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Advancing Conversations: Srecko-Horvat

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John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Interview One: Politics

Alfie Bown: In your book co-written with Slavoj Zizek, What Does Europe Want? (Columbia University Press, 2014), you describe a global situation today in which there is no unity left, only decay that inevitably leads to disaster. Can I open with a general question and one that is a bit trendy at the moment: is it inevitable that capitalism is leading to disaster? Is this a crisis or disaster for capitalism, or the disaster that is capitalism, or both? How does this relate to your idea of "permanent civil war"? How bleak is our political situation today?

Srecko Horvat: Although What Does Europe Want? was published in 2014, it seems that only a year later all its darkest fears and warnings were, unfortunately, coming true. All that Slavoj and I did, is that we had been closely reading symptoms of Europe's disintegration and concluded that, if there isn't a radical change, Europe would soon diminish. And then came 2015, a year which was even more characterized by what Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, called "morbid symptoms." There he says that the old world is dying and that the new world cannot be born yet, and it is at this moment that a series of "morbid symptoms" appear. We live precisely in such an "Interregnum" today. One of the morbid symptoms was the case of Greece which started with huge enthusiasm because of Syriza's victory in January 2015 and ended up, after the historical OXI referendum in July 2015, in a new defeat of the Left which accepted and now implements even worse austerity measures then previous Greek governments. So this was just one of the morbid symptoms of capitalism, where even a democratically elected government had to go against its own political principles and against the will of its own people. Another of the symptoms of disintegration is the still ongoing war in Syria. Another is the refugee crisis which won't end so soon, with more than five million displaced Syrians of which more than one million entered the EU only in the last months of 2015. Not to mention all the refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia and other war-torn countries which are rarely mentioned anymore. And then, of course, another symptom of this permanent crisis is terrorism, from Paris to Brussels, cities which after the attacks in 2015 look like war zones, with armies on the streets and frequent "terrorist alarms" during the week. At the same time you have the rise of the far-right parties and even governments – Hungary, Poland, Croatia, just to name a few – across Europe. And then in 2016 came Brexit as a final nail in the coffin of Europe as we knew it. We can see new borders, walls, fences, terrorism, displacement of whole populations. So, yes, all these symptoms point in the direction that we really live in a permanent state of civil war or, we could even go so far as to say, permanent war. It is the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben who recently proposed the theory of stasis. He says that we live in a new phase where civil war is a paradigm for our current situation. And I think today's Europe – but also other parts of the world – perfectly fits into this definition.

AB: So you are saying, via Agamben, that the concept of civil war need no longer refer to a concrete example of a nation fighting within itself but to the condition of Europe as a whole? Is it rather that civil war describes the structural condition of Europe today?

SH: Yes, I am afraid that's correct. So, Agamben calls this stasis, which is actually a term from Ancient Greece. In the 4 and 5century BC, there was a struggle inside the Ancient Greek society between the oligarchic and democratic factions, so it was the city's struggle against internal revolt. What I think we have today is a general experience of this situation on a global level. In what sense? Well, in the sense, firstly, that we have a lot of wars going on in the world at the moment. If you take the case of the war in Syria: it has more than 20 different players involved. These range from the US to Russia, from China to the EU, from Saudi Arabia to Qatar to Israel and so on. All of these players are involved on a geo-political level in the bloody game in Syria. So you can expect that this war also has at least some affects in all of these countries, and you can expect consequences in all these regions, because we live in a globalized and hyper-connected world.

How did the war in Syria start in the first place? It started already with Libya. How did that war start? It started, as was revealed by Hilary Clinton's emails recently made public by WikiLeaks, because the US and France had interest in natural resources and because Western oil companies were heavily indebted to Gaddafi. At one point Gaddafi even proposed to them – what the Troika never proposed to Greece – that they could re-negotiate the debt and even offered to get rid of the debt, but they did not want to do that, so the civil war started. So after the civil war in Libya, part of the arms and so-called "freedom fighters" went to Mali where again France had an interest in natural resources, some went to Niger where wars started as well, and some went to Syria. And why Syria? For at least two reasons. The first is that in Syria, before the so-called "Arab Spring," new natural resources were found, and the second is that Syria was the only country in the Middle East that was not indebted to any international monetary institution. That was a big problem, because you need indebted countries to keep the system running. Then there are Russian interests, Turkish interests, US interests, Israeli interests, etc. This is close to Agamben's definition of stasis but it is still not stasis: you could still say that these are just "normal" geo-political conditions and that they have occurred many times throughout history, where there have always been wars between countries for land and resources. But when you come to the refugee crisis or terrorism, as two consequences of these wars, then these conditions develop into stasis. Why? Because the war, as a boomerang, returns home – precisely where it started.

