Srećko Horvat Discusses the Fight for Democracy in Europe and the Imprisonment of Julian Assange
Interview by Andrew Perez
Photo by Oliver Abraham
This interview was originally published by our partner Media For Us.
Srećko Horvat is one of the most original thinkers of our time and a leading voice in the fight for democracy in Europe. Along with Yanis Varoufakis, Srećko is the co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), and he previously co-founded the Subversive Festival in Zagreb, Croatia, where he brought together thinkers such as Oliver Stone, Aleida Guevara, Slavoj Žižek, Tariq Ali, and David Harvey. Srećko is the author of many books, including What does Europe want? The Union and its Discontents (with Slavoj Žižek), The Radicality of Love, and, his most recent, Poetry from the Future. We asked Srećko to discuss the false choice between neoliberalism and fascism, the capitalist domination of time, and the need to have “hope without optimism” to build a new global liberation movement. With the recent EuroLeaks announcement by DiEM25, we also asked Srećko about the imprisonment and trial of his friend Julian Assange and DiEM25’s goal of bringing more transparency into politics in the EU and around the world.
Media For Us: In Poetry from the Future, you describe how our political landscape is transforming into an “extreme center”, in which the xenophobic and historical revisionist tendencies of fascism and the privatization of healthcare and education of neoliberalism reinforce each other. Can you talk about the false choice between neoliberalism and fascism and the danger of the extreme center.
Srećko Horvat: The Extreme Center is a term that I borrowed from my friend Tariq Ali, who developed it in his book under the same title back in 2015, mainly dealing with UK politics. Now after Brexit, it is becoming even more clear what it means: the deep establishment, namely the neoliberal forces, always seem to prefer right-wing populism — and even authoritarian politics — to a left alternative. We can see this with the way that neoliberals prefered Boris Johnson to Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, and how the Democratic Party establishment in the United States prefers billionaires to Bernie Sanders. There are numerous other examples in contemporary politics showing that capitalism will do everything in order to protect the interests of the ruling classes — instead of free broadband internet and technological sovereignty they prefer "platform capitalism" and "surveillance capitalism". The same goes for health care, housing, infrastructure, student debt — as long as the rising fascism and authoritarian politics will not put in question property relations or disrupt the free flow of capital, neoliberalism is actually rather happy with more control and surveillance. However, the link between neoliberalism and fascism is not new, it is sufficient to observe the role big US car and tech companies, from Ford to IBM, had in the Second World War fueling the war and Nazi extermination machine. The present Extreme Centre is, on the one hand, more "subtle" — it creates control through new technologies that turn all citizens into consumers (take the commodification of the Self through "social networks") and treats them as a biopolitical "living currency" (take Erdogan's recent "refugee blackmail" warning Europe that he would "release" 3.6 million refugees currently in Turkey if the EU dares to call Turkey's attack against the Kurds an "occupation). On the other hand, this Extreme Centre is becoming a global paradigm. Unlike the times when, for instance, the Non-Aligned Movement in the 20th century presented a significant sort of counter-balance to both the United Sates and the Soviet Union, there seems to be no global progressive front or global political subject that would enable us to go beyond the false choice between "surveillance capitalism" a la Silicon Valley or Chinese totalitarianism.
MFU: You call on us to reactivate the potentials of the past by taking action now, and likewise to preemptively activate potentials of the future, to “create what we are about to lose”. Can you discuss how solidarity movements are connected across time, and the need to recognize and activate events of the past and future?
