible power which is the very stuff of our inner lives."7
Dichter was born in Vienna in 1907 to a workingclass family who lived in an apartment across the road from Freud. His carrot-red hair, he later said, predestined him to be a psychologist because it always made him feel like an outsider, concerned with what people thought of him. His father was a "spectacularly unsuccessful salesman," as he wrote in his memoir. Getting Motivated(1979), a traveling haberdasher and peddler of textiles for whom Dichter grew up to have little respect. He was sometimes unable to provide for the family, and during the severe shortages of post-World War I Vienna the family ate bread made of flour and sawdust and sometimes starved, Dichter recalled, "with nothing to eat for three days in a row."
At fourteen, to help support the family, Dichter left school and went to work for his uncle Leopold, who owned the Dichter department store on Brunnengasse. Dichter worked there as a secretary and then a window dresser: he was soon the family's principal breadwinner. His uncle became a substitute father figure and, while his two younger brothers both became militant communists, Dichter became an advocate of conspicuous consumption. He read American magazines and imported US sales techniques, such as piped-in music and kinetic displays, and enjoyed his first hurried sexual experiences with "a dark-haired, somewhat cross-eyed girl" in the company's store rooms "behind rows of kitchen utensils and sundry china ware, glasses, and, around Christmas time, behind dolls and electric trains, waiting to be given a place in the visible shelves at the front of the store.''8 Sex and commodities were inextricably interlinked in Dichter's mind.
Dichter, who went on to study psychology at the University of Vienna under Charlotte and Karl Buhler. was trained as an analyst by an American studying in Vienna who treated him in return for German classes. He came to New York in 1938, with only a hundred dollars to his name. and found an apartment in the Bronx. then known as the Fourth Reich because it was so full of European immigrants. His first job was as a market researcher. Unimpressed with the discipline's bland empiricism. the thirty-one-year-old Dichter wrote to six corporate giants to try and interest them in a psychoanalytic approach to marketing: "I am a young psychologist from Vienna," he wrote by way of introduction. "and I have some interesting new ideas which can help you be more successfuL effective, sell more and communicate better with your potential clients.''" Four companies were intrigued enough to respond, and there followed a flurry of work that firmly established his reputation in America and made him the leading practitioner in the new field of "motivational research."
Dichter went to work for Esquire magazine. where he used psychoanalytic methods to discover the perhaps obvious fact that subscribers were attracted to the publication because of the nude pictures (he told the company not to be embarrassed about this but to stress to potential advertisers that readers lingered longer on the page, and with wider eyes). and a study he conducted for Proctor & Gamble's Ivory Soap revealed that there was an erotic element to bathing, and that a bath was seen as a purification ritual whereby one washed one's troubles away. The resulting jingle was. "Be Smart and Get a Fresh Start with Ivory Soap." He helped Chrysler market Plymouth cars, discovering that women most often made the decisions about which car a family bought and that. while convertibles sucked men into the salesroom, they were seldom sold-men associated them with the fantasy of having a mistress. but settled for a wifely sedan.
Only eighteen months after arriving in the United States, Dichter's clever analyses of the sexual appeal of commodities earned him a write-up in Time, where he was described as "a smalL neat, emphatic man who speaks almost perfect English."'10 Dichter claimed to be "the first to apply to advertising the really scientific psychology." Advertising agencies, Dichter liked to say, were "advanced laboratories in psychology." Consumers were docile and malleable, and adverts should try to bypass their rational mind and appeal to the softer ground of their unconscious: "Dr. Dichter scoffs at advertising that tries to reason with potential customers, to scare them or lecture them on their shortcomings," Time explained. "He believes in tapping hidden desires and urges." Chrysler was just about to launch its "Dichterized advertisements" which. the magazine concluded. would do just that: "Probable motif: the subconscious lure of the open road, the deep passion to master a machine."
It was in his 1947 book The Psychology of Everyday Living (a play on Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life) that Dichter introduced his ingenious psychoanalytic findings about soap, cars, appliances. and cigarettes to a wide public. The book was designed as an accessible self-help manual to help Americans "accept the morality of the good life."" Dichter thought that the country's traditional puritanical values were desperately out of sync with capitalist ideology, and wanted to encourage people to shed their guilty feelings about self-indulgent pleasures and find erotic satisfaction in buying things.
As America entered the 1950s, the decade of heightened commodity fetishism. Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption. and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism. which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas. "Hedonism," Dichter argued, "as defended by the old Greeks. has to be brought to the surface again. We have to learn to forget the guilt of original sin."'2 Dichter maintained that Americans had to shed their outmoded concept of morality if they were to discover their freedom in commodity culture without the destructive guilt that might lead to fascism or communism: "We are fighting a sham battle with rockets and hydrogen bombs," Dichter wrote. "while underneath the real struggle, the silent war. is for the possession of men's minds."13
In 1957. the sociologist Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders, a bestseller about the worrying symbiotic relationship between psychoanalysis and advertising. The book, an attack on Dichter's advertising methods. with their deliberate appeal to the unconscious mind, asked on its front cover, "What makes us buy, believe-and even vote-the way we do?" (In the 1956 elections, Adlai Stevenson had bemoaned the fact that candidates were now marketed like breakfast cereals.) Advertisers. Packard warned. employed "depth boys," as they were nicknamed, to try and puzzle out in less direct ways what really motivated people so that they could develop marketing strategies to best appeal to their selfish desires and whims. Dichter was, wrote Packard," certainly the most famed of these depth probers."14
"Typically they see us as bundles of daydreams. misty hidden yearnings, guilt complexes. irrational emotional blockages," Packard complained of advertising's underhanded manipulations. "We are image lovers given to impulsive and compulsive acts."15 Their techniques were becoming increasingly "scientific,'' sophisticated and insidious: researchers exposed test subjects to a battery of projective tests. psychoanalytic interviews. and free-association games. They were subjected to hypnosis. lie detector tests. and eye-blink rate analysis. all so that advertisers could best determine how to bait their hooks and "invade the privacy of [consumers'] minds.'16
By the time Packard visited him. Dichter had expanded his operations to a castle in Peekskill thirty miles north of Manhattan. a twenty-six-room fieldstone mansion on a hill overlooking the Hudson River that could only be reached via a narrow. winding. milelong private road. Inside, there was a sixty-five-foot living room. a full-sized pipe organ. and an indoor pool. Dichter. dressed in a bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses, was described in the book as "jaunty ... exuberant. balding."17 Children, Packard noted, were watching televisions while resident psychologists. crouching behind special screens. secretly filmed and studied their every action so that they could inform advertisers how to manipulate their unconscious minds. Dichter called such focus groups his "living laboratory": one such session led to the invention of the Barbie doll. "What they wanted was someone sexy looking, someone that they wanted to grow up to be like.'' Dichter reported, "Long legs. big breasts, glamorous."18 To Packard, Dichter's gothic mansion was a sinister factory that manufactured and implanted self-destructive desires.
Ironically, Packard's bestselling attack (it sold over one million copies) made Dichter even more successful; he was invited onto TV and radio shows to explain and justify his Svengali-like techniques. further increasing his celebrity. A chapter in Dichter's autobiography is titled "Thank you. Vance Packard." Some clients even suspected that he'd commissioned The Hidden Persuaders for promotional purposes. Shortly after the book came out. Packard and Dichter confronted each other in a radio debate. Packard argued that. because of his commitment to "self-guidance and individuality," he had severe reservations about the way "advertisers are learning to play upon [our] subconscious needs without our awareness.''19 Packard thought that science was being used to menace and undermine democracy; he invoked "the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother."20
Dichter, however, thought that motivational researchers were the invisible force that upheld democracy; salesmen offered "a positive philosophy of life" and the people who bought what they sold declared their faith in the future and in the American dream. In Strategies of Desire (1960), Dichter"s book-length riposte to Packard, he described motivational researchers as "merchants of discontent" who created a world of psychological obsolescence and incessant demand for new things, and he believed that it was precisely in that endless quest and constant striving that people found political and psychological health:
Our role, as scientific communicators, as persuaders, is one of liberating these desires. not in an attempt to manipulate but in an attempt to move our economic system forward and with it our happiness . ... The real definition of happiness is what I call constructive discontent. Getting there is all, not just half. the fun. Stress and insecurity and whatever its labels may be, are the most beneficial movers and springs of our life: Trying to reach a goal but having the goal recede is the real mystery of happiness. 21
Dichter described himself as "a general on the battlefield of free enterprise" and was, in his way, an idealist. He embraced consumer culture wholeheartedly as a bulwark against fascism and the best weapon against communism. Like many European exiles, he felt that the totalitarian threat was simmering beneath the surface of American life, and saw the motivational researcher as a social engineer or psychoanalyst-at-large whose job it was to safeguard the country against this menace. He turned consumption into a kind of therapy, believing that by offering people a proliferation of material goals that could never be sated, his '"selling' techniques" would "impel people to live democratically."22 Whereas thinkers such as Riesman and Mills saw mass affluence as leading to an epidemic of alienation, Dichter interpreted it as the very thing that kept democracy and the economy on the march. "If we were to rely exclusively on the fulfillment of our immediate and necessary needs, our economy would literally collapse overnight," Dichter said. 23 Citizens bought into the American dream with their every purchase.
