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John Schostak
Manchester social movements conference
April 2011
Wherever people invest their powers is where education and research must become vitally involved in creating the public conditions for the free and equal expression of voice and the collective development of reason and action in all matters. I want to explore this statement that echoes Kant’s (1784) formulation that defined Enlightenment in terms of “freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.”
My reformulation also deliberately evokes a Spinozan formulation of ‘powers’ where there is no Cartesian split between the body and the mind as a way of provoking spaces for what Mack (2010) calls an alternative modernity. Education ‘educes’ or draws out, or draws upon the powers of people whose individuality makes sense and exists only through the forms of social organisation in which they engage whether freely or under coercion. This distinction is usefully picked up by Hardt in his preface to Negri (1991) exploration of Spinozan political philosophy in distinguishing between two forms of power:
Whereas the Latin terms used by Spinoza, potestas and potentia, have distinct correlates in most European languages (potere and potenza in Italian, pouvoir and puissance in French, Macht and Vermögen in German), English provides only a single term, power. To address this difficulty, we have considered several words that might serve for one of the terms, such as potency, authority, might, strength, and force, but each of these introduces asignificant distortion that only masks the real problem. Therefore, we have chosen to leave the translation issue unresolved in this work: We make the distinction nominally through capitalization, rendering potestas as "Power" and potentia as "power"
It seems to me that the question of powers and Power is intimately tied to legitimacy in all social forms of organisation whether families, schools, corporations, nation states or transnational and global institutions. This, I think, is the central issue at stake in both Wikileaks and what is being called the Arab spring symbolised by Tahrir Square. So I ask the questions:
What does it mean to be pro-democracy under the different regimes symbolised by Tahrir square and Wikileaks?
What are the powers that make democracy possible?
What are the Powers that counter democracy?
In short I am addressing the countervailing organisations of power.
Wikileaks – the diplomatic cables
On Sunday 28 November 2010, Wikileaks made available to The Guardian, The new
York Times, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel a small percentage of nearly 250,000
US embassy cables diplomatic cables allegedly leaked by Manning. Almost immediately,
a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) was made to try and take it down.
Death threats were made to Julian Assange, founder and figurehead of Wikileaks.
Sarah Palin saw him as an “anti-American operative with blood on his hands”
and wanted him hunted down (Telegraph 30 Nov 2010). And:
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and possible Republican presidential candidate provided a harsh assessment of what he believes to be an appropriate punishment for the source of the latest WikiLeaks transmission of U.S. embassy cables, saying that "anything less than execution is too kind a penalty."
(Huffington Post 30/11/2011)
Corporations came under pressure to stop supporting Wikileaks. PayPal, Amazon, Visa and Mastercard were the first to comply. This in turn led to what many called the first cyberwar waged between Wikileaks supporters (under the name of Anonymous) who carried out DDOS attacks on these corporations. Under threat was the symbolic freedom, the democratic commons, of the internet.
When wikileak.org was taken down by government agencies, countervailing powers were organized in terms of mirror sites that sprang up until there were over 2000 of them making it impossible to prevent leaks. The character of Assange became a focus in various articles following revelations from co-founders and the setting up of alternative sites for leaking Assange as figure head and following rape charges against him, allegedly committed in Sweden. As a symbol of Wikileaks, Assange remains a critical focus point for media attention, and a critical focus for legal struggles both at a personal level in facing rape charges, and at a universal level of State against individual in terms of extradition from the UK first to Sweden, then potentially to the USA to face charges in relation to leaking documents (see Guardian site for a range of articles). Whose laws and values take precedence? On the basis of what is an extradition being made? What are the further consequences of such an extradition? The lawyer for Assange claims that no official charge has yet been made, no evidence has been presented by the Swedish prosecutor (see critical Guardian example; see Pilger alternative), and indeed that the prosecutor is reluctant to answer such questions. Assange and others have claimed that behind these moves is US influence on Sweden to create the conditions for a later extradition to the USA to face charges for leaking documents. It has been claimed that there is a special relationship between Sweden and the USA in terms of Intelligence activities, in particular in relation to the transfer of asylum seekers for US interrogation. Palin is in no doubt about the treasonous nature of Wikileaks:
Inexplicable: I recently won in court to stop my book “America by Heart” from being leaked,but US Govt can’t stop Wikileaks’ treasonous act? 6:25 AM Nov 29th, 2010 via Twitter for BlackBerry® Retweeted by 100+ people
(Tweet by Sarah Palin)
Assange is, of course, Australian and the leaks were made by another, alleged to be Bradley Manning, a soldier, who has been kept in solitary confinement undergoing interrogation. And Wikileaks itself has no specific location in the world, being hosted by many servers in many different countries. However, further kinds of accusation have been made focusing on his character as an overbearing leader by founding members of Wikileaks who have now broken away to form their own group Openleaks (and see also).
