Where do we want to fight? — How do we want to fight? — Who do we want to fight with? — So what could politics be?
I would like to approach these questions via three points. Firstly, through an experience or an inner conflict with myself using the example of the pro-Palestinian protests in Berlin, secondly through the concept of „victory or winning“ and thirdly through the concept of hope.
My first point is not primarily about an evaluation of the historical conflict and the current war, but for me about the productivity that the whole controversy, and the specifically German controversy, means in the surrounding of these questions.
When the protests began, I was happy that people were breaking the iron silence of the German reason of state and I was curious. Curious because people, regardless of whether they articulated themselves in a classically bourgeois manner in demonstrations and public discourse or more irreconcilably on the street with focused attacks on the cops, came together in a way that I couldn’t assess. Of course I could get an idea of why the individual groups – Palestinians, Muslims, Trotskyist splinter groups or post-colonial students – were taking part in the protests, but it became more difficult for me when it came to people who saw themselves as explicitly queer, Jewish or somehow from the anti-German corner. Because it is also fact that for some, Hamas was and is a positive point of reference as the only resistance group. So I was so curious about this mixture of different people, young women with hijab, queer academics, Jews, German leftists, expatriots and Arab people, whose composition seemed so strange to me. What am I getting at politically? I would like to mention three points:
We always fall back on the justified rejection of our classical political categories, or at least their questioning, when so-called left-wing actors appear in protests. So we start to judge them again by the standards of left-wing categories. But the point must be to look at the protests without these categories, in other words, not to see the left-wing actors as such at first. Otherwise we will miss the underlying common experience in the protests, that which goes beyond the obvious political left. And that should be decisive for one’s own feelings and ultimately the decision to participate or not. Because what was this shared experience, which I also intuitively felt, why I was attracted to these people, despite all my bad thoughts when I think of academics, queer theory, postcolonial theory or the machismo of the street kids, but which I repressed politically and analytically with my classic thinking categories of „anti-Semitism“, „regressive anti-imperialism“, etc.? Bifo Berardi writes in an interview about what distinguishes today’s university occupations in the USA from those of 1968: „In my opinion, the students identify with despair. Desperation is the psychological and also cultural characteristic that explains the broad identification of young people with the Palestinians. I think that the majority of students today consciously or unconsciously anticipate an irreversible deterioration of living conditions, irreversible climate change, a prolonged period of war and the threat of nuclear fallout from the conflicts that are underway in many places on the geopolitical map. In my opinion, this is the main difference to the 1968 movement: A reversal of the balance of power is not in sight.“ And isn’t the search for people who share an experience with you, and by that I don’t mean a superficial political or economic experience, but a fundamental relationship to the world, the crucial point at the moment? In the long run, of course, this is not enough and we also need a common understanding of the world, a reflection on shared experience, because otherwise we could end up at the party conference of a new right-wing party. Nevertheless, the shared experience is currently a crucial starting point because everything is on the ground and we have to find out new with whom we want to live and fight, where and how.
In this respect, the answers to these questions cannot be strategically determined or defined. The place is the right one when we decide to make it our place and others do so in a similar way. This also determines whether it becomes a strategic place or whether it is „only“ a place for me. That is also a lot, because in it I learn to fight again (in the classic tactical sense, in the sense of fighting for what I am, what others are and how we relate to each other). And then the third point: if it becomes a strategic place, we have a non-movement. The non-movements cannot therefore be discovered analytically, at most perhaps we can get an idea of them (but even that is not due to analytics, but to the ability to share a basic experience with people), but can only be made into such through the people in them.
I believe it is necessary to approach things in this way. Shared experience and theorising it means something different for everyone, but only in this way can we deepen and broaden our experiences, become wiser together, approach the essentials from different sides, places and people. Now, of course, the question immediately arises as to why I am telling you this, why you should relate to events, protests etc. in this way. Because I believe that it is a first step towards creating the conditions for the possibility of winning again. So I agree with the formulation in Bulletin No. 5: I still want to win: I want to live in freedom, I want that others can live in freedom, I want justice for all those murdered by the system. But what does it mean to win? In my opinion, it cannot be its meaning in the popular sense, that is, victory as a process of struggle in which one acquires the power to defeat (in the extreme case even to destroy or kill) the other and to take its place, more politically speaking, to dare to revolt, to become a constituent and ultimately constituted power, or more philosophically speaking, to go from being a servant to becoming a master. For what would remain is rule under a reversed sign. The master becomes the servant and the servant becomes the master. In the left, people talk about „victories“ from different starting points, but always in this above-mentioned understanding, only that it is packaged in beautiful vocabulary such as hegemony, counter-power, grassroots work, insurrectionalism. As far as we know, this led to the historical mistakes of the anarchists, Bolsheviks and all those who followed them. Making historical mistakes is legitimate, but continuing to reproduce them is stupidity and opportunism. So what does it mean to want to win? Or how can we think differently about victory? I think it has to do with power or with thinking about victory without power. I find that quite difficult because it’s so ingrained in our minds that we always think of victory in terms of the defeat of the other. Two closely related proposals that I find interesting are that of living „as-if-not“ and of denial, of „I would prefer not to“; here I refer mainly to Marcello Tari’s book „Unhappy Revolution“. So what does that mean?
