tamás - counter-revolution against a counter-revolution

8/13/2019 Tams - Counter-Revolution Against a Counter-Revolution

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Unlike the revolutionary upheavals of 1953,1956, 1968 and 1981 (respectively: East Berlin, Budapest,Prague, Gdansk), the East European rgime change in1989 did not proclaim a purer and better socialism,workers councils, self-management or even higherwages for proletarians. It was seen as a re-establishmentof normalcy, historical continuity and a restoration ofthe treble shibboleth: parliamentary democracy, themarket and an unconditional allegiance to the West.

As I have shown earlier, this idea of continuity was amirage. No such system existed before inEastern Europebut a backward agricultural society based on ramshacklelatifundia, an authoritarian political order led mostly bythe military caste drawn from the impoverished gentry,prone to coups dtat, and a public and intellectual lifedominated by bitter opponents of a perceived hostileWest. Elements of modernity, such as they were, had

been introduced subsequently by Leninist planners andmodernisers who, exacting an extremely high price ofblood, suffering, scarcity, tyranny and censorship, hadbeen able to impose mobility, urbanisation, secularisa-tion, industrialisation, literacy, numeracy, hygiene, infra-structure, nuclear family, work discipline, and the rest.

Those were the foundations on which the new mar-ket capitalism and pluralist democracy were built, not arediscovery of a spurious liberal past, but its introductionby decree for the first time. It was an extremely populardecree for that portion of the population (and of which

I, too, was an enthusiastic and active member) whichparticipated in the marches, rallies, meetingsnot tospeak of the shenanigans and skulduggery unavoidableeven in utopian politicsand which seemed at the timeto have been the people, but which was at best five percent of the actual, empirical demos. Still, to those of us,stepping into the light from our sombre dissident con-venticles of a few dozen people, a hundred thousandpeople appeared as the masses. This minority, sincedispersed, possessed a political attitude and a world-viewthat was a combination of 1848 and 1968: a joyful demo-cratic nationalism and constitutional liberalism mingledwith a distaste for authority, repression (cultural and sex-ual), discipline and puritanism. These transient ideologi-cal phenomena which seemed so profound, interestingand solid to us at the time, reflected a state of affairs thatnearly all observers had been very slow to understand

and even slower to describe comprehensively.Neither the Leftish bent of most dissident criticismof real socialism, nor the the Sixty-Eightish, libertarianfeel of some of 1989 was ever explained satisfactorily.Even the most glaringly obvious historical comparisonswere not made. What I find most curious is that thecoincidence in time of the crisis of the welfare stateEast and Westdid not awaken any interest. Historicaland political imagination was paralysed by the unthink-ing acceptance of the claim that Soviet bloc rgimesmust have been (in some elusive sense) socialist since

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Demonstration in Budapest on the anniversary of the 1956 revolution,Oct.23, 2006. The lead marchers hold letters spelling szabadsg(freedom).


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this is what they have declared of themselves and, in amore important sense, this was why they were relentless-ly fought by the great Western powers of various hues.

Here, a few precisions should be made.I dont think there can be any doubt as to real

socialism having been state capitalism of a peculiarsort. It was a system with commodity production, wagelabour, social division of labour, real subsumption of

labour to capital, the imperative of accumulation, classrule, exploitation, oppression, enforced conformity, hier-archy and inequality, unpaid housework and an absoluteban on workers protest (all strikes illegal), not to speakof a general interdiction of political expression. The onlyremaining problem is, of course, the lack of market co-ordination and its replacement by government plan-ning. The term private property is misleading here,since if its essence is the separation of proletarians fromthe means of production, it also refers to state property,even if we should not try to minimise the considerabledifferences. If property is control (and legally it is con-trol), then state property is private property in thissense: nobody can pretend that in Soviet-type rgimesthe workers controlled production, distribution, invest-ment and consumption.

Nor can there be any doubt that post-Stalin statecapitalism in the Soviet bloc and in Yugoslavia (roughly1956-1989) attempted to create a kind of authoritarianwelfare state with problems very similar to, and imma-nent in, any welfare state in the West, be it of the socialdemocratic, Christian Democrat or Gaullist or, for thatmatter, New Deal, variety. (I shall neglect features ofwelfarist state capitalism in Fascist and Nazi rgimes,however apposite.)