1 Daniel Horowitz. The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer
Culture, 1939-1979 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). p. 50.
2 Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund
Freud and Ernest Jones. 7908-1939, ed. R. Andrew Paskauskas (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 383.
3 Sigmund Freud to Marie Bonaparte, 13 August 1937, Letters of Sigmund
Freud. 1873-1939 (London: Hogarth Press. 1961). pp. 436-437.
4 Edward L. Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel
EdwardL. Bernays (NewYork: Simon and Schuster. 1965), p. 395.
5 Ibid .. p. 779.
6 Franz Kreuzer. Gerd Prechtl. and Christoph Steiner, A Tiger in the Tank: Ernest
Dichter, an Austrian Advertising Guru(Riverside, Cal.: Ariadne, 2007).
7 Ernest Dichter, "Put the Libido Back into Advertising," Motivations, no. 2 (July
1957),pp.13-14.
8 Ernest Dichter. Getting Motivated: The Secret Behind Individual Motivations by
the Man Who WasNotAfraidtoAsk Why(NewYork: Pergamon. 1979),pp. 147-148.
9 Ibid.
10 "Psychoanalysis in Advertising," Time, 25 March 1940.
11 Ernest Dtchter. The Strategy of Desire (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. 2002). p. xxi.
12 Ibid .. p. 263.
13 Ibid .. p. 20.
14 Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay, 1957), p. 31.
15 Ibid .. p. 7.
16 Ibid .. p. 266.
17 Ibid .. p. 31.
18 Betty Fried an would criticize Dichter for stereotyping women in her book The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton. 1963).
19 Daniel Horowitz, "The Birth of a Salesman: Ernest Dichter and the Objects of Desire" (unpublished paper). Hagley Library and Archive, Wilmington, Delaware, p. 37. Available at <www.hagley.org/library/collections/historicalref/articles/HOROWITZ_DICHTER.pdf>. Accessed 23 November 2011. See also Horowitz, "The Emigre as Celebrant of American Consumer Culture: George Katona and Ernest Dichter," in Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern. and Matthias Judt, eds., Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998), pp. 149-166.
20 Vance Packard, Hidden Persuaders, op. cit., p. 5.
21 Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire, op. cit., p. 258.
22 Ernest Dichter, The Psychology of Everyday Living(New York: Barnes & Noble. 1947). pp. 233-239.
23 Ibid .. p. 169.
It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of a “destructive character.” He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better his chances of representing the destructive character.
The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.
The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenate, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony.
The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself.
The destructive character sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space – the place where thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without occupying it.
The destructive character does his work; the only work he avoids is creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy.
The destructive character is a signal. Just a trigonometric sign is exposed on all sides to the wind, so he is exposed to idle talk. To protect him from it is pointless.
The destructive character has no interest in being understood. Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunderstood cannot harm him. On the contrary, he provokes it, just as oracles, those destructive institutions of the state, provoked it. The most petty bourgeois of all phenomena, gossip, comes about only because people do not wish to be misunderstood. The destructive character tolerates misunderstanding; he does not promote gossip.
The destructive character is the enemy of the étui-man. The étui-man looks for comfort, and the case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.
The destructive character stands in the front line of traditionalists. Some people pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them; others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.
The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.
The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.
The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worthing living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
This is a, somewhat loose, transcription of a talk by Slavoj Žižek given on Subversive Festival 2013, which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b44IhiCuNw4
The majority of the text is actually, as often is the case with talks (and also writings) by Žižek, a rehash of ideas and analyses from Žižek's books and articles (see the links I included at the end of the transcription, also see his own reference to this in the talk to his repetition of his idea of decaffeinated coffee), and, to my disappointment, the majority of the material Žižek discusses does not or only barely touches upon the subject of love. Nonetheless, put together Žižek draws some interesting connections between love, violence, spirituality, religions, modernity, capitalism and so on, and so on.
I didn't transcribe the whole of the Q&A, except for an interesting relevant statement Žižek makes about love.
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“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem part of it".
This is how, in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Cathy characterizes her relation to Heathcliff, and provides a succinct definition of unconditional erotic love. There is an unmistakable dimension of terror at work here. Think about the ecstatic trance of Tristan and Isolde; ready to obliterate the entire social reality in their immersion into the night of deadly enjoyment.
Now I could go on here about erotic love, because I sincerely think that in contrast to our youth, the youth of those who are already old, when fighting for sexual freedom was experienced as liberating and even monogamous love was considered/dismissed as a bourgeois convention, I think today, more and more, love is emerging as something dangerous and subversive. Think about how you are addressed in your everyday life by society, what society demands of you. It's basically a kind of slightly spiritual, pseudo-Buddhist hedonism. Ideology is telling you: "be faithful to yourself", "realize your true potential", "experiment with your life", "try all different options", "don't fixate yourself on a certain stable identity", "life is dynamic, fluid" and so on, and so on. And I claim that within this economy, not only is stable love/passionate love emerging as an obstacle to your "authentic development", but even the crucial dimension of love is gradually disappearing. What is love? As Alain Badiou, our good friend, put it in his wonderful book In Praise of Love, there is always something traumatic/extremely violent in love. Love is a permanent emergency state. You fall in love. And it's crucial [to know] that in English and in French we use this expression; you "fall" in love. You lose control. I claim that love, the experience of passionate love, is the most elementary metaphysical experience, it's a platonic experience. In the sense of, you lead your easy, daily life, you meet [up with] friends, go to parties and whatever, everything is normal, maybe here and there a one-night stand, and then you passionately fall in love, [and] everything is ruined. The entire balance of your life is lost. Everything is subordinated to this one person. I almost cannot imagine in normal daily life, outside war and so on, a more violent experience than that of love. And I think [this is] which is why all the "advisers" that we [supposedly] need today are trying precisely to domesticate or erase this excess of love. It's as if love is too poisonous and then they, [i.e.] all the marriage and dating agencies, tell you that the trick is how to find yourself in love without falling in love. This idea came to me when on one of my Transatlantic flights I read one of those stupid airline journals and there was a text in there, in big letters, claiming: "We will enable you to find yourself in love, without the fall", without this dangerous exposure. And I think this fits perfectly to our daily narcissistic metaphysics. You know the old story that I repeat all the time; we want coffee without caffeine, we want beer without alcohol, and we want love without its dangerous moment, where you get lost.
Now this is Eros, erotic love. Then we have its counterpoint, in Christianity, Agape. Agape functions in a wholly different way. How? It may appear that in contrast to Eros, with its violent subtraction from the collective space, the love for a collective succeeds in getting rid of the excess of terrorizing violence. Does Agape not imply an emphatic yes to the collective, ultimately to the entire humanity? Or even, as in Buddhism, to the entire domain of suffering life? The first counterargument is provided here by the reply to a simple question, just think about it: which political regimes in the twentieth century legitimized their power by evoking the subjects' love for their leader? It was the so-called, I don't like the term, totalitarian ones. Today, remember, it is only and precisely the North Korean regime which evokes all the time the infinite love of the Korean people for Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and so on, and vice versa the radiating love of the leader for his people. Love expressed in continuous acts of grace. Kim Jong Il wrote a short poem along these lines: "In the same way that a sunflower can only thrive if it is turned towards the sun, the Korean people can only thrive if their eyes are turned upwards towards their leader", towards himself of course. Terror and mercy are thus closely linked. They are effectively the front and the obverse of the same power structure. Only a power which asserts its full terrorist right or capacity to destroy anything and anyone it wants, only such a power can systematically universalize mercy. Since this power could have destroyed everyone, those who survive are all still alive because of the mercy of those in power. Consequently, the very fact that we, the subjects of power, are alive, is the proof of the power's infinite mercy. This is why the more terrorist a regime is, the more its leaders are praised for their infinite love, goodness and mercy. Theodor Adorno was right to emphasize that in politics love is evoked precisely when another democratic legitimation is missing, loving a leader means you love him for what he is, not for what he does.
