The Democrat and the Capitalist
 In order for the purchase and sale of labour power -- the activity on which the modern world rests -- to take place, it is necessary that the individual is, for one moment, free. Free, that is, of any obligation prohibiting him from entering into the contract which binds him to capital. Even if, in reality, he has hardly any choice... « Everything that helps to measure men and products, without prejudice or consideration of statute, rank, race or nation... assists capital. And everything that hinders the free measurement of the social labour contained in products for exchange, hinders the smooth operation of capital. ( ... ) There is a zero moment of exchange ( like the « free » hiring ) where the two parties are supposed to meet without precondition. Precisely as at the time of an election, one mimics the recreation of a new, original moment, a starting point, a resetting of the meters to zero. » [7] The abstract character of liberty and equality under capital by no means prevents these concepts from having a real impact : « It is necessary that one hundred Mauritian shirts at one dollar apiece encounter a Japanese television set at one hundred dollars so that one hundred dollars exchanges against one hundred dollars even though, actually, the exchange is unequal, the shirts incorporating more human labour and thus more value. For this mechanism to function, it is necessary that the individuals or social persons who manage these quantities of value in circulation are neither hindered nor favoured in their encounter, and that their circulation is thus not frustrated or impaired by too awkward privileges in the accumulation of value. . . The equality of men and things also supposes confrontation in political and legal life. Ideas must meet, to measure themselves equitably. [7 bis] » From their origin one has seen that the rights of man, far from being indeterminate, belonged to a given society. Lefort attempts to dismiss this argument in two ways. First he accuses the revolutionary critique of Right of « confus(ing) the symbolic and the ideological », as if the first was sheltered from the influence of ideology. The dominant ideology cannot be summarised as a doctrinal unity -- today less than ever. The texts of the founding fathers, the annotations of specialists, the litanies of journalists are only the elaborated part, the visible tip of an iceberg of more or less conscious mental representations which structure rationality and the social imaginary. Symbolic authority is in fact an integral part of it. Right doesn't only exist in constitutions and codes, but also in people's heads, cause and effect of their « manner of being in society ». It is because they are unaware of this reality that so many minority activists and rebels against the democratic consensus find themselves crushed without understanding why. The spectacle of anti-terrorism which liquidates them is not simply a matter of manipulation by masters who consider society from the ramparts of their castle. This spectacle draws its substance and its dynamism from the spontaneous democratism which secretes capitalist social relations. Democratic formalism exchanges the pacification of social life for a thousand humiliations and a great renunciation. When zygotes come to disturb this peace in such a manner that the citizen has nothing in common with them, he feels that this dearly acquired tranquillity is being threatened. From this arises a rejection which nourishes all the state-media manoeuvres. Conversely, the idea of Right is so little constitutive of a human nature that in order to put it into the heads of savages, it was necessary to cut a certain number of them off. When a Kanak tribe, divided between « masters of the earth » and « masters of the sea », caused the products of soil and ocean to circulate among its members in a framework of relations marked by the reciprocity of the gift ( See « Lettre aux Kanaks » in Le Brise Glace no. 1 ), the acquisition of concepts such as rights of ownership or fishing rights could only be experienced as an impoverishment and debasement of life. For his part the modern proletarian experiences how far the language of right which he stammers and the democratic rituals that he reproduces constitute a brake as soon as he attacks their conditions of existence. Everything which individuals and communities immediately had hold of became an object of right from the moment that a mediation intervened, the great universal mediators of money and State which, as a last resort, always impose the measure of the former, and the guarantees and sanctions of the latter. When masses of peasants were forced from their land, and their ties, their histories and often their flesh were finely chopped up by industry, once they had been reduced to nothing more than labour power, they obtained the right to associate in order to be able to sell themselves more effectively. As our bodies have progressively been taken in charge by specialists, so that each moment of our lives has been made the object of a new intervention by external authority, we have won the right to life, to death, to procreate, to maternity for women, to health, to a worthy old age. Never have we had so many rights, never have we had so little responsibility for the good and bad fortune of our carcasses. To finish with Lefort, he continues : « From the moment when the rights of man are posited as the ultimate reference, established right is open to question ( ... ) Now, where right is in question, society - that is, the established order - is in question. » But what happens when that order is established, amongst other things, upon its being put into question ? The dynamics of democratic legalism which spontaneously double the ever increasing mediatization of our lives certainly involve modifications to the law, sometimes even changes in the leading personnel. But this reinforces a fundamental adhesion to the system, an acceptance of the presence of the Great Mediator and the fiction of a social contract which we must have adhered to, in total liberty, at our birth. We like liberty well enough, this brave old notion so many times abused and disguised as its opposite, to consider that democracy is not an idea large enough to contain it. To the limited democratic definition of liberty ( « power to do anything which does not harm another » ), we oppose this communist definition : liberty is power to do all that others do -- to make that which makes the Other, this Other who makes me. To intervene in that which determines others, what power they give me ! And if others determine me, what liberty I offer them ! Notes [7] « Pour un monde sans innocents », La Banquise No 4 [7 bis] « Pour un monde sans innocents », La Banquise No 4 |