Beyond the Interregnum
Can Democracy Survive Capitalism's Final Crisis?
At this juncture in history, humanity’s situation is so volatile that whatever may await us beyond this turning point is of such a magnitude that it frightens and paralyzes us. We are sleepwalking toward a third world war and an ecological collapse of unimaginable proportions and consequences. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a small group of plutocrats is transforming concepts and solutions in which humanity had placed some hope into cruel caricatures, perverse mutants, or mere ruins of fond memories. This is the case with concepts and solutions such as progress, democracy, peace, sovereignty, diplomacy, science, law, and human rights.
The destructive maelstrom and the power it wields are all the more overwhelming given that the ruling political elites, in general, oscillate between such disarming mediocrity and such arrogant aggressiveness that they are merely another dimension of the catastrophe awaiting humanity. For a long time, the concept of the Deep State—the underground government exercised by de facto powers that control major national political decisions without any democratic legitimacy—was stigmatized as a delusion born of conspiracy theories. Today, without running the risk of indulging in conspiracy theories, one can speak of a global deep government with the same characteristics as the Deep State, only now on a global scale. Recent news about the quasi-secret Bilderberg Group is a clear sign of this reality.
Humanity as a whole is in need of humanitarian aid, even though some parts of it need that aid more urgently.
The interregnum and tragic optimism
Inspired by Antonio Gramsci, I have characterized this moment in the curve of history as an interregnum, but I recognize that many people—especially younger ones—view the current moment more as an end than as an interregnum. It is the idea of an end that, ultimately, fuels the current rise of the far right. Under the guise of proposing a new beginning, it merely accelerates the end of the end. Beyond that lies thick fog.
I hold fast to the idea of an interregnum, which means that, for me, beyond the curve, there could be either a precipice or a less rocky path with more shelter. This is the essence of my tragic optimism. Except that this interregnum has little to do with Gramsci’s. For Gramsci, the old order that was slowly dying was ethically, socially, and politically inferior and worse than the new order that was also slowly being born. For that to happen, it was necessary to fight, but it was worth fighting for; the goals to fight for and the means to achieve them were known.
Our situation is far more complex, and therefore the demands of navigating this interregnum are much greater. What we can know with any precision is what currently exists, and what currently exists is an unfathomable mixture of material conditions and perceptions and ideas about those conditions. And since nothing exists except in relation to what does not exist, the relativity of our present consists of the past we no longer live and the future we will never live. Since the sixteenth century, capitalism has come to dominate the material conditions of the vast majority of the world’s population. In Gramsci’s time, capitalism did not yet fully dominate perceptions and ideas about those conditions; on the contrary, it was losing the dominance it still held. In that disjunction between material dominance and ideological and perceptual dominance lay the possibility of revolutionary rupture.
Over the past forty years, capitalism has sought to “balance” material domination with ideological and perceptual domination, strengthening both and blurring them to the point of merging them. To this end, it has focused on five main areas to increase ideological and perceptual domination: the media, education, science, culture and entertainment, and religion. Today, the majority of the world’s population believes that the old is (was) bad but that the new might be worse. This downward spiral of expectations leads to resignation and a conservative political stance. Perhaps the world’s population has never been as conservative as it is today.
The far right exploits this sense of unease to stoke it and provoke a rupture—not a revolutionary one, but a reactionary one. The far right is not conservative; on the contrary, it is radical in its break with the recent past. However, this rupture aims to break with the recent past in order to legitimize a return to a more distant past—a pre-French Revolution past—one that was even more unequal, more colonialist, and more patriarchal. This is why some critics describe the far-right rupture as a return to a new form of feudalism, a distinctly Eurocentric characterization.
The invisible leaders of the far right are the representatives of the current plutocratic version of capitalism. This version is incompatible with democracy and the social rights won through past struggles—both democratic and revolutionary. The proposed break is thus simultaneously true and false. It is true because it taps into a widely shared sense of unease that the merchants of negativity exploit, but it is false because the promise of a better future is a hoax. It will not be fulfilled either in this world (a secular scam) or in the next world (a religious scam). And the truth is that when the far right comes to power, it quickly increases the discontent of the overwhelming majority of the population.
Democratically elected fascist leaders are, in general, the ones who lose popularity the fastest, and if they do not lose it further, it is because society has, in the meantime, been deprived of the possibility of envisioning a better alternative. This is why, in a previous text, I argue that, in the short term, being on the left means defending democracy and the modest level of well-being that the reformist and revolutionary changes of the recent past have achieved.
But from what I have just analyzed, it becomes clear that this solution is nothing more than the emergency humanitarian aid I mentioned earlier. It is incapable of solving the problems humanity faces. Hence, the need to think about the medium term.
The epistemologies of the South, the Left, and communism
We cannot know beyond what we are. Our existential condition is intertwined with our epistemic condition. To think about the medium term, it is not enough to think about what has not yet been thought; it is necessary to think about what, in the light of the dominant epistemology, is unthinkable. An epistemic rupture implies an ontological rupture. In other words, to think the unthinkable and act accordingly, we must reinvent ourselves as human beings. Neither of these ruptures will happen quickly. They will unfold over the course of several generations, feeding into one another. Whether they occur before, during, or after a new Great War, no one will know. Together, the two ruptures constitute the paradigmatic revolution.
The timescale of a paradigmatic revolution is the long term. In the medium term, the key concept is that of transition. In epistemological terms, transition means that the unthinkable is gradually revealing itself through the exploration of the “ruins-seeds” of the present—that is, through thinking devices and agents that, having been targets of destruction, survive as ruins and, even as ruins, unsettle the guardians of the status quo. And by unsettling them, they cease to be merely ruins and become seeds as well. Hence, the concept of “ruins-seeds.”.