Whether Assange is a criminal, flawed, wronged individual or indeed cyber hero at the back of all the character questions, public relations, legal, political, cyber-war strategies are issues concerning the rule of law in relation to States, territories, individuals and freedom of information. It is very much about the contemporary ‘conjuncture’, that is the historical political and economic forces at play in the world to compose a sense of the state of the global order of relative powers as between states, and between states and their populations. For commentators like Fukyama (1992) the contestation between the great political alternatives – democracy or socialism/communism – had been settled with the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall: Western liberal democracies had won, now it was the ‘end of history’, that is, the end of the great geo-political contestations. For Huntington (1996) history was re-born as a clash of civilizations, in particular between Christian and Islamic cultures. So, the symbolic order changed from what was the post-war ‘Evil Empire’ behind the Iron Curtain to the ‘Axis of Evil’ post-9/11. With it changed how the spatial-political order was symbolically drawn and perceived. Rather than a specified enemy, physically located behind clear barriers, there were terrorists in cells who could be within Western nations but were underpinned by networks of influence and resourced by particular State sponsors. The imagery extended to activists of any kind who sought to contest the workings of the State and undermine the prevailing cultural, political, economic order – that is, the ‘enemy within’ as Margaret Thatcher called them. As Arditi (2007) has conceptualized it, given the effects of capitalist market globalization and the degree to which states are in a subordinate client-role to global corporates and transnational financial organisation there is as such no ‘outside’. The Other can only be internal, like a cyst, to the political-economic-social body. Whether the strategies are the support of puppet states, regime change or the use of ‘extraordinary rendition’ for the kidnapping of ‘suspects’ to be taken to a ‘no-place’ (a place therefore outside of the law and of human rights as in the case of Guantanamo) for the containment of terrorists – the object is the removal and excising of the foreign body from the body of the global order (- in relation to this imagery, it might be interested to speculate about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ diasporas; and to the relation between ‘bad’ diasporas and the imagery of plagues and infections and ‘acts of god’ as in the case of natural disasters. Alongside this is a rhetoric of anxiety and panic). It is thus quite consistent with this kind of political rhetoric that Wikileaks should be labeled terrorist, indeed, ‘treasonous’ and Assange, as its figurehead, hunted down. Assange, at least gives a concrete yet symbolic focus for the representation of the internet as an unregulatable no-place, a space outside territorial law for authorities to attack as a focus for public attention, perhaps as a lesson.
Exploring these confrontations of powers through the Spinozan distinction, it seems to me that it is useful to distinguished between the resources that Power can draw upon and those that power can draw upon. Like Derrida’s différance, the difference can only be seen in the writing, the ways in which the resources each party has to hand can be differently inscribed for different objectives. The leader of a given organisation only has power due to the aggregation of the powers of each individual composing that organsiation. This aggregation of individual powers into a unified structure is Power. Historically, Power in the form of monarchies, theocracies, dictatorships and capitalist corporations, of course, generally through their control of organisations have access to greater resources than those they command and subjugate. The technologies that underpin organisations are critical to the exercise of power over others. Just as Virilio (1996) commented that with each technological advance in communication, the military that has access to the new technology is able to respond to changes in circumstances over a greater field quicker than the opposing force. However, the new technologies of the internet age change the game through which powers are aggregated into Power. The totality of resources and their forms of organisation available for use at any given period of time I shall call a dispositif, drawing on Agamben’s (2007) development of this term employed by Foucault. Apparatus, as a term, does not seem to me to capture the meaning of ‘dispositif’ and in particular Agamben’s division between everything created by human beings and the rest. How the objects of human creation are organized and how they can be drawn upon composes a dispositif. It seems to me useful to distinguish between two forms of organized power – the dispositif of Power and the dispositif of power(s). Politically they can be explored as a disposif of fear in the case of tyrannies and a dispositif of hope in terms of freedom from fear as in the case of protests and liberation movements that generate countervailing powers to that of Power.
Wikileaks and its allies such as Anonymous, draws upon the countervailing powers
to Power. The internet as a human creation can be differentially employed. It
augments the powers of individuals to associate with each other just as it augments
Power. The dynamics of the organization of power is being played out as between
the supporters of Wikileaks and the organizations of the State and the corporations
of the market place.
