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Title: The Golden Mediocrity
Author: Miguel Amorós
Date: September 26, 2015
Language: en
Topics: Spain, globalization, politics
Source: Retrieved on 11th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/golden-mediocrity-miguel-amor%C3%B3s
Notes: Original title: “La hora de la áurea medianía”. Transcript of a presentation delivered on September 26, 2015 at La Col.lectiva, Cabanyal, Valencia, Spain, during a conference on gentrification. Translated in October 2015 from a copy of the original Spanish text provided by the author.

Miguel Amorós

The Golden Mediocrity

You’ll live more virtuously, my Murena,

by not setting out to sea, while you’re in dread

of the storm, or hugging fatal shores

too closely, either.

Horace, Odes, Book 2

Capitalist society is a society of hierarchically stratified masses. If

there is one thing that distinguishes today’s masses from classes, it is

the fact that masses detest action, and always prefer that others should

act in their stead, while they devote themselves to their private

affairs. Someone even went so far as to say that masses do not want

revolution, but the spectacle of revolution; now, however, even the

spectacle of revolution is not to their taste. Onstage, the masses like

to show off rather than communicate, but their feeling of insecurity is

so great and their fear of losing what they have is so intense, that the

director must be very sparing with the play’s dramatic development and

must emphasize the music instead. Or, to speak plainly: the play must

walk on eggshells and give the impression that everything will go

swimmingly in a happy world that is shielded from danger, with peace,

tranquility and no pay cuts. Outside of the spectacle, struggles can be

anything but massive, while the few that violate the rules of the game

and sound a violent note will be regularly condemned as provocations

harmful to the particratic regime, the alleged guarantor of “well being”

and “democracy”, the two mainstays of the easy-going postmodern

condition.

The proletarianization of the world, that is, the renewal of capitalism

at all levels after the defeat of the last workers movement—to which we

must add its fusion with the State and the media—made possible a

considerable degree of economic and administrative growth, creating an

environment of bureaucratic-commercial prosperity favorable for the

optimal development of an intermediate salaried stratum. The latter was

not a real class, a world apart by virtue of its own particular

ideology, its own customs and its own values, but an agglomeration of

diverse fragments lacking any solid nexus, yet its members were

satisfied, politically indifferent and obedient, feeling that they were

well-represented by a careerist political class deeply embedded in

public affairs. The rationalization of production, the predominance of

finance and the expansion of the state apparatus provided the system

with a sufficient social base, the market with a considerable number of

consumers, and the universities with a numerous contingent of students.

Its social base was composed of civil servants, white collar employees,

politicians, professionals, experts and so on, individuals whose status

depended on academic training with a price tag on the labor market that

was higher than the price of conventional labor power.

This whole “cognitariat” was so closely bound to the established order

that it identified its fate with the preservation of that order. In the

past, classical German social democracy perceived such emerging sectors,

which it called “middle classes”, as a factor of stability; a sort of

shield against the blows of the class struggle. In fact, the mentality

of this motley sort of bourgeoisie that wore two hats, so to speak, was

quite variable, but for the most part it was closer to that of the haute

bourgeoisie than it was to that of the proletariat, and, as history was

to reveal, in extreme conditions its attachment to the State led it to

be more in favor of dictatorship than revolution. A half century after

the Second World War, the historical situation had changed significantly

and the liberal application of credit seemed to ensure the absolute

victory of the economy and of professional politics. It is therefore not

at all surprising that social activism ever since the end of the 1980s

has taken place in an environment characterized by total passivity, an

absence of dissent and an almost total conformism. Society was in the

grips of a widespread feeling that confronting power was impossible,

because the wage-earning majority had faith in the management of the

party du jour and believed what the television told it, feeling quite

comfortable in a private life colonized by the commodity and replete

with gadgets. Revolution was little more than a dream and the

partiocracy appeared to be the least evil of all political regimes, and

besides, it was always subject to improvement. Few were those who

believed that revolution was necessary, and its advent became an article

of faith derived from ideological convictions similar to those of

religion. The anti-system struggle was sidelined and the scarce

conflicts that broke the surface after the capitalist unification of the

world always ignored modernized misery and relied on the mediation of

institutions and the media spectacle.

