Following on from elements of an ecological philosophy (determined by the environment rather than the subject), I have gathered here a number of texts that draw political conclusions by denouncing the idealism of our political illusions (democratic, revolutionary, voluntarist, constructivist, historical). It is not enough to vehemently criticize the world's march toward the abyss and all its injustices in order to remedy them. There is a crucial need for criticism of criticism (of the supposed unity as well as the friend-enemy opposition or the simple inversion of values, or the subjectivism of critiques of rationality, reification, alienation, commodities, etc.) just as it is necessary to criticize all the imaginary solutions that come to mind (take from the rich, abolish money or property, stop progress or growth, increase wages, reduce working hours, don't pay back debts, abolish the army, reappropriate the media, radical democracy, leave Europe, etc.). To regain a minimum of effectiveness, we must add to these dead ends, which condemn us to powerlessness and reduce politics to a sham, the delusional claims of a reform of thought and a new man dreamed up by revolutionary romanticism and the metaphysical utopias of artistic and philosophical avant-gardes, not to mention the strange sexo-leftism that completely misunderstands the impact of psychoanalysis on politics, Freud and Marx limiting each other instead of allowing hope for the harmonious liberation of instincts expected from a fantasized revolution—as others may expect from a more “natural” life.
After clearing the ground of all these myths of the 20th century, we must resolve to no longer overestimate our means and take stock of what it really means to change the system of production in order to have a chance of succeeding. This is by no means a question of discouraging action and pretending that nothing can be done, but quite the contrary: it is a question of establishing the conditions for achieving a minimum of effectiveness. The ecological emergency cannot be satisfied by our protests and our pie-in-the-sky plans for an ideal world, but imposes on us an obligation to achieve concrete results, even if they are very insufficient. This pragmatism is wrongly despised by radicals on the pretext that everything would indeed have to be changed... if we could, but unfortunately what is necessary is not always possible, a hard lesson from experience that is difficult to accept.
The other decisive factor, along with globalization, has been our entry into the Anthropocene, not so much in the geological sense as in the sense of global awareness, confirming the destruction of our environment and our living conditions. This concern for the environment reinforces materialism at the expense of idealistic values and subjectivity, contrary to what many environmentalists believe. Ecological responsibility is not compatible with millenarian conceptions of politics and requires us to move from utopian idealism to the materialism of production, more seriously than the Marxists themselves, who paradoxically tended to ideologize everything (from Gramsci's cultural hegemony to Mao's Cultural Revolution, or the post-1968 counterculture). We need to reestablish that ideology is only a historical product corresponding to the material infrastructure and social relations. It is not thought that shapes the future, as an architect's plan projects its construction in advance, but historical time that changes our thoughts and shapes the world without asking our opinion, a world that we cannot recognize as our own, as the one we would have wanted, but whose destruction by our industry forces us to react, starting from what exists and what is possible, to save what can be saved instead of just making things worse by trying to point the finger at someone to blame, a scapegoat for all our ills, whatever name we give it (industry, technology, productivism, capitalism, financialization, growth, globalization, neoliberalism, the market, competition, consumption, individualism, domination, etc., this accumulation being sufficient to show that there is no single cause).
It is very enlightening on this point to understand how Gentile, the official philosopher of fascism, was inspired by Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, which he completely distorts by making the transformation of the world a realization of the idea instead of an objective process, a transition from historical materialism to fascist voluntarism. This is worth reading and reflecting on because, when we no longer rely on the material of production but on subjective values that oppose each other, all that remains is the reign of force, propaganda, and censorship—from which only material objectivity, on which we can agree, can save us.
If voluntarism not only leads to failure but also wreaks havoc, the reasons for political failure, between religiosity and determinism, can be found either in the charismatic frenzy that gives the crowd a sense of communion and omnipotence, or in the greater weight than we thought of determinism and interdependencies, which cannot be denied into non-existence. Wanting to change the world is often very foolishly ignoring the real ecology, not only of living beings but also of society, the complexity of interdependencies and balances, and even systemic risks. The question is not a theoretical or philosophical one about “our relationship with nature.” There will be no other way out than to take into account all the material causes: ecology, economics, technology.
There is also an institutional idealism, a dream of the ideal political regime as the embodiment of a timeless rationalism. However, comparing political philosophy and effective politics shows how Aristotle's analyses of city governments were immediately rendered obsolete by the empire of Alexander, his pupil. There is no autonomous politics, based on itself or on the spirit of a people, as it is subject to external forces and to the empire that ensures internal peace and trade. Republican myths about democracy do not stand up to scrutiny either. When we ask ourselves, “What is democracy?” at the level of the state, we find simply the rule of law and institutions, a far cry from the supposed power of the people and the fantasy of direct democracy based on referendums, which reflect rather dangerous and naive conceptions of democracy, given that it is made up of compromises its sovereignty being very limited in the global rule of law—with the slow construction, despite all resistance, of a universal and homogeneous state under the aegis of the UN and its agencies (WHO, WTO, etc.). More generally, it seems that stable regimes are those that know how to combine democracy, oligarchy, and aristocracy in the management of the established order through intermediary bodies and the separation of powers, not those that claim to change everything unilaterally through the central power of a strong state.
