Rethinking Marxism

July, Vol: 17.4

David F. Ruccio, David F. Ruccio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000448146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

In this issue class revolution is discovered in a perhaps unlikely context- the paid domestic labor of African-American women. Analyzing the changing economic relationship between African-American women and white households, from end of slavery to the late 1970s, Cecilia Rio uses the concepts of Marxian class analysis and a wealth of empirical evidence to demonstrate that African-American women were historical agents of fundamental class transformation. Also in this edition- articles on Humanities, Surplus, Communism to Capitalism, Categories of Class Analysis, Contingent Commodification's of Labor Power and more.

Did Somebody Say Liberal Totalitarianism? Yes, and Despite the 5-1/2 (Mis)uses of the Notion

Zeynep Gambetti and Refik Güremen

Revisiting the concept of totalitarianism, together with and in spite of Slavoj Žižek, has utmost importance at a time when the post–9/11 world takes on totalitarian forms. These forms seem to escape both the logic of “everyday totalitarianism,” as elaborated by Zizek, and that of “Empire,” described by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

Key Words: Totalitarianism, Liberalism, Iraq War, Empire Concentration Camps, Biopolitics, Political Action

Slavoj Žižek is spot on when he contends that the term “totalitarianism” has been used, misused, and abused as a stopgag to “tame radicals” and to prevent anyone from considering alternatives to the liberal democratic hegemony (2001, 1–3). But this denunciation need not lead us to discard the notion altogether. And we certainly have no reason to agree with an expeditious footnote in Negri and Hardt’s Empire stating that the “numerous shelves of our libraries that are filled with analyses of totalitarianism should be regarded only with shame and thrown away with no hesitation” (2000, 421 n. 9).

Our claim is that the works of two thinkers, Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, deserve to be kept in our libraries and given a scrupulous rereading if the post—9/11 world is to become intelligible. These thinkers demonstrate to what extent the totalitarian experience has altered our political universe. We hold that the lessons to be drawn from this experience can, and should, provide the negative blueprint for any radical political project. Our double aim therefore is, first, to show how totalitarianism is still inherent in today’s political formations, including Empire; and, second, to underline the need for a political project aiming at a radical turn in our contemporary existence away from the conditions that sustain the totalitarian peril. In other words, we propose using totalitarianism as a negative model to guide future political engagement, without falling into the trap of providing radical politics with a positive content.

It should be noted from the very start that we do not use the term “totalitarianism” to connote some severe form of dictatorship. Totalitarianism does not oppress; it aims to dominate. The only totalitarian regimes in history were Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR. The political experience to which these regimes corresponded was not the extreme ossification of the status quo but, on the contrary, a state of permanent instability, incessant movement, and continual blurring of all established lines of demarcation. It is also important to note that we are especially using the term “liberal totalitarianism” to distinguish ourselves from those politologues who claim that liberal democracies are either the antithesis of totalitarianism or its antidote. Totalitarian regimes were the result of the crystallization of “totalitarian elements” inherent in the modern “liberal” world. These elements were the antecedents of Hitler and Stalin’s regimes, but they were and are still being reproduced in the discourses and practices of the liberal world even after the collapse of those regimes.

Taking up Arendt’s analysis of the concentration camps, Agamben notes that if her achievement was the conceptualization of the specificity of totalitarianism and of the camps, while being indifferent to the phenomenon of biopolitics, Foucault’s achievement was the conceptualization of biopolitics while being indifferent to the phenomenon of the camps. Agamben ingeniously establishes the relationship between biopower and the camps. Reiterating Agamben’s point of view, we will argue in the following that although Empire is entirely constructed through the perspective of biopolitics and biopower, it lacks the conceptual instruments required to detect the inherent possibility of totalitarian politics in an age when politics is wholly transformed into biopolitics.

According to Agamben the point one should not overlook in dealing with biopolitics is that the radical transformation of politics into biopolitics legitimated and necessitated something like total domination, which was carried to its extreme in the concentration and extermination camps. For Agamben, it is not by chance that a hitherto unknown political regime like totalitarianism could be “invented” in the twentieth century. Since life itself comes to be what is at stake in politics and remains so, one can expect new and unexpected “reinventions” of totalitarian politics, Agamben warns us. What is missing in Empire is this tense and inherent relation between biopolitics and totalitarian politics. Negri and Hardt lose sight of totalitarianism at the very moment they see it.