To live as-if-not, as if the laws did not apply, as if you had already won.
In view of the historical defeats of the left, there are, and I believe rightly so, attempts to approach the same questions via a different tradition, such as Badiou, Zizek, Agamben and Tari. Motifs often appear in the Bible in which people, whether Jesus or Paul, act as if they have already won. It is not about „wanting to win“, but about „having already won“: give to the emperor what is the emperor’s and to God what is God’s, the temple situation with Jesus, the palm leaf and entry into Jerusalem, stories of Jesus‘ healing. In this respect, this „as if not“ not only includes the legal laws, but also the constitution of our society. You live as if the stinking homeless person in the subway is not an outcast and despised member of this society. In this respect, the „as-if-not“, „as-if-we-had-already-won“ always refers to the weak, the poor and the dissident. In this sense, victory means turning to the weak, not the strong. In the Bible, the non-intentional behaviour towards victory culminates in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, the true and non-intentional victory. I believe this last plot twist of the Bible is central because it turns the weak into the strong and protects us from slave morality (Nietzsche).
The „I would prefer not to“ goes in the same direction, but with a different shade: it is the attitude of „I would prefer not to“ to reject any seduction of realpolitik, any entanglement in supposed discursive contradictions, any danger that exists in wanting to win with a simple „no“. This „no“ is not justified in terms of content, but at most by the abstract principle of simple and plain „not wanting to“.
This living-as-if-not, as if one had already won and „I woud prefer not to“ is neither an invitation to a laissez-faire attitude. It is neither a call for an anarcho-primitivist retreat nor a call to wear oneself out in the entanglements of domination. It requires a permanent effort or confrontation, because otherwise it leads to an attitude of indifference. It requires a permanent consideration of what this „as-if-not“ could mean and a knowledge of what domination and power are. In this respect, the as-if-not unfortunately remains related to the law. Specifically: does the „as-if-not“ mean constantly travelling without ticket, because one believes that a central essence of domination is expressed here? or is not buying tickets precisely the slogan „give to the emperor what is the emperor’s“? This is an individual and collective debate or a concretisation in the individual way of life, where everyone has to make a serious decision about what it means for him/her to do the as-if-not. This is an opportunity to approach this as-if-not from different directions, experiences and knowledge.
Does it still make sense to talk about victory then? I’m not sure, I don’t like the term. In this sense, I agree with Tari: it’s better to be a loser than a lost one.
The thoughts about Victory is followed by hope:
Some accuse hope of condemning us to an attitude of waiting, in which we postpone the possible and necessary to an uncertain future, in other words, hope tempts us to live in a capitalist normal state. The others accuse hopelessness of leading us either to nihilism or to an identitarian feel-good politics in the ideal world of the commune.
I would like to rescue hope from this false dichotomy and claim that neither hopelessness means nihilism, nor hope the flight into the future. Both positions, once in relation to the present and once in relation to the future, belong together. Hope would then be an attitude towards the future that goes beyond wishing, that does not flee into the future but brings the future into the present. The dichotomy mentioned above would then not be a dichotomy at all, but the same thing, namely despair and waiting into emptiness. Hope arises from the present and is a firm certainty (e.g. that communism is possible as long as two people exist) in relation to things that are unclear and unknown.
I would therefore like to end these thoughts on hope, which is also about concepts of time, with a few brief thoughts on time. Tari writes that the time of capital has always been characterised by a frenetic acceleration, also in order not to give the revolution the time it needs – and thus slow down subjective development. One could therefore say that capitalist time, through this frenetic acceleration, makes it impossible to think about hope and drives us into the wrong dichotomy of time and thus hope vs. hopelessness. It should therefore be about slowing down capitalist time in the sense of „as if not“ and „I would prefer not to“ and giving up our impatience, but not our urgency. So it’s about „having time“, i.e. creating distance from the present: You only see things from a distance … Those who remain in the centre of things learn nothing“ (Tari)
Thank you