What cannot now be stopped, are the implications, the consequences of revealing
the behaviour of leaders, corporations and the activities of states. As a lead
into the next section:
Publication of WikiLeaks sourced private US comments on the corruption and nepotism of a hated "sclerotic" regime is said to have helped create Tunisia's protest, and generated talk by US commentators of a "Wikileaks revolution".
(Ian Black, The Guardian, Saturday 15 January 2011)
And the revolution in Tunisia sparked protests in Egypt.
Tahrir Square – the demand for freedom
On the 18th January 2011 Asmaa
Mahfou posted a video on Face Book calling for people to meet at Tahrir
square on January 25th 2011. They did. It was the Day
of Rage. She had spoken of four Egyptians who set themselves on fire as
a protest and went on to describe the corruption, the need to rise up, and to
regain one’s dignity. This impassioned call was heeded and led to the
first of 18 significant days that periodised the time and space leading to the
resignation of Mubarak (see day
to day summary).
This revolution is the result of someone sending a Facebook invitation to many people. I got it like other people on our network. The buzz around it was then created on different social media websites and with videos. I was here on 25 January when riot police forced us out and by the 28th, we were back following the violence. I've been sleeping here most of the time since.
Our social network was established in 2005, when there was a democratic opening around the time of the presidential elections. People from different backgrounds all met through blogging and hoped to use technology for social change. It meant we have all gained good contacts, experience and strong networks.
I like to think the social network is the people itself. Things like Facebook, Twitter, SMS and phones are just social tools. When they blocked Facebook and shut down technology, our network still operated because it's about people. Internet activists are also people and a lot of our organising, social work and relationships are developed offline.
The dispositif of Power in terms of the police was countered by the dispositif of power in terms of social media that enabled communication and organization. However, a dispositif is not just the technology. It is about the people and their knowledge, skills, values, practices, discourses.
The role of the people is, it seems to me, to be critical. But what is – let alone who are - ‘the people’? Activists are not ‘the people’, but act like a vanguard, where the activists come to represent that universality (as where the part is claimed to represent the whole) the people as People should embody in order to achieve the future good society. The work of the activists then is as a ‘vanguard’, to motivate and inaugurate what they hope will come into being. The internet and social media, as stated above, have played a critical role in this. There had been previous experience and organisation, in particular, the formation of the April 6 movement (see also) which is described by Wikipedia as an:
“Egyptian Facebook group started by Ahmed Maher and Israa Abdel Fatah in Spring 2008 to support the workers in El-Mahalla El-Kubra, an industrial town, who were planning to strike on April 6.
Activists called on participants to wear black and stay home the day of the strike. Bloggers and citizen journalists used Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, blogs and other new media tools to report on the strike, alert their networks about police activity, organize legal protection and draw attention to their efforts.
When Khalid Said was beaten to death by police in broad daylight, a commemoration was placed on Facebook under the title ‘We are all Khalid Said’ (see also, and). In the view of many, he became a ‘trigger’ for the protests that led to the resignation of Mubarak on February 11, 2011. The power of the internet, social media and the mobile phone led to the Egyptian authorities denying access to the internet and despite vodaphone being compromised on the 25th Jan 2011 and ‘forced’ to send propaganda (see also), the foundations for face-to-face work to keep the protests going had already been laid. Even when violence was used against the protestors by the police and then Mubarak ‘supporters’, the protestors drew strength from the anger, the injuries and the killings to return in even greater numbers. That the police had ‘melted away’ was a common observation of commentators on Al Jazeera and elsewhere. When pro-Mubarak supporters appeared on January 31st, there was speculation that these were composed of, or stimulated by the police. Several police identity cards were found upon captured pro-Mubarak supporters and shown to Al Jazeera reporters lending credence to this view. That the military did not fire upon the protestors, that the protestors persevered in remaining peaceful, determined, that they showed they could defend their selves against attack, that they defied the nightly curfew and consistently turned up in greater numbers each day, transformed Tahrir square into a symbol of unity. It drew together people of all ages. It become a family event, giving at times the sense of a party atmosphere. Considerable attention was given to the range of people who came – engineers, doctors, workers, middle classes, working classes, men, women, Christians, Muslims, non-believers. Again, much was made of the fact that no one person represented them all. There was no leader. There was no political party that would take the lead. Mohamed El Baradei appeared for half an hour or so to make a speech at Tahrir square. In his expressed view, this was protest begun by the youth movement that spread throughout society. There could be no leader. The Muslim Botherhood said that it would support but not lead. When Wael Ghonim a Google executive and well known blogger, went missing January 27th and then released from custody on 7th January, he refused to be accorded the title of ‘hero’ and thus a symbolic leader of the revolution. The real heroes he said, were the people. His emotional interview on release, however, contributed to a sizable turn out at Tahrir square and other cities. The increasing size of the protests, particularly at Tahrir square was a significant factor in focusing attention both locally and internationally – there was the Million Man March January 30th, and the crowds flooding the square on ‘the day of departure’ February 4th, and after Ghonim is released on the 8th February further large crowds with the Trades Unions joining in on the 9th February with strikes around the country and finally after the disappointing speech on February 10th the next day further thousands protest and Mubarak resigns.