So how about the next candidate for love as a political category? The so-called oriental spirituality, Buddhism, with its, so we are told, more gentle balanced, holistic, ecological approach. You know, all the stories about how, when digging up earth for the foundation of a house, Tibetan Buddhists are careful to not kill any worms and such. In the whole of the last 150 years Japan's rapid industrialization and militarization, with the ethics of discipline and sacrifice, was sustained by the large majority of Zen Buddhist thinkers. Who today knows that Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki himself, the high guru of Zen in the United States of the 1960's, supported in his youth in Japan of the 1940's the spirit of utter discipline and militaristic expansion. There is no contradiction here, no manipulative perversion of some authentic, compassionate insight. The attitude of total immersion into the selfless now, of the Instant, this so-called Buddhist enlightenment in which all reflexive distance is lost, in short in which absolute discipline coincides with total spontaneity, perfectly legitimizes our subordination to the militaristic social machine. It's quite interesting to read Buddhist texts on war, where they claim openly that, for ordinary people, who don't have time to meditate for years, the best shortcut for overcoming you false self and reaching nirvana, satori whatever we call it, is total subordination to the military discipline. And Suzuki himself wrote a wonderful text, where he even gives advice to the military how to use Buddhism to make killing easier. He says that if I persist in my everyday attitude of false belief in that I have a self, which is the free agent of its acts, and let's say I have to kill one of you, this is difficult, I look into your eyes, I find it difficult, [I hesitate whether] I should stab the knife into you, I feel responsible. Then Suzuki says if you reach Buddhist enlightenment it's much easier. You no longer believe in your autonomous self, your perceive yourself as just a void, an anonymous, impassive observer of life around you where phenomena simply are engaged in their cosmic dance, which is a totally neutral process. From this distance, as Suzuki puts it, you simply observe your knife in a cosmic dance of phenomena hitting the eye or the throat of your enemy. This is no joking matter, because I'm not blaming Buddhism for this. I'm just saying how even the most radical spirituality is no guarantee that we will not be doing horrible things in our daily life.
"Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces. [...] This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; what for the Buddhist (or Theosophist) personality is the fall of man, for the Christian is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the Theosophists [or Buddhist] asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine center of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it. [...] All modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into different living souls.”
A tremendous violence thus dwells in the very heart of the Christian notion of love for one's neighbor. The violence which finds its most direct expression in a series of Christ's disturbing statements. Here are some of these passages from the Gospels. You may be surprised what you find in what Christ is saying:
"Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me."
"If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, even their own life--such a person cannot be my disciple."
"Perhaps people think that I have come to cast peace upon the world. They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth: fire, sword, war. For there will be five in a house: there'll be three against two and two against three, father against son and son against father, and they will stand alone."
So how are we to read these statements? And believe me I know what I'm talking about. All the time when I engage in debates with Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox priests, I ask them to tell me what this means, and it is incredible how they try to squeeze out of it. One way is the linguistic one, they claim maybe hate is not the right translation, that Christ just wanted to say if you love some people more than me, not to hate them. I claim this is a blasphemy for a true Christian. God appears here then as a stupid jealous guy who says: "you can love others, but be sure that you love me more", that's an obscenity! The best answer was given to me by a Polish priest in Warsaw during a debate, when I asked him what does this mean, he told me he did not expect this question today and needed more time to prepare the answer, to which I answered him: fuck you, you had 2.000 years to prepare the answer. I didn't pull out an unknown passage. And it's absolutely incredible how they are really not ready to provide a clear answer.
To put it in a somewhat simplified way, there are two basic attitudes discernible in the history of religions. On the one hand there is the pagan cosmos, the divine hierarchical order of cosmic principles which, when copied on the society, gives the image of a congruent edifice in which each member is at each/his/her own place. The supreme good is here the global balance of principles, while the evil stands for their derailment or derangement, for the excessive assertion of one principle to the detriment of other principles, of the masculine principle to the detriment of the feminine one, of reason to the detriment of feeling, and so on and so on. The cosmic balance is then reestablished through the work of justice which, with its inexorable necessity, sets things straight again by crushing the derailed element. With regard to the social body, an individual is good when he or she acts in accordance with his/her special place within the social edifice, when he respects nature which provides food and shelter, when he shows respect for his superiors who take care of him in a fatherly way, and so on and so on. And evil occurs when some particular strata or individuals are no longer satisfied with their proper place within the global order, when children no longer obey parents, when servants no longer obey their masters, when the rulers no longer take care of their subjects and so on, and so on. I think that this is the ethics which even now is re=emerging often in the guise of some New Age wisdom, its so-called holistic approach. Every element should be in its proper place, evil is imbalance and so on, and so on. I claim that Christianity does precisely the opposite. Christianity introduces into the global order a principal totally foreign to it. A principle that measured by the standards of the traditional cosmology cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion, the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to the universality, in Christianity the universality of the Holy Spirit, or today, of human rights and freedoms. The idea is that I can participate in this universal dimension directly, irrespective of my specific particular place within the global order. So do Christ's scandalous words, not point, in the same direction? Here we are not dealing with a simple brutal hatred demanded by a cruel and jealous god. When Christ says "if you don't hate your father and mother you cannot be my follower", I think the point is not that you should simply hate them as living being. I think that in a very simple way you can resolve this dilemma. Father, mother and so on, here condense the entire hierarchic social order, the network of relations of domination, subordination and so on. So that the hatred Christ mentions is simply the hatred of established social hierarchy; "you are my follower, if instead of functioning as a part of social hierarchic order, you see as your true home, as it were, the Holy Spirit, an unconditionally egalitarian community." [The hatred enjoined by Christ is therefore not any kind of dialectical opposite of love, but the direct expression of love.] Or as St. Paul put it, it is love that enjoins us to unplug from our social community into which we were born, so that "there are neither men, nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks." This is I think the very core of the Christian insight for me. God dies, Christ dies, at the same time the Father dies, all that survives is the Holy Spirit, which is the first name of the Communist Party as we know. A radically egalitarian society which violently opposes social hierarchy, an immediate violent assertion of universal equality.
It is against this Christian background that one should read Che Guevara's well-known statement on revolutionary love:
"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think o a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."
There is a further step to be made here. Guevara's statement that "the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love" should be read together with his much more problematic statement on revolutionaries as “killing machines”: “Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy." These two apparently opposite stances are united in Che’s motto: ”Hay que endurecerse sin perder jamás la ternura. (One must endure – become hard, toughen oneself - without losing tenderness.)” I think Guevara is here basically paraphrasing Christ's declaration of the unity of love and sword. In both cases, the underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere unstable, pathetic sentimentality is its cruelty itself, its link with violence. So while Guevara certainly believed in the transformative power of love, he would have never been caught humming "all you need is love", what you need is to love with hatred. Or as, another strange bedfellow, Soren Kierkegaard put it long ago, the necessary consequence, the truth of the Christian demand to love one's enemy is "the demand to hate the beloved out of love and in love". To such an extreme madness, humanly speaking, can Christianity drive its demand, if love is to be the fulfillment of the law. Therefore it teaches that the Christian must, if required, be capable of hating his father and mother and sister and the beloved."
With regard to social order this means that the authentic Christian tradition rejects the wisdom that the hierarchic order is our faith, that all attempts to mess with it and to create another egalitarian order have to end up in destructive horror. Agape as political love, and following Terry Eagleton this is how I would propose to translate Agape, means that the unconditional, egalitarian love for one's neighbor can serve as the foundation for a new social order.