The social purpose of any welfare stateincludingpost-Stalinist real socialism with the Gulag closeddownwas (we can safely use the past tense here)the attempt to bolster consumption through counter-cyclical demand management, to include and co-opt therebellious working class through affordable housing,transportation, education and health care, to create adopolavoro (a Mussolinian idea already much admired byNew Dealers, but of course equally prevalent in theStalinist Russia of the 1930s) replete with paid holidays,mass tourism, cheap popular entertainment, moderatelypriced sartorial fashions, and The Motor Car. The MerryKids, a 1930s Soviet movie musical featuring Young

Pioneers (the greatest Russian box-office hit ever), withits unbearable happiness, is indistinguishable fromHollywood or the Third Reich UFA studios deliriouslysmiley output, perhaps with less stress on sauciness andgirls legs. At the same time, in socialist EasternEurope there were a few features more reminiscent ofSouth East Asian corporate welfare methodscompanyholiday camps and company-owned holiday hotels,usually free for the employees, managed by the tradeunions (access to them was basically a right for all citi-zens), free crches and kindergartens for the workforces

offspringand some features inherited from Europeansocial democracy, but generalised and made mandatory,such as well-stocked lending libraries and cut-pricebookshops in every entreprise, affordable good books,theatre and cinema tickets (moreover, books and ticketsordered through your trade union were to be had at halfof that non-competitive price), positive discrimination infavour of working-class youngsters at higher education

admissions, job security, cheap basic food, cheap alcohol,cheap tobacco, cheap and plentiful public transport, easyaccess to amateur and spectator sports. The absence ofconspicuous wealth, let alone ostentatious luxury, of theruling class together with ever-recurrent shortages anda very reduced consumer choice, sexual puritanism,lengthy terms of military service, the cult of hard work(popular mechanics and space flight cults for theyoung) and a relentless propaganda emphasising theplebeian and collectivist characteristics of the rgimewhere everybody was supposed to know what to do witha tool-chest, a hoe or a pitchfork, promoted an atmos-phere of equality.

An atmosphere, a mood, yes, but also a reality ofincomparably greater equality than today. Nation-statesin real socialism oppressed ethnic minoritiesoutsideSoviet Russia especiallyafterStalins falloffering assim-ilation instead (training films for Hungarian social work-ers and local council officials in the early 1960s showforcible baths, haircuts and delousings for nomadic Romafamilies, operated by police and military hospital person-nel, amid scenes of infernal humiliation and artificial for-camera grins) suggesting unity and harmony and anend to age-old cultural conflicts. The transfer of peasantpopulations to industrial townships, unlike in the nine-

teenth century, had been relatively well organised: untilthe 1970s when resources had begun to run out, theywere moved into high-rise council estates, and immedi-ately offered the whole set of comprehensive and egali-tarian social services including health and culturethere are countries, such as Romania or the formerCzechoslovakia where the majority of urban populationstill lives in disintegrating communist-era blocks offlats.

There is no doubt that these societies were intolera-bly authoritarian, oppressive and repressed, but we arebeginning to see how well-integrated, cohesive, pacified,crime-free and institutionalised they were, a petty bour-

geois dream, but a dream nevertheless. Also, vertical,that is, upward social mobility was fast and comprehen-sive and, since we speak of initially backward, peasantsocieties, the change from village to town, from back-breaking physical work in the fields to technologicalwork in the factory, from hunger, filth and misery tomodest cafeteria meals, hot water and indoor plumbingwas breathtakingand the cultural change dramatic.Also the route from illiteracy and the inability to read aclockface to Brecht and Bartk was astonishingly short.(By the way, it is instructive to see how institutionally

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embedded cultural needs can behow half a continentstopped to read serious literature and listen to classicalmusic in a couple of years since the social and ideologi-cal circumstances ceased to make such activities bothhandy and meaningful: Doch die Verhltnisse, sie sind nicht so.)

When, after the rgime change in 1989 (in whichthe present writer has played a rather public rle andabout which his feelings are quite ambivalent retrospec-

tively), the concomitant onslaught on state propertythrough privatisation at world market prices, asset-strip-ping, outsourcing, management by-outs (companies sub-sequently bought up by multinationals and closed downto minimise competition and to create new captiveconsumer markets) caused unheard-of price rises, plum-meting real wages and living standards, massive unem-ployment. Market liberalisation meant that the hithertoprotected, cushioned, technologically backward localindustries could not withstand the enormous competi-tion in retail markets which has led to the collapse oflocal commerce unable to resist dumping and similartechniques. Almost half of total jobs have been lost. Thevery real rejoicing over pluralistic political competitionand hugely increased freedom of expression was damp-ened by immiseration and lack of security, accompaniedby the ever-increasing dominion of commercial popularculture, advertising, tabloids and trash. What has beenconceived of at first as colourful proved merely gaudyand as it became more and more shopsoiled its novelcharm has waned.