The consistent claim being made for this leaderless unity – focused symbolically on Tahrir square, then was that it was an expression of the ‘people’. Some commentators talked of a ‘raw’ demand, a demand for freedom, for social justice, for rights of free speech, for a more democratic future. In Laclau’s (2005) approach to understanding political struggles key terms like ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’, ‘social justice’ are universalising signifiers, empty of contents. They become a site of contestation as different groups, with different interests, seek to place their ‘contents’ and thus construct the ‘meaning’ of the term. The task for the protestors – widely seen as a youth movement - was to show that their demands were not limited to a particular social group or age group. Conversely, the task of those against the protestors would then be to show that the interests of the protestors was limited and thus not universal. This struggle to manage the contents that would be associated with the key terms very much involved the control of the media, particularly in terms of what could be seen and heard. During the protests state television showed optimistic peaceful views of Egyptian society, Mubarak going about his presidential duties and quiet scenes on the streets. Attempts by Mubarak to employ the rhetoric of ‘my people’, symbolising himself as father and the people as children were seen to be patronising by the increasingly large crowds in Tahrir square and in the major cities where protest were also taking place. Al Jazeera, which gave continuous coverage of Tahrir square and events as they were happening in other cities was criticised and its office closed and its reporters harassed. It was stated that foreign journalists were actually spies and trouble makers, particularly from Israel. Coverage, however, continued. Indeed, a large screen was eventually put up in the square for people to see broadcasts. Although the internet was disrupted and mobile phone coverage taken down this was partially restored during the latter days of the protests. Twitter messages of support continued throughout the period, indeed Google helped by improving its speak2tweet technology.
Twitter had played an important role both in the early developments and the period during the protests. It enabled a shared sense of solidarity, emotion and hope that I think are expressed in the following twitter messages – few amongst many hundreds if not thousands that were sent at the time. I recorded these on the February 6th. They do, I think, express something of the high expectation, and indeed awe that people felt as they participated or watched events unfold:
eepings RT @Salma_ts2al: You can't imagine how I wish to be in #Tahrir again! We're making our history guys... don't listen to anybody now... Just go on! #Jan25
Twitter - 8 minutes ago
(06/02/2011)FaithCNN Christians, Muslims hold hands in Cairo, some holding up crosses and Korans #Egypt #Jan25 #tahrir #mubarak
Twitter - seconds ago
(06/02/2011)Avadhutika RT @NadiaE: At times, Tahrir looks like a European flee market. At others, a rock concert. And yet others, a war zone #egypt #jan25
Twitter - seconds ago
(06/02/2011)BBCKimGhattas RT @BBCWorld: Egypt state TV says 6 youths representing TahrirSq protesters participating in gov talks w/ opposition
Twitter - seconds ago
(06/02/2011)XtyMiller RT @Peta_de_Aztlan: RT @sharifkouddous: Just interviewed novelist Ahdaf Soueif in Tahrir: "Egyptians have found their voice again"
Twitter - seconds ago
(06/02/2011)scatx To protesters in #Tahrir & #Egypt: The world is watching. We see you. We see your bravery. We are your witnesses and we are in awe. #jan25
Twitter - 1 minute ago
(06/02/2011)
Overcoming of fear
Fear is an essential ingredient of rule. Its variants can be found in families
and gangs as well as religious, political and business organisations. Hobbes
(1651) famously argued that such was the wild nature of people, to avoid a war
of all against all a fearsome state had to be constructed that through its awesome
power could subject all to its will – Leviathan. The regime underlying
such power was well described by La Boetie in his essay on obedience written
about 1552. Through the conferment of huge rewards and privileges a tyrant maintains
the loyalty of a small number of people, say four or five:
who keep the country in bondage to him. Five or six have always had access to his ear, and have either gone to him of their own accord, or else have been summoned by him, to be accomplices in his cruelties, companions in his pleasures, panders to his lusts, and sharers in his plunders. These six manage their chief so successfully that he comes to be held accountable not only for his own misdeeds but even for theirs. The six have six hundred who profit under them, and with the six hundred they do what they have accomplished with their tyrant. The six hundred maintain under them six thousand, whom they promote in rank, upon whom they confer the government of provinces or the direction of finances, in order that they may serve as instruments of avarice and cruelty, executing orders at the proper time and working such havoc all around that they could not last except under the shadow of the six hundred, nor be exempt from law and punishment except through their influence.