The form of appearance of this love is the so-called apocalyptic millenarianism, or the idea of communism: the urge to realize an egalitarian social order of solidarity. Love is the force of this universal link that, in an emancipatory collective, connects people directly, in their singularity, bypassing their particular hierarchic determinations. Terror is terror out of love for the universal-singular others and against the particular. This terror means exactly the same thing as the work of love. Our reproach to the fundamentalist terrorists, whether Islamist or Christian, should thus be precisely that they are not terroristic in the right way, that they shirk from authentic terror as the work of love.
Now you might be saying I am crazy. What distinguishes this from a murderous terrorist who kills but claims to kill you because of your eternal soul and so on, and so on? I will try to explain this in the remaining part by beginning with what is precisely the form of non-love today, but which poses as love: charity.
When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, like something like for the price of a couple of cappuccino’s you can save their life and so on, I claim that the true message is something like: "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!". In short the true message is that for the price of a couple of cappuccino’s you can continue your ignorant, pleasurable life, not only not feeling any guilt, but even feeling good for participating in the struggle against suffering. The notion of love is the opposite of charity. Charity is false love, because charity is love where the true aim is to make you[rself] feel good.
How would the authentic, violent love help us to orient ourselves today? Let me begin with a wonderful quote from the last Christmas issue of the magazine Spectator, in which there was an editorial with the title "Why 2012 was the best year ever" which argues against the perception that we live in a dangerous, cruel world where things are bad and getting:
"It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age."
Though, conceding to the devil what belongs to the devil, many things are true in this statement, the first thing to add here is that people rebel not when things are really bad, but when their expectations are disappointed. The French revolution occurred only once the king and the nobles were losing their hold on power; the 1956 anti-communist revolt in Hungary exploded after Imre Nagy had already been a prime minister for two years, after (relatively) free debates among intellectuals; people rebelled in Egypt in 2011 because there was some economic progress under Mubarak, giving rise to a class of educated young people who participated in the universal digital culture. And this is why the Chinese Communists are right to panic: because, on average, people are now living better than 40 years ago – and the social antagonisms (between the newly rich and the rest) are exploding, and expectations are much higher. That's the problem with development and progress: they are always uneven, they give birth to new instabilities and antagonisms, they generate new expectations that cannot be met. In Tunisia and Egypt just prior to the Arab spring, the majority probably lived a little better than decades ago, but the standards by which they measured their (dis)satisfaction were much higher. So yes, the Spectator is in principle right claiming that we live in a golden era, but the very facts the Spectator emphasizes are creating conditions for revolt and rebellion.
What rebellion? There is a more down-to-earth version of this claim by the Spectator, which I often hear in the mass media, especially when I visit non-European countries. They laugh at me and say: "Crisis? What crisis are you talking about?". Look at the so-called Bric countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, or at Poland, South Korea, Singapore, Peru, even many sub-Saharan African states – they are all progressing. The losers are western Europe and, up to a point, the US, so we are not dealing with a global crisis, but simply with the shift of the dynamics of progress away from the west. A potent symbol of this shift is the fact that, recently, many people from Portugal, a country in deep crisis, are returning to Mozambique and Angola, ex-colonies of Portugal, but this time as economic immigrants, not as colonizers. So what if our much decried crisis is a mere local crisis in an overal [frame of] progress? Even with regard to human rights: is the situation in China and Russia now not better than it was 50 years ago? Describing the ongoing crisis as a global phenomenon, the story goes, is a typical Eurocentrist view coming from leftists who usually pride themselves on their anti-Eurocentrism. Our "global crisis" is in fact a mere local blip in a larger story of overall progress. But we should restrain our anti-colonialist joy. The question to be raised is: "if Europe alone is in gradual decay, what is replacing its hegemony?" The answer is: "capitalism with Asian values" – which, of course, has nothing to do with Asian people and everything to do with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism to limit or even suspend democracy. From Marx on, the truly radical left was never simply progressive, it was always obsessed by the question: "what is the hidden price of progress?". Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed; but he insisted this success engenders antagonisms. We should do the same today: keep in view the dark underside [of global capitalism that is fomenting revolts.]
How? First I want to note something about the status of universality, because critiques of Eurocentrism usually emphasize the ideological limitation/lie/deception of western European universalism, which are right up to a point [for example] when we talk about human rights where we privilege a certain ideological set of human rights specific to western, individualist societies and so on, and so on. It's true, but it lies a little bit more complicated, because, in a proper dialectical Marxist perspective, every universality can be false. It is always over determined by some particular content, for example looking closely at human rights it secretly privileges whites, males, people of some property and so on, and so on. When we for example talk about Chinese philosophy, it is clear that we are doing a Eurocentrist operation, because philosophy as we know it emerged in Europe and if we applied the same notion to Chinese thought it is automatically in a disadvantage. But this historicist relativism, i.e. the caution of how universality can be a false universality, is just one side of the story. Marx is saying something, I think, which is much more actual today: that we are not only less universal than we think, but we are also much more universal than we think we are. For Marx the uniqueness of capitalism is that, as agents in a market we ourselves, as individuals, occupy a universal position, in the sense that we relate to ourselves as universal subjects, universal in the sense that we are no longer fully rooted in or identified with a particular social, ideological position. It's not a universality with regard to others. Today I am an engineer, when I lose this work tomorrow I can be a taxi driver. Our particular field of work is experienced as something ultimately contingent, the same goes for market commodities. So universality is a way of life as it were, a mode of our immediate experience. And now the big question is, what role, with regards to the process of emancipation, this brutal capitalist universality, this unknown heard of force of capitalism to dissolve all particular modes of life has.
I want to do something extremely problematic, I want to rehabilitate two texts of Marx, which are usually dismissed by postcolonial studies as embarrassing cases of Marx's racism and Eurocentrism, his two short 1853 articles on India: "The British Rule in India" and "The Future Results of British Rule in India". Marx admits here without restraint the brutality and exploitative hypocrisy of the British colonization of India, up to and including the systematic use of torture prohibited in the West but 'outsourced' to Indians (there really is nothing new under the sun--Guantanamos already existed in the midst of nineteenth-century British India): "The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked." All Marx adds is that:
"England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindu, and separates Hindustan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history....England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? IF not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution."
This is the Marx that is usually attacked. One should not dismiss the talk of the 'unconscious tool of history'. Marx is not a naive teleologist claiming the brutal exploitation of India by the British was a tool of some higher historical reason which made it an instrument of future progress and so on, and so on. All Marx claims is that the British colonization of India unintentionally created conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonization itself. There is even empirical proof of this. The British colonizers were intelligent enough that they knew that if they allowed their colonization to simply dissolve the traditional, ideological, social, Indian edifice, castes and so on, this would create revolutionary upheavals in India. It is interesting to notice that from the very beginning of their rule, in contrast to what anti-colonial critics claim that British colonizers wanted them to lose their conditions and impose western standards, they put hard work into re-establishing some kind of resuscitating old, stable, value, ideological and religious system, which would keep India a stable, inert society ready to be exploited.
For example, the ultimate Indian ideological textbook, the Laws of Manu, a pretty terrifying book, is a detailed justification of the caste system, with detailed descriptions what where to do. I learned surprisingly, from my Indian friends, that in the 17th century this book was half-forgotten. It is in the early 19the century that the British colonizers re-established this book. So I claim, all this talk about respect for local cultures, was from the very beginning the crucial part of the process of colonization. The British didn't want the Indians to become like them, they wanted them in their inert traditional ways, and they even went as far as praising immensely the superiority of their spirituality. The standard memoir of a British colonizer read something like that; yes, we the British may be richer materially, yes, we bring progress and industry to India, but when you see a single yogi [practicing his spirituality], don't you feel how worthless we are, don't you feel the infinite depth of that simple spirituality, and so on, and so on. I claim that this is absolutely crucial. If you take this false respect for the Other away from colonialism, you lose colonialism itself.
