We can speak today of a certain crisis of democracy both as a fact and, more importantly, as a credible value. Authoritarian regimes prove their efficiency, and in many Western countries, voters show their preferences for illiberal and/or authoritarian forces, which makes the electoral interpretation of democracy a self-destructive principle.

Unsurprisingly, democracy and democratization, once at the top of value priorities for progressive intelligentsia, survive with a moral twist: the intelligentsia increasingly dedicates itself to the rights of the identitarian minorities that do not and would notvote for it and chastises its elites for universalist assertiveness. The moral outlook further serves as a gatekeeping principle against the potential non-democratically minded outsiders. In this way, democratic agenda survives in an internalized form that Alain Badiou once called “democracy for the democrats”.

A nice metaphor of such gatekeeping is a famous art project “Enjoy Poverty” by Renzo Martens, where he shows how human rights agencies promote the welfare of the starving citizens of Congo but would not let the Congolese themselves into the human rights “business”, specifically, by not accepting them as photographers for their publications.

Right-wing governments and left-wing intelligentsia get disappointed in democracy for different reasons: the former just want a stable authoritarian power structure immune from legal persecution, the latter (rightly) see democracy as a Western hegemonic value allowing to exterminate subalterns. But the result is ubiquitous rise of nationalist authoritarianism. For years, a looming exception was the Kurdish Rojava, but this project has been almost eliminated lately, due to the processes of state consolidation in Syria.

In this context, it is equally mistaken to hold on to the Whiggish doctrine of democratic progress, or, at the other extreme, to identify with a purely self-destructive program of supporting outsiders, the more ruthless they are the better. Some mutual “outreach” between authority and rebellion would be preferrable here.

The rationale for the ongoing shifts is fairly evident, and can be described in terms of the Hegelian/Marxist dialectical method. Class struggle, as described by Marx, or a power struggle, as described by Hegel, is at its most apparent as a clash between two forces: society polarizes into two positions, and all the various groups align with one of them: a situation of a civil war or of any US election. However, Hegel’s point, and mutatis mutandis Marx’s too, is that this antagonistic relation is unstable, and that dialectically it has to move toward a third element. The traditional version of this ternary relationship is “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” as developed among others in Soviet ideology and in Kojève’s version of French Hegelianism. As Popper, being a critic of dialectic, saw well, this theory comes close to a commonsense view that the two extremes have to be reconciled in some kind of a compromise, synthetic picture. In the diamat version, such a synthesis would be the socialist worker, in Kojève’s version, or, more precisely, it would be a democratic worker-citizen.  Both Soviet “socialism” and American “democracy”, the master signifiers of the Cold war, were in fact two awkward attempts at a synthesis between a “master” and “servant” role that would allow one to conceive the proletarianized and at the same time embourgeoised masses as collective “masters”. Both could only accomplish this ideological synthesis with the help of nationalism, with which I’ll deal a bit further.

Against the naïve and deeply un-Hegelian notion of “synthesis”, twentieth century “Western Marxism” proposed several versions of a “negative dialectic”, that is, in Adorno’s words, a “dialectic without synthesis”. The great proponents of this school of thought in the recent and current theory have been Jameson and Žižek. Complex and vast as this body of scholarship is, I’ll try to summarize it in the following way:

i. There is no historical solution to antagonism. History does not move on, and dialectic is at a standstill, in the best case yielding a destructive strike (Walter Benjamin).

ii. The antagonism (contradiction) is a glue that, in the final account, holds society together.

iii. There is, however, some kind of negative synthesis between the opposites, which combines only their destructive, morbid elements and usually expresses itself psycho-pathologically—via sadism, masochism, and fetishism.

Now, if we take this back to Hegel, we see that we have to be more subtle. In Hegel’s dialectics, a correlative opposition such as master and servant resolves itself through an operation he calls a “negation of negation”. Adorno rightly understands this to mean that the negation actually intensifies, because the first negation had not been negative enough. One historical route of this transformation, the one that Hegel himself takes, is towards the interiorization of the conflict (in the so-called “unhappy consciousness”, or in the nation-state). Another, no less obvious, route is to say that both the master and the servant have become too close by virtue of their correlation, and the negativity inherent in this relationship has now been displaced, reattached to a third force. Thus, we get a “classical” ternary scheme, but instead of a synthesis, we have a force of the excluded, of the uncounted, of the precarious sub-servants, lumpen-proletariat, and of paperless migrants.