Local democracy and change from below are something else entirely and a safer path towards a relocalized and less productivist economy (for which I have proposed the triptych of guaranteed income, municipal cooperatives, and local currencies), which does not mean that state policies are not important for the democratization of society and its adaptation to external constraints, the support of the weakest individuals, the preservation of minorities, and our living environment. Similarly, European policies and global actions by the UN or global movements (especially youth movements) are of the utmost importance. There is a dialectic between top-down and bottom-up approaches; it is not a question of one or the other, but rather their complementarity. We must make use of all available resources, taking into account local diversity, minorities, social balances, and material constraints or powers. Compared to thunderous anti-capitalism, one might think that this is just old-fashioned reformism, when what we need is to establish a completely new synergy between different levels of a truly transformative ecological transition, involving alliances of varying shapes and sizes between actors with varying degrees of commitment.
Because of the urgency that is narrowing our horizons, we are no longer in the realm of idealistic morality, but in the harsh reality of a morality of responsibility and effective policies that are absolutely vital. Political action to change our lives and save what can be saved is essential. It is certainly not a question of letting things happen and pretending that nothing can be changed on the pretext that not everything is possible. We are obliged to change, whether in the face of predicted ecological disasters or because of economic upheavals and the digitization of the world, but it is not enough to say so; we must give ourselves the means to do so. It is not a question of personal convictions, since the necessary adjustments do not depend on our opinions and are often not even known in advance, only becoming apparent in hindsight. If we need radical action that takes the urgency seriously, it is in our determination to see the experiment through to the end, to learn from our failures and to correct our course in order to achieve concrete results as quickly as possible, both locally and globally.
This is undoubtedly a break with the ideologies of the past that many refuse to accept, but politics in the Anthropocene era should be the end of politics as we have known it, the end of its revolutionary or nationalist mystique, in favor of a more modest and achievable “practical politics” that is ecological. If Machiavelli assures us, after the terror of Savonarole's theocratic utopia, that “the world remains in the same state as it has always been,” politics nevertheless changes meaning according to the times. Thus, we are no longer in the situation of the previous century, neither ideologically, after the collapse of communism and revolutionary hope, nor materially, with new ecological emergencies, peak population, market globalization, and the digitization of the world, a world of the Anthropocene undergoing accelerated transformations, not only technological.
In this context, it would be absurd to try to revive obsolete ideologies when we need to move from communism to ecology. However, while a paradigm shift does highlight the flaws of the previous paradigm—its unthought-through aspects, its simplifications, its generalizations, its prejudices, its errors, its horrors—and makes it necessary to distance ourselves from the mistakes of the past, it is not certain that it can protect us from new illusions, as history has repeatedly shown us, and it takes a long time for these “paradigm shifts” to take hold—outdated ideas continue to have nostalgic supporters, sometimes for centuries. There is therefore always the risk of lagging behind, and for example of believing that we are still in a savage market economy when we may already have entered an economy administered by central banks. There is always the risk of being blinded again. Nevertheless, there is a step to be taken (to hold on to the ground we have gained), shedding new light on our history and our future.
From historical materialism to fascist voluntarism, 10/09/13
The actualism of Giovanni Gentile, the official philosopher of fascism, helps us understand how fascism stems from Marxism, based on an idealistic interpretation of both the injunction to transform the world and praxis, of an active subject opposed to a passive object (well before Lukács). The autonomy given to ideology and worldviews in relation to infrastructure makes them an arbitrary choice of values, in an assumed historicism that gives the illusion of being able to change history itself. This can be seen as the origin of the reduction of politics to morality (Gramsci's ethico-politics, most influenced by Gentile), leading straight to the red-brown tendencies that would contaminate Marxism itself. This process of fascistization is characterized by the abandonment of materialism, where human action is certainly necessary but no longer determinative (in the final instance), in favor of voluntarism and a constructivism devoid of dialectic (which could be called Kantian), where the transformation of the world depends solely on ideological struggle, on the hope that “the idea will become a material force by seizing the masses.”