The consequence of all this is fatal indeed. And whoever is pleased to unwind the skein will observe that not the six thousand but a hundred thousand, and even millions, cling to the tyrant by this cord to which they are tied.
(La Boetie 1552, 1975: 72)
The millions are made vulnerable through a host of fears and the hope for a good life. Even under a dictatorship, even at the lowest social rank there is sufficient security and stability to provide work for the minimum levels of subsistence and allow the ordinary pleasures of personal friendship and family life at least for those who do not step out of line, do not challenge and know that it is not their destiny to ask for more. Indeed, dictatorships cannot persist without a minimum of consent and support from a large number of people alongside a sense of vulnerability and fear from the rest. Translating this into comparisons with contemporary dictatorships, the organisation of Mubarak’s regime in the context of the Tahrir Square protests the people had first to confront and then cross the fear threshold as they took on the whole deeply ingrained and intricate structuring of threat, punishment and corruption that had been maintained psychologically, socially, economically and militarily. This could be called a dispositif of fear, and imposed through the sources and elements of Power:
These sources of political power include:
- Authority, the belief among the people that the regime is legitimate, and that they have a moral duty to obey it;
- Human resources, the number and importance of the persons and groups which are obeying, cooperating, or providing assistance to the rulers; Skills and knowledge, needed by the regime to perform specific actions and supplied by the cooperating persons and groups;
- Intangible factors, psychological and ideological factors that may induce people to obey and assist the rulers;
- Material resources, the degree to which the rulers control or have access to property, natural resources, financial resources, the economic system, and means of communication and transportation; and
- Sanctions, punishments, threatened or applied, against the disobedient and noncooperative to ensure the submission and cooperation that are needed for the regime to exist and carry out its policies.
All of these sources, however, depend on acceptance of the regime, on the submission and obedience of the population, and on the cooperation of innumerable people and the many institutions of the society. These are not guaranteed.
(Sharpe 2010: 18-19)
With nothing guaranteed there is always the possibility and hope together with the work of resistance and mobilisation employing all the means to hand:
After our huge turnout on the first Tuesday, demonstrations continued for the next two days and we publicised further action for Friday on the internet. That day they cut our communications and took our cameras so we had an information blackout and the violence was unbelievable. A lot of people died. Still the threshold of fear and pain had been broken and we have kept up momentum since. Now older people especially come up to us when we're collecting trash or whatever in the square and they say: "We're really proud of you... You did what we didn't manage to do for 60 years. "People have called this the "Facebook Revolution" because it gave us a form of expression even when people were too scared to talk in big groups about political issues. We had already set up Facebook pages for people who were tortured to death. We found it was a way to talk without being tracked.
(Amr Gharbeia, BBC 7 February 2011 Last updated at 15:56)
Characteristic of the Egyptian protestors were their insistence on peaceful means. This, in Sharpe’s terms is critical because:
By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority. The dictators are equipped to apply violence overwhelmingly. However long or briefly these democrats can continue, eventually the harsh military realities usually become inescapable. The dictators almost always have superiority in military hardware, ammunition, transportation, and the size of military forces. Despite bravery, the democrats are (almost always) no match.
(Sharpe 2010: 4)
However, what is there to learn from these experiences of successful protest in Egypt for those in the West?
What is going on? Miracle or ….
For Zizek Egypt is a miracle and Wikileaks is impoliteness in public. First
the miracle:
One cannot but note the "miraculous" nature of the events in Egypt: something has happened that few predicted, violating the experts' opinions, as if the uprising was not simply the result of social causes but the intervention of a mysterious agency that we can call, in a Platonic way, the eternal idea of freedom, justice and dignity.
The uprising was universal: it was immediately possible for all of us around the world to identify with it, to recognise what it was about, without any need for cultural analysis of the features of Egyptian society. In contrast to Iran's Khomeini revolution (where leftists had to smuggle their message into the predominantly Islamist frame), here the frame is clearly that of a universal secular call for freedom and justice, so that the Muslim Brotherhood had to adopt the language of secular demands.
