Demanding the Impossible (3 page)

Again, this is what I try to adhere to: given the sense of urgency, we need to think – and this is not because of any of my communist dreams. I have lived in a communist country. I know how horrible it was – in a more
global
sense. Let’s say something like a new ice age in Europe or more severe droughts in Africa do happen. At the same time, they tell us – I don’t know whether it’s true – the gigantic forests in northern Siberia will become habitable because the permafrost is melting there. True, climate change will bring increased competition for resources, coastal flooding, infrastructure damage from melting permafrost, stresses on animal species and indigenous cultures of the region – all this accompanied by ethnic violence, civil disorder, and local gang rule. In the same way, we hear more and more voices enjoining us to heed global warming. The pessimistic predictions should be put into a more balanced context.

But if this happens, do we even have mechanisms to organize things? How will we transfer people from, let’s say, Africa to wherever? There are already spontaneous transfers happening. In a year or so, cargo ships will be able to take a direct northern route, cutting the consumption of fuel and reducing carbon emissions. And I was told that many Chinese are already moving to Siberia. Are we aware of what is happening? Two million Chinese are already in Africa taking over. This horrifies my leftist friends there.

But I’m telling them that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions. Doesn’t this mean that maybe we should accept that the United States is not always automatically the bad guy? We talk about America being an economic neocolonialist state, but what about Chinese neocolonialism? I am what you might call abstractly an anti-capitalist. I am, for instance, suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. Why is the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. But it is obvious that China is now a mega economic colonial power in Africa. They are doing some better things than the West, but not all. For example, take Sudan or Zimbabwe where they are ruthlessly creating factories run by local tyrants. Or take Myanmar. It is absolutely clear how the General survived the great protest led by the Buddhist monks a couple of years ago: the military regime was saved with the discreet help of Chinese security advisors. Myanmar is effectively a Chinese economic colony, with China playing the standard postcolonial strategy of supporting the corrupt military regime in exchange for the freedom to exploit the vast natural resources.

It is the same as what South Korean business corporations tried to do in Madagascar. I’ve heard that it didn’t go through, but it is another example of capitalist colonialism. As I was told, the plan was pretty horrible. Daewoo Logistics, one of the major international corporations in South Korea, announced that it wanted to buy some 3.2 million acres of farmland, the most fertile land, in Madagascar, amounting to nearly half of its arable land. And it plans to put about three-quarters of this land under corn, with the remainder used to produce palm oil, a key commodity in the global biofuels market. And they claim that their deal will also benefit Madagascar. But everyone knows that it is OK as long as the economy goes well. If not, people in Madagascar will suffer from hunger. I really think we are living in such crazy times, where, without some kind of links beyond and above the level of state, we will be lost in a new chaos. The circle of postcolonial dependence is thus closed again.

From what I heard from my political friends, many states are silently already preparing for debt. One way to read American politics is to see it based on the premise that most of the world will be in chaos soon. So we just have to isolate ourselves, protect ourselves and think about how we have control over a few vital issues, like oil in the Middle East. And the others – who cares? Let them starve. So communism is once again at the gates. Who is to decide on the priorities here, and how, if such decisions cannot be left to the market? It is here that the question of communism has to be raised once again.

As you have argued, the resuscitation of the notion of communism can only be justified when it is related to the commons. And in an interesting interview with the
Guardian
, you “disclosed the secret” that communism will win. What did you mean by that? And by your claim that the explosion of uprisings and rebellions would lead us to overcome the failures of twentieth-century communism?

SŽ:
I like the aspect of
common
, in the sense that we are facing mega problems where old notions of sovereign states or even issues like ecology are being questioned. See, for example, what they did for the financial crisis: compare the $700 billion spent by the US alone in order to stabilize the banking system to the fact that, of the $22 billion pledged by richer nations to help develop poorer nations’ agriculture in the face of the current food crisis, only $2.2 billion has so far been made available. The financial meltdown made it impossible to ignore the blatant irrationality of global capitalism. In this sense, the Copenhagen Climate Summit was simply a fiasco. When there is any type of ecological meeting, all they say is: “Yes, we should go on talking and then we succeeded because we decided that we will meet again and talk in two years.” You see, nonetheless, for the financial crisis, they are able to act immediately with sums of money, which are simply unbelievably huge. This, I think, is a paradox.

Look what Stalin said: “If you shoot one person you are a murderer. If you kill a couple of persons you are a gangster. If you are a crazy statesman and send millions to their deaths you are a hero.” It’s horrible. We now can say the same thing about crime. If you steal one hundred thousand dollars, you are a thief. If you destroy billions, banks and the state will help you. I’m really worried.

This is what I mean about my communism – not the Leninist version, which was total madness. Many leftists hate me when I argue that twentieth-century communism might have been the biggest ethico-political fiasco in the history of humanity. I think there is no other soft explanation. Some things were done well here and there, but globally it was a fiasco. But the problems, to which communism tried to provide an answer, are still here, more than ever. They are returning.

This is why I like to say communism, for me, is not an answer. Communism is not the name of a solution but the name of a
problem
: the problem of the
commons
in all its dimensions – the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (“intellectual property”), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem. So what you are trying to capture with the common good is the name of a problem. This is communism for me. What will be the answer? I don’t know. Maybe we don’t have an answer. Maybe it will be a catastrophe. Maybe … I don’t know.