Also, it should not be forgotten that we must draw asharp distinction between bourgeois society and the societyunder the domination of capital, called in an un-Marxianfashion capitalism. The bourgeois, especially the ren-

tier, not to speak of the educated, cultivated, stylish(romantic-liberal) Bildungsbrgertum, is politically anextinct species, like the old, rust-belt industrial workingclass of Ford, Renault, Putilov, Thyssen, Krupp, ManfredWeiss, Fiat and the Union Minirealthough the latterstill exist and are economically more important thangenerally thought. Theflneurwouldnt know where tostroll. Bourgeois society was in the main politically dom-inated anyway by some sort of Whiggish aristocracy, themilitary or an overlapping bureaucracy, civil service andclasse politique. What has appeared to Marxs predeces-sorsand this appearance was then empirically true evenif it proved ultimately to be only a surface phenomenon

as the conflict between socio-culturally constitutedand parochial estates (Stnde, corporations) withtheir contrasting world-views and peculiar organisationforms, was (and is) in reality a system of impersonaldomination (to use Moishe Postones expression), funda-mentallyuninterrupted by the communist interlude.Granted, real socialism did not have a bourgeoisie,although I think it had a new class, and it did not pos-sess the specific class rule based on the personal andinformal group version of private property; thus thecorporative resistance of the proletariat against it (or

even against the various fascisms) was much weaker thanin times and places where an identifiable, clear-cut classenemy was culturally and politically visible. The univer-sally ignored fact, e. g., that not only party functionariesbut secret police and intelligence dignitaries and leadingoperatives were in their overwhelming majority of prole-tarian (or poor agricultural labourer) originshown byall historical monographs on the subjectdemonstrates

clearly that class struggles had to take radically differentforms under state capitalism dubbed state socialismthan under market-driven capitalist rgimes of whatevercolour, including National Socialism. The corporativestruggles between the old bourgeoisie and what wascalled socialism in Europe, i. e., the working-classmovement (trade unions, politicaloften undergroundparties and the adversary culture) in the nineteenthand the twentieth century had not been able to address amuch more insidious form of capital rgime where thelessons of state socialism have been learned by heart.The social-cultural antagonism is now radically divorcedfrom the class struggle as a structural given in any soci-ety based on the appropriation of surplus value and onthe loss of control over ones life (the definition of theproletariat according to Guy Debord). Hence the mythi-cal creation of an enemy (the neo-liberal or neo-con-servative lite of nebulous world institutions, usuallyfinancial and commercial ones) which embodies exploita-tion but has the political disadvantage (for socialists) thatit does not actually exercise, execute or implement it. Itis a merely political adversary, and it is not and it cannotbe a replacement for thevanishedbourgeoisie, just asthe bureaucracy of the Stalinist or neo-Stalinist statecould not replace it as the deep antagonist.

When this bureaucracy has lost its political para-mountcy and the old forms of hierarchy, deference andsolidarity have collapsed together with the old dispensa-tion, one of the great legitimising forceswhich were atthe same time extremely perilous for the communistold rgimehas waned, namely, the ever-present possi-bility of the recurrence to the revolutionary roots ofreally existing socialism which had always been there,buried, to point towards the unavoidable direction ofmoral criticism, to wit, social justice. With the collapseof this possibilitytogether with the very modest variantof the welfare state in developing Eastern Europepoverty has not only become destiny for the majority but

a state of affairs impossible to classify, interpret, condemnor justify.

This was regarded by the unhappy East Europeanpopulations as unmitigated and incomprehensible catas-trophe. The political groups on the ground possessed bya little critical sense had been those which fought theformer rgime and continued to fight its ghost for a longtime to come and pushed the post-Worl War II liberalagendafreedom of expression, constitutionalism, abor-tion rights, gay rights, anti-racism, anti-clericalism, anti-nationalism, certainly causes worth fighting for, but

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bewildering to the popular classes, otherwise engagedwithout any attention to the onset of widespread poverty,social and cultural chaos. These groups combined thehuman rights discourse of the liberal Left with thefree to choose rhetoric of the neo-conservative right(they still do, after 18 years) and thought of privatisationas the break-up of the almighty state whicharmed withthe weapon of redistributionappeared the enemy to

beat, the dependency culture to be the ideologicaladversary preventing the subjects of the Sozialstaatfrombecoming freedom-loving, upright, autonomous citizens.I rememberI was a member of the Hungarian parlia-ment from 1990 to 1994that we discussed the questionof the republican coat of arms (with or without the HolyCrown; the party of with won) for five months, butthere was no significant debate on unemployment whiletwo million jobs went up into the air in a small countryof ten million.

