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For
many years, the inhabitants of the Susa Valley, in Italy,
have been struggling against the construction of a new fast
railway (Tav) between France and Italy. These struggles
- as several commentaries have already pointed out - pose
a pressing question about democracy. An imposing and expensive
public work, the new railway is important for the entire
country, but it would primarily upset the environment and
life of the valley residents, affecting probably their health,
due to the presence of asbestos in the mountains which are
to be excavated. It is beyond doubt that the project was
adopted by democratic institutions (the Parliament, the
Government, the Piemonte Region). But do these institutions
have the right to use representative democracy to impose
a choice, when the people directly concerned are opposed
to it? The valley inhabitants' opposition is steady and
long dated: they claim their objections were never seriously
taken into account by different governments (both the left-
and right-wing ones). The residents may be right or wrong,
but one thing is sure: this event shows that political "democratic"
structures (that is, a Parliament elected by fair and correct
procedures) alone cannot assure "democracy". The
valley residents see the decision for the new railway as
an antidemocratic and authoritarian imposition, even if
the formal rules of "democracy" have been kept.
The question of the relationship between formal (or representative)
democracy and direct democracy was already posed in the
experiences of ancient times (in Athens and Rome), but it
was raised again in modern times, during the democratic
revolutions of Great Britain, United States and France.
It was also present in the experience of the workers' movement
and in the 1917 Russian Revolution. It is becoming topical
again, as new information and communication technologies
allow everyone to be directly connected in real time. Between
the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called "Californian Ideology"[1]
referred to Thomas Jefferson's thought to theorize an "electronic
democracy", capable of overcoming representative institutions.
Republican leader Newt Gingrich and the failed presidential
candidate Ross Perot used these ideas to promote a plebiscitary
concept of democracy, very similar to Peronist "television
democracy" theorized and realized in Italy by Silvio
Berlusconi. This idea of democracy widely uses marketing
techniques, such as surveys and polls: but there is no guarantee
for the citizens that the expressed opinions (often manipulated
and warped) will be taken into account by political and
market leaders. Janez Janša too, in his DemoKino,
raises a similar doubt.
Other questions about democracy arise when we consider international
politics. Let us just think of the weakness of the European
Parliament, or of the rejection by the people in France
(and other countries) of the proposed European constitution;
of the United Nations crisis, or of the international arrogance
of the US government. Every time the question arises: how
to make governments acknowledge the orientation of public
opinion? In the years 2001 and 2003 the world peace movement
organized the most impressive protests ever against the
Iraq war: but the Bush administration kept its policy, undisturbed.
The reference to war reminds us that the problem of democracy
is closely linked to those of justice and law. In the modern
era, the push toward democracy was deeply rooted
in a craving for justice. It was believed that
power in the hands of the people would suppress inequalities
and injustice, that it would create a fairer society. Things
did not go that way, as we know. There is another reason
for that (and this is the third question I want to raise):
economy never got along well with democracy. And capitalist
economy (always an important sphere of human action) in
its post-fordist version is more and more invading contemporary
life.
In fact, the problem of democracy appears today in a situation
that is characterized by three main features: the dictatorship
of economy over all aspects of individual and associated
life; the establishment of Western society as the Empire;
the widespread presence of war as a tool to expand
this Empire. The combination of these features makes the
development of democracy difficult and hampers the potentialities
of digital technologies, whose use is restricted (this is
an attempt of governments and corporations) in order to
strengthen class domination. It suffices to think of the
role of technologies in fields such as: the preparation
and conduct of war; the control of migrations; the introduction
of work "flexibility" to reduce and control workers'
rights.
It would therefore perhaps be useful to offer some further
reflections on the idea of justice and the foundations of
law.
Law, violence, war
Walter Benjamin considered the question of violence in a
paper written in 1921, Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Critique
of Violence)[2].
He linked the idea of violence with justice and law, which,
according to him, define the sphere of moral relationships.
He analyses this link in the fields of natural law and positive
law: "natural law," he writes, "tends to
'justify' the means through the justice of ends, while positive
law wants to 'guarantee' the justice of ends through the
legitimacy of means." But, in any case, the link between
means and ends (set by nature or assumed by reason) is assured
by violence. This assumption is made easier for Benjamin
by the German word Gewalt, which means both "violence"
and "authority" or "established power".