This is a line of thought that became popular after 1968 and can be found in Rancière, Badiou, Negri and Hardt, and other Western philosophers, most often without any reference to Hegel. It is also in line with the post-colonial criticism of Marxism: the real conflict allegedly lies not between the classes in the West, or the North, but between the North and the South that it had subsumed both militarily and economically. This rather simple observation is quite in line with original Marxism. Marx defined “proletariat” as the third, purely negativistic term in the confrontation between nobility and bourgeoisie. Marx’s analysis in The Capital shows that proletariat emerges in at least two forms: the working class and the “reserve army of labor,” alias, the unemployed. That means the relationship is double, and a proletarian is not fully integrated into it, standing so to say with one foot inside, and with the other outside it. Using the Lacanian method according to which the Freudian subject is always-already castrated just because s/he can be, one could similarly say that a worker under capitalism is always-already unemployed. The current discussion of “precarity” is in this sense nothing new, but just the Marxian analysis of capital revealing itself more explicitly. The same can be said about migrant labor, where the outside is not only structural but also geographic. The post-colonial and de-colonial logic are also an element of Marxist theory, spelled out if not in Marx himself then in Rosa Luxemburg: the tertium datur of exploitation are the goods and sites of production that are not yet integrated into the market, so that sheer violence and domination supplement the supposedly novel contractual mode of exploitation.

Translated back into dialectical theory, we see that the site of contradiction is unstable: what used to be a contradiction, and then a binary opposition, contracts itself, the negative term is absorbed into the positive one, and the emerging term appears as an exotic outside that falls out of the relationship. Jameson, who observes this problem in the “Valences of the Dialectic”[i], rightly observes (against Foucault) that it does not falsify the method as such: the seemingly unrelated term gradually reconnects with the previous opposition (now appearing as almost reconciled) through a number of new terms, that would relate to both and thus provide a mediation:

“Meanwhile, a rather different philosophical problem is raised by the logical objection that the instances we have enumerated are in fact not really binary oppositions at all, inasmuch as the subordinate term ought in principle to be able to be subsumed under the dominant one, thus offering at least a caricature of the pseudo-Hegelian synthesis […]. Thus, the slave is not the opposite of the master, but rather, along with him, an equally integral component of the larger system called slavery or domination; and it is only with the reintroduction of individual existence that the two “aspects” become individual terms in their own right.”[ii]

Thus, the excluded outsiders are included into the capitalist logic inside the country, through a public welfare system (or, socialism of the capital), and outside the country through nationalism which ambivalently unites the logic of welfare membership (inside the Northern polities) with the support of an identitarian autonomism and secession (outside them). The sphere of labor is distinct from the spheres of politics, domestic and international, as well as from religious struggles, and Marx thought that the latter were auxiliary “superstructures”, but it makes more sense to think of them as spheres of their own. Political conflicts over identity, membership, and voice are variously interwoven with the economy of labor, concerning, among other things, the reserve army of labor, eligibility for labor, and creating “workplaces” for communicative labor. In philosophical terms, “politics” is here the way to think about interiority and exteriority: a relationship without which power struggles are inconceivable. In this sense it is not quite accurate to believe, like early Žižek, that the ongoing events are clustered along the lines of a foundational parallax of “class struggle”, because such a struggle must happen somewhere and between someone, and neither its sites nor participants can be hypostasized. If we are Hegelian, we need to capture the structure in its dynamic, thus witnessing a pendulum going from opposition, toward a disentaglement (that is, a “parallax”), and potentially back. History, like an amoeba, moves along through a series of invaginations and expulsions or, which is the same thing, of so many twists between form-content.

Now, if I proceed more practically, there are four conclusions.