The proletarian defeat foreclosed the perspectives for class struggle in

the seventies and eighties, and led to a theoretical disarmament of

subversion that would prove to be long-lasting. In opposition to the

revolutionary social critique, immersed in paralyzing contradictions

that we shall not address here, a submissive and weak structure of

thought was erected that, with an ostentatious pseudo-critique,

condemned all radical change as impossible and, furthermore, as

undesirable. For this way of thinking, every revolution conceals a

totalitarian project. Thus, for this brand of servile thought, Marx and

Bakunin were the founding fathers of revolutionary fundamentalism. The

vulgar, pragmatic and Third-Worldist Marxism that the revolutionary

critique had denounced, would no longer be used as a toolbox for this

reactionary philosophical trend. For the intellectual comfort of the

enlightened middle classes, something less sacerdotal and more adapted

to the euphoric triumphalism of the dominant powers was needed. Social

disintegration, frivolity, consumerist hedonism, ephemeral commitments,

identitarianism and short-sighted incrementalism, everyday features

typical of the new capitalism, were turned into individual virtues that

were to be preserved for the benefit of an alleged “freedom” that was

actually trivial, and was to be administered by the State. The idea of

Progress, the guiding principle of the ruling classes, could be

abandoned without regrets by dissolving it in the exigencies of the

eternal present. Postmodern philosophy perfected cum laude the task

begun by Stalinist Marxism, a cold and lifeless ideology. This mother

lode even produced ore for the mills of pseudo-extremism: a tremendously

reactionary post-anarchism arose from the marriage of individualism and

post-structuralism. The thought of power was academically reinvented

with critical fragments scavenged from the class war, beating a dead

horse and “thematizing” the new world order by way of a self-referential

jargon particularly adapted to an ambivalent and relativist worldview.

Words like “deconstruction”, “episteme”, “drive”, “simulacrum”,

“counter-power”, “rhizome”, “schizo”, “meta-relation”, “heterotopia”,

“biopolitics”, etc., allowed its proponents to both swim in the current

of protest and to use the existing institutions as a changing room,

combining disenchantment with the real revolution with the prestige of

an apparent break from the norm. Coldly and with stoic resolve, academic

reflection rid itself of concepts like “truth”, “ideology”, “class”,

“totality”, “subject”, “reason”, “alienation”, “universality”, “memory”,

“spectacle”, etc., which were notions that corresponded to what it

called “modernity”, and culminated on the terrain of ideas in the social

counterrevolution that then led to the current mass society. Henceforth,

the dominant ideas were patently the ideas that were useful to

domination.

This did not prevent contradictions from arising, however, as they

spread from one sphere to another on a planetary scale. As a result, an

ersatz class consciousness crystallized around a new abstract political

subject, one that would take the world by storm, which the sociologists

of postmodernity called the “citizenry”, and which others would later

christen as the “multitude”, or simply as the “people”. In the

mesocratic conception of the world, the State was ideally separated from

Capital by means of a mental operation that drew from its sociological

hat the “citizen”, a subject external to the economy, with the right to

vote and to be represented by a political class. Likewise, the Present

was set up as absolute reality and the most coarse and opportunistic

pragmatism was treated as a sign of the greatest political intelligence.

Emancipatory ideals, insofar as they derived from old-fashioned grand

narratives and insofar as they referred to the future, would no longer

serve as guides for action, because the allegedly “libidinal” voting

subject was alien to any social problem that could not ipso facto be

translated into political terms and thus become the responsibility of

licensed professionals. The civil society boosters were characterized by

their firm belief that economic and social problems are actually

political problems and must be addressed by way of elections. This is

why they worshipped the State; they comprise the party of the State. And

they are therefore opposed to any really autonomous movement: their

pacifist, another-world-is-possible, and naively optimistic

[buenrollista] initiatives, from their beginnings in Seattle and Genoa,

were never intended to marginalize the parties or to put an end to

capitalism, but to suggest new strategies and to call attention to new

perspectives that were more in accordance with the specific interests of

the class to which they belonged. “Another” capitalism was possible,

just like another politics, and this is why they did not propose to

bypass the existing institutions, but to work within them. A capitalism

with the middle classes intact.

Finally, however, the bursting of the credit bubble not only brought the

long period of continuous economic development to an abrupt end, but

also threatened to take various States down with it. Budget cuts

proliferated and unemployment, precarious jobs, and exclusion spread

like wildfire, but among the most drastically affected layers of the

population there was hardly any reaction. Public assistance, trade union

and police controls worked effectively. The new damage-control measures

implemented in response to the crisis, however, were also seriously

deleterious for the salaried middle classes, which were major losers in

the budget cuts and were furthermore burdened with significant debt.

Unemployment hounded their footsteps, especially among recent college

graduates, highlighting their special vulnerability to the wild swings

of the economy, while government toleration of corruption and waste, as

well as the bank bailout, aroused their indignation. Tired of

fruitlessly petitioning the political class, some of them no longer felt

that they were represented by that class. On May 15, 2011, the enraged

youth poured into the streets and proclaimed their rejection of the big

government parties, which they claimed were responsible for the “low

quality” of “democracy”. This wave of discontent, manifested by way of

social networks, the “civil society movements” and the “occupation” of

public squares, persisted, for the most part, in seeking the least risky

solution, that is, reform of the electoral process, which its supporters

called “real democracy”, rather than the end of parliamentarism. At the

same time, the movement for regional independence won majority support

in Catalonia for similar reasons. The civil society movement and

nationalism were the first political responses of a portion of the

population that had previously remained on the sidelines as spectators.