According to Agamben, this tension operates through the political circumstances determining the relationship between zoe and bios. The Greek term zoe expresses the simple fact of being alive common to all beings, whereas bios signifies “the form or manner of living peculiar to a single individual or group” (Agamben 2000, 2). Thus, bios stands for culture while zoe corresponds to the naked fact of life. Agamben argues that “(p)olitical power as we know it … always founds itself—in the last instance—on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context of the forms of life” (3). The body politic of a modern imperium is constituted through the inscription, that is to say, the inclusion of this isolated zoe (man) into bios (citizen) while trying to hide the traces of this articulation as much as possible. This inscription creates a peculiar tension or ambiguity which Agamben believes is implicit in the very title of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. According to Agamben, the “hidden kernel” of modern sovereignty lies in this ambigious title because “it is not clear whether the two terms homme and citoyen name two autonomous beings, or instead form a unitary system in which the first is always already included in the second” (1998, 126–7). The constitutive biopolitical gesture of modern sovereignty is accomplished by the inclusion of man’s naked life into the mechanisms of power. But one should pay attention here to the fact that what is to be controlled and repressed by the sovereign power is actually the bios itself, since there and only there lies the possibility of a counterbios—that is, an alternative bios capable of standing against the sovereign bios.

Hardt and Negri reject the possibility of totalitarianism because they see a productive dimension in biopower, a dimension which also accounts for the paradoxical nature of this power. The productive dimension is expressed as such: “Biopower… refers to a situation in which what is directly at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 24). Hence, in “the biopolitical sphere, life is made to work for production and production is made to work for life” (32). One should notice that the terms “production,” “work,” and “life” are employed to designate an all-embracing process, including “after-work” (say, the realm of reproduction) and the affective capacities accompanying it. Yet, for Empire, the paradox of imperial power lies precisely in this productive dimension of biopower: while power “unifies and envelops within itself every element of social life … at that very moment [it] reveals a new context, a new milieu of maximum plurality and uncontainable singularization—a milieu of the event” (25). Because it bears such a paradox, imperial power can no longer tame the excess of the multitude—that is, its bios. According to Hardt and Negri, this very paradox allows the multitude to organize and reappropriate its bios as counterempire. It is because imperial power is a totalizing biopower that the notion of totalitarianism loses its relevance.

Historically, however, totalitarian regimes were extreme examples of a kind of power that was biopolitical and productive, but resistant to the paradox of power hailed by Hardt and Negri. Totalitarian regimes discovered that the total (reproduction of the social bios lies in controlling and regulating life as a whole. One must acknowledge that the Nazi regime was quite aware of the fact expressed in the following passage in Empire: “[The collective biopolitical body] is … both production and reproduction, structure and superstructure, because it is life in the fullest sense and politics in the proper sense” (30). The point that Empire posits as the paradox of power was discovered by totalitarian regimes and employed as their very founding principle. What makes these regimes historically singular is that they organize and mobilize animal laborans as their constitutive force and show us, paradoxically, that animal laborans is not altogether deprived of a capacity for bios. Totalitarianism is the political regime that violently extracts, at any cost, (the capacity of) bios from animal laborans, which under “normal” circumstances is not its inherent capacity. Hence the cruel inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (Work liberates) at the entrance gates of Auschwitz. Hence also the significance of Arendt’s (1958b) analysis of animal laborans, which is the closest she gets to an analysis of biopolitics. Totalitarianism has the power of presenting, to animal laborans, its “worldlessness” as its world proper.

Therefore, the fact that power is essentially paradoxical is not a guarantee against totalitarian domination, since the latter is precisely the regime that can organize its own paradox to totalize itself. Besides, having a productive dimension does not necessarily mean that an unmanageable paradox will inhabit power itself. The historical example of totalitarianism shows that the (re)production of life, in which Hardt and Negri locate the paradox of Empire, could actually turn into a site of intervention where the tension between biopolitics and totalitarian politics could cease being just a tension and transform itself into the very ground of a biopolitics constituted as totalitarian politics.

There are two other venues that render totalitarian interventions possible: the inherent nomadism of the multitude, and the lack of mediation between life and power.