The system of modern domination, consisting of three main modes of domination—capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy—has become globalized as it has destroyed the world of thought and action that previously existed and opposed it. This destruction occurred both at the center of the system—the European and Eurocentric world—and in the non-European and non-Eurocentric world. It is in these two worlds that we must excavate the ruin-seeds. I repeat that they are tools of paradigmatic transition—that is, to guide us in the medium term. In the long term, we have no idea what will exist, much less how it will be named.
I identify three ruins-seeds, but there are certainly more. What unites them is that they continue to unsettle the dominant classes and dominant thought. This unease manifests itself in contradictory ways. On the one hand, it is insisted that, if they existed in the past, they no longer exist; or if they still exist, they are irrelevant and easily dismissible. They are the subject of what I call the sociology of absences. On the other hand, those who defend them are attacked as if they were dangerous—an existential threat to the status quo. In short, there is a fear that they might be harbingers or signs of a destabilizing sociology of emergences.
The three ruins-seeds are the epistemologies of the South, the Left, and communism. The first is rooted in the non-Eurocentric world, the second in the Eurocentric world, and the third has its origins in both worlds, albeit in different forms. As I said, the only thing they have in common is that they challenge the system of domination. For such a system, to propose the epistemologies of the South is to advocate obscurantism, to be an enemy of progress; to be a leftist is to be an inconsequential utopian or a dangerous subversive; to be a communist is to be a fossilized relic of the past or an extremely dangerous subversive.
The epistemologies of the South
The epistemologies of the South do not call into question the validity of modern scientific knowledge; they merely insist that it is not the only valid system of knowledge. They assert the validity of the knowledge born out of the struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy waged by the populations, classes, peoples, or groups that have suffered most from the social injustice, oppression, and destruction that these three main modes of domination have caused and continue to cause. For dominant epistemologies, this knowledge is not valid. If it was valid in the past, it ceased to be so with the emergence of modern science; in any case, it would be dangerous to use it. Artificial intelligence seems capable of eliminating this knowledge once and for all. Artificial intelligence can use it as raw material, but never as knowledge that rivals the standardized knowledge produced by the mechanical reasoning of algorithms.
The Left
The Left originated as a seating position in the chamber of the French National Assembly following the Revolution of 1789. Over time, it came to denote any thought or action opposed to a status quo deemed unjust and exclusionary, in the name of the possibility of a more just and inclusive society. Since then, being on the left or a leftist has troubled—and continues to trouble—the ruling classes. As I mentioned earlier, for me the left is a constellation of lefts because domination affects different classes, peoples, groups, and cultures in different ways and with varying intensity. It is one possible term to identify the tasks of liberation that I will mention later.
Over the past hundred years, there have been many divisions within the left, notably the division between the moderate/democratic/social-democratic left and the far-left/revolutionary/communist/anarchist left. The latter exists today only as a memory or as a ruin-seed. The former, as I mentioned in my previous text, is important in the short term to save what remains of democracy, but it has no viability in the medium term. It will be progressively absorbed by the right, just as the right will be absorbed by the far right. It may survive a little longer as the moderate right but never as the left. The moderate left is the moderate right of the near future.
To be a useful instrument in the transition, the left must be conceived as a ruin-seed—a possible term to describe the tasks of liberation. It will certainly combine Eurocentric components, both democratic and revolutionary, with non-Eurocentric components of resistance. To emphasize the confrontational nature of the left, it may be preferable to speak of leftism.
Communism
Finally, communism as a ruin-seed has both Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric origins. In the Eurocentric world, it has come to signify the most vigorous resistance and the most consistent alternative offered by the left against modern capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal domination. Drawing on Max Weber’s concept of the ideal type, I refer to communism as the project of a society free from the exploitation of human beings by other human beings (potentially unlimited extraction of value from the labor force) and from the exploitation of nature by human beings (potentially unlimited extraction of value of natural resources).
In terms of the epistemologies of the Global South, communism denotes a post-abyssal society—a society that does not divide human beings into those treated as fully human and those treated as subhuman, a society that does not treat nature as something we possess or that belongs to us, but rather as something we are and to which we belong. I am not referring here to the concrete social experiments that have self-identified as communist. Some came close to the ideal type; others perverted it in an ethically and politically repugnant manner.
In the non-Eurocentric world, communism referred to premodern, communal forms of collective life. In fact, the truly existing version of communism arose in the premodern, non-Eurocentric world and was therefore labeled by Western modernity as primitive communism. To describe communism as a ruin-seed without evoking primitivism or perversity, it might be preferable to speak of neo-communism.
The guiding liberations of the paradigmatic transition
The three ruins-seeds—epistemologies of the South, the Left, and communism—are the principal mechanisms of the paradigmatic transition. If this transition ever comes to an end, whatever comes into being will have every right to self-designate. The paradigmatic transition aims at the liberation of shackled or oppressed potentia. The scope of this task today far exceeds anything Gramsci could have imagined. The names given to the liberations of shackled potentia are necessarily inadequate because they stem from the different dimensions of oppression.
We cannot imagine the names that this potentia will assume once it is liberated. As they appear on the horizon from the point where we stand, the main liberations are: liberating nature, liberating the commons, liberating the subhumans, liberating knowledge, liberating democracy, liberating education and culture, and liberating the divine. Each of these liberations presupposes the others. There will be no liberation without liberation struggles. There will be no struggle if there is no one willing to fight and take the risks that this entails. In the following texts, I will show how the ruin-seeds can help us in the immense tasks of liberation that impatiently await us.
References
1 Carole Cadwalladr, “You’re obsessing over the wrong Peter Thiel conference.”
2 The End of the Cognitive Empire: the coming of age of the epistemologies of the South. Duke UP, 2018.
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