  1. The shift of emphasis to the outsiders and the unemployed cannot and should not obscure the initial “internal” contradiction. Unlike the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”, the triad of position, negation, and negation of negation should not be taken in a linear progressivist sense. The second negation does not really annul the first one, and does not supersede it, but actually reinforces it right where it is. Class and ideological struggle within national borders do not weaken because of colonial and imperial oppression but, on the contrary, international imperialism exacerbates internal democratic struggles. The election of Trump and other nationalist populists was in part a return to the initial “Northern” class struggle in the situation where globalization ran out of steam, and the attitude to migration has increasingly become one of the most important items of domestic politics throughout the “North”, even though the migrants themselves are not necessarily an active driving force of these conflicts. In this sense, the dialectical structure of Modernity has become static, and in this the prophets of negative dialectic are in a way correct (malgrè eux): no one is moving anywhere, but the tension is circulating around the system, from the first negation to the second, and back. The problem of insiders/outsiders undermines the fundamental political ideal of democracy, not even in the superficial sense of the liberal democratic order being a cover-up for capitalist exploitation, but in a more serious sense where democracy is understood literally and represents a widely accepted value of left-liberal, or social-democratic politics. If democracy is a value, then there is no reason why it must not be, ideally, extrapolated into workplace democracy (employees’ councils at enterprises) and international relations (“cosmopolitan democracy”). But as long as democratic membership is in this or another way circumscribed, limited by citizenship, a long-term contract at an organization, or an international body, then there is immediately looming a specter of in-group-based sovereign egoism that would make members fear migrants or prevent the CEO from making ad hoc hires.
  2. Similar processes happen in the capitalist economy even without any movement towards workplace democracy. Monopolization, oligopolization and (in countries with strong labor protection) the provisions of job security stabilize scarce jobs, while commercial relationships are increasingly redefined as relations of “subscription” (that is, membership and privilege).
  3. Democracy, being a political ideal, may be juxtaposed and contrasted with socialism as a Modern economic ideal. Socialism could be seen as a revolutionary and materialist alternative to light-minded “democracy”. However, the notion of socialism is split in a way similar to that of democracy. The more familiar welfare-state Socialism-1 is a model to complement classical capitalism: it allows capitalism to exist by providing sustenance to the reserve army of labor. A subversive and emancipatory Socialism-2 would need to go further and involve a democratization of workplace, instead of being a form of legalized charity. Thus, “socialism’ is dialectically split into integrative and transformative frameworks, but, more commonly, this set of measures serves capitalism in order to create privileges both for the existing jobholders and for the unemployed (for the latter, through nationally provided guarantees). The aforementioned collective egoism can be countered by an extension of the democratic model through “open democracy” or “stakeholders’ democracy”, but then the democratic principle risks being transformed into a liberal and selective humanitarian policy depending on good intentions and self-serving to the insiders’ economic interests. For instance, if we take the US, selective privileges for the inclusion of disadvantaged groups (or “affirmative action”) in most cases reflect the historical injustices characteristic for this country and may serve, in a different optics, as additional barriers against non-Americans. As for the extension of labor rights to migrants (another inclusive liberal measure), it is clear that, under capitalism, it is a way of increasing general wealth by furthering exploitation. The enthusiastic defense of the rights of minorities to secede from other countries undermines the power of these countries by comparison with the more homogeneous ones (like the United States).   All of this is to say that, because of the ternary dialectic described above, the concept of democracy is subject to a dialectical ambiguity. Restrictive democracy can bring undemocratic results on a larger scale. This is an old historical mechanism that precedes explicit “democratization”. For instance, in the 18th century, many European monarchies, for instance France and Russia, extended the rights of nobility, sharing power with them and opening up the political process. The democratic reforms and revolutions that followed were not continuous developments of these liberalizing reforms but, in part, went directly counter them, the bitterness of the French revolution being due to this clash of the two ascending classes. Similarly, the recent trend of right-wing “populist” vote is a defense by the underprivileged groups of the “Northern” societies, having been affected by the transfer of capitalist exploitation, as described above, to outsiders from the South, their democratic privilege of membership weakened. The dialectic of democracy, which thus blocks both the expansion and the credibility of this higher political value of Modernity, is thus the second direct result of the ternary dialectic of master/servant (master/servant/servant’). There is a certain blockage here again, a “dialectic at a standstill”.  And this leads me to my fifth and last point.
  4. Wilhelm Reich famously argued that sexual repression, being an interiorized subspecies of violence, is much harder to struggle against than forms of external violence. This logic of internalized oppression can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the self-consciousness of the citizens of welfare-state national republics, and explains the spectrum of conservative and xenophobic reactions to the current crisis. As Herbert Marcuse, being critical of liberal democracy as such, once noted, they accomplish a “democratic introjection” of authority. However, a de-colonial anti-capitalist revolution, something along the lines of Régis Debray, or even of Negri and Hardt, is under these circumstances extremely complicated as well. Revolutions in the South, as we know them, take the form of nationalist secession (as in Iran), or, in the more recent years, are enthusiastic attempts to join the liberal democratic capitalist world (as in the failed uprisings of the Arab Spring). The externality of geographical and cultural borders is almost as serious of an obstacle to a universalist progressive revolution as the interiority of psychological borders. A conflict, IIh in tIuth is due Io an internal antagonism of the system with its extremely uneven distribution of agency and wealth, may at best (or at worst) end up in a war among nations and further self-othering of historically underprivileged societies. The result of this double negative that Western de-colonial theory is building upon will be a proliferation of national capitalist states, usually politically authoritarian and corrupt, because they simply cannot afford to provide political and economic transparency to the world where Northern capital’s power is reinforced by the powerful intrusive media. The stronger of these national authoritarianisms will provide the ruthless caricatures of Western capitalism; the weaker ones will further disintegrate through a nationalist logic; and the ensuing atomization will reinforce the power (both political and economic) of the stronger states, along with the US and European Union.

