Comradely Greetings (10 page)

I respectfully await your reply,

Nadya

Dear Nadya,

Let me first express my joy—I am glad that you are now free, and even more glad that your struggle goes on. You have, of course, my full solidarity with Zona Prava. I also fully support Pussy Riot's style of performance. What you wrote about masks reminds me of what Nietzsche wrote apropos
Hamlet
: “what must a person have suffered if he needs to be a clown that badly!” One should unconditionally defend the apparently irreverent and clownish attitude of Pussy Riot's actions as the only appropriate reaction to traumatic and violent events—let me make an extreme example to clarify this point. A Bosnian cultural analyst was surprised to discover that among those people whose relatives died in Srebrenica, dozens of jokes about the Serb massacre circulated. Here is one of them, which refers to the way of buying beef in old Yugoslavia when usually the butcher would ask,
“With or without bones?” The joke goes: “I want to buy some land to build a house close to Srebrenica. Do you know what the prices are?” “Prices vary, depending on what kind of land you want—with or without bones.” Far from expressing tasteless disrespect, such jokes are the only way to deal with the unbearably traumatic reality: they render quite adequately our helpless perplexity, belying pathetic compassion with victims of atrocities as itself a truly tasteless blasphemy.

Let me address the rumor you mention that I intend to write an essay criticizing Pussy Riot for their inordinate conservatism. Frankly, I don't know where this rumor originated—it is simply not true, and furthermore “conservative” is to me not necessarily a critical notion. From Marx on, the truly radical Left was never simply “progressist”—it was always obsessed by the question, what is the price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheardof productivity it unleashed. He just insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms. And we should consider the same in the context of today's progress of global capitalism, to keep in view the dark underside that is fomenting revolts. What this implies is that today's conservatives are not really conservative: fully endorsing continuous capitalist self-revolutionizing, they just want to make the system more efficient by supplementing it with some traditional institutions (religion, etc.) to contain its destructive consequences for social life and to maintain social cohesion. A true conservative today is the one who fully admits the antagonisms and deadlocks of global capitalisms, the one who rejects simple narratives of progressism, and is attentive to the dark
obverse of progress. In this sense, only a radical Leftist can be today a true conservative.

I did, however, make a remark about solidarity with Snowden, about the danger of becoming engulfed by the liberal human rights movement, and on this I have more to add. First, let me emphasize that I totally agree with your characterization of Snowden, the compromises he had to make, and the way he can be (and is) exploited by Putin. My only point is, what other choice did he have? He is exploited and manipulated in the same way (and much more so, undoubtedly) that human rights liberals try to manipulate Pussy Riot. This is why I think that it would be very important for Snowden, Assange, Manning, etc., to make it clear that they cannot be reduced to simple anti-Americanism. Snowden should be defended not only because his acts annoyed and embarrassed the US secret services. What he revealed is something that not only the US but also all other great and not-so-great powers, from China to Russia and Germany to Israel, are doing to the extent they are technologically able to do so. His acts thus provided a factual foundation to our earlier premonitions of how much we are all monitored and controlled—the lesson is a global one, it reaches far beyond the standard US bashing. We didn't really learn from Snowden or from Manning anything we didn't already presume to be true, but it is one thing to know it in general and another to have concrete data. It is a little bit like knowing that one's sexual partner is playing around—one can accept the abstract knowledge of it, but pain arises when one learns the steamy details, when one sees the photographs. Sometimes, we learn such steamy details
from smaller marginal countries that pass security measures in a much more open and direct way. In the summer of 2012, the Hungarian parliament passed a new national security law that

And here is how the Hungarian government justifies such measures:

When confronted with such facts, should not every decent US citizen feel like a baboon suddenly overwhelmed by the shame of its protruding red butt? Assange, Manning, and Snowden are exemplary cases of the new ethics that befit our era of digital control and communications. They are no longer just whistle-blowers who denounce illegal practices of private companies (banks, tobacco and oil companies) to the public authorities; they denounce these public authorities themselves when they engage in the “private use of reason.” We need more Mannings and Snowdens in China, in Russia, everywhere. States like China and Russia are of course much more oppressive than the US—just imagine what would have happened to someone like Manning in a Russian or Chinese court: in all probability there would be no public trial, a Chinese Manning would just disappear! However, one should not exaggerate the softness of the US tactics, though true they doesn't treat prisoners as brutally as China or Russia. Because of the global technological priority of the US, they simply do not need to take an openly
brutal approach, though they are more than ready to apply it when necessary. In this sense, the US are even more dangerous than China insofar as their measures of control are not perceived as such. That is to say, in a country like China, the limitations of freedom are clear to everyone, there are no illusions about it, the state is an openly oppressive mechanism, whereas in the US, formal freedoms are mostly guaranteed so that most individuals experience their lives as free and are not even aware of the extent to which they are controlled by state mechanisms. Such whistle-blowers do something much more important than state the obvious by denouncing openly oppressive regimes, that is, rendering public our already directly experienced unfreedom: instead they render public the unfreedom that underlies the very situation in which we experience ourselves as free.

