The Implosion Point
of Democratist Ideology (2)

Democracy and Communism What separates us from all the others, is that they concentrate entirely on the question of autonomy. They are in search of procedures making it possible to impose the will of the individual or the group on that which determines them. The revolutionary approach, by contrast, consists in going to the heart of that which determines. The efforts made by those who want to change the world through democratising it, including by means of self-management, only lead to perpetuating it through giving everyone the illusion of being able to modify the rules, whereas everybody is subjected to the Law of an abstract monster : the Economy -- the other name for capitalism. It is why, restoring their original meaning to words which the failure of past revolutions has left in the hands of their worst enemies, we affirm that to be expressed, liberty needs the human Community, a society which has never been seen anywhere on our planet, a communist society. This has some concrete implications today. How one must act depends on the limits to be exceeded, and on all the boundaries put up to the communist project. Since Communism is the destruction of the State, of money and, more concretely, the abolition of the business enterprise, of the separation between material production and the acquisition of knowledge, and therefore the liquidation of the school, the destruction of prisons, of advertising, of nuclear power, of one-sided « communication » ( media ), we are not ready to « respect rhythms » and the self-limitations of social movements under the sole pretext of respect for their autonomy, or for the procedures of self-organisation which they have developed. Being a society which will only incidentally be reached through voting in assemblies, a society which will give the liberty of all an expansion that is still impossible in the world of Capital, communism is not defined by procedures for the expression of the collective will. The human Community is neither democratic nor anti-democratic : the question of democracy does not arise in it. It is here that the most rigorous thinkers of democracy, like Lefort, believe they can trap us into the old dilemma : are you for democracy or for totalitarianism. « Whoever dreams of an abolition of power secretly cherishes the reference to the One and the reference to the Same : he imagines a society which would accord spontaneously with itself, a multiplicity of activities which would be transparent to one another and which would unfold in a homogenous time and space, a way of producing, living together, communicating, associating, thinking, feeling, teaching which would express a single way of being. Now what is that point of view on everything and everybody, that loving grip of the good society, if not an equivalent of the phantasy of omnipotence that the actual exercise of power tends to produce ? » [1] Putting on one side the pop psychoanalysis that concludes this passage, what is striking is the obsession with the question of power. « If by Communism... one understands a society from which would be absent all resistance, all substance, all opacity; a society which would be for itself pure transparency; where the desires of all would agree spontaneously or at least, to agree would need a winged dialogue that the bird-lime of symbolism would never weigh down; a society which would discover, formulate and achieve its collective will without passing through institutions, or whose institutions would never create problems - if this is what it is about, then it is necessary to say clearly that it is an incoherent daydream, an unreal and unrealisable state of which the representation must be eliminated. It is a mythical formation, equivalent and analogous to that of absolute knowledge, or of an individual to whose " consciousness " all being is reduced. » C. Castoriadis [2] Because our imaginations cannot conceive of the disappearance of the unconscious dimension, but equally because our desires don't demand an end to it ( since those same desires presuppose it ), to us it appears inseparable from the social dimension ( the propensity of humans to associate and to change through associating ) which we, communists, regard as the primary wealth of mankind. That human relations, both interpersonal and social, in general give certain individuals power over others, and that these powers are partly related to the unconscious, these are realities that seem to be difficult to get beyond in any existing society. In the same way, it is difficult to imagine that these powers will stay in an eternal state of blissful fluidity and succeed in simply being -- that is to say, act -- without fixing themselves in forms of organisation ( of institutions, Castoriadis would say ) which assure them that minimum of permanence essential to any human activity. One can still object that the difficulty in conceiving of the disappearance of all power only expresses how difficult it is for our imagination to leave the limits of the old world, its images and its mental categories. But similarly one can wonder if its disappearance is even desirable. Is the existence of power compatible with the existence of liberty ? Not only can one answer in the affirmative but one can also say that each presupposes the other. Notes [1] Claude Lefort, L'Invention démocratique, Le livre de poche-Biblio-Essais, 1981. All the quotations of Lefort which follow are drawn from this book. [Translators note : The quotes are all in fact from one article « Politics and Human Rights » in L'Invention démocratique. Translated in The Political Forms of Modern Society Polity Press, Cambridge, 1986.] Online at this link. [2] C.Castoriadis, L'institution imaginaire de la société, Le Seuil, 1975. [Translators note : Translated as The Imaginary Institution of Society. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1982. A translation of this passage appears on pg. 111] .