Many of these arguments may be familiar from the writings of conservative anti-Western authors like Dugin, but the Left has to be aware of these structural contradictions. Most of the positions that the Northern academia currently considers radical, meant to correlate with personal and intellectual radicalism, have historically been developed as humanitarian distractions by the bourgeoisie to preserve its comfortable lifestyle, appease its consciousness, and avoid socialist revolutions. It is by now clear that the socialist revolutionary phase, without perspectives of being supported or implemented, may serve as a distraction as well. Therefore, what is needed is not moral enthusiasm but a theoretical dialectical work that would find the strategies that would be truly emancipatory and universalist.

On a theoretical plane, this essay has shown that the master/servant dialectic, that is, in Hegel and Marx, the dialectic of subject and object (both self-undermining in the process), cannot be understood without a concurrent dialectic of inside and outside, or (what is the same) of identity and otherness. A conflict over agency (mastery/servitude) is overdetermined by a dynamic of absorption and expulsion, with two possible end-states:

a) both sides being left alone, becoming master-without-servant (contemporary middle class) and servant-without-master (authoritarian nation-states of the South).

b) both sides absorbing each other, into a guilty moral consciousness of a Nietzschean “master” or the Marcusean democratic introjection of mastery by the servants, on the one hand, and the non-Western decolonizing societies self-colonizing by building authoritarian and identitarian caricatures of capitalist states, on the other.

Power is not simply agency; it is also influence. The dialectic of inside/outside, as overdetermined by power, is permeated by the forces of attraction and seduction. The Northern metropoles pull in migrants, this new proletariat that chooses submission but is not immune to the risk of expulsion into the geographical outside. Southern post-colonies tempt with negativity: the spectacle of tragedies that keeps the attention of the Northern sentimental public who seek to help the victims of hunger and atrocities on the spot, without including them, because that would amount to a new imperialism. Imperialism, however, has become illegitimate, being too ambiguous and indeterminate between the logics of interiority and exteriority.

The attempt at revolt may mean, as in Marx, an attempt of the proletariat to completely revolutionize the system and destroy the class structure. But, more often than not, it leads to a severing of relations. When complicated by geographic outsideness, this can lead, on the part of the oppressed “servant”, to a nationalist secession, or an atomizing pulverization of protest in anarchistic “multitudes”, and on the side of the master, to what Hegel further describes as a “beautiful soul”, or an objectless subject constantly indignant with any instant of human objectivization, but incapable of acting. Ironically, as Hegel also saw all too well, the insistence of a subject on their identity (A=A) and, in a humanitarian logic, on the sovereign self-identity of the Other, leads, instead of empowerment, to rigidity and self-reification.  When we speak of negation of negation as an intensifying mechanism, we shouldn’t ignore Hegel’s reminder that “no” to “no” may also mean a modified affirmation, but at this level of intensity affirmation most probably means a reification: the deadweight of melancholia, a bare life of a pauperized worker and, from a political perspective, the rigidity of nationalist or racial identity.

An alternative to this deadlock is a federalizing internalization of the world, and elaboration of vibrant cooperative institutions, which I would call democratic, but only on the condition that they are based on a rotation of personal functions and memberships, and include the use of sortition (this powerful institutionalization of negativity) as a mechanism of rotation.  If we want to expand these institutions, master/servant asymmetry cannot be fully eliminated, nor can the charge of “imperialism” be fully refuted, but it could only be legitimate if combined with educational hegemony and built on the possibility of gradual and continuous inclusion.

Notes:

[i] Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, Verso 2009, 20.

[ii] Ibid.