This feature is not limited to the control of digital space: it pervades thoroughly the form of subjectivity that characterizes the “permissive” liberal society. Since free choice is elevated to a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear to infringe on a subject's freedom: it has to appear as, and be sustained by, the very self-experience of individuals as free. There are a multitude of forms in which unfreedom appears in the guise of its opposite: when we are deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we have been given a new freedom of choice, to choose our healthcare provider; when we can no longer rely on a long-term employment and are compelled to search for new precarious work every few years, we are told that we have been given the opportunity to re-invent ourselves and discover unexpected creative potentials that lurk in our personalities; when
we are obliged to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become “entrepreneurs of the self,” as if we should be acting like a capitalist who chooses freely how he will invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed) into education, health, travel … Constantly bombarded by such imposed “free choices,” forced to make decisions for which we are not even properly qualified or sufficiently informed, we more and more experience our freedom as a burden that causes unbearable anxiety. Unable to break out of this vicious cycle as isolated individuals, since the more we act freely the more we are enslaved by the system, we need to be “awakened” from this “dogmatic slumber” of fake freedom from outside, by the push of a Master figure.

This brings me back to my central point: it is absolutely crucial to insist on the universality of our struggle. The moment we forget that Pussy Riot and WikiLeaks are moments of the same global struggle, everything is lost, we have sold our soul to the devil. And I think that we must maintain the same attitude towards the events in Ukraine. I, again, totally agree with you that the the protests that toppled Yanukovich and his gang were a miracle comparable to the Arab Spring. They were triggered by the Ukrainian government's decision to prioritize good relations with Russia over the integration of Ukraine into the European Union. Predictably, many anti-imperialist Leftists reacted to the news about the massive protests with their usual racist patronizing of the poor Ukrainians: how deluded they are, still idealizing Europe, not seeing that Europe is in decline and that joining the European Union would just make Ukraine an economic colony of Western Europe sooner or
later, pushed into the position of Greece. What these Leftists ignore is that Ukrainians were far from blind about the reality of the European Union, but fully aware of its troubles and disparities. Their message was simply that their own situation is much worse. Europe's problems are still a rich man's problems—remember that in spite of the terrible predicament of Greece, African refugees are still arriving there en masse, drawing the ire of Rightist patriots.

Second, and much more important, what does the “Europe” the Ukrainian protesters refer to stand for? It cannot be reduced to a single idea: it spans from nationalist and even Fascist elements up to the idea of what Etienne Balibar calls
égaliberté
, freedom-in-equality, the unique contribution of Europe to the global political imaginary, even if it is today ever more betrayed by European institutions and people themselves. And between these two poles is the naïve trust in European liberal-democratic capitalism. What Europe should see in Ukrainian protests is its best and its worst, and to see this clearly, Europe has to look outside itself onto a Ukrainian scene.

Rightist nationalism, although relatively marginal in general, should not be underestimated. One of the signs of the deep shift in ideological hegemony that Western Europe has undergone in the last decade is the request of the new Right to establish a more balanced view of the two “extremisms,” the Rightist one and the Leftist one: that is, to treat the extreme Left in the same way Europe after WWII treated the extreme Right. Although Communist critics of Stalinism were naïve and full of their own flawed ideas, long before Solzhenytsin “the crucial questions about the Gulag were
being asked by Left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat written out of history (they expected far worse than that, and often received it).”
³
This large-scale critical movement was inherent to the Communist movement, in clear contrast to Fascism: “nobody can be bothered to argue much about whether fascism might have turned out better, given more propitious circumstances. And there were no dissidents in the Nazi Party, risking their lives on the proposition that the Fuehrer had betrayed the true essence of National Socialism.”
⁴
Precisely because of this immanent tension at the very heart of the Communist movement, the most dangerous place to be in the time of the terrible 1930s purges in the Soviet Union was at the top of the
nomenklatura
: in a couple of years, 80 percent of the Central Committee and Red Army Headquarters members were shot. Furthermore, one should also not underestimate the “totalitarian” potential, as well as direct outright brutality, of the White counter-revolutionary forces during the Civil War: had a White victory been the case,