What do we have to accept here? We have to accept that, quoting from, another great dialectician, Richard Wagner from his Parsifal: "a wound can only be healed by the very spear which smote it." That is to say, we should insist on what Marx insists on this brutal but radical ambiguity of colonization. That is to say, that it is the very power of social disintegration, unleashed by colonization, which at the same time opens up the space for liberation and also anti-colonial liberation. Let me give another example from India. When I was there two years ago I got into a heated debate with some Indian cultural theorists who complained about the fact that they had to use English language to express themselves. They claimed English is already a form of cultural colonization which censors their true identity: "you can see how strong colonization is, even now, when we try to formulate our project of liberation from colonialism, we have to do it in the language of the colonizers." To quote one of them: "we have to speak in an imposed foreign language to express our innermost identity, does this not put us in a position of radical alienation, even our resistance to colonization has to be formulated in the language of the colonizer." My answer to this was: yes, but this imposition of English, a foreign language, created the very X of unknown quantity which is oppressed by it. My message was received differently among my partners in the debate, but in strict correlation to their social status. The top Brahmin intellectuals shouted at me as colonizer blabla, the Dalits, the untouchables immediately accepted it. Me message was that, it is true, when you speak a foreign language, you feel deprived of the very core of your identity, but my thesis is a much more radical one; it is that which you feel deprived of is a specter engendered by this very colonial imposition of a foreign language. In other words, it is a very refined dialectical paradox, Hegel uses the wonderful term "the absolute recoil", the very loss of something, in a properly dialectical notion of history, creates the lost dimension. We don't have a pre-colonial India and then brutal colonization, which makes people aware what they lost, and then in anti-colonial struggle they are trying to regain what they lost. No, the pre-colonial India was something totally different, it was irredeemably lost, insofar as it's not lost it precisely serves the colonizers. This new dimension that you are craving more, for example in India a new, modern, democratic India, the very programme of decolonization is something engendered by colonization itself as a reaction to it.
Another example to make this clear, one of my heroes Malcolm X, the great American fighter for black rights, who was a little bit more violent than Martin Luther King jr., chose to replace his family name with just an X, as the unknown, because at an immediate level he wanted to emphasize how the blacks, by being torn out of their African ancestral homes, are deprived of their roots. But the programme of Malcolm X was not, so let's return to those roots, but X means: what if we grasp this very void into which our enslavement put us, the fact that we don't have any genuine tradition to rely on, that we have to, as it were, collectively, re-invent our identity as a unique opportunity of freedom. And it's also clear that he followed this line, in the end he was right, he found a new universalist frame in Islam. He had no dreams about returning to origins.
If you want further proof for what I'm saying, never forget that in South Africa it was the greatness of the African National Congress that they absolutely resisted all the bullshit about returning to some authentic African roots. The one who was preaching to return to African roots was King Bhutelezi, a local king who collaborated with Apartheid forces, he was even directly financed by the Pretoria Apartheid government. To see the truth of what I'm saying you should really read history. For example the white racist justification of the Apartheid system, it was not "we whites are more", of course it was de facto this, but the justification was something like "what a precious difference of cultures we have here, we have Bushman, Hottentot, this that, and if we give them equality in the modern sense, all these precious spiritual traditions will all get lost in our vulgar, western mechanical, materialist, non-holistic civilization". This idea was strictly a fake multiculturalism, but nonetheless a multiculturalism. The greatness of Mandela and so on was always to insist that they should beat the white people at their own field, by being more universal than they are.
Back to India, I think that the solution is not to look for some lost Indian identity, but to see colonization as a welcome chance of getting rid of old rules and to take the fact that India is deprived of their proper tradition as a chance to achieving much more open, egalitarian and democratic society. And believe me or not, western Conservatives are becoming aware of this. For example I read a wonderful complaint by an American conservative linguist who says we shouldn't be too proud of the primacy of English language, because the English language which is now a lingua franca, is no longer the old English of British people, but an English spoken by Indian merchants in Bombay, Singaporean bankers and so on, the English as a universal language is being stolen from British people themselves.
So this is what I see as the core of Marx's insight. I don't believe in anti-colonial resistance on behalf of any return to some primordial lost roots. If anything we should advocate a newer, further universalization, a further loss of our local roots.
Next point, what does this mean for us concretely today. There is a certain paradigm which unites many modern and not-so modern philosophers, let's call it the Hölderlin paradigm, from the great German poet Friedrich Hölderlin whose most well-known line is: "Where the danger is grows also what can save as.". The idea is that our epoch, is the epoch of extreme danger, extreme alienation for Marx or loss of our roots in global technology for Heidegger, but at this point of extreme loss is also the opportunity for, what Heidegger calls, die Kehre, for the reversal. When things are lost there is a chance of reversal. For example the whole eschatology of Marx is based on this; capitalism is utter alienation, workers are deprived of all of the substantial, objective conditions of their work, but this very deprivation liberates them from all particular roots, creates them as universal subjects who may re-appropriate the universal substance.
My final thesis is that I think we should resist this paradigm that; we are at the moment of Kairos, dangerous times, the very limit, everything is almost lost, but maybe there is a chance in this total enslavement for total liberation. I think the opposite; our situation is much closer to that experienced by Hegel. Just like Hegel we had revolution. For Hegel it was the French Revolution, for us it were the communist attempts in the 20th century and other attempts. And it is obvious things went terribly wrong. For Hegel in the French revolutionary terror and so , for us in Stalinism and so on. And the whole problem of Hegel, if we read him properly, is how in this condition of failure, where, for example, communism as we experienced it in the 20th century was a fiasco, more or less globally, though not totally. How to save the legacy? How to remain faithful to it? How to do it again? How precisely not to betray what was worth fighting in it. Because the fiasco of communism was used not only by anti-communists, but in a much wider sense by ruling ideology to put in question basically the entire legacy of modernity. First it began with communism is over, it was a dangerous utopia. Then it went on into, because of this lucky or unlucky coincidence, 1789 - 1989, 200 years, that an era that began with the French Revolution was over. Then they went further, claiming that all of modernity was a fiasco. And you can feel this even in TV-series, Game of Thrones, or all this desire for a neo-gothic universe, that there is a big unease with modernity. And you find here strange bedfellows, from the extreme right, which basically claims that all horrors began with Luther or European modernity, up to a person for who I have great admiration, president of Bolivia Evo Morales, who said that capitalism killed Mother Nature, as if the catastrophe started there. No, it didn't. I think that more than ever today, when we are faced with all the horrors of global capitalism, we should remain faithful to this Marxist insight that modernization is a radically ambiguous process and that every return to pre-modern values and traditions only serve to accelerate and strengthen what is most dangerous in modernization and that the only way out is through bringing modernization to its end.
This brings me back to the beginning, we encounter here the very dilemma with which I began. The two ways, either this holistic, pseudo-oriental (because with Buddhism things are much more complex) idea of global harmony, universal compassion which will close the wound of modernity. Or to accept that the wound itself, this cut of modernity, violent interruption of traditional order by modern universalism, beginning with Christianity and so on, that this is our only salvation.
Since there were no dirty jokes, I would nonetheless like to end with a very dirty joke, that I heard in Ramallah, from a Palestinian Christian. He told me this joke about Jesus Christ:
"The night before Jesus was arrested and crucified, he was praying alone in the tent. His Apostles gathered around the tent and started to worry. Christ was still a virgin, he didn't have sex. And they said, my God, our lord did so much for us, so many great things, and he will die tomorrow, being crucified without any joy and happiness, so why don't we at least bring him on the last evening some joy. So they call Mary Magdalene and ask her to go to the tent where Christ was resting to seduce him. Of course being who she was she said with pleasure and went there. Now after 5 minutes Mary Magdalene came out running with a totally horrified cry, and the Apostles were wondering what happened there. Is Christ secretly a pervert, did he torture her or something? 'No, no', she explains, 'everything went well in the beginning, I slowly undressed, I spread my legs, I showed to Christ my pussy, but then catastrophe started, he said what a terrible wound is there, he put his hand on it and "healed" it and made it whole'."