The task of a welfarist rearguard action went toany political force considered to be beyond the pale. Incountries where there was official discrimination againstfunctionaries of the communist apparat and where themembers of the former ruling party had to stick togetherfor self-protection and healing wounded pride, like inEast Germany and the Czech Republic, this was incum-bent upon the so-called post-communist Left, and forthe rest, it usually went to extreme nationalist andChristian parties. Since there was a certain continuityof personnel between the ruling communist partiespro-market reformist wing (and their expert advisers inuniversities, research institutes and state banks) who,being at the right place at the right time, profited hand-somely from privatisations, there was a superficial plausi-

bility to the popular theory according to which nothinghas changed, which was only a conspiracy to prolongthe rule of a discredited ruling class. The truth of thematter is, of course, that the changes have been sogigantic that only a fraction of the nomenklaturawasable to recycle itself into capitalist wheelers-dealers. Theultimate winner was nobody local, but the multinationalcorporations, the American-led military alliance and theEU bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, there is a grain of truth in this populartheory, namely the suspicion that the contrast betweenplanned state capitalism (aka real socialism) and liberalmarket capitalism may not be as great as solemnly trum-

peted in 1989. Popular theories formulated as paranoidurban legends, however understandable, cannot (andshould not) replace analysis. But they do have politicalsignificance, especially as many successor parties to for-mer communist organisations are now touting theneo-conservative gospel (the term neo-liberal is some-thing of a misnomer: todays ultracapitalists and marketfundamentalists are no liberals by any stretch of theimagination) and are dismantling the last remnants ofthe welfare state. Hence the strange identification insome countries of Eastern Europe of communists

with capitalistsafter all it is frequently former com-munists who are doing this to us, it is always the samepeople on top, the democratic transformation was afraud, this is all a Judeo-Bolshevist cabal, and so on.

Now the identification of socialism and capitalism iswell known to have been a Nazi clichboth are racial-ly alienbut the circumstances, they are not so, theycould not be more different. After all, communists and

social democrats in the 1920s and 1930s were united andadamant in their false consciousness concerning theirintegral opposition to capitalism and tyranny. False con-sciousness does not preclude sincerity. The ex-commu-nist parties at the beginning of the twenty-first centuryare opposed not only to socialism but to the most ele-mentary working-class interests: this is nothing new andit also not limited to Eastern Europe. (When speaking ofEastern Europe, I always include the European part ofthe former Soviet Union, following the good example ofGeneral de Gaulle.) After all, the Italian CommunistParty and its leader Enrico Berlinguer have called forausterity measures and the proletarian duty to acquiescein them two years before Mrs Thatchers accession topower. (The right-wing of the former PCI, the DS, hasmergedwith its enemy of sixty years, the ChristianDemocrats) Therefore the clich, while it has notbecome any truer, represents fair and just historicalrevenge.

This is why and how the neo-conservative counter-revolution is countered by forms of resistance couchedin the terms of the pre-war nationalist and militaristRight, often intermingled with open fascist rhetoric andsymbols and, in the case of the former Soviet Union,extreme eclecticism trying to synthesise Stalinism and

fascism. (The Communist Party of the RussianFederation, the main opposition force in Russia, isinspired by the loony ideologues of the White Guards,who represented the political brain trust of the generalstaff of Admiral Kolchak and Baron Wrangel.) There is agreat variety of political solutions. After the defeat of theneo-liberal or neo-conservative rgime of ex-commu-nist President Kwaiewski in Poland, the ultra-CatholicKaczyski twin brothers act, however ridiculous it mayhave appeared at first, was quite successful and appearedto be consolidating, combining extreme social conser-vatism, anti-gays, anti-women, anti-minorities, anti-Russian, anti-German, anti-semitic and, above all,

anti-communist, with monetarist orthodoxy, pro-Bushmilitary zeal, persecution of everybody on the Left (theyhave stopped the pensions of the few surviving veteransof the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war inthe 1930s), censorship and savage ethnicist propaganda.(Later, being dropped by the West, the twins have lostthe forced early elections in favour of their more stream-lined conservative rivals.) In Slovakia, the government ofthe Left social democrat, Robert Fico, is an alliance ofhis own party with the nationalists of Vladimr Meciarand the quasi-fascist National Party led by the notorious

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alcoholic blowhard, Jn Slota. Mr. Fico had the effron-tery to increase pensions, cut public transport prices,stop the dismantling of state-managed, essentially freehealth care and public education. It is an immenselypopular government, made even more so by its sharpanti-Czech and anti-Hungarian nationalism, combinedwith pro-Russian leanings.

