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Title: The Civil Society Plague Author: Miguel AmorĂłs Date: April 30, 2015 Language: en Topics: capitalism, liberalism, reformism, the state Source: Retrieved on 11th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/civil-society-plague-middle-class-its-discontents-%E2%80%93-miguel-amor%C3%B3s#footnoteref1_s5bzagj Notes: Transcript of a talk scheduled to be given at the CafeterĂa ĂŤtaca in Murcia on April 30, 2015. Translated in April 2015 from the Spanish text provided by the author.
That economics and politics go hand in hand is an elementary fact. The
logical consequence of this relation is that real politics must be
fundamentally economic: the market economy has its corresponding market
politics. The forces that direct the world market also exercise de facto
control over the States, with regard to both foreign and domestic
policies, and this same control is also exercised at the local as well
as the national level. This is how it is: economic growth is the
necessary and sufficient condition for the political stability of
capitalism. Within capitalism, the party system evolves in accordance
with the pace of development. When development is in high gear, politics
tends to take the form of a two-party system. When development falters
the political panorama diversifies, as if in compliance with a
homeostatic mechanism.
Capital, which is a social relation originally based on the exploitation
of labor, has appropriated all human activities and invaded every
sphere: culture, science, art, everyday life, leisure, politics…. The
fact that every nook and cranny of society has been commodified means
that all aspects of life itself function in accordance with mercantile
standards, or, which amounts to the same thing, it means that they are
ruled by the logic of capitalism. In a market-society with such features
there are no classes in the classic meaning of the word (separate worlds
in confrontation), but rather an undifferentiated and malleable mass in
which the class of capital – the bourgeoisie – is no longer clearly
demarcated, while its ideology has become generalized and its values
have come to regulate all behavior regardless of class differences. This
particular form of blurring the boundaries between the classes does not
reflect a diminution of social inequality; quite the contrary, social
inequality is much more accentuated, but, paradoxically, it is perceived
less distinctly, and, as a result, there is less real combativity. The
bourgeois way of life has penetrated the non-bourgeois classes,
liquidating the desire for radical change. Wage workers do not want any
other lifestyle, or any other kind of society, or, at most, they want a
better position within the existing society, i.e., more purchasing
power. Violent antagonism is relocated to the margins: the greatest
contradiction is now rooted in exclusion more than in exploitation. The
main actors in the historical and social drama are no longer those who
are exploited on the market, but those who have been expelled, or have
chosen to separate themselves, from the market: those who are situated
outside of the “system” and who tend to act in ways detrimental to it.
Mass society is a standardized, but tremendously hierarchical, society.
Its commanding heights are not staffed by a class of owners or rentiers,
but rather by executives who constitute a veritable managerial class.
Power therefore derives from one’s function, not from one’s possessions.
Decision-making is concentrated in the highest echelon of the social
hierarchy; oppression, mainly in the form of precarious employment and
exclusion, wreaks its havoc in the lowest part of the social hierarchy.
The intermediate layers neither feel the sting of oppression nor do they
concern themselves with it, they just acquiesce. During periods of
economic crisis, however, the phenomenon of oppression ascends the
social scale towards them, dragging them downwards. These strata,
usually called the middle classes, then awaken from their apathetic
condition, upon which the party system was based, contaminate the social
movements and engage in political initiatives which take the form of new
alliances and parties. Their goal is obviously not the emancipation of
the proletariat, or a free society of free producers; in a word, their
goal is not socialism. Their objective is much more prosaic, because the
only thing that they seek to achieve is to save the middle class, that
is, to save it from being proletarianized.
The geographic and social expansion of capitalism entails the expansion
of sectors of wage workers linked to the rationalization of the
production process, the development of the tertiary sector in the
economy, the professionalization of public life and statist
bureaucratization: government officials, consultants, experts,
technicians, white collar managerial staff, journalists, members of the
liberal professions, etc. Their status is derived from their academic
training, not from their ownership of the means of labor. Classic social
democracy perceived these new “middle classes” as a stabilizing factor
that made possible a moderate reformist politics, and, of course, their
further development allowed the process of globalization to be maximized
without too many difficulties. The exponential growth in the number of
students was the most eloquent sign of their prosperity; unemployment
among college graduates, on the other hand, has marked the devaluation
of their training and therefore has served as an indicator of their
abrupt proletarianization. Their response, of course, does not adopt
anti-capitalist characteristics, which are completely foreign to their
nature, but is embodied in a moderate revision of the political scene
combined with a fervid attachment to the social democratic reformism of
the past.
The middle class finds itself at the heart of modern false consciousness
and does not contemplate its own specific condition as such; in its
view, its condition is universal. It sees everything through its own
particular lens, exacerbated by the crisis. With regard to its
mentality, everyone is middle class and must express themselves in the
prefabricated language that has been provided to them by their thinkers
(Negri, Gramsci, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Baudrillard, Mouffe, etc.).
