Feminist Antifascism

Counterpublics of the Common

Ewa Majewska

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839761171
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In this exciting, innovative work, Polish feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska maps the creation of feminist counterpublics around the world-spaces of protest and ideas, community and common struggle, that can challenge the emergence of fascist states as well as Western democratic "public spheres" populated by atomized, individual subjects.Drawing from Eastern Europe and the Global South, Majewska describes the mass labor movement of Poland's Solidarno sc in 1980 and contemporary feminist movements across Poland and South America, arguing that it is outside of the West that we can see the most promising left futures. Majewska argues for the creation of a feminist public-a politics and a world held in common-and outlines the tactics this political goal demands, arguing for a feminist political theory that does not reproduce the same forms of domination it seeks to overcome.

1

Revisiting “Solidarity”:
Counterpublics, Utopia and the Common

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”

When reading theories of the public sphere, I am mostly preoccupied with the bodies in the streets, homes, industrial spaces and gardens.¹ Of less interest are the elitist debates typically presented as the core of the public in classical liberal theories of the public sphere, such as that of Jürgen Habermas. I know both theoretically but also from experience that there are embodied, resistant and critical forms of politics that require a theory of the public sphere to go beyond talking heads, a theory that embraces all of those either excluded from the dominant conceptualization of the public or marginalized while trying to take part in it. Classical theories of the public sphere, which conveniently follow Aristotelian divisions of the people into “tools” (Aristotle’s word for slaves), the elitist group of zoon politikon and all the rest of (the largely unimportant) humans foreclose a theory and practice of the public of a genuinely common nature. In Aristotle’s work—still fundamental for theories of the public sphere, be it that of Habermas or Arendt—the “rest” includes women, children, servants, the poor and those who could not produce documents for three generations of ancestors living in the city before them. It did not embrace the publics made in the streets, homes, factories, fields, forests and so on. This helps to explain why the most important political agencies involved in today’s protests are relegated outside of the public sphere.

The long-term consequences of these exclusions cannot be overstated. Without systematically revising the concept and practice of the public sphere, we will not move any further forward. I am not alone in the conviction that such critical revising is crucial, and failing to do so risks shoring up the marginalization and exclusion of the political voices of the “Others” who also constitute European subjects. Denouncing the public sphere entirely makes its exclusions even stronger. Efforts to talk about something “entirely different,” whether bodies or street processes, still allows for the marginalization of the political voices and claims produced there. It also perpetuates a macho, Eurocentrist model of politics. Only a strong re-appropriation of the public by those excluded will change the distribution of power and the diffusion of visibility in contemporary politics.

Even if we protest in the streets, or silently, we add to the discursive political practice, and we cannot afford to further exclude marginalized voices, including the silenced and deformed ones. As Karl Marx wrote in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, representation matters, and at the same time its patterns are misleading, since the oppressed tend to vote against their class interest. As Gayatri Spivak makes clear in Can the Subaltern Speak?, we can run from representation but it will still be there, shaping our political agency as ineffective due to the chasm between our interests and political choices. This is where ideology comes in. If we consider Marx’s and Spivak’s critiques of the mechanisms of political representation seriously, we need to work on the concept of the public sphere, otherwise its mechanisms of exclusion and ideological shifts will still control our political theory and practice.

The theories of counterpublics discussed here contest the exclusions and bias inherent in Habermas’s notion of the public sphere; however, they likewise evade the question of how not to repeat these problematic mechanisms. Inspired by the notion of the common as it was presented by Negri and Hardt, as well as Félix Guattari’s concept of transversality, I offer some solutions. Every political option leaves its traces in the discursive field and political debates. Leaving this large field of articulated consent to the liberals is to me like abandoning the ship in the middle of a marine battle. Why would we want to do such thing? Resigning from any theoretical and practical influence on the public sphere because liberal and conservative politics shaped it to ideologically strengthen the hegemony of these leading political currents means allowing the continuation of the exclusionary political practice we have known until now. Today the possibilities of a globalized fight for equality are the greatest in history, and the spread of the women’s protests since 2016 proves my point very eloquently—yet our concepts of the public, and the public sphere in particular, mainly exclude their voices, helping to perpetuate their marginalization.