In Hungary, the socialist-liberal coalition led by the

young and gifted Ferenc Gyurcsny, a billionaire busi-nessman and a former secretary of the Communist YouthLeague before 1989, was returned to office in 2006 afteran election campaign based on Left-populist promiseswhich, in a secret speech to his parliamentary party, Mr.Gyurcsny himself announced to have been a bunch ofdeliberate lies. After the speech was leaked, riots eruptedin Budapest, and the headquarters of state televisionthe symbol of mendacitywas torched. On October 23,2006, the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolu-tion of 1956, the formerly defeated police visited retri-bution on the protesters, beating up rioters, passers-by,already immobilised prisoners and whoever else was intheir way. (The liberal intelligentsia, to its eternal shame,took the side of police terror.) Protests continued formonths, deteriorating rapidly, dominated by the symbol-ism of the Arrow-Cross, the Hungarian Nazis famousfor their anti-Jewish terror in the encircled Budapest of1944. The protests were adroitly mined by the parlia-mentary Right, led by the former prime minister, ViktorOrbn. The government coalition proceeded with itsradical austerity measures, immense tax increases, socialand health expenditure cuts, closing down hospitals (thefirst deaths caused by the chaos in the health servicehave already occurred), schools, cultural insitutions, cut-

ting or stopping subsidies altogether, planning to priva-tise the hospitals, the railways, the electricity board andmunicipal services, liberalising prices (e. g., those ofmedicaments), introducing fees for every visit to a (state)doctor, fees for university students, doubling the price ofpublic transport, freezing wage and pension increasesall necessary to reduce public debt and trade deficit inorder to meet the so-called convergency criteriademanded by the European Union, mandatory forjoining the eurozone. Credit-rating agencies, such asStandard and Poors, have more influence on govern-ment policy than the electorate.

All this is opposed by deafening anti-communist

vociferation, xenophobic, anti-semitic, anti-Western andanti-immigrant agitation (there are practically no immi-grants in Hungary, but never mind, there may be atsome point in the future, if the rootless cosmopolitansin office are not chased away). The polls show that theparliamentary centre-Left may disappear, governmentsupporters are openly threatened. There will be a refer-endum on the most unpopular measures initiated by theparliamentary Right, certain to be another, unsurprisingmajor defeat for the socialist-liberal government. (SinceI have written this, the referendum on health care and

higher education fees has taken place and brilliantly wonby the nationalist Right, the liberal party has left thecabinet and the neo-conservative reforms had to beabandoned.) Because of police abuses, the three majorchiefs of the national police, the head of the secret serv-ice and the justice minister responsible had to resign inignominy. Corruption is rife. Motorway and under-ground railway construction is in tatters. High-rise office

blocks are unfinished or empty. Trust in public institu-tions is nil.

Thousand of motorcyclists, sporting imitationWehrmacht helmets, huge Nazi and Arrow-Cross flagson their machines, the official name of their associa-tionGoy Bikersproudly emblazoned on their leatherjackets, are filling the main streets of central Budapestwith their thunderous noise and billowing exhaustfumes. Neo-Nazi groups are successfully interruptingcourt proceedings or the official meeting of the BudapestCity Assembly, and are intimidating the media. Thecountry is rife with rallies demanding an unelected,non-party upper chamber, a constitution ascribing sover-eignty to the Holy Crown (instead of to the people).Forty-one Polish MPs, members of the majority in theDiet, proposed a bill for the election of Jesus Christ ashonorary president of Poland (some would amend this tohonorary king). The speaker threw it out on a technicali-ty, they didnot dare to put it to a vote: it might have won.

Add to this the seeming inability of the CzechRepublic, Romania and Serbia to put together a workingparliamentary majority, the anti-Russian madness grip-ping the Baltic statelets together with very real,apartheid-style discrimination against their ethnicRussian minorities, the persecution and segregation of

the Roma minorities everywhere (said the president ofRomania of a journalist from whom he personally wres-tled and stole, well, confiscated her mobile phone: Iwont talk to this stinking Gypsy c--t), the total collapseof ethnic enclaves statified by the august internationalcommunity, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia,Moldova/Transnistria, the Stalinist intermundium ofBelarus, the expulsion of ex-Yugoslav residents fromSloveniaand you have a picture of the new democra-cies, the brave soldiers of the coalition of the willing,Mr. Rumsfelds and Mr. Cheneys new Europe.