The lumpenbourgeoisie reconstituted its political identity along with a

kind of class consciousness, but not in opposition to capitalism, but to

“the caste”, or, in the case of Catalonia, to “Madrid”, that is, some

directed their opposition against the corrupt political oligarchy that

had made the State its patrimony, and others directed their opposition

directly against the central State itself, which they accused of keeping

most of the taxes it collected from Catalonia. The ineffectiveness of

exclusively symbolic demonstrations and the fascistic authoritarianism

of the government drove the salaried middle classes to proceed beyond

strategies limited to putting pressure on their political

representatives, convinced that, in order to restore their pre-2008

status, they must oust the corrupt right-wing elements entrenched in the

established institutions or even proclaim the “Catalonian Republic”, to

install either a new social democracy or a moderate separatism. The

middle classes wanted to be bailed out and rescued from

proletarianization by a State, but given its present form, and given the

collapse of the traditional parties, their salvation could only be

brought by other parties and other, more resolute, alliances. The task

that had to be accomplished was clearly laid out: to galvanize the

students and the young people who were struggling to live on part-time

and temporary jobs, along with the wage-earning masses and dissatisfied

elements of the bourgeoisie, and align them all behind an electoral

slate. As is to be expected in a spectacular society, the communications

media facilitated this operation with much greater efficacy than the

squalid “social movements”. In the 2014 elections for the European

Parliament the new representatives of the salaried lumpenbourgeoisie,

almost all of them former college students, occupied center stage on the

political scene for the first time. In the regional and municipal

elections of May 2015, the political scene was seriously transformed.

Those in the middle claimed to fight on behalf of those below them and

those above them. The civil society-oriented middle class seized the

initiative, but not as a universal class that was capable of

representing the common interests of all the exploited classes. Its

ambiguous stance, that was neither fish nor fowl, and was derived from

its position in the economic process, allowed it full freedom of

maneuver, although this same freedom was not granted to the radicals.

This is easy to explain: the goal was to occupy political spaces, not to

solve social problems. “The Social Democracy of the 21^(st) Century” and

other civil society tendencies were incapable of thinking about any

other interests than their own, and therefore they had to limit

themselves to seeking to change rulers rather than the rules of the

game; nor did they seek to bring an end to oppression, but rather to

restore the previous, more buoyant material conditions of the

“citizenry”, that is, their own conditions. This peculiar

“democratization” of politics had the virtue of exhuming Stalinist

cadavers like the IU and the ICV. It did not lead to the

institutionalization of the “movements” by way of mechanisms of

“citizens’ participation”; it simply explored the terrain, co-opted its

leading figures and integrated or prevented protests. There was no

better way to clear the streets than an electoral campaign. The popular

opposition, too weak and confused to devote itself to an alternative

project, succumbed to the conservative reflections of the middle classes

and allowed itself to be led by them. It hardly needs to be pointed out

that the autonomy of the oppressed masses was not reinforced by the

partial victories of the civil society movement, or that the cause of

social justice was not furthered. To the contrary, the presence of this

new kind of politician was the decisive factor, alongside other more

visible elements, in the stabilization of the particratic caste, and

conferred upon the latter an extra dose of legitimacy. The established

order, far from having been weakened thanks to the exaltation of a

permanent participatory assembly movement, has recovered its strength by

arousing in its lost social base the expectations of a shared management

of public expenditures and of a moderate change implemented by

parliaments and municipal councils. In the meantime, the new politicians

expend all their enthusiasm in post-election alliances, attempting to

unite wherever possible the interests of the salaried middle classes

with the administrative bureaucracy and with the “green sprouts” of the

economy—especially in tourism, the new vanguard of the economy—because

it is the latter factors that make the greatest contribution to capital

formation and, to a lesser degree, to the creation of jobs.

Politics is not a sphere that is separate from economic activity or from

the mass media, a sphere from which one can correct social problems

thanks to the intervention of a specialized elite of leaders who rely on

generalized passivity. Politics is that same spectacular economy

camouflaged as social action. It is therefore not a neutral means, an

empty form that can be filled with any content, but the specific form

that, in capitalist society, imposes market relations on the public. The

political liberty guaranteed to the “democratized” institutions in the

offices corresponds in the final reckoning to the free market. Its

purpose is not to establish direct connections between individuals, but

to subject individuals to an external power, that of capital/state.

Today’s new and improved partiocracy has not changed its nature; at

most, it has become more theatrical and is trying harder to play up to

the crowd. It must preserve the obsolete class remnants of the previous

capitalist period without altering the general progress of the

world-economy, something that is hard to do without considerable growth,

which the end of the cycle of economic development renders highly

unlikely. The hypothesized extractive cycle based on the “sustainable”

destruction of the territory has not proceeded here at the speed that

has characterized its progress in Latin America, and the European

situation is still deadlocked, with the civil society masses awaiting

the next elections. If the crises and struggles that will ensue as a

result do not lead to disruptions that result in a Failed State and,

consequently, in the total collapse of the partiocracy, the movements of

the salaried middle class, that is, those associated with the civil

society movement and regional nationalism, their political expressions,

will block any autonomous manifestation of a revolutionary subject, or,

to put it another way, they will prevent the appearance of a truly

assembly-based democracy that will fight against capitalism for an

egalitarian social transformation of society. Anti-capitalist protests

must become more widespread and must become powerful enough to render

the institutional path unviable if they really want to abolish classes

and collectively construct a self-governing, ecologically balanced,

non-patriarchal, just society based on solidarity. The framework of the

civil society movement must be shattered.