(Zizek Guardian 2011Thursday 10 February)
The universal as ‘eternal’ transcends a mere promise. For those who do not feel they are treated with freedom, justice and dignity it generates a demand that is either repressed and thus frustrated or expressed and so, at its most controlled, a challenge to the prevailing order that denies their realisation for all, or explosive when that challenge is violently repressed. What is it that holds in check all the frustration felt when the universal is denied? It was a question asked in terms of the obedience of the many to the will of the few by La Boetie in the c1552, a question of why the many tolerate the injustice of exploitation by the tyrant, or in contemporary western terms, by the oligarchical elites that run our economies and own our ‘democracies’. His answer was in terms of the hierarchical structures by which those higher up receive greater privileges and rewards than those below them to enforce – by violence when necessary – obedience by those lower down. At each level, in Dejours’ (1998) terms there is a hardness seen as a virtue by the mangers, the captains, the group leaders, the head of the family to impose discipline and sanctions. And by the recipients there is the virtue of ‘being able to take it’, of not complaining, of coping with, perhaps even delighting in, austerity. The attitudes required, the everyday rationales appropriate to make justifications, the skills of management and of coping comprise the curriculum for the pedagogies of obedience and the toleration of the intolerable.
Now we can turn to the issue of the intolerance of impoliteness in public and the lesson of Wikileaks. Firstly:
The only surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn’t we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don’t know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.
(Zizek 2011: London Review of Books)
Zizek points to the function of the lie in civil society, the Noble Lie as Plato called it, a lie all the same that was necessary, he believed to maintain the belief in a hierarchy of value between people, the talented, wise and noble at the top ruling over the labouring masses at the bottom, with the security forces (or guardians) and skilled workers in the middle ranks. Its modern version was taken up by Leo Strauss, a student of Carl Schmitt (a political theorist who became a Nazi sympathiser and advisor) who believed that politics began only in the formation of an enemy as a way of creating a bounded image of the State or Nation defined as ‘us’ against ‘them’; and who believed in the necessity of the lie for the maintaining of elite control and governance in all institutions within ‘democratic’ societies – a doctrine that fits well with capitalist neoliberal and neocon practices to underpin inequality, exploitation across the public and private sectors of the economy. What is impolite is revealing in public that ‘we know’ the Noble Lie is just a lie. But who is the ‘we’? Is it comprised only of the leaders who must act as if there is no lie, or that they have no knowledge of such a lie? Or, is it the people who must not bring to consciousness the anxiety of expressing knowledge of the lie and thus betraying that it is they who are the real power behind the maintenance of the lie?
What WikiLeaks threatens is the formal functioning of power. The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs etc) – as the Indian academic Saroj Giri put it, WikiLeaks ‘challenged power by challenging the normal channels of challenging power and revealing the truth’. The aim of the WikiLeaks revelations was not just to embarrass those in power but to lead us to mobilise ourselves to bring about a different functioning of power that might reach beyond the limits of representative democracy.
(Zizek 2011: London Review of Books)
What is downplayed by this focus on the impolite is the anger, the demands for retribution, the accusations of treachery and terrorism made by the elites against a subordinate, in this case Bradley Manning currently in solitary confinement, who ‘allegedly’ passed the stolen cables to Julian Assange. The stated purpose of stealing and subsequently leaking the cables was that a particular individual could no longer tolerate the acts of the powerful.
Everyday, in every organisation, in every market place, in every street and every home we tolerate the acts of the powerful. Tolerating the intolerable is a major feature of neoliberal practices as argued by Christophe Dejours (1998) drawing on Hannah Arendt’s (1963) reflections on Eichmann at the Nuremberg trials. The banality of evil is today translated into the many ‘normal’ acts of subjection, indifference to and exploitation of others carried out by everyone as increasingly the intolerable is tolerated when: managers take hard decisions to cut costs; or citizens take hard decisions to stop benefits to ‘scroungers’, the ‘idle’ or mothers with too many children; or feel justified in procedures that refuse help to Asylum seekers or ‘economic migrants’. And all this, and more, across all areas of society in the public and private sectors there are the everyday rationales required to justify the increasing toleration of the intolerable onslaughts on social, economic cultural and ‘human’ rights. Behind any appearance of the polite, and the need for tact in public, are the frustrations and angers that are kept in check by anxieties and the sheer fear of acting out of step.