A similar link can be found in the English phrase to
enforce the law, which suggests that it is impossible
to think about the law without referring to a certain violence,
both at the origin, when the law is first created, and repeatedly,
when the law is "applied." But Benjamin wants
exactly to deconstruct this link, showing that law and justice
are two separate and somehow opposite dimensions. According
to Benjamin, the law, which is indissoluble from power,
comes from a mythical violence (in his words, a "simple
manifestation of gods"); justice, on the other hand,
is linked with divine or "pure" violence (Benjamin's
examples are taken from the Bible). Benjamin finds this
law-justice polarity in the difference, exposed by Sorel,
between the "political" general strike and the
"proletarian" general strike: the first aims to
conquer the state, and its violence has a blackmail feature
("we'll come back to work only if..."); while
the latter aims to completely destroy any state power, it
sets itself as a "sheer means", and therefore,
paradoxically, it carries no violence. In the wake of his
alliance between historic materialism and theology (expressed
in the first of his Theses on the Philosophy of History),
Benjamin refuses any mythical violence, both the one that
"sets" the law, and the one that "maintains"
it: "divine violence," he writes, "which
is the sign and seal, but never the means of sacred execution,
may be called sovereign violence."
Almost seventy years later, Jacques Derrida went over this
essay in his text Force de loi. Le "Fondement mystique
de l'autorité" (Force of Law. The
"Mystical Foundation of Authority")[3].
Here the French philosopher tries to deconstruct the conceptual
structure of Benjamin's writing, calling into question the
difference between the "setting" and the "maintaining"
of violence in the field of law. According to Derrida, there
is something similar in the primary action that interrupts
the pre-existent conditions (through a war, or a general
strike) to build a new law, and in the repeated practice
of the enforcement of the law: the common element is interpretation.
Every time we establish the law (as well as the language)
we use an "interpretative force," we refer to
the possibility of repeating that action, in order to interpret
it in new conditions: in other words, every foundation carries
in itself, implicitly, the application, and every application
always refers, somehow, to the foundation. It is in the
interweaving of these two dimensions that Derrida finds
"what Montaigne and Pascal call 'The mystic foundation
of authority'." "Given that the origin of
authority, the foundation or setting of laws can only be
grounded on itself, authority and law are in turn a violence
without grounding. It does not mean they are 'illegal' or
'illegitimate.' In the moment of their foundation they are
neither legal nor illegal. They go beyond the opposition
of 'grounded' and 'not grounded,' as well as of every foundation
or anti-foundation." In other words: "there is
no justifying language that can or must claim to have a
metalinguistic role in the performatory dimension of the
establishing language, or of its dominant interpretation."
That is why it is not easy to have a juridical foundation
of democracy. The argument must be rather different. In
Zur Kritik der Gewalt, Benjamin discusses a statement
by Kurt Hiller ("above the happiness and the justice
of an existence - there is existence in itself"), and
he concludes: "It is false and mean to hold that existence
is superior to the just existence, if existence is intended
as mere life (...). In fact, man cannot, at any price, be
said to coincide with the mere life in him, no more than
with any other of his conditions and qualities, not even
with the uniqueness of his bodily person." This remark
is especially relevant now, when the war in the biopolitical
era intends to realize the right to existence for the concerned
people, rather than destroying them. These are the claims
of the western powers, and they are surely not only lies,
or disguises of more material interests. But with this "humanitarian"
concept of its military and economic interventions (to free
peoples from dictatorships, to bring "democracy"),
the West arrogates itself the right to decide what is the
"right" existence (the one lived under western
rules and habits). Thus, the right choice to oppose the
war and really ground a "democracy" would be to
claim the right to justice, rather than to practise the
justice of law. Because the practice of justice implies
the freedom of every human being and every human community
to self-determine the conditions of their life and development.
Is democracy really useful?