If you have this situation that we just described, and then on top of that millions of people are forced to flee, and on the other hand, terrorism starts to occur all around Europe, then as a result you have a massive increase in militarization. Just a few days after the attacks in France, in the UK there was a 15% increase in military spending, while there were 20% cuts in other budgets. Then David Cameron decided to abolish the divide between the army and the police and sent ten thousand troops onto the streets of Britain. At the same time, if you walk the streets of Paris or Brussels today you can see not police but the army on every corner. This is quickly becoming a new "normal" and it reminds me of Alfonso Cuaron's wonderful dystopian movie Children of Men (2006) in which terrorism, the army and refugees are in full view all the time but no one is surprised any more. It was supposed to be science-fiction, but obviously we are living in a documentary version of Children of Men today. All these "morbid symptoms" point in the direction that we are really heading towards what Agamben calls stasis. It is this combination of symptoms that defines our condition today. It is no longer a war between individual states but an eruption of the contradictions of capitalism itself. On the one hand you have capitalism's interests because of which France and other countries intervene in other countries for oil and other reasons. On the other hand, you have reactions either in the form of the retreat to the nation-state (rising right-wing extremism, closing of borders, Brexit, etc.) or Islamic fundamentalism. The situation is rapidly accelerating and leading towards war.

Actually – don't be surprised – here I completely agree with Pope Francis, who after the Paris attacks said that we are already living in a Third World War. What I want to add to that comment by Pope Francis is this: what if the Third World War is different and still invisible, although it is highly visible on every corner, because it is not a war that was declared? You can see the symptoms of it, just take a closer look, but no one calls it a Third World War: the refugee crisis, wars, austerity measures, rise of fascism all over Europe, what are all these but symptoms of a permanent war? The symptoms are everywhere, but the war is not declared and probably it is not going to be declared, which makes it particularly difficult to create a kind of resistance movement.

AB: I want to go back to a lot of things you mention here, especially the refugee crisis and the rise of Nazism again today. But first let me ask you about Children of Men. Do you know Mark Fisher's discussion of the film? Here it is used as an example of how we cannot think of alternatives to capitalism but only apocalypse. This takes us back to that earlier question of inevitability. Can we think about alternatives and articulate them, or are we stuck in a situation in which every alternative we imagine is yet another dream of capitalism or something like that? What is the position of the Left in this situation?

SH: If there is one lesson we need to learn from Greece it is the old lesson that we always seem to forget: that there can be no communism within one country, or – to paraphrase it – there can be no democracy in only one country. I really despise the fact that much of the Left exclusively blamed Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras for being a traitor and betraying Syriza. Of course, Tsipras was responsible and he could have had many different decisions, but I think we should also speak about our responsibility. There was a kind of international "masturbation" when Syriza came to power, and then a day later when it had all gone wrong no one was blaming themselves, we all only blamed Tsipras. This is a big problem with the Left and it always has been. The Left usually projects its own fantasies and its ownhopes onto different political subjects, be that a leader, a movement, a party or something else (for example Tsipras, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring). Then when it doesn't happen, the Left goes down into what Walter Benjamin calls "Left-Wing Melancholy." This is like a sort of incapability to act at all. To come back to the beginning of what I was saying: there are several lessons here. The first and most important one, as I mentioned, is that it is not possible to radically change the situation in one country just by taking power in that country. It is surprising that the Left has not realized this yet. We live in a globalized world and Greece is part of a bigger geo-political situation, so no national government alone can defeat capitalism.