So beware of the people who are too intent on healing other people's wounds. I claim in exactly the same way, if today's advocates of anti-Eurocentrism were to find themselves in actual pre-colonial reality, they would have undoubtedly uttered the same terrifying scream as Mary Magdalene did. There is no way back, we have to play the game of the modernist project until the end. This is the greatest temptation today, even if it's called anti-imperialism. I am totally against imperialism, I just think we should never, never forget that anti-imperialism is also a very much misused word. Remember that when they started to fight the British and so on, German and Japanese fascists were regularly using the term anti-imperialism. I'm against imperialism, but I'm not ready to sacrifice the legacy of European modernity. Precisely that passionate model of love, Agape as universal love, love which is not the wisdom of keeping a distance, but fully falling into it, full engagement, losing oneself without reserve. For me wisdom is not all that Star Wars, pseudo-oriental bullshit; don't attach yourself too much to a worldly object. No! Attach yourself to the end to a worldly object. That's the only way out for me, with all the risks this involves.
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A relevant, abridged quote from the Q&A
"As to universal love, I would say that for me, an authentic communist perspective, would not be love for humanity. Here I admire Marx, when he was writing the Communist Manifesto with Engels, and they were debating what should be their slogan with their fellows. And some of them proposed things like "all men are brothers", "love of mankind", and Marx just acidly answered: no thanks, there are quite many people whom I don't want to be my brothers, quite many people I don't want to love. I think that there is always something wrong in proclaiming directly, universal love in this simple all-encompassing sense, because I think that this type of love is always founded on an exception. "I love you all", always, when you scratch deep enough, means something "I love you all and I love you all so much that I am ready to kill all those who destroy/undermine your universal welfare".
I think that authentic love is always; the majority of people are stupid idiots and ignorant, but maybe I love you and you and you and just you. I much more believe in this particular exclusive love. Now you will say, what about Agape? This is for me strictly love as a category of struggle. It's not love in the sense of I love you all. It's in the sense of let's establish solidarity. The only universality that I admit today is the universality of struggle. The only universality is that [everywhere] we [all] have our problems and there is a common front of each of us fighting in our country against a [common] enemy. That is love as a category of struggle."
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Books and articles with fragments included in the talk
Toward a Marxist Theory of Oppression by David McNally
Oppression is a widely used – and misused – term. Marxists, social democrats and some liberals all agree that something called “oppression” exists; that certain groups in society do not enjoy the full legal, political or economic rights enjoyed by others. But, not all these groups agree as to what “oppression” is. Liberals and social democrats, for example, will sometimes argue that whites can be oppressed when black organizations refuse to hire them, or that men can be oppressed by dominating wives. For Marxists, however, if the concept of oppression is to be a useful category, for understanding specific features of the system we aim to destroy, then it must be something clear and precise. It must mean something more distinct than a catch-all for describing every relationship in which someone feels dominated or mistreated. Otherwise, we are left with a concept that is essentially psychological in nature – one that is based on relationships simply between individuals.
1. A Marxist Concept of Oppression?
Marxists have addressed various forms of oppression – national, racial and sexual in particular. But rarely has the general concept of oppression in capitalist society been discussed. On the basis of Marx’s method of analysis, I want to sketch what I think should be the outlines of a Marxist theory of oppression. This is not meant to be a complete theory of oppression, but an attempt to establish the framework for such a theory.
All liberal theory starts with the category of the abstract, isolated individual. Liberalism conceives of society as an addition of individuals. For the most part, then, society is best understood in the liberal view by understanding human nature. Marx, on the other hand, starts with the total society. For Marx, individuals are born into and shaped by a society not of their choosing. Thus Marx writes:
“It is above all necessary to avoid postulating ‘society’ once again as an abstraction confronting the individual. The individual is the social being.” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts)
Thus, in order to understand the relationships in which individuals find themselves, it is essential to understand the structures and dynamics of the society in which they find themselves. It is not individuals who create their own relationships; it is society that establishes the system in which people relate to one another:
“My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.” (Marx, First Preface to Capital)
Individuals do not experience their relationships as social processes however. The problems in an individual worker’s life appear to be due to this rotten manager, that unsympathetic husband or wife, this stingy bank manager, that dictatorial teacher, etc. It is only on the basis of analysis that these seemingly individual experiences can be shown to be part of the general features of the society as a whole. Marxist analysis consists precisely in showing the real, underlying essence of these relationships – their roots in the system we call capitalism. In the third volume of Capital, Marx wrote that “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.” We need scientific analysis, in other words, precisely because the relationships in society appear to be purely individual, when in fact they are conditioned by social processes.
This point is important to keep in mind when we look at the experience of oppression. Oppressed people, like everyone, do not automatically see the social origins of their oppression in the structure of capitalist society. To blacks, oppression seems to be the result of racist shites, or even white people in general. To women, oppression seems to come from sexist men, or even men in general. To gays, oppression appears to be a result of bigoted straights, or even “straight society”. without belittling the poisonous relationships that often prevail between blacks and whites, women and men, gays and straights, it is important to see that the oppression of these groups has deeper social roots. In reality oppression is a social relationship in which capital benefits through the subjection of a certain group in society.
The same goes for the oppression of blacks and immigrants. Capitalism needs, at all times, a reserve army of labour – a section of the working class that is shoved into job ghettoes and pulled in and out of the workforce according to whether the economy is expanding or contracting. Immigrant labour (mainly black and Asian over the past decade) serves that purpose especially well. Thus, the ideology is perpetuated that these workers aren’t “full Canadians” entitled to permanent employment. Rather, they are less than equal (“immigrants”, “non-citizens”) who will be given work when it’s available, but who don’t deserve jobs when “real” Canadians are out of work. By denying immigrants equal rights and perpetuating racist ideas about them, capital is provided with a fluid reserve army of labour which also creates a downward pull on the wages of all workers (since they are usually unorganized and low paid).
In the case of women, their oppression is rooted in capital’s need to control the rearing of the new generation of workers and to have that work done as cheaply as possible. This is best achieved through the family. Thus capital is dependent upon the privatized reproduction of the labour force through the family unit. As a result, capitalism strives to perpetuate the family system and women’s social role within it. (There are other benefits to capital that derive from the oppression of women through the family – especially putting women workers into low-paying job ghettoes – but these are side benefits, not the root cause of women’s oppression.) Gay oppression, of course, is also tied into the need of capital for the family system. The gay identity is seen – especially in the case of lesbians – as a threat to the maintenance of women’s identity as mothers and wives in the family. The gay male identity is also seen as a threat to the “masculine ideal” under capitalism, but the system is more capable of tolerating a gay male preserve, or ghetto since it is control over women’s bodies and sexuality that is really central to the system.
All these forms of oppression are backed up by extensive forms of discrimination against oppressed groups. This may be anything from discrimination in hiring or access to higher education to the right to buy a house or get admitted to another country. The point, really, is this: oppression is based on a material interest of capital and is backed up by a systematic process of legal, political and economic discrimination that keeps oppressed groups in a subordinate role. In other words, the oppression of particular social groups is structured into the political economy of capitalism.
Unless there was a material basis to oppression in the needs of the capitalist system, then oppression would not be essential to the system. And if that was the case, then the elimination of any and all forms of social oppression would not necessarily require the overthrow of capitalism; it would be conceivable that oppression could be reformed away. It is because these forms of oppression are materially necessary to the system that their elimination requires a revolutionary transformation of society.
2. Oppression and Ideology
Capitalism could not continue to exist unless the majority of working class people believed in the system; unless they thought that in some sense the present system was the best possible and that all talk of a new and free society was “unrealistic”. In order to keep its hold, capitalism is not only based on a system of economic and political domination; it also requires a system of ideological domination, a system through which workers can be made to believe bourgeois ideas. This system of ideological domination consists of the work of government agencies, the school system, the media, churches, etc in installing capitalist ideas and values in people.
The oppression of specific social groups could also not continue unless the ruling class could present a set of ideas – an ideology – designed to justify the oppression of these groups. In order to maintain the oppression of blacks and immigrants, the system pushes ideas like the inferiority of blacks to whites, white superiority – in short, racism. In order to perpetuate the oppression of nations, the same sort of ideas are required – the belief that certain nations and races are superior to others – the ideas of national chauvinism. And in order to keep women in their oppressed position in the home, it is necessary to advance the ideas of male superiority, the biological inferiority of women, the myth of “women’s place” as in the home, etc. In short, it is necessary to perpetuate sexism. In the case of lesbians and gay men, the same thing applies – homosexuality must be tainted as sick and abnormal while heterosexuality is held up as normal and healthy.