Also, recently there had been attempts at creatingquasi-presidential rgimes based on murky and vague

New Constitutions to be adopted by plebisciteandthus imitating the Left-populist Latin American govern-ments, new republics (the Third in Romania, theFourth in Poland), non-party presidential movementsimitated from Charles II von Hohenzollern-SigmaringensRoyal Dictatorshipin 1938 Romania, a generalisedattack against pluralism and multi-party systems, an evermore generalised revival of fascist symbolism, now mademore actual by not at all symbolic storming of parlia-mentarism and whatever remains of the very modestliberal achievements of the 1990s.

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Liberal commentators speak of an insurgencyagainst modernity. This is utter nonsense. The neo-con-servative (or neo-liberal) counter-revolution has attackedthe nation and especially the lower middle classes on twofronts.

First, it has ignored the fact that social welfare insti-tutions are the backbone of national identity, the onlyremaining principle of cohesion in a traditionless capital-

ism. It is not only the loss of livelihood, but the per-ceived loss of dignity, the loss of the sense of beinglooked after, protected, thus respected by the communityrepresented by the state which is at stake. Upwardmobility was the greatest triumph of planned welfarestates, internalised as dynamic equality. The loss ofclass statusthis latter symbolised in East CentralEurope characteristically by a university degree: even astarvingHerr Doktor is a gentleman,the feeling thatthe descendants of tradespeople, civil servants, teachersand physicians may have to do physical work, again, orflee somewhere as illegal migrants, to be dclass, is anintolerable threat. This insurgency is the revolt of themiddle classes against loss of nation and loss of caste.

Second, identifying with the bulwarks and battle-ments of the welfare state created by the communists isideologically impossible for the middle classes. It wouldbe a tremendous loss of face, since communism sym-bolises defeat and the past, and the petty bourgeoisie isnothing if not modernist and driven by the myth ofachievement, self-improvement and all the rest. Theycannot defend openly the institutions that gave themtheir dignity in the first place, which has made peasantsinto bureaucrats and intellectuals, since this would beacknowledging the shameful agrarian past and the equal-

ly shameful communist legacy. Thus, by representingthe neo-conservative (or neo-liberal) destruction as thework of communists, shame can be avoided and thedefense of pre-1989 institutional arrangements accept-able. Also, former communist party or communist youthsecretaries cannot say that they never belonged to thatinstitutional order, and they have nothing to be thankfulfor its blessings, and they have to declare that the dis-mantling of that order is a correction of a mistake. Sothey appear fallible and opportunistic, not the harbingersof a new era, liberty, or some such.

So, the new counter-revolutionaries can be fash-ioned as being of both the Left and the Right, and the

impeccably anti-communist foes of the communistprivatisers, monetarists, supply-siders and globalisers.They can defend the Bolshevik-created welfare statewithout giving an inch to Bolsheviks who went from theInternational to the Transnational and the Multinational,since both can be opposed by the idea of militant ethnic-ity, quite different from classical nationalism built uponthe legal and political equality of all citizens regardless ofcreed and race.

Since this oubreak of political lunacy in EasternEurope is as much a defensive reaction to neo-conserva-

tive or neo-liberal globalisation and neo-imperialism asthe anti-capitalist version of the new social movementsin the West and in the Third World (I know, this expres-sion exudes an unpleasant whiff but I could not find orconcoct a better one), we shall have to consider brieflythe quite numerous and slightly alarming parallelsbetween the two.

The differences between the post-Fordist contem-

porary protests from past forms of resistance to capital-ism in the twentieth century are considerable.

Because of changes in technology and housing(including suburban spread, home ownership for theworking class, the motor-car, the dismantling of the massfactory), the dispersal of the workforce and, in general,because of changes in the organisation of production,not to speak of the impact of the new mass media, themain adversary class in advanced capitalism, the prole-tariat, is now spatially separated from the seats of power(both economic and political) which are anyway de-territorialisedand de-nationalised. One cannot storm theBastille or the Winter Palace since the structure ofpower has been transformed. Direct revolutionary con-frontations between, say, the haves and the have-nots are impossible, except in some so-called backward,that is, poor, countries. Thus, contemporary strugglesare largely symbolic. Compare, e. g., the protests againstthe G8 summit meeting at Heiligendamm that tookplace as I first started writing: Let us suppose for amoment that the protesters did win and managed tochase away the assorted heads of state and other greatpanjandrums from Mecklenburg-Vorpommernwhatwould have happened? They would have returned totheir respective seats of government, with a few bruises,