In his study of the conditions of work imposed by neo-liberal practices in France, Christophe Dejours (1998) has argued that political strategies, particularly those on the left, have not employed appropriate strategies of analysis. Without a good analysis of contemporary circumstances, he argues, political strategies aiming at social justice will be deficient or wrong. And a good analysis for the production of appropriate strategies can only be accomplished through a multiplicity of collective reflections, debates and decision making in public spaces for public action(s). The protests that have spread since the food riots in Algeria on the 6th January, the revolution in Tunisia and then the revolution in Egypt and then riots spreading to Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Jordan and others have drawn lessons from each other providing experience for the development of local strategies. Any protest will give insights into the conditions underlying the protests and the community and state structures, discourses, practices, and processes that tacitly if not explicitly underlie the social, political and economic order at local, national, transnational and global levels. This is why, it seems to me, that critically exploring from an educational and research perspective what has happened in response to Wikileaks and has been happening in the Middle East is so important today.
At a global level they give credence to the arguments of those like Callinicos (2000), Wallerstein (2003) Arrighi (2007) of the unsustainability of global capitalism in its present form. In terms of the conjunctural cycle, we are in a period of transition. American power is in decline (Wallerstein 2003), the power of China is in ascendance (Arrighi 2007) but it is not yet clear what the settlement in terms of a new world order will be. Western leaders’ and in particular Obama’s reactions, or rather lack of them, in the initial stages of the Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan risings contribute to the sense that the old American dominated world order is confused as to the tactical let alone strategic courses to take.
The financial crisis unfolding since 2008 has revealed the degree to which the political order is subject to transnational finance corporations and global markets. Private corporations have grown so large that their revenues now exceed many States and as the financial crisis has demonstrated States even the size of the USA have little choice but to accommodate to market expectations.
These two events – Wikileaks and the symbol and practice of Tahrir square - of global significance, were neither the result of a miracle, nor an impoliteness. By deconstructing the symbols, the media representations, the organisation of systems and institutions of the state and the structures of private corporations what begins to emerge are the histories of the struggles between the creation of public space as against the organisation of obedience of the many in the creation of private spaces for the amassing of wealth and the exercise of privilege for the few. In saying that the purpose of Wikileaks is to ‘mobilise’ us all in organising power differently, Zizek, of course, recognises this. As an advent of such mobilisation, the Tunisian, the Egyptian and following them the protests in Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Libya, Iraq Jordan, all calling for their day of rage; and in terms of Wikileaks itself, the attacks (DDOS) on Wikileaks websites have led to the generation of mirror sites and attacks on corporations and government departments.
To go against the State and Corporate security forces takes courage as distinct from the ‘virtues’ that lead to tolerating the intolerable (Dejours 1998). Clearly, the work of activists is significant. But there needs to be more than this if a protest is to be more than a shortlived event at the margins of a particular organisation, system or state. The role of communications media have been crucial. Indeed, they are seen as a new and powerful resource for the mobilisation of protest. Activists were well aware and organised for this. However, there must also be a pedagogy drawn from the lessons of past protests. In the case of the April 6 Movement, there were in particular lessons to be drawn from the Otpor movement of Serbia as well as support and training by the USA(see also). Otpor provided strategies based upon non-violence (see for example). They too had begun with a day of rage. And there had been the inspirational text of Gene Sharpe (2010) in developing a conceptual framework of peaceful strategy where:
one has four immediate tasks:
• One must strengthen the oppressed population themselves in their determination, self-confidence, and resistance skills;
• One must strengthen the independent social groups and institutions of the oppressed people;
• One must create a powerful internal resistance force; and
• One must develop a wise grand strategic plan for liberation and implement it skillfully.
(Sharpe 2010 : 7-8)
But where, in the West, is our Tahrir Square?
What does it mean to be pro-democracy?
Being pro-democracy is not about resistance to some external greater authority.
It is, in my view, about constructing democracy in all spheres of social life.
As such it builds countervailing powers, legitimacies and justices to those
of Power. So then, what is democracy?