In her analysis of the Occupy movement, the “we, the people” formula and public gatherings, Judith Butler rightly defends the role of nondiscursive elements in constituting a people or peoples.² Accentuating the performative dimensions of this constitution, she solves the classical dilemma of those in and out of the public sphere. But Butler’s analysis, while far more focused on the “bodies in the streets” than Habermas’s and other liberal theories of the public sphere, nevertheless shares the assumption that the making of the people builds a sense of togetherness based on a chain of words and actions that include—or at least reference—the basic “we, the people” formula. Interestingly, Butler emphasises the connection between the right of assembly and the legal guarantee of the right to strike and form labor unions, thus implicitly evoking the Solidarność movement, which was the first massive mobilization making claims based on the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which she references in her text. This connection—between the possibility of making economic claims and the right to publicly voice demands through assembly—is deepened by a growing precarization, pushing people in so many countries to form the Occupy movement, to participate in the protests in Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia and other countries and to build the M15 movement in Spain. However, the mechanism of street protest—as important as it was in the years after the economic crisis of 2008—has failed in multiple ways, one of which is a lack of institutional structure. The rise of such political parties as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in Turkey or Razem in Poland was precisely a follow-up and a transition from these protests in an effort to translate their politics into more stable and possibly also more effective means of political agency.

Butler is right to summarize the events of Gezi Park, the Occupy movement and the other protests of the time as particularly vital examples of public gatherings that express the general constitution of the people as heterogeneous, embodied and contextualized against market forces. I believe that these remarks correctly diagnose the weak points of many liberal theories of the public sphere and allow for their critique and correction. Butler is also right when she claims that every act of constituting the public sphere immediately brings forth the risk of imprisonment. One might not actually be arrested or threatened or encounter violence or death—yet every act of public protest entails such risk. It only depends on the particular time and place as to whether this risk is big or small. This part of Butler’s argument is an important correction to the predominantly optimistic liberal visions of the public sphere, in which becoming public is portrayed as immersing oneself in a zone of wisdom, while in fact the majority of efforts to become public are done with risk—especially those performed by those who clearly stand outside of elitist liberal vision of public sphere participants. The all-too-frequent reality of violence, imprisonment or death can be seen in the striking example of the US civil rights movement: its main leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, murdered and other key representatives imprisoned. Also, the history of the Polish opposition after 1945 is filled with instances of people being imprisoned and even killed. This dangerous element—by which I mean making certain matters and people public—is absent not only in liberal theories of the public sphere (Habermas being my favorite example), but also from leftist theories of counterpublics, such as those of Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt as well as Nancy Fraser. Michael Warner, who wrote about Black and queer counterpublics, among others, has emphasized the cost at which public agency takes place.³ Similarly, Butler is right to mention the risk of imprisonment, but she is wrong in not mentioning the threat of death. This reality is very real in many places around the globe, such as in Turkey where, during a police raid on a meeting of the HDP, dozens of members were killed. In some countries, going to demonstrations seems perfectly safe, yet in most places it is connected with at least some risk.

I am aware that revisiting Habermas’s theory of the public sphere may strike many as mundane. Around 2013, when I started to research Solidarność and counterpublics, everybody was convinced there was little to say about Habermas’s thinking in relation to these things. But I believe that certain aspects of his theory correctly capture the present reality of the public sphere; others help to shape its ideological power over the imaginations of not just conservative politicians, but also the progressive left. Also, the opposition to Habermas’s thinking—particularly the theories of Kluge and Negt, with their vision of proletarian counterpublic spheres, Nancy Fraser’s feminist counterpublics and Michael Warner’s analysis of publics and counterpublics—are extremely helpful in a left-wing reshaping of our understanding of the public beyond liberal and conservative political thinking. For example, regarding the notion that a public and private divide is crucial for the making of politics, feminists have made of this divide one of the worst demons of patriarchy and declared its abolition, with slogans such as “the personal is political,” as well as harshly criticizing the ways in which this division has perpetuated the invisibility of domestic violence, women’s care and affective labor as well as reproductive work. Since the 1970s, we have not seen a major repetition of this annihilation, while the majority of institutional politics still works based on this distinction, thus maintaining the exclusions it traditionally caused. While some may say that “the work seems to have been done,” the theory and practice of politics remains shaped by what enters the public and what stays private. As I will detail, in Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, this division allows us to shut down the Pandora’s box of particularism—the entire sector of production, and that of reproduction, are excluded from the debate as insufficiently liberated from the domain of needs. But if politics is not about needs, what is it about? When the issue of equal rights is discussed, do we discuss its theoretical forms or its actualization in the existing society? When Kluge and Negt say they want to discuss the public spheres of production, they also speak about desires, bringing in Wilhelm Reich and his analysis of the mass psychology of fascism, warning that embodiment can become a tool for the left but also a dangerous weapon of the right. Yet they discuss desire as an element of what they call, after Benjamin, “lived experience,” and in this they situate production, but also the politics implied by psychological drives.⁴ In today’s analysis, the early days of Solidarność are usually nostalgically petrified into a pseudo-utopian mythology of the once brave nation that is long past. The sheer possibility of approaching the events of 1980 and 1981 is conveniently blocked by the supposedly definitive character of the events that took place later, especially the martial law introduced in 1981 and the neoliberal transformation that began after 1989. This idealized and stabilized vision of a securely distanced political event usually becomes an argument for the impossibility of any general political mobilization today.⁵ “Solidarity’s failure,”⁶ the “self-limiting revolution,”⁷ “Polish uprising” and other idioms petrify the beginnings of Solidarność into a “bad abstraction,” a pseudo-utopia contradicting its basic principle—it does not aim at negating the status quo, but affirms and stabilizes its appearance.