perhapsend of story. There were no specific demands(Make capitalism history is not one), therefore the pro-testers were not meeting bourgeois politics at the levelwhere it is designed and implementedand the few real-ly specific demands, in fact, requests, voiced by a moder-ate wing, are always confined to the framework ofbourgeois politics and therefore not revolutionary (forexample, those concerning carbon emissions, migrantlabour, intellectual property rights, etc.), but rather com-patible with bourgeois (mainstream liberal) politics evenif they have few chances of immediate success. Violenceerupts because the protesters are opposed to the sys-tem but the system is not invested in an arbitrary con-

geries of nation-state bosses who are not exercising theirtrue, that is, legal power in this setting. What is threat-ened (unlike in the case of communist or socialist revolu-tions) is not a rgime change, but chaos. Chaos cannotbe met by repression (although it could be and was sup-pressed and cleaned up by police and Bundeswehr),since only counter-power can be repressed, and protestas such is not power. Repression itself can be made, onthe other hand, into chaos. Power does not encountercounter-power, as in the case of classicalespeciallyEuropeanrevolutions.

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In post-Fordist, twenty-first century protests thefundamental principles of the political and legal orderand of statecraft are not directly challenged. The regulararmy is not opposed by a Red Army, police by RedGuards orRepublikanischer Schutzbund (Austria 1934),national, parliamentary governments by workers coun-cils, bourgeois parties by proletarian parties, nation-states by a universal republic of councils (let us not

forget that the coat of arms of the Soviet Union was theterrestrial globe swathed in red strips inscribed withProletarians of all countries, unite! in languages not localsuch as French, English, German, Hindi, without theslightest parochial allusion to Russiaand initially itsnational anthem was, simply, theInternationale), princi-ples of private ownership, of the separation of powers, ofthe distinction between state and civil society are notannounced in a straightforward manner to be abolishedpresently, cultural or ideological sub-systems (from lawto art) are not directly denounced to have been nothingelse but deceit. As we have seen, the demands of theprotesters are not wholly unimaginable within the sys-tem as greater equality, an end to imperialistic interven-tion and to the pile-up of nuclear weapons, greaterjustice towards various groups, etc. And even if theyare not the stuff that practical, feasible politics of themoment are made of, they have nothing in them thatcould not be welcomed into a more generous, moreinnovative liberal politics. (I have said earlier that theanti-globalisation movements combine social democrat-ic, reformist policies with revolutionary street theatre.)Why the despair then?

I do not think that the actual policies propoundedmatter very much. These movements areprofoundly a-

political or anti-political.They are addressing problems,not attacking state-forms. They are attempting to ignorestudiously the state as such which they recognise implicit-ly since they are more or less expecting their demandsand proposals to be made into government (or globalgovernment: IMF, World Bank, WTO, OECD) policy,but not trying at the same time to create a new state-form more amenable to prosecute such policies.

In these post-Fordist protest movements there isnothing that would be inherently impossible to be alsoattained by change(s) of government(s) through electionsby parliamentary parties or an international alliance ofsuch parties. Why then the reluctance to join the by now

traditional varieties of political participation, e. g., elec-tions, referenda, plebiscites, strikes or different butlonger, more patient and more purposeful methods ofpassive resistance or civil disobedience? Or, if this provesimpossible, why not prepare, and train for, revolution?

The answer is, I think, in their a-political substance:it is the withdrawal of recognition from pluralistic politicswhich presupposes the conquest and exercise of poweras such, including revolutionary politics. It is not apathythere is a lot of passion, particularly hatred, contempt,scornbut an objectless repudiation of a subjectless

order (that of capital). But the wholesale rejection of thepresent order is not matched by a corresponding andresponding utopia (like in 1968); this is a projectless,anti-utopian revolt, pure negationwhich makes it para-doxically stronger since the wrecking debates aboutmeans and ends are implicitly void.

It is important to establish that the new protestsare, by the same token, not less subversive than their

predecessors had been, since what they attack is not thepolitical and social order per se, nor liberal politicalinstitutions as such (not even the markets: fair tradepresupposes markets), but legitimacy. Civil disobedience,when partial and particular in its aims, however radical,is a morally grounded, publicly declared and assumedlaw-breaking. But however much it resists law, the veryresistence is couched in terms of liberal constitutional-ism. Nowgeneralisedcivil disobedience (generalised in itsobjectives, not in its prevalence), even if it is plain that itcannot trigger a collapse of the prevailing order, poses aproblem for liberal democracy. Without the systemicopposition being able (or indeed, willing) to createcounter-power, government by consentwhich is thebasis of any free politybecomes imposible. Consentis increasingly, albeit passively and symbolically, with-drawn, not counterbalanced by resistance (which is natu-rally political) but by a checking-out from institutionsand by a relegation of reflection on human affairs ontoan altogether different, usually ethical, plane. But sincethis ethics is usually some species of distributive justice,it needs an authority in which the intellectual force nec-essary for fair redistribution rests.