Ideologies, in other words, are essential to backing up the oppression of groups in capitalist society. These ideologies are not simple reflections of material interests. The whole point about bourgeois ideology is that capitalism can make most workers believe it, or most of it, even though it contradicts their own interests as members of working class. In a class society dominated by the warped values of the ruling class, the various ideologies of oppression enter into the relations between working class people themselves – they twist, distort and poison the relationships between ordinary working people. In fact, these ideologies actually develop a certain independence, a life of their own and will often continue in the minds of people long after their material necessity for capitalism has vanished. The best example of t his is anti-Semitism. North American capitalism no longer depends upon keeping Jews confined to working class job ghettoes and in the state of a reserve army of labour. Nonetheless, racism against Jews (anti-Semitism) continues as a powerful force in society and among working people.
This example, in particular, shows the importance of distinguishing between the social relationship of oppression and ideologies of oppression. A group is not oppressed simply because an ideology that it dislikes is perpetuated in society. Although anti-Semitism is a vicious and barbaric ideology that must be completely opposed by revolutionaries, it is not the case that Jews are an oppressed group in North American society today despite the racist abuse they often suffer. Jews are not systematically discriminated against in hiring, access to higher education, etc. Thus, they are not an oppressed social group.
The same thing goes for the theorists of “Male Oppression”. What these writers usually argue is that men are oppressed because the role of efficient, hard-working breadwinner is imposed upon them by the ideology of the system. Be that as it may, this does not constitute a social process of oppression, however alienating these ideas may seem to individual men.
Oppression, in other words, is not a relationship between individuals based on a discriminatory ideology. Such ideologies may back up a social process of oppression, but they are not that process itself. It is not whites who oppress blacks, men who oppress women, English Canadians who oppress Quebecois or straights who oppress gays. True, these groups may behave in racist, sexist and chauvinist ways (which must be completely opposed by revolutionary socialists), but oppression does not consist of the one-to-one relationships between individuals.
Individuals are born into a world in which exploitation and oppression exist. They may choose to accept these relationships, or to fight them. But they have no choice over whether or not these relationships will invade and shape their lives. (Although it is true that they can reduce the direct influence of the ideologies of oppression, racism, sexism, etc., in their lives.) Joan Smith has expressed this point quite clearly in the case of women’s oppression:
“Men as a group do not oppress women as a group, but individual men and individual women live out their lives together in a family system, constantly reaffirmed by capitalism and it’s that family system of reproduction which places women in their oppressed position. Some men go right along with the system – some men don’t. The question is not actually about the attitudes and beliefs of individual men, although they too have to be changed, but about the family form of reproduction of society and what women are going to do about it.” (“Women and the Family. International Socialism nr 104)
If oppression was a relationship between individuals, then various forms of separatists solutions would make sense. Zionism, for instance, would be a logical response to anti-Semitism – reduce the contacts between Jews and non-Jews and it would follow that Jews would be less oppressed. The same goes for black cultural nationalism (perhaps the “Black Muslims” are the best example) – develop a separate black culture with no white influence and it follows logically, blacks will be less oppressed. The same goes for separatism for women – reduce to the lowest possible level contacts with men and women will be less oppressed.
But we know that these responses are no solution to oppression and for a very simple reason: oppression is a social relationship structured into the very fabric of society. However much oppressed peoples may remove themselves from personal relationships with those who carry ideology of oppression (racist whites, sexist men, etc) they are still oppressed by capitalist society in a systematic way. So long as the material basis of oppression – capitalism – is not eliminated, oppression will continue. That is why we argue that socialist revolution is the only solution to the problems of oppressed groups.
3. Some Conclusions
This is not meant to be a finished theory of oppression. There are many aspects of the particular oppression of different groups that need to be further analyzed byMarxists. In particular, while it is not men who oppress women, it is the case that there is a system of male domination within the family that we do not fully understand. Questions such as these need much more attention in socialist theory.
A few important conclusions follow, I think, from the points developed here. Firstly, by understanding oppression as a social relation based in the capitalist mode of production or reproduction, we strengthen the argument for socialism as the only possible solution to oppression. We make it clear that no section of the working class has a material interest in the oppression of any other.
At the same time, this framework makes clear how important the ideological struggle inside the working class really is. It emphasizes the ideological domination that the ruling class exercises over the working class and makes it clear how central it is to carry the ideological fight against sexism, anti-gay bigotry, national chauvinism and racism inside the working class. What’s more, it enables us to understand that ideologies have an independence from their material bases – thus, even after a socialist revolution it will be essential to carry on the fight for a new form of consciousness and new relationships between people. Trotsky wrote that: “Inertia and blind habit, unfortunately, constitute a great force. And nowhere does blind, dumb habit hold sway with such force as in the dark and secluded inner life of the family.” (Women and the Family)
Finally, this framework reaffirms the necessity for independent organization of oppressed groups within the working class movement. Since these groups suffer social forms of oppression and since most working people are at least partly under the spell of the ideologies of oppression, it is essential that oppressed groups organize independently to address their common problems in an atmosphere free from the poisonous ideologies of racism, national chauvinism, anti-gay bigotry and sexism.
We have a long way to go in developing the theory of our tendency on all of these points. But, the starting point for correct analysis has to be a consistent Marxist theory of oppression. Such a theory is essential to developing our political practice. For, as Lenin put it, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary practice.”
Critical pedagogy is a teaching method that aims to help in challenging and actively struggling against any form of social oppression and the related customs and beliefs. It is a form of theory and practice which serves to let pupils gain a critical awareness Critical pedagogy is a type of pedagogy in which criticism of the established order and social criticism are essential. Critical pedagogy wants to question society in its understanding of the role that education has. From this point of view, social critique is necessary if one does not want an upbringing and education that contributes to the reproduction of inequality
An important key concept in this is emancipation. It is emancipation, liberation from oppressive social relations, which critical pedagogy is committed to. Social critique leads to social change. With this mode of critique we want students to see clearly that phenomena like inequality are not necessary, but arose in a certain historical context that has been established and produced by man-made social processes. Upon becoming aware of this reality, a person no longer needs to feel like a manipulable object anymore.
According to the critical pedagogy, education is inherently political, and any kind of pedagogy should be aware of this fact. A social and educational vision of justice and equality should be the basis for any kind of education. The liberation from oppression and human suffering should be an important dimension in education.
Education should promote both emancipatory change as well as the cultivation of the intellect. It should be kept in mind that the current education system is a reflection of the interests of the existing system of exploitation. This dynamic must be exposed by critical pedagogy, understood, after which action should be taken against it as part of a praxis towards social change; a cycle of theory, practice, evaluation and reflection.
Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"
Paulo Freire is the grandfather and one of the major contributors to critical pedagogy. Freire, who became a professor of history and philosophy of education at the University of Recife in Brazil, experienced and learned from the plight of poverty and hunger during the Great Depression of 1929. This experience imbued in him a deep concern for the poor, which influenced his views on education.
He is best known for his book "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" in which he described how people have have been untaught or have never learned to think critically about their situation. Most people accept their situation as inevitable and as belonging to life itself. Only when they become aware of their situation and are able to assign meaning to it (collectively called a process of "conscientization"), the step a step can be made toward changing the situation.
Four levels of consciousness
Freire speaks in this context of four levels of consciousness:
1) Magical consciousness; at this level of consciousness people experience themselves as completely impotent to do something about their personal and socio-economic position. They are, as it were, controlled by outside forces like the gods in mythology who could intervene in the life of man without being able to defend oneself against them.
2) Naive consciousness; at this level one is able to make a distinction between oneself and the outside world. Life is not seen as something that just happens to you, but it gets contours in the sense that there are things that are within your reach, and other things that you think you need others for. They know that they can do something about their situation, but is also convinced of not being capable of a lot of other things as well. The difference between the first and second level of consciousness is that magical consciousness has been transcended by a more thorough understanding of the existing situation.
3) Critical consciousness; at this level, one discovers not only the distinction between self and others, but one is also, due to the distinction, able to change things. At this level there is a growing understanding of one's own capabilities and because of that also a way of relativizing the power of others. One will recognize how oppression occurs, which role one has in that situation and how one can fight it by intervening.
