The ‘government of anybody and everybody’ is bound to
attract the hatred of all those who are entitled to govern men by their birth,
wealth or science. Today it is bound to attract this hatred more radically than
ever, since the social power of wealth no longer tolerates any restrictions on
its limitless growth, and each day its mechanisms become more closely
articulated to those of State action. The pseudo-European Constitution
testifies to this. State power and the power of wealth tendentially unite in a sole
expert management of monetary and population flows. Together they combine their
efforts to reduce the spaces of politics. But reducing these spaces, effacing
the intolerable and indispensable foundation of the political in the
‘government of anybody and everybody’, means opening up another battlefield. It
means witnessing the resurgence of a new radicalized figure of the power of
birth and kinship. No longer the power of former monarchists and aristocrats,
but that of the peoples of God.
This power may openly assert itself in the terror practiced
by a radical Islam against Democracy identified with States of oligarchic law.
It may also bolster the oligarchic State at war with this terror in the name of
a democracy assimilated, by American evangelists, to the liberty of fathers
obeying the commandments of the Bible and armed for the protection of their
property. In France, it can be invoked against democratic perversion to
safeguard the principle of kinship, a principle that some leave in an indeterminate
generality, but others unceremoniously identify with the law of the people
instructed by Moses in the word of God.
Destruction of democracy in the name of the Quran; bellicose expansion of democracy identified
with the implementation of the Decalogue; hatred of democracy assimilated to
the murder of the divine pastor – all these contemporary figure have at least
one merit. Through the hatred they manifest against democracy, and in its name,
and through amalgamations to which they subject its notion, they oblige us to
rediscover the singular power that is specific to it.
Democracy is neither a form of government that enables
oligarchies to rule in the name of the people, nor is it a form of society that
governs the power of commodities. It is the action that constantly wrests the
monopoly of public life from oligarchic governments, and the omnipotence over
lives from the power of wealth. It is the power that, today more than ever, has
to struggle against the confusion of these powers, rolled into one and the same
law of domination. Rediscovering the singularity of democracy means also being
aware of its solitude. Demands for democracy were for a long time carried or
concealed by the idea of a new society, the elements of which were allegedly
being formed in the very heart of contemporary society. That is what
‘socialism’ designated: a vision of history according to which the capitalist
forms of production and exchange constituted the material conditions for an
egalitarian society and its worldwide expansion. It is this vision that even
today sustains the hope of a communism or a democracy of the multitude: the
notion that the increasingly immaterial forms of capitalist production
concentrated in the universe of communication are, from this moment on, to have
formed a nomadic population of ‘producers’ of a new type; to have constituted a
collective intelligence, a collective power of thought, affects and movements
of bodies that is liable to explode apart the barriers of the Empire.
Understanding what democracy means is to renounce this faith.
The collective intelligence produced by a system of
domination is only ever the intelligence of that system. Unequal society does
not carry any equal society in its womb. Rather, egalitarian society is only
ever the set of egalitarian relations that are traced here and now through
singular and precarious acts. Democracy is as bare in its relation to the power
of wealth as it is to the power of kinship that today comes to assist and to
rival it. It is not based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional
form. It is not born along by any historical necessity and does not bear any.
It is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts. This can provoke
fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercising the magisterium of
thought. But among those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the
equal power of intelligence, it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy.
[Note 50] The word ‘liberalism’ lends itself today to all sorts of confusions. The European left use it in order to avoid the taboo word of capitalism. The European right use it to designate a vision of the world where the free market and democracy go hand-in-hand. The American evangelical right, for whom a liberal is a leftist destroyer of religion, family and society, reminds us opportunely that these two things are quite different. The weight of a ‘communist’ China in a free market and in the financing of American debt, advantageously combining as it does the advantages of liberty and those of its absence, testifies to this in another manner. The French term liberalisme can refer both to political liberalism and to economic neoliberalism.
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