This nostalgic petrification is understandable, as the memories of Solidarność are loaded with trauma. A common political agency, hope and sense of change was awakened in August 1980 and explored by most of the society, but it was painfully foreclosed on December 13, 1981, when martial law was imposed in Poland, resulting not only in the despair and resignation of the majority of Solidarność members, but also in the erased memory of the political agency of the masses, predominantly the workers and women.^* The necessary transition of Solidarność into an underground movement, enforced by its de-legalization and the arrest of the 3,000 most active members on and after December 13, 1981, required the anonymity of those who decided to stay active. The mass arrest also eliminated certain spoken forms of political agency, such as big meetings, debates and discussion, making way for written formats of expression only accessible for those already fluent in this form of political engagement—principally, those educated in political analysis and law. It therefore re-established the classic division of workers—actively conspiring as printers and distributers of the clandestine Solidarność press—and intellectuals, engaging in debates via illegal press and radio, which was obviously exclusive. The proletarian counterpublics were easily appropriated by those with more cultural capital. It was thus much easier to “forget” the worker’s own circulation of knowledge and political agency, which founded Solidarność, and insert it in a line of the oppositional movements in Poland that had been initiated by the intelligentsia.

For that reason, and due to the enthusiastic welcoming of neo-liberal capitalism to Poland after 1989, Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism” is an interesting tool to unpack the unfulfilled promises of Solidarność. Berlant depicts it in the following passage:

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project … These kinds of optimistic relation are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.⁸

This concept depicts an affective attachment, of which the object not only ceases to fulfill the premises it once was chosen to keep, but it also becomes the source of the subject’s confusion and a danger to the desiring subject. Berlant goes on to explain:

But, again, optimism is cruel when the object of scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.⁹

Solidarność was created in a highly democratic, popular, massive and yet not destructive atmosphere of resistance and opposition. It was unequivocally desired by the majority of the Polish population. By March 1981, some 10 million had officially registered as its members, and belief in the transformative power of this entity was huge. However, the economic and political reforms introduced after 1989 left the majority of the population disenchanted and resistant to the very idea of using popular mobilization to transform politics. The “defeat of Solidarity,” depicted by David Ost, consisted of cruel optimism—its premises were not only unfulfilled but, in reality, it became the exact opposite of what had been decided in the Solidarność committee meetings in 1980 and 1981.¹⁰ Today’s problem, however, consists not only of the fact that the liberals cannot defeat the right wing in Poland, as Ost emphasizes. The main political problem caused by “the defeat of Solidarity” is actually profoundly structural, a systemic condition of the day-to-day practices of politics: the working classes, women and minorities cannot produce any reliable representation other than that granted to them through the populist structures of right-wing politics.

The counterpublics of Solidarność that I would like to discuss here concern only the first sixteen months of its existence (August 1980–December 1981) and I do not pretend to offer a complete account either of the events from this period or of subsequent events. Instead I interpret Solidarność as a form of proletarian counterpublic, following the idea introduced by Elżbieta Matynia of discussing Solidarność as a structural transformation of the public sphere.¹¹ In my discussion concerning the character of that public sphere, I discover the limitations of Habermas’s theory, and argue for implementing theories of counterpublics that were written in critical response to his work. An important element of such an interpretation of Solidarność is acknowledging the workers’ political agency and emphasizing their experience in the production process. The specifics of this experience and its influence on both the form and content of Solidarność’s political agency requires an introduction to the concept of proletarian counterpublics, but it also allows for grasping the utopian aspect of these formidable events. If we decide to see utopia as the background and direct precu...