(My talk at Democracy Rising World Conference 2015 (Athens, 16-19 July 2015)
Lenin and the Jellyfish
Lenin probably had some contact with jellyfish when on vacation in Capri at Gorki's place, where he enjoyed walking along the seaside. As long as I know, he never mentioned jellyfish in his work. Jellyfish -especially some species related or identified to jellyfish like Polyps and Hydroids- is a strange animal defying western metaphysics in more than one respect. First it is made of several animals united in a colony. Second, it defies the principle of individuation since its different components are partially melted in an originary gelatinous mass, while still keeping their individual features. The French philosopher Simondon tried to produce a new metaphysics, based not on the already existing individual, but on the process of its production from the pre -individual. In other words, he wanted to state the priority of individuation -the making of the individual- over the individual -as a complete and self-standing reality- to affirm that the individual is not an isolated substance but the provisional end of a process of individuation. In this process, jelly among other metastable matters is essential, since matters in a metastable state are the pre-individual base of individuation. In jellyfish, jelly is both the origin and the environment of the individual, as well as the whole to which any individual part belongs. In physics, a metastable state of the matter is the one where, for instance, a liquid is saturated and only lacks a small modification of its state to produce crystal or other forms of matter different from the initial broth. Some kinds of Jellyfish are individuals, but composed individuals with common gelatinous parts, whence its English name. In other languages jellyfish is called “medusa” or “méduse”, what reminds us of the scary mythological person whose hair was made of serpents and who petrified its victims with only one sight. For the Western common sense formalized into a system by Western mainstream metaphysics, medusae are monsters as always was the multitude.
Antonio Gramsci did speak of jelly, as a political concept. He typically distinguished revolution in the East and in the West, saying that while in the East State power is strong and rigid and civil society "gelatinous", in the West the State was not so rigid and could hardly been taken by assault since it is protected by a series of fortifications, making up a very strong civil society. Consequently, the Russian Revolution could easily topple the Czar and later Kerensky's bourgeois government: only the center of the system, the State had to be taken by assault. A gelatinous civil society is one which lacks a defined structure and has no organic relation to the State which intervenes in it from outside.
Lenin’s party was adapted to this kind of reality and, in some way, emulated it. For him, civil society was not an obstacle to taking power, and consequently power could be easily “taken” provided one availed himself of a war machine comparable to the State itself, in other terms, a fortress protected from the outside by solid walls. This mode of power implied little negotiation with civil society which was decreed to be a negligible quantity, only existing as a whole through outer command. Lenin's model emulates Thomas Hobbes' model of political constitution of the people and the sovereign by means of representation, in which civil society amounted to almost nothing, since it was permanently torn out by civil war. Civil society before representation was actually no society at all. Consequently, only as represented by the sovereign could an actual civil society emerge. What allows Hobbes to state that in a monarchy "the King is the people".
One can distinguish in the modern Western tradition two different ways to tackle the problem of the multitude. The one follows the model of the sovereign who creates his own people out of a disorderly crowd, the other considers the multitude as something always already unified by a common ground, a common jelly, as happens in jellyfish. Two very different patterns of political action emerge from both models. The first is the centralized, vertical and authoritarian party typical of the mainstream left, the second is a decentralised organisation based on distributed power, with multiple nodes sharing a common network of communication.
This general introduction will lead us through the history of Podemos. Podemos is reputed to be the most successful political structure emerging from the political stall of the Indignados' movement in Spain It was the result of the encounter of the remains of this grassroots movement with a small party of the Left and a team of political scientists turned into very efficient media activists. Just after the proclamation of the founding manifesto, more than thousand grassroots Podemos organizations, the "circles" were created throughout the country. Podemos was proclaimed the legitimate heir of the social movements and was proud to represent a completely new experience combining active participation and political representation.This fortuitous combination of diverse realities led Podemos to an important social influence and very soon, only five months after its foundation to a first electoral success in the European elections. This success encouraged the leadership to turn a down to the top decision making process where the circles had a huge protagonism into the reverse, a vertical top to down organisation where the circles have little to none power. This culminated in the founding of Podemos as an official party in November 2014 and the subsequent process of inner elections where the leadership won the election taking 100% of the charges in the national organs. Indeed a Bulgarian result obtained through a majority poll with closed lists.
This change was accentuated by a very strong campaign of propaganda through the media, inspired by the right and the Socialist Party. Podemos was linked to Venezuela, ETA, to the far left and even to the extreme right. The leadership developed the typical reaction of the besieged fortress and practically eradicated any kind of real inner debate. They reclaimed from the adherents discipline. This reaction reminded of other historical experiences in the Left and is very close to what Louis Althusser described on the French Communist Party in the 70es. Reacting to outer aggression and concentrating all the power in the central organs, what was a political innovation became a very common party of the authoritarian Left.