There is a beautiful scene in Costa-Gavras's movie Capital (2012) in which a CEO of a big French bank has a family lunch. During the lunch his uncle who is an old '68 guy says: "Nephew, do you know what you are doing in Greece, it brings thousands of people to their knees, creates huge unemployment, high suicide rates and disaster." So the nephew – the banker – responds: "You know uncle, we are actually realizing the dreams you had in 1968." The uncle is astonished and completely surprised, and asks what on earth the nephew means. The nephew says: "We are building internationalism and it's the internationalism of Capital." This shows us the problem of the Left: yes, we need to take power in each country in Europe and beyond, but this is not near enough. If Syriza was in power and at the same time Podemos was in power and Corbyn's Labour was in power in the UK, would the situation have been better? Yes, in a way, they would have had a bit more support in Europe. Do you remember how from the very start of the Syriza government, Alexis Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis built relationships with Hollande and Renzi, expecting that those two would support them. In the end the Eurogroup was just playing the goodcop/bad-cop routine and they all betrayed Syriza in the end. Perhaps if Jeremy Corbyn and Pablo Iglesias were the allies of Syriza from the beginning, the power balance in the Eurogroup meetings would have been different, but I think this would also not be enough. Two or three countries in Europe with a left government will not really be enough. On the one hand, Syriza had to deal with the domestic oligarchy, with what Andre Gunder Frank calls the lumpenbourgoisie. On the other hand, you have to defeat the international monetary system. If you have these two enemies at home and on the international level at the same time, not to mention the rise of right-wing groups, you need more strength.

AB: Did Syriza have real leverage? Were they serious about autarky and was that really going to happen? Or was the whole thing just a case of the good-cop/bad-cop routine that you just mentioned – which was never going to be successful?

SH: I knew Alexis Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis, and many other members from Syriza, even before they came to power in Greece. Already in 2013 we all met at the Subversive Festival in Zagreb. These people had honest intentions and Syriza back in that year presented a big hope for all of us around Europe. Perhaps in some way we were naive to believe they could achieve the change they announced, and perhaps they were naïve to think that they could defeat the irrationality of capitalism by putting rational arguments on the table in front of those in the Eurozone. But I think what most of the people don't realize – under the false illusion given by the media that Greeks were "lazy" and that Syriza was a completely incapable party – is that in the first months of the Syriza government you had some of the most radical changes that were implemented anywhere throughout Europe in such a short period. Let me give some examples. I had the chance to speak to the Minister of Welfare during my days in Athens in summer 2015. Greece was and still is a country that is in a financial and a humanitarian crisis, so the Ministry of Welfare is a very important one. First, they started the scheme of food vouchers, so that each month people could go to the supermarket with a card like a credit card and the government would help people to survive by providing food. So what Syriza, in the early days, only several weeks after coming to power, did was a re-invention of the social state or welfare state. Second, they reconnected the electricity for hundreds of thousands of people who had been cut off for failing to pay bills, by making a deal with electricity companies. Third, they passed a law to grant citizenship to all the children of immigrants. All of these acts are more radical than the highly publicized event of Angela Merkel inviting one million people to Germany at the end of 2015. The real question here is: what happened to all these progressive laws? The answer is that when the Memorandum was signed, one of the key points was that all of the laws passed by Syriza would be suspended. So from all these examples, which show a genuine attempt to do something, we can learn that it is not enough to gain power in one country because actually you do not have real power in that country. So what I am claiming – and I think this could be a way out of the problem – is that we need to develop a new internationalism.

AB: So this new internationalism could be a way out of the situation – a way to get real leverage for change, as opposed to these localized attempts to change things? What would an international solution look like?

SH: Of course there is nothing new in the claim that we have to unite and work together, it's the old motto that there is no communism in one country. When I am speaking about a new internationalism, I speak as someone who was born in Yugoslavia, I speak about and from the experience of a historical achievement of the 20 century which is called the Non-Aligned Movement. Just last year – in 2015 – we were marking the 60 anniversary of the Bandung conference which happened in 1955 when the Indonesian president Sukarno invited Yugoslavia's president Josip Broz Tito, India's president Nehru, Egypt's president Nasser and China's Zhou Enlai, and young Indira Gandhi as well. So you can imagine this "line-up" which gathered in Bandung in 1955. Can you see such world powers gathering today and saying that they do not want to play a role in the war in Syria? It's a bit of a disgrace to the Left that no one really celebrated the 60 anniversary of this event. I think that we should remember this and that we could start building a new Bandung conference or a new Non-Aligned Movement by using the five principles that those people laid out at the time. They were conceptualized by Nehru in his speech in 1954 in Sri Lanka. The first was respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty. The second was mutual non-aggression. Third was mutual non-interference in domestic affairs. Fourth was equality and mutual benefit. Fifth was peaceful coexistence.

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Excerpted from Advancing Conversations: Srecko-Horvat by Alfie Bown. Copyright © 2016 Alfie Bown. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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