SH: I think what is still missing today, besides the spatial perspective of a new internationalism going beyond borders and nation-states, is a better understanding of the importance of time. The current eschatological threat is not just something that will have and already has effects on different places on Planet Earth, but also affects time itself. What the collision of the nuclear age and climate crisis — something I write about in my upcoming book After the Apocalypse — confronts us with is not just the destruction of the whole world, but the disappearance of "history" as such, in the sense that our epoch might be the last epoch, the beginning of the end of "epochality" as something that refers to historical epochs that were always ending (for instance, the Fin de siècle) in order to give birth to a new epoch (First World War, Second World War). Each disaster was an "Apocalypse" in the original sense of the word, a "revelation" that would lead to the next stage in history. This changed after Hiroshima, with the beginning of the nuclear epoch, and accelerated with climate crisis and the currently mutually reinforcing and accelerating "tipping points", or rather the multiplicity of eschatological threats that open not only the possibility of self-destruction but the possibility of total destruction, a destruction of the current totality of the world, that wouldn't just include Homo sapiens (including language, arts and history), but also other species — and the geology of the planet itself. Many call it the Anthropocene, but I prefer the term coined by Jason W. Moore "Capitalocene", since it is not all humans (or something "human" as such) to blame but global capitalism based on a vampire-like logic of extractivism, not only sucking natural resources and humans, but time itself. No wonder Jeff Bezos is creating a 10,000-year clock that should outlast civilization in a hollowed-out mountain in Texas — he realized that with the end of civilization, the one who will be able to measure time, will hold the power. Even if only Jeff Bezos will be left in his cave. There is, as the French historian Jacques Le Goff showed in his seminal study Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, a direct transition from the religious bell-tower clocks to the capitalist time (the same bell-towers would instead of invite the citizens to prayer, designate working hours). Capitalism is the new religion. Time is money. But what Silicon Valley utopianism, following the concept of chronos (directional or linear time as in a calender, as if everything is moving from the past towards the future), doesn't take into account is chairos, time as change, a temporality that is closer to quantum physics than to our prevailing understanding of the clock-time universe, namely the fact that there is no clear demarcation between past, present and future. It is in this sense also that social movements are connected through times and spaces, and it is up to us to reactivate their meaning or power.
MFU: You discuss the concept of the “state of exception” in your book, the transgression of the law as a “necessary” step to keep society safe. Could you describe this concept and how it relates to the war on terror, national emergencies, or the refugee crisis in Europe? Could you discuss how this is impacting the treatment of Julian Assange?
SH: What is happening to Julian Assange, someone who revealed so many transgressions of law, is a direct consequence of a globalized "state of exception" that is being managed by the industrial-military complex and the deep state(s), including secret services cooperating beyond borders. While you have revelations about war crimes (like the killings of the civilians or journalists revealed by Wikileaks' Collateral Murder) that are still not prosecuted, a courageous publisher is facing 175 years in prison because he revealed how this "state of exception" operates. And precisely in this context, it is useful to examine Carl Schmitt's classic definition of the Ausnamezustand as the sovereign's ability to transgress the rule of law in the name of the "public good". In other words, those who commit war crimes during the various ongoing "wars on terror" (from Iraq to Libya) are actually legitimizing it not only by security but by "democracy", while those who reveal those war crimes, even though they are the real fighters for the public good (and our right to know), are treated as enemies and traitors — imprisoned in solitary confinement like Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange or exiled like Edward Snowden. At the same time, as I attempted to show in Poetry from the Future, this "state of exception" is now being normalized all across the world, and that book was written before Bolsonaro, Brexit, Coronavirus; I was writing about the G20 in Hamburg in 2017 that turned a whole city into a dystopian police controlled city, but look at France today where you have a permanent state of exception. Look at Chile. Not to mention the surveillance control, including facial recognition and automated apartheid, that has become the new normal not just in China, but everywhere. Somewhere it is the state, somewhere companies, very often both that are turning Minority Report into dystopian reality.
MFU: Related to the previous question on the state of exception, can you comment on the need for resistance movements to create their own exceptions to the law? Examples might be animal rights activists trespassing to rescue animals or creating alternative structures through some of the intentional communities that you write about. How should activists relate to the law?