Political failure, between religiosity and determinism, May 23, 2015
Politics is decidedly disappointing, something that is pretty much accepted by everyone today—especially since the financial crisis and the Arab revolutions—except that we persist in blaming our collective powerlessness entirely on our defeatism and passivity,
when our activism could just as easily be contributing to this by missing the target and feeling obliged to repeat like a mantra, from failure to failure, that we must remain utopian because otherwise we would be accepting the injustices of the world! The first obstacle is indeed there, in this law of the heart, a simple refusal to accept reality and recognize the extent of our powerlessness, which no one can pretend to ignore anymore, preferring to believe in miracles, always ready to follow the dream merchants. There is no doubt that focusing on concrete problems (energy conversion, relocation, inequalities, precariousness) would give us a much better chance of solving them, but we prefer to enhance our image with lofty ambitions and devotion to a few grand ideals or nostalgia for a fusion society, lost in a religiosity that mixes abstraction and emotion, with reality paying the price. In the wake of the work carried out so far, it seemed useful to me to first return to what is misleading us, preventing us from recognizing our determinisms and solving our problems, then on what constrains us materially, whether we like it or not, trying to sketch out the bleak framework for collective action, leaving us with little hope, and the effective mechanisms behind the political facade of competitive democracy. What I am trying to show is that the first obstacle to democracy, collective intelligence, and ecology is our limited rationality, our illusions, ideologies, religions, dogmatisms, traditions, prejudices, the idealism of values, group thinking, affiliations (clans, parties), diversity of interests, narcissism, bouts of euphoria (which lead to crashes), the inability to think long term, etc. Above all, there are unavoidable material constraints (war, technology, economics, health, ecology) that mean that most of what politics would like to regulate escapes it—as we have seen—leaving it with nothing but the ministry of words, which is left to communicators or confiscated by religion and its professed good intentions. There is reason to despair because, no, we cannot change the world any more than we can change the era we live in, however unpleasant that may seem to us, given how unacceptable this world is. On the other hand, there is nothing impossible about changing our own world, locally, or living outside the dominant codes, even if it is not always easy and even if there are many failures.
Material causes: ecology, economy, technology, 09/03/18
Criticism of politics is a prerequisite for not expecting too much from it and recognizing that determinations are not ideological but largely material. Rather than a battle of ideas, it is our local actions that can convince and multiply. Material causes are not immediately decisive; they leave some room for maneuver in the short term, feeding the illusion of our freedom, but it is in the longer term that they impose themselves, after the fact, according to different time frames. Thus, ecology is certainly the most fundamental constraint, but it is also the one that takes the longest to manifest itself. It is not love of nature that makes ecology so indispensable, but rather the destruction of our living conditions. Economic causality is undoubtedly felt more quickly, and in any case it is ultimately decisive. The third material cause has become more apparent in our time with the acceleration of technology, which is becoming increasingly rapid, even though innovations are always initially criticized as useless (since they did not exist before) and accused of all kinds of evils, of making us lose our souls, before we end up adopting them as if they had always existed... Once we have identified these three material causes that are imposed on us, we must build a strategy that takes them into account and does not overestimate the power of politics. Instead of serving no purpose (by wanting too much, beyond political possibilities), we must organize ourselves to obtain the most effective measures, particularly at the local level.
What is democracy?, 09/22/17
The farmers who replaced the fishermen of the megalithic culture were very egalitarian and democratic, according to Alain Testart, who refers to them as “primitive democracies.” But then, if democracy was relatively common in prehistoric times, although dominated by hierarchical and military regimes since the Neolithic period, what did the Greeks invent? One could say that they simply formalized democracy, putting the various constitutions into writing to allow reflection on their principles, but in fact, they mainly invented unequal market democracy! The market would indeed be the main determinant of democracy if we are to believe Archytas of Tarentum, a philosopher-king and friend of Plato, for whom the concept of equality was established in commercial relations, with fair exchange between seller and buyer thanks to a common measure and rational thinking that equalized the contracting parties. The market would thus be the condition for unequal democracy governed by egalitarian law. The other mythical origin of democracy is, of course, the French Revolution, even though, apart from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, our institutions come directly from constitutional monarchy or the Empire.
On referendums and naive conceptions of democracy, 12/23/18
The insurgents can invoke the national narrative to claim this power of the people promised and always confiscated by parliamentarianism, which is in fact a call for strong power and a dictatorship of the majority, of which the referendum is the preferred instrument, whereas what should be defended are policies of dialogue, a democracy of minorities and municipalities, as opposed to the myth of a uniform people (which turns against foreigners before turning against the enemy within). The reality of politics is its powerlessness; changing the form of democracy does not change that. The supposed sovereignty of democracy is a denial of reality and external constraints that can only lead to dictatorships (as were the so-called “people's democracies”). This fascist-like democratism is apparently always based on the same simplistic narrative that all our misfortunes come from corrupt elites (such as Jews) who enrich themselves at our expense. Therefore, all we need to do is get rid of these parasites to restore the supposed unity of the people and social harmony.