The transformations of the production and circulation of
knowledge due to the advent of digital technologies have
sharpened the political problem of the forms of democracy:
a problem raised, in different ways, both by the "anti-globalization"
or "new globalization" movements, and from the
most "political" sectors of the free software
movement. Some philosophers too have made reflections on
the relationships between real and formal democracy. In
a recent interview[4],
Jean-Luc Nancy said:
We are waiting now, I think, for the display of new forms.
One doesn't wait for individuals, for some great thinker
or artist. The great thinkers, the great artists only come
when forms are available. There are times, indeed, that
have forms, and times that have not. The great effort of
contemporary art is to find forms. We live today in a general
deformation, that's the reality we live in. (...)
Democracy is always fulfilled in the form of representative
democracy. But there is a kind of democracy that has no
form, and that's the direct democracy, the democracy of
councils, or committees, of soviets. So, beyond the
realized democracy there's some other political
form to be found [added italics, a.c.].
Nancy's words clash with the superficiality with which the
experiences of the 20th century direct and alternate democracy
were gotten rid of: they were too hurriedly identified with
the oppressive and dictatorial states that usurped their
names (Soviet Republic), but, as a matter of fact, those
states could only be established on the repression of those
experiences. The reference to workers' councils and soviets
could, indeed, be a key for the reflection upon the crisis
of representative democracy (and politics in general) and
possible new forms of social life. After all, representative
democracy (i.e., the only form of democracy ever realized
in history in an effective and steady way) is a fruit of
the alphabetic brainframe and the press (according to MacLuhan's
thought). It is not so strange, therefore, that at the end
of the alphabet's era there is "some other political
form to be found": and these possible new forms have
something to do with the new techniques of post-alphabetical
(digital) communication.
But perhaps democracy is not the only issue to be considered,
or rather it cannot be separated from social transformations
and political measures that humankind needs in order to
resolve its important and difficult problems. It is necessary
to take into consideration the cycles of social conflicts
and struggles in the 20th century to understand the present
social and political situation worldwide. Mario Tronti,
a scholar and an exponent of the left-wing movement called
"operaismo" , reflecting on the 1970s
defeat of the working class (defined by him as "the
last great historical form of social aristocracy"),
warns the new social subjects trying to build the conditions
for "another possible historical breakdown" against
being harnessed in "the net of the present 'real democracy'":
Democracy today is not the power of the majority, it is
the power of all the people. There is a process of standardization,
of massification of thoughts, feelings, tastes and behaviours,
which expresses itself in the common sense. (...) After
the fading of the glorious days of class struggle, neither
the great bourgeois nor the petit bourgeois won. The middle
classes, in the literary sense, won. Democracy is just this:
not the tyranny of the majority, but rather the tyranny
of the middle-class man. And this middle-class man gathers
in mass within the Nietzschean category of last men.[5]
The digital leap, the "emerging identities" that
are looking for "a higher form of consciousness"
according to Derrick de Kerckhove's words, request not only
new scientific theories for the interaction of the ideas
of matter and information; they also request new tools to
understand society and to move within social conflicts.
These new emerging identities mainly rise among the immaterial
knowledge workers, who are the mark of our time. In his
latest book, McKenzie Wark calls them "hackers",
and urges them with the same slogan with which Marx and
Engels addressed, a century and a half ago, the working
class[6].
In order to fully develop all the social strength of technological
innovations, to make social conflict bear new equilibrium,
not new troubles, we will first of all need to study the
processes occurring in the behaviour and the imagination
of these workers.
(1) For a critique of the "Californian Ideology",
see Richard Barbrook's and Andy Cameron's essay, "The
Californian Ideology. A critique of West Coast cyber-libertarianism,"http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology.html
(2) Walter Benjamin, "Zur Kritik der Gewalt,"
in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankurt
am Main 1972-1989.
(3) Jacques Derrida, Force de loi. Le "Fondement
mystique de l'autorité", Éditions
Galilée, Paris 1994.
(4) Roberto Ciccarelli, "La Repubblica smarrita senza
forma," Il manifesto, November 12th 2005.
(5) Mario Tronti, "Per la critica della democrazia
politica," in: Guerra e democrazia, manifesto
libri, Roma 2005.
(6) McKenzie Wark, A hacker manifesto. Immaterial workers
of the world united!, Harvard College 2004.
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