The ever more consensual character of formerlyand supposedly adversarial political processes (elections,

party politics, the nations contest, conflict of capital andlabour in the workplace) proved self-defeating. Authorityis historically asserted only against something: the con-flation of authority and politics is extremely dangerous.Nevertheless, all other forms of authority (religion, con-sensual social morality and moral sense, high culture,science, tradition as such comprising old peoples allegedwisdom and the like) have atrophied, therefore all scis-sion within politics causes panic.The one surviving formof authority by assent is still with us since it is not main-tained by the community by virtue of its excellence, butonly as an expression of the serendipity of surreptitious,whimsical, capricious, impermanent will. When this will

appears to be cheated, hell breaks lose. This popularwill, perceived as an empty screen, onto which anythingcan be projected, is subservient to mood and fashion. Ifthe dominant style of public decisions and pronounce-ments is not in tune with these transient perceptions ofdemotic preferences, this serves as a proof of the hypo-critical or illusory character of political institutions whichare out of touch with these demotic preferences, hencesubservient to occult lite powers, interests or cabals.

Small wonder, then, if the desperate and dclassmiddle-class youth in Eastern Europe dreams of sinister

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plots, and feels that its sorrow and anxiety is both demo-cratic and profound beacuse somehow it matches thestyle of the epoch.

The unmediated, direct negation of legitimacyseems to contradict the lack of truly revolutionary inten-tions I have just imputed to the new social movements.But revolutions are quarrels. The revolutionary says tothe tyrant, You declaim that your order is just; no it

isnt; it is the next order we are going to inaugurate thatis just; you are wrong, and we are right; God is on ourside. The new social movements would say nothing ofthe sort. Justice as conceivable by conventional politicsis of no interest to them. They desire an end to globalwarming or to child poverty by means they despise,while they do not think there are any other means avail-able, but it will not be them who would have to usethose means.

The shift of the political strugglefrom form to sub-stance makes constitutional, legal, legitimising argumentssuperfluous. The apparent recognition that there are nocontemporary alternatives to capitalism in the offingdoes not mean that capitalism now is considered legiti-mate or even bearable. On the contrary. It means theabandonment of the constitutional and social idea oflegitimacy and of the philosophical ideas of justice andliberty seen in the context of conscious human action.This is in marked contrast to Marx who saw that theproblem with capitalism is precisely that it (togetherwith exploitation, oppression and hierarchy) prevailsamong free and equal subjects.

The Zeitgeistthat makes young Western Europeansmarch under red and black flags is different from youngEast Europeans, who imitate their Palestinian scarves

and bandannas, their hoods and masks, their stone-

throwing and their rebel cool they have watched envi-ously on television, but combining all this with extremeauthoritarianism, racism, and so on. While WestEuropean, North and Latin American anti-globalistdemonstrators evince a nostalgia for the revolutionaryproletariat, their East European counterparts expressunambiguously their fear and loathing of proletarians.Even if this is merely politico-cultural atavism, it (class

as as orientation point) is highly significant.The adaptation of the props and stage management

ofgauchiste demonstrations by reactionary, bourgeoisnuclei of future storm-troops is in part a cargo cult.More importantly, though, it is the application of mili-tant anti-politicsat its heart there is, both East andWest, a culturally anti-tatiste defense of the redistribu-tionist, protective, strong state, a living self-contradic-tionto the ruins of a secular society based onegalitarian planning, 1945-1989. R. I. P. Involuntarypost-modern pastiche plays a certain rle. A born-again(as fake Catholic and fake nationalist) burgher middle-class created by communists striving and seeking topreserve institutions and routines practiced by commu-nists all the while shouting death to the communistsmeaning capitalists: this would have warmed the lateJean Baudrillards cunning heart.

The working class is silent. There are hardly anystrikes. This battle is fought between transnational capi-tal and its native agents and the local, ethnic middleclasses and the ethnicist and clericalist intelligentsia. Anauthentic Left has not surfaced.

Yet.

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Gspr Mikls Tams, a Hungarian writer and philosopher living in Budapest, was one of leaders of the Hungarian dissident move-ments before 1989 and a member of Parliament (1990-1994). He has since turned to the radical Left. He has taught at Columbia,Oxford, Chicago, Yale, the New School, etc.

tamás - counter-revolution against a counter-revolution

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