For Hardt and Negri, the evacuation of the places of power (that is, desertion and exodus) is the fundamental mode of resistance in the postmodern age of Empire. As they put it, nomadic migration is an issue of control: “All the powers of the old world are allied in a merciless operation against” the specter of migration haunting the world (2000, 213). We argue that it is right here, in the merciless operations of the powers of the old world against migration, that one should identify and expect the comeback of the “age-old” totalitarian reflex of these powers. To express it in Agamben’s words, the totalitarian impulse could be reactivated because of the difficulties faced by Empire in inscribing nomadic bodies into a bios. The refugee is the figure that brings to light and puts into crisis the originary fiction of modern nation-states. Agamben observes that nation-states are constituted upon the political gesture of clothing Man (call it birth or naked life) with the rights of Citizen (bios). The fundamental sovereign gesture is, therefore, to institute a fictional continuity between man and citizen. The fiction here is that “[rights] are attributed to man (or originated in him) solely to the extent that man is the immediately vanishing ground (who must never come to light as such) of citizen” (1998, 128). When man as naked life tends to come to light as such in the figure of the refugee, the fiction of nationality is faced with a crisis that threatens to reveal the hidden kernel of sovereignty. Hence Agamben’s penetrating insight: “When the hidden difference … between birth and nation entered into a lasting crisis following the devastation of Europe’s geopolitical order after the First World War, what appeared was Nazism and fascism, that is, two properly biopolitical movements that made of natural life the exemplary place of sovereign decision” (1998, 129).

Any body that puts the sovereign fiction of the Man-Citizen indistinction into a crisis carries the potential of provoking totalitarian reactions. This is precisely the case of the sans papiers in Europe and illegal aliens in the United States. Although Hardt and Negri acknowledge that the mobility caused by desertion and exodus “most often leads to a new rootless condition of poverty and misery” (2000, 213), they fail to heed Arendt’s warning about the resurrection of totalitarian solutions: “The Nazi and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their factories of annihilation which demonstrate the swiftest solution to the problem of overpopulation, of economically superfluous and socially rootless human masses, are as much of an attraction as a warning. Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social or economic misery in a manner worthy of man” (1973, 459). Considering the issue from this perspective can also account for the rise of right-wing parties in Europe.

Lack of mediation between life and power is the third site of tension where biopower can become totalitarian. Hardt and Negri’s theoretical claim is that the relationship between life and imperial power is unmediated. The juridical constitution of Empire corresponds to the process whereby the mediation between the juridical, ethical, and political poles of power are eliminated. Power no longer operates with reference to an external symbolic framework but becomes truly performative—that is, identical with its own operations. But the crucial question that cannot be asked within the framework of Empire is the following: can the lack of mediation also be the condition of totalitarianism? Historically, a total lack of mediation has also been the very paradigm of the camp. The concentration camp according to Agamben is, in its pure state, the zone of indistinction between bios and zoe, norm and fact: “[T]he camp was also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation” (1998, 171). Hardt and Negri treat the life of the multitude as if it were a life that could never be subjected. It is as if the confrontation between the life of the multitude and imperial biopower had no effect on the multitude, or as if the only response power could generate when confronted with the disintegrating force of the multitude were to adapt itself to the new demands. Although Agamben’s idea that today bios lies in zoe (1998, 188) is implicit throughout Empire, Hardt and Negri miss Agamben’s warning concerning biopower’s capacity to incessantly isolate naked life from bios, thus obscuring the chances for a Nietzschean affirmation of life as such.

The hitches inherent in the three sites mentioned show that biopower could be expected to reactivate a totalitarian reflex when faced with a crisis. Hardt and Negri’s optimism thus becomes ill-founded.

The totalitarian moment is understandably, but incorrectly, missing in the scheme that Hardt and Negri call Empire because it incorporates three types of regime only: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. In contrast, Agamben’s analysis makes plain that Empire actually opens up not one, but two paths. The first leads to the possible victory of the democratic forces of the multitude, as Hardt and Negri claim. But a second path leads to the possible employment of totalitarian strategies, which consist of the total suspension of b/os, leaving nothing but pure naked life or pure zoe.

The figure of the “Muselmann”, analyzed by Zizek (2001, 76–88), acquires heightened importance here.¹ The Muselmann is the concentration camp inmate who has lost all capacity to react. The Muselmann is nothing but the manifestation of the fact that, in the camp, “being-in-the-world” is suspended, hence all the worldly qualifications of “being human” also are suspended. In a Heideggerian perspective, however, it is precisely because it is qualified that Dasein or human existence is an always mediated and political existence—that is, a zoe which is necessarily qualified within a bios.

To insist with Arendt and Agamben on the essential interlacement of bios and zoe is to claim that only bios can harbor the possibility of the freedom to change the coordinates of human existence, and not zoe. We in fact contend that there is no indestructible human kernel or essence, that political freedom and resistance are conditional and dependent on the ...