Sharpe (2010: 22) notes that ‘democracies’ consist in a multiplicity of groups – ‘families, religious organizations, cultural associations, sports clubs, economic institutions, trade unions, student associations, political parties, villages, neighborhood associations, gardening clubs, human rights organizations, musical groups, literary societies, and others.’ It may be true that they provide countervailing powers to that of a government, but what sort of power. These institutions of civil society do not necessarily mean that democratic values will be implemented; they can equally be employed to instil the values of local hierarchies through traditional pedagogies of obedience. Rather than spheres of justice – in Walzer’s (1985) sense – these become spheres of servitude and duty that can be ‘tamed’, ‘shaped’ ‘engineered’ by the public relations arms of governments and corporations of what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex in order to manufacture consent (Lipman 1922) or engineer it (Bernays 1928, 1947; see also see Herman and Chomsky 1988 who drew upon the notion of the manufacture of consent in their study of mass media). The role of education – or rather as I prefer it, schooling – in the manufacture of the habits of consent as well as the habits of the toleration of the intolerable in all organisations from schools to universities, from the street to the church, and from home to work provides the dispositif called upon by the elite drivers of policy and the market place that in the words of Bernays (1928:127) produces “a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses.” This intelligent minority forms what Bernays called the ‘invisible government’:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
(Bernays 1928: 27)
Bernays, the nephew of Freud, was one of the key pioneers of public relations selling the New Deal of Roosevelt alongside masterminding the marketing of cigarettes to women. His strategies are still drawn upon today (Tye 1998, BBC 2002). As the newly elected President Hoover in 1928 was quick to acknowledge addressing representatives of the new public relations industry:
“You have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines, machines which have become the key to economic progress.”
(BBC 2002)
As ‘constantly moving happiness machines’ or as fearful tolerators of the intolerable each such individual is a part of the contemporary globalised neo-liberal market and its client ‘democracies’. where in this is the possibility of the emergence of a ‘western democracy’ version of Tahrir Square, a space and place of liberation?
Being pro-democracy it seems to me, is to take seriously the claim that democracy is an unfinished and unfinishable revolution (Mouffe 1993). Democracy, if it is to be more than rule by ‘invisible governments’ has to open up the spaces for the inclusion voices to participate in decision making in every organisation and institution of social life. It is a similar point made by Fraser (2007) speaking of social justice:
justice requires social arrangements that permit all members to participate in social interaction on a par with one another. So that means they must be able to participate as peers in all the major forms of social interaction: whether it's politics, whether it's the labour market, whether it's family life and so on.
This opening up of spaces for voices to engage in all matters is what I consider to be the co-extensive roles of education and research in creating the conditions for the emergence of a public rather than a ‘phantom public’ (Lippman 1927) where critical decision making is systematically closed down by the manufacture and engineering of consent, fear and ‘happiness machines’.
Education, if it is not to be reduced exclusively to the curricular and pedagogic demands of the corporate dominated market places and their client States; and research, if it not to be reduced to engineering consent and managing behaviour to meet policy targets can draw inspiration from what has begun in protest in order to build socially just societies and social organisations that guarantee freedom with equality.
Freedom with equality (What Balibar calls égaliberté or equaliberty) is fundamental for the imagination and expression of alternatives as the basis for critiques of present local circumstances and global historical conjunctures (This is a deliberate echo the Analistes, the French school of historical analysis. However, I am not using the term with any rigid reduction to their method. It connotes that prevailing dynamics of economic, political, cultural, military factors at play in international relations.). Freedom with equality makes a radical demand. Without freedom only a limited range of approved views can be heard – hence not all views are equally available for debate. Without equality, minority views, critical views can be overruled, hence their freedom to be heard and taken into account in debate negated.
Thus there is a critical demand on education and research to scrutinise under the principle of freedom with equality the governance, administration and organisational structures adopted by policy makers by which they impose their will upon people across the whole range of spaces and places involving all forms of collective work, play, the expression of views, the exchange of goods and services, and engagement in action in everyday life. All governance, administration and organisational structures must be continually challenged by both research and education, if they are to sustain the exercise of reason, expression of views, the imagination of alternatives, the voicing of experience, debate as a basis of decision making and collective engagement in action under conditions for freedom with equality in all matters.
Neither education nor research, on this principle, can be a client of a particular group expressing interests that require the repression or subservience of other groups and individuals. Thus education and research, on this principle, is radically open to the voices of all. Under these conditions subservience and the injustices experienced that have been variously constructed historically and maintained throughout the economic, political, social, cultural, religious spheres of community life by force or the threat of force cannot continue without challenge in public. Without a radically and dynamically open political organisation voices will be excluded and thus injustices unheard. Thus the work of education and research involves the continual creation of the conditions to include new voices in public spaces of debate, decision making and action (as modest example of democratic practice see). But education and research are not the preserve of specialists. It is the unfinished and unfinishable work of all. It is here, I think, in this work of education and research where we find our Tahrir Square, a no-space of democracy always creating the place of its emergence in every act of engagement with others. It here that we can construct the forms of democratic organisation in every sphere of life that are the countervailing powers to Power.
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