As for its politics, everyone is a citizen, that is, a member of a
community of voters, and everyone must enthusiastically participate in
elections and in the technical machinery to mobilize voter
participation: postmodern ideological cretinism, on the one hand, and
technologically-equipped parliamentary cretinism, on the other. Its
worldview prevents its supporters from understanding social conflicts as
class struggles; for them, such conflicts arise from the incorrect
distribution of assets, a problem whose solution lies in the hands of
the State, and therefore depends on the political hegemony of the
political formations that best represent the middle class. The middle
class reconstructs its political identity in opposition, not to
capitalism, but to the “caste”, that is, to the political oligarchy that
has made the State its own patrimony. The other corrupt sectors,
bankers, real estate developers and trade union leaders, are relegated
to a secondary level. The middle class is the fearful class; it is set
in motion by fear; ambition or vanity appear alongside confidence and
tranquility. Its class enthusiasm is completely exhausted in
parliamentarism; the electoral conflict is the only battle that it
thinks of waging, since there is no place in its plans for a frontal
confrontation with the source of its fears, power, and its highest
priority is to restore its pre-2008 status.
The concept of “citizenship” offers a substitute identity wherever
working class community has been destroyed by capital. Citizenship is
the quality of the citizen, a being with the right to vote whose enemies
are apparently neither capital nor the State, but the old majority
parties, the major obstacles standing in the way of the desperately
beleaguered middle class’s march on the institutions of the State. The
ideology of civil society, which is the ideology of a middle class that
has been mistreated by the global market, is not, however, merely a
variation of Stalinoid workerism; it is instead the postmodern version
of bourgeois radicalism, and therefore the vanguard of social
regression. Not even for the benefit of its public image does it
recognize itself in anti-capitalism, which it considers to be obsolete,
but instead it embraces a more or less populist kind of social
liberalism. This is because the crux of civil society ideology is the
decline of the middle classes and their real aspirations, however much
it may avail itself of the support of the masses who are at risk of
exclusion, but who are too disoriented to act autonomously, and of the
social movements which are too weak to impose a reorganization of civil
society outside of the economy and the State. In this sense, civil
society ideology, which is the successor and heir of the failed
neo-Stalinism of the IU, MC, and IC type,[1] perseveres despite its
frustrated desires for leadership and its inferiority complexes,
although it preserves certain authoritarian eccentricities of its own
and uses one or another symbol for purposes of establishing an identity.
The civil society program is a program of parvenus: it is extremely
flexible. Principles do not matter; its strategy is consciously
opportunist, because, despite the fact that it makes use of almost every
unemployed political adventurer, its ranks are generally composed of
careerists who are new on the political scene and who propose only
short-term objectives.
No civil society program will call for the socialization of the means of
life, generalized self-management, the suppression of the political
specialization, council administration, communal ownership or the
balanced distribution of the population on the territory. The civil
society parties and alliances simply call for a redistribution of
“wealth” that would expand the mesocratic base, that is, they agitate
for certain institutional budgetary allocations that would mitigate the
precariousness of labor and absorb into the workforce the majority of
unemployed college graduates, intentions which by no means threaten to
bring about a break with the past. They do not even enter the political
arena as enemies; their talk about changing the 1978 constitution is not
sincere. They have not yet set foot in the ring and yet they still
display realism and moderation in abundance, building bridges to the
reviled “caste” and even making deals with some of its parties. They are
aware of the fact that, once they are consolidated as organizations and
possess enough influence in the media, the next step will be the
management of the existing system in a more clear and effective way than
it was previously managed. They do not subscribe to any destabilizing
measures because the leaders of the civil society movement must show
that the economy will develop more smoothly if they are the ones at the
helm of the ship of state. They must perforce present themselves as the
hope of salvation for the economy, which is why their project identifies
progress with productivity, that is, it is developmentalist. They
therefore advocate industrial and technological growth that will create
jobs, redistribute income and increase exports, whether this is to be
achieved by way of reforms of the tax system, or by the intensive
exploitation of territorial resources. The least that can be said of
these proposals is that the jobs that they would create will be socially
useless and will not respond to real needs. Economic realism is in
command and complements their political realism: nothing outside of
politics and nothing outside of the market—everything for the market.
The relative upsurge of the civil society movement, including its
nationalist variants, is indicative of the relative exacerbation of the
economic crisis which, far from deepening the social divide and laying
bare the causes of oppression and leading to a conscious and organized
protest movement that calls for the destruction of the capitalist
regime, has instead resulted in their dissimulation and concealment,
allowing for the emergence and development of a false opposition that,
far from challenging the system of domination, reinforces and supports
it: a crisis that has stopped halfway. Nonetheless, social oppression
and alienation are profound, and over the long term they cannot be
camouflaged as questions of politics, but will end up arising as social
questions. The outburst of the social question will depend on the return
of the real social struggle, a struggle which is foreign to the media
and politics, a struggle saturated with initiatives born among the most
uprooted sectors of the masses, the ones that have little to lose if
they decide to cut the bonds that tie them to the cart of the middle
class and if they cast aside bourgeois prejudices against nature. Today,
however, these potentially anti-system sectors seem to be exhausted and
incapable of organizing themselves autonomously, and that is why the
civil society movement is running rampant in their ranks, gently
knocking on the door of the existing institutions and asking for
permission to enter.
[1] IU: Izquierda Unida—United Left—founded in 1986. MC: Movimiento
Comunista—Communist Movement—founded in 1971. IC: Iniciativa per
Catalunya—Initiative for Catalonia—founded in 1987 [Translator’s note].