Combining democracy, oligarchy, and aristocracy, 11/11/16
Aristotle, Polybius, Montesquieu, Rousseau
It is striking that Aristotle, the great Greco-Roman historian Polybius, and Machiavelli, who was inspired by Cicero, all arrived at roughly the same conclusion as Montesquieu: the necessity of a temperate republic or a mixed constitution, with a division of powers. What is even more striking is that our democratic system is, in a way, the embodiment of this, although we are not willing to admit it. It must be said that there is a scandalous ignorance of the true history of our democracy and the origins of our institutions, which are falsely traced back to the Revolution, when in fact they date back to the Empire and the constitutional monarchy, the essence of which we have retained (with a republican monarch, a senate, etc.), albeit in an increasingly democratized form. Our democracy is not so different from the English constitution, which combines monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy with a strict separation of powers. If Rousseau rejects mixed constitutions, it is because he asks himself what a legitimate government should be for rational beings born free and equal. He is not so much concerned with its feasibility, which he himself strongly doubts. His doctrinal simplism is thus dictated by his aim of a legitimate right that would not be contaminated by illegitimate forces, but this purely theoretical position is not tenable in practice, as history has taught us since ancient times. There is no completely legitimate power, even democratic power, which can always be contested. The reality is one of conflicting interests and social division. Civil unity is, like law, purely formal; it exists entirely in institutions, including national holidays, and no more in ideology or culture than in origin or race. If we leave behind the regulatory ideal and turn to history and the observation of political regimes as they have existed, a mixed constitution is justified by the fact that reality imposes effective powers beyond principles (which it is dangerous to push to extremes) and that denying the role of the elite or wealth simply leads to their becoming underground powers, and thus to the corruption of democracy. In any case, it would not be a bad idea to introduce into the debate the question of mixed government, which is completely absent in favor of pure and simple postulates of principle.
The End of Politics, 7/10/14
Rather than imagining that we need to strengthen convictions, win ideological hegemony, change minds, or call for universal love, we should do away with these messianic conceptions of politics and of a fusional community and return to the materialist and pluralist dimension of a democratic politics that is not “sovereign” and domineering but rather made up of compromise and power relations. This is undoubtedly unacceptable to most people in the face of social injustice and looming ecological disasters. Yet it is precisely what is needed to give our protests a minimum of effectiveness and a small chance of improving things instead of going from defeat to defeat. It is not so much a question of what we want as of what we can do, not of what we dream of, which differs for each of us, but of what we are obliged to do in order to adapt reasonably well to a radical anthropological change such as has never before occurred at this speed in history. The problem is that the economic superiority of collectivism has not been proven, so it can no longer be based on historical materialism. Apart from the ecological reasons for which the proof has not yet been provided, all that remains is a voluntarism of values (the beautiful ideas associated with collectivism), which is precisely what fascism was built on. The end of political maneuvering and demagoguery is therefore not imminent. We will undoubtedly have to bite the bullet once again, but this should then bring us back to the true purpose of politics when it is ecological and democratic, i.e., not the authoritarian expression of a general will imposing its norms, but the democratization of society and its adaptation to external constraints, support for the weakest individuals, and the preservation of minorities and our living environment.
Politics and life, 10/01/17
Wanting to change the world often means ignoring ecology, the complexity of interdependencies and balances, and even systemic risks. The reign of ends that has provided us with tools and a home, committing us to the artificialization of the world through our work of transformation (negentropic), all this technical efficiency (local) contrasts sharply with its global perverse effects and political inefficiency, especially as the masses involved are large. While technology increases our power over things tenfold, it does not take us out of the evolutionary process of becoming technical evolution, an evolution that so many people complain about, which has become second nature and is sometimes as threatening as the first. This selection after the fact by the result clearly signifies the primacy of reality over thought and, it must be emphasized, requires the reintegration of the principles of life into politics, those of systems theory and cybernetics, with the need to correct the course and be guided by the result. There are therefore profound (cognitive) reasons that limit the effectiveness of planning and voluntarism, moving from the mechanistic paradigm to the biological paradigm. This does not prevent all companies from investing in their development and planning their future, but they have had to integrate feedback from their actions. There is a dialectic between top-down and bottom-up; it is not one or the other, but a combination of the two. One might think that it would be necessary for there to be a collective intelligence that governs the world and preserves the future, taking us from a history that is endured to a history that is designed. We can only note its absence. It should be added that not only do the necessary adaptations not depend on our opinions, but they are not known in advance, eventually becoming necessary, but always after the fact and sometimes with a long delay.