Podemos arrived to its second electoral challenge, the communal and regional elections. Podemos decided not to take part in the communal elections under its name and only to take part in the regional elections alone and under its identity. The result was that in the main towns, large coalitions of social movements and parties of the Left created in a very short time, with the involvement of some militants of Podemos, but mainly of the social movements and grassroots sectors, won Madrid and Barcelona 's municipalities. At the same time Podemos' lists got a national average of 14% only surpassed in Madrid (region) and Aragon where the lists included many people not belonging to the trend monopolizing the national organs. Podemos' downwards trend was only conjured by the return to a horizontal inclusive model of people's participation beyond Podemos.
The changement Podemos experienced in its short life can be explained by several factors: a social one, an ideological one and last by the effects of its inclusion in the Spanish political State Apparatus. To be short, the social one has to do with its inability to extend its constituency beyond the middle classes and some sectors of the working class. The social origin of its leaders can explain this: there is not a single member of the working class in the inner organs of Podemos, and its political discourse addresses the frustration of the middle classes which suffer the effects of the crisis, more than the problems of the precarious workers. The fact that the circles, the political space which could have encouraged participation by those social categories most distant to political life, were practically abolished is a clear token of this social identity and of the limits Podemos' leadership imposes to any real hegemonic project involving the social majority.
Ideology is also an important factor. For Podemos' leadership the main theoretical reference is the work of Ernesto Laclau, the basis of the populist hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, social movements are not politically meaningful unless represented by an empty signifier, a leader, a party or an idea able to articulate a series of scattered demands in a common demand for political power. Even if Laclau is very critical of leninism, he agrees with it in his claim that the working class as such and class struggle as such have no political meaning unless they are represented. However the greatest difference between Lenin and Laclau is what the second pretends to be the former's essentialism, that is the idea of a determination of politics by other external factors like class struggle. Even when Laclau and his Spanish followers speak of overdetermination, this doesn't mean that politics is determined by other spheres, but only through the various signifiers of partial demands. There's no outside of the political sphere and this is utterly a symbolical one.
Most relevant in this evolution is Podemos' integration in the Spanish political system. Born of the rejection of the political class, qualified as "the caste", Podemos steadily took place in the official political game. It was no more defined as the bearer of popular demands expressed in people's assemblies, but as one party as opposed to others. Podemos contributed to complete a system of oppositions defining the different Spanish parties. On one side, one could find the classical Right and Left parties constituting the bipartisan system (Partido Popular) and (Partido Socialista Obrero Español), and in the other the two new emergent parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos. Ciudadanos was the immediate result of Podemos' normalization as a part of the system: just as Podemos was the new left party challenging the traditional ones, Ciudadanos became the center-right counterpart of Podemos. The initial criticism of representation and delegation was completely relinquished and what remained was an electoral war machine entirely centered on representation and delegation of political decision to a strong leadership.
Louis Althusser said in his essay on ISA( Ideological State Appararusses) that the ruling classes of capitalism needed the participation of the dominated classes in the political system in order to render the capitalist order legitimate. The dominated classes were enrolled in the political system through the parties. The parties of the working class were originally class struggle organisations, but they were very soon incorporated into the system as the Left. Podemos has become integrated into the grammar of the system and has an identity through this system. What initially was a new reality coming from outside and hardly assimilable by the political regime, quite soon became a part of the State Political Apparatus, a factor contributing to the reproduction of the social and political order. This is indeed the fate of all the parties of the Left. Trapped inside the political system, those parties are unable to define themselves as an expression of the social realities which gave birth to them. They pretend to represent them, but in doing so they don't bring them to the light, instead they keep them absent, out of sight. Representation is the presence of an absence and structurally needs the absence of the represented.
Podemos, which initially was the Jellyfish or the Hydra of the multitude, became a separated individual, no more the expression of a common jelly. In some way it resembles the Party created by Lenin, there is though a big difference. Lenin’s party was created in order to challenge the Czarist State and to take its place in the disciplining of the social jelly. On the other hand, Podemos was initially a part of the multitude rooted in the social jelly and quickly became an autonomous and almost independent body above the multitude which it strives to represent. The Jellyfish has been replaced by Lenin, or even worse. While Lenin recognized the centrality of the masses as a complex and articulated reality, Podemos' leadership sees itself as the creator of the social reality sustaining the party. Like Baron von Münchhausen, it tries to get out of the marsh pulling its own hair. This could hardly work.
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