4) Political consciousness; on this highest level people discover from their perception of reality that others share their perception of reality, and they also share some of the same problems. This leads to that people combine their strengths and try to influence politics and negate the situation of oppression. According to Freire "Nobody liberates nobody, nobody liberates themselves alone: human beings liberate themselves in communion."
People create their own consciousness of struggle by changing reality and freeing themselves from the oppression that is embedded by traditional pedagogy. Similarly, when one learns a new way of thinking, the understanding of one's own social status has a transformative effect. Freire's method has thus two successive moments: the first relates to the awareness of reality that one is oppressed and is submitted to the decisions imposed by the oppressor, the second refers to the initiative of the oppressed to fight and emancipate themselves from the oppressors.
Critique of educational banking
Freire criticized the traditional education method of simply depositing knowledge, or what he called the "banking concept of education"; which only strengthens the established order. Instead of communicating with the students, the teacher gives deposits which the students have to patiently receive. They are not considered as able to do more than to organize and accumulate the deposits.
This "banking" concept is the reflection of the dichotomous oppressive society we live in: the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing, the teacher thinks and the students are being thought, the teacher talks and the students listen obediently.
The success of this method depends on the willingness to swallow. Those who are not willing to cram themselves with deposits remain supposedly 'undeveloped'.
Freire looked for a method that is conscientizing and thus comes to the basic principle of his educational theory: Education can never be neutral, it is either an instrument of liberation or an instrument of domestication. Or as Richard Shaull formulated it in the preface of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
"There is no neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the 'practice of freedom', the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
Freire adds that this does not depend on the content of the education provided, nor the good will of the educator, decisive here is the educational process itself.
If the individual does not fight for its interests, and its cultural and social emancipation, it seems that one has lost the love for life. Thus the necrophilia, that prevails in the world today, is reproduced by the type of education given at school. The pedagogy that Freire proposes is the opposite of that described above. It suggests that the individual has a love for life, teaches a cultivation of being - by being in the world, not of or under the world - a condition brought about by liberation. This necessitates a kind of education that isn't alienating and mechanistic.
Education that liberates the individual must be a conscious act in which the content is understood and analyzed, with the dichotomy that exists between teacher and student is transcended; it should negate the unidirectional (coming from one side) relationship to replace it with bidirectionality (coming from both sides) to contribute to the education of both parties, because both have the elements to offer each other insights. The teacher is hereby turned into the pupil of his own pupils. "Nobody educates anybody else, nobody educates himself, people educate each other through their interactions of the world."
The role of the teacher is to problematize the world, thereby creating the right conditions so that learning process transcends the 'doxa' (undoubted axioms) to get to the level of "logos" (actual understanding). This type of learning helps people to create new with the expectations and reach a reflective state where they discover their own reality. It creates new challenges that instigates pupils to self-construction of the world, in which they have a real and direct participation in the activities in which they are involved. All this demands that we problematize the individual as such, without mediation by artificial experiences in the learning process.
Dialogics and conscientization
Man is not allowed to understand reality and change it in an education that is just one method to adapt to reality. To bring the awareness process in motion there must be dialogue, because man does not create oneself in silence, but by words, actions and reflection. The use of such a dialogue is the main element in the learning process.
To understand the reasoning of Freire one should start from his image of man. Through their actions people work on the world, they change the world. Because of their ability to reflect, people take distance from themselves, from their actions, from the world; this reflection again leads to action. The aforementioned cycle forms the praxis, that is to say the way in which the human being is manifested in the world. "To become human" happens in praxis. No seperation can therefore be made between action and reflection.
Dialogue can only happen by the speaking of "own words" with which the individual reflects its reality, it is the only way to get the understanding of this reality and change it. In opposition to the depository education system that maintains the system, Freire proposes the problematizing education with consciëntisering (coming to consciousness) as a goal. Learning is not 'eating' of false words, it is not programming, learning problematizing by raising questions. The subject matter is the life situation of the pupil.
Dialogics and antidialogics
Freire recognizes that the practice of conscientization that he recommends can run up against "limiting situations", and that these situations are a product of the resistance by the oppressing classes to any change of the status quo, which is so important to them. This can lead to defeat and apathy among the oppressed classes. According to Freire it is "not the apathy of the masses which leads to the power of the elite, but it is the power of the elite, which makes the masses apathetic."
For this Freire worked out opposing frameworks for cultural action, antidialogics and dialogics, the former being the oppressive one, and works through submission, division, manipulation, and cultural invasion and the latter the liberating one, which works through cooperation, association, organization, and cultural synthesis.
The oppressor uses antidialogics in different ways in order to maintain the status quo. He subdues the oppressed with an unwavering unilateral dialogue , in which the communication is transformed into a necrophiliac act . The ideological instrument is often used here for complete submission.
The oppressor also attempts to dissuade people to unite through dialogue. One of their main activities is to weaken the oppressed through alienation , with the idea that this will provide internal divisions, and that in this way things will remain stable. In their implicit discourse they warn that it is dangerous for "social harmony" to talk about concepts like association and organization. Compared with those who fight against them, the oppressors seem the the only ones who can maintain the needed harmony in life. But this is only an attempt to ensure divisions. If an individual decides to fight for liberation the person is stigmatized, all in an attempt to avoid the historically inevitable realization of freedom.
The oppressor also uses antidialogics by abusing ideology to manipulate people and to agree with the goals proposed by the oppressor, but entirely at the expense of the oppressed.
Freire discussed as the last feature of antidialogics that of cultural invasion, where the oppressed are the turned into objects, while the oppressors are the actors and authors of the process. This is a subliminal tactic that is used to control and leads to the inauthenticity of individuals. The greater the level of imitation by the oppressed, the greater the calm for the oppressors. What happens to the masses is a loss of values, a transformation in their way of speaking and willingly supporting the oppressor.
In contrast with antidialogics, dialogics is a form of community empowerment. This process is not due to the presence of some prophetic leader, but by the covenant that occurs when there is communication and interaction between the leader and the masses in order to to achieve liberation and discover the world, instead of adjust to it. This happens when there is mutual trust, so that a revolutionary praxis can be developed, where humility and constant dialogue is needed by all participants.
To complement this collaboration it is necessary to form associations with the joint effort towards liberation. This implies a form of cultural action that teaches to join a revolutionary aspiration without falling into ideological hyperbole. Instead, the goal should be described as something it really is, namely a human act, not some exaggerated event. Dialogical action also requires the organization to avoid ideological coercion from above.
Organization is a necessary element of revolutionary struggle, it implies coherence between action and practice, courage, radicalization without sectarianism and the courage to love. All these aspects should be present without naivety . Of course, for revolutionary action, there must also be discipline, order, precise objectives, clear tasks to be fulfilled and accountability, but dialogics is mainly about the awakening that is required from the encountered oppression.
The final characteristic of dialogical action is the cultural synthesis that aims to overcome the contradiction created by the oppressor. This addresses the strength of one's own culture as a creative act and avenges the oppressed by giving another perception on the world than the one imposed without consultation or assessment.
The role of revolution
Revolution is for Paulo Freire removal of the structures and mechanisms that cause different forms of oppression in the society. It is about overturning political and economic powers that the are the cause of the oppression of the majority. The conscientization is assigned an essential role here. The oppressed must be made not only aware of their own value, they must also be freed from their image of man that they derive from the oppressors with whom they have an ambivalent relationship.
For Freire dialogue belongs to the essence of being human: human life is not live 'alone', they live 'together' in the world. In that sense, the oppressor maimed his own humanity, because he is not 'the others'. Revolution implies, in addition to the empowerment and recognition of the human dignity of the oppressed, at the same time humanizing the oppressors.
On Utopia
Freire want individuals to forms themselves rather than being formed (from above). With this goal in mind, he suggests that subjects must be taught that come from the everyday experience of the individual and that we have to avoid the pitfalls of current education to gravitate towards artificial oppressive experiences.
Paulo Freire teaches us that only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, can bring forthh critical thinking. He proposes to problematize one's life to realize that one needs both another situation without oppression as well one can really achieve such a situation. Is this utopian? Maybe. But utopia serves as the receding horizon, where the journey never ends, and the effort of the journey can makes the chance of a more humane society, where peace reigns, larger every day.