Nonetheless, and I’m not being too pessimistic here, but what shocks me, again and again, is how so-called specialists are proven wrong. About 10 or 15 years ago, people said that in postmodern times there are no longer revolutions; forget about people taking to the streets. My god, now you have them all around. Who knows where we will go from here?

I would like to see Saudi Arabia. This is the true worry. Everybody is in a panic not so much because of Egypt, but Saudi Arabia, which is an incredibly corrupt regime. But do you know what’s really absurd? It is that corruption, in a way, doesn’t exist there, because it is the system itself. In other countries you have politicians who steal from the state, but there the king
is
the state, so he doesn’t have to steal. The system itself is simply horrible.

I was in Qatar for the New Year and I met some people from Saudi Arabia who told me this incredible story. Basically, the royal family possesses the state. They don’t even have to steal anything, because they already have it. The key is that they all have a mistress and the breeding, so there are around 10,000 princes in the family. They all have a wonderful life. But if you go out into the neighborhoods, the country has its own poverty. Did you know that, a couple of years ago, there were small demonstrations even in Saudi Arabia? It has already started there. Now everyone is afraid in the West, but don’t they see that the more it is postponed, the more crazy and self-destructive the explosion will be?

I see explosions everywhere. In Qatar, a female curator at a museum took me to an industrial city in the suburb of Doha. I asked immediately who does the work for all those nice buildings. It seemed almost like a concentration camp. You have military barracks for immigrant workers. They just seem like self-employed men who sold themselves into slavery. Many of them came from Nepal, Indonesia, or the Philippines. And for four years, they take away the workers’ passports and claim that it is a safe way to pay the stipend. They are not even free to leave. They have to work without air-conditioning where the temperature in summer rises to 57ºC. Literally, in this temperature, if you step out you can fry eggs without any problem. And they are paid $150 per month out of which the company takes some for food.

Now comes the beauty: they want them to be
invisible
. On Friday, they are free to visit the city. But to prevent them from going to stores, they found an ingenious solution. Every Friday, entry into a shopping mall is prohibited to single men – officially, to maintain the family spirit in the malls; but this, of course, is only an excuse. Of course, all these workers are single. So under the pretext of protecting the family, they are prohibited from going to shopping malls on the only day they are free. This is all just waiting to explode. It’s interesting what is happening in all these places – Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai. This is slavery and it will just explode.

We are now witnessing all these explosions, from Egypt to Tunisia. And what if they just end up as a mere revolutionary episode? In these economically stressed times, why is it that we are expanding the war, why is the US administration expanding the war in Afghanistan?

SŽ:
What I always repeat is that the West itself created the problem here: this rise of religious fundamentalism is strictly an effect of the retreat of the left. You can see it, for example, in Afghanistan. Just 40 years ago Afghanistan was an extremely secular, tolerant Middle East Muslim country. There was a king who was a kind of pro-Western secular technocrat and a very strong local communist party. Then what happened? The communist party forced a
coup d’état
and the Soviet Union and the West intervened with Americans backing up the Muslim fundamentalists, so now we have fundamentalist Afghanistan. Isn’t this a nice paradox? It is not an old traditional fundamentalist society that we should enlighten, but, in every way, it became entangled in world politics, which made it fundamentalist. With the global liberal system, we generated fundamentalism. It’s the same in all Arab countries.

I claim that this rise of religious fundamentalism is strictly the other side of the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries. We tend to forget how strong the secular left was in the Arab countries. It played a pretty honorable role. It wasn’t just an instrument of the Soviet Union in Syria, Iraq, or even in Egypt. And we all know, for example, what was probably the greatest crime of the Egyptian politician Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the mid-60s, he basically killed all the communists. I often quote Walter Benjamin, who said: “Every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.” This is perhaps more pertinent today than ever.

Liberals like to point out similarities between left and right “extremisms”: Hitler’s terror and camps imitated Bolshevik terror, the Leninist party is today alive in al Qaida – yes, but what does all this mean? It can also be read as an indication of how fascism literally replaces (takes the place of) the leftist revolution: its rise is the left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, which the left was not able to mobilize. Is the rise of radical Islamism not exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries? Where did this secular tradition disappear? This should be our message to center liberals: “Ah, you got rid of us, the extreme left, and now you have religious fundamentalists.”

If a
new secular left
does not emerge – I don’t mean “revolutionary” in the sense of killing people, but I mean “revolutionary left” precisely in the sense of certain radical measures which could safeguard, as we would like to see it, the liberal legacy – we will find ourselves reaching what in Europe we ironically call “capitalism with Asian values,” which means totalitarian capitalism.

We are approaching it now. Look at Italy, Hungary, or even Western Europe. We are seeing new forms of racism in Europe. Sweden is not so bad, but when I was in Norway they told me that even there the second party is already an anti-immigrant party. The Netherlands, a country that was always considered to be a symbol of tolerance, is also the same. This is very worrying. You cannot imagine what a strong hold authoritarianism is having in Hungary and how this is linked with the rehabilitation of fascism. The latest fashion of the European right, from Italy to Hungary to Romania, is to focus everything on Hitler, so that you can save others. The right wing say that they are totally against Nazism, not fascism. Say Mussolini was not so bad, and Franco was not that bad, but this is just to save the other soft fascists. Why this urge to save, not ex-functionaries of “soft” fascist regimes like the one in Italy itself, but Nazis themselves, whose ideology was explicitly anti-Christian, pagan? Well, I see so many problems with all this.