SH: There is a long history of political theory and political practice that has explored precisely this question. My own theory and practice, and the older I get the more precious it seems, came from the teenage punk-hardcore days in ex-Yugoslavia, where instead of being blinded by disastrous nationalism that was ravaging throughout the Balkans during the 1990s or the fake promise of the "end of history", we were not only reading anarchist clasics such as Peter Kropotkin and Henry David Thoreau, but we were active in a flourishing underground movement that was occupying places to organize concerts, publishing fanzines, skating and doing illegal graffiti — something that might seem as a naive teenage activity, but was actually the first political subjectivation of my generation. The first experience of collective action and organizing, sharing something and creating temporary autonomous zones. When I was 16, me and my best friend translated Kropotkin's "Law and Authority". I am afraid to even imagine what kind of "punk" translation it is, but his point that law is a product of modern times still holds true. And Thoreau's concept of "civil disobedience" also becomes even more relevant today and you can see it with Extinction Rebellion, who are enacting various actions of civil disobedience, or even Fridays for Future, because the very act of skipping school was an act of disobeying the Law ("you must go to school!"). And here we come to the crucial concept of "deschooling" which was popularized by Ivan Illich, the great anarchist Roman Catholic priest, namely the fact that sometimes — in order to create a future — we have to not only "skip school" but to radically transform the very institutions of education. I think anarchism — including critical pedagogy — can still teach us a lot here. But as much as I was rooted in the anarchist practice and theory, in order to resist on a global scale, to confront the major challenges and minimize the threat of a mass extinction, anarchism alone doesn't seem to be sufficient to deal with the eschatological threats we are facing today. We simultaneously need not only a "horizontality" (direct democracy, general assemblies, cooperatives, communes, alternative economies) but also a sort of "verticality" — not in the sense of authority, but in the sense of a coordinating body consisting of social movements and progressives from across the world that would be able to organise and coordinate effectively on the planetary scale protecting the planetary commons, including the future itself.
MFU: You discuss the idea of the capitalist domination of time (the “fake now”), and contrast this to a more emancipatory conception of time (Jetzt-Zeit) that deconstructs this domination. Can you describe these two ideas and how we can use time as a mode of resistance?
SH: You can understand the "fake now" as the constant little dopamine hits that Homo sapiens get when scrolling through the daily apocalyptic news on iPhones produced in Foxconn factories in China that are now closed due to the Coronavirus. You can also understand it as the religion of "presentism", the imposed rhythm of 24/7 capitalism that is still being called "progress". But there is also a different time, many different times, cracks in time, a time that doesn't go from the past to the present in order to arrive in the future. This emancipatory conception of time was something that Walter Benjamin developed in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History", written in 1940 in occupied Paris, with a gas mask hanging on the wall above his table. Recently I have been reading a wonderful book by Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, which made me think Benjamin and quantum physics have more in common than it is thought. Namely, both are against the linear conception of time. Both are, even though quantum physics never makes it into a political project, against the notion of "progress”: the illusion that time (or history) is developing from point A to point B, from the year 0000 to the year 2020, from the past to the future only in order to reach the "end of history". What I find interesting with Rovelli is that he often speaks about the sea, about "fast time" and "slow time", about a rhythm which already brings us to resistance. In its original meaning, rhuthmós is much closer to quantum physics than to Plato or today's prevailing understanding of rhythm as a regular repeated pattern of movement or sound. As the great linguist Emil Benveniste showed, rhuthmós is not a “Form" or an “Idea,” an εἶδος (eîdos), it is not something fixed. On the contrary, for the Atomist philosophers of the Ionaian era it rather meant a "pattern of a fluid element", a form that is moving and mobile, which has no organic consistency. In the same way, time is a changeable form. Capitalism imposes its own rhythm, its own time, its own "now". What unexpectedly brings Benjamin — take his reading of Kafka (the quantum-like figure Odradek) and his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" — and quantum physics together is the rejection of the teleological concept of time. This, when we move from the terrain of quantum physics to emancipatory politics, doesn't just imply a radical redefinition of the future, but also means that "history" is actually incomplete. It means that not everything is lost. When we speak of "failures" of previous social movements, we should rather understand past struggles as something that can be reactivated — not the mistakes, but the unfulfilled potentialities that are not in the past, but in the future. And in the same way that Nils Bohr reminds us that when it comes to atoms, the language that must be used is the language of poetry, I think that resistance needs a sort of poetry from the future, in the sense of deconstructing the predominant paradigm of time and rhythm that is imposed on us since the day we are born — but it is nothing "natural".
MFU: For those who may not be familiar with DiEM25, can you describe the movement and how it may be related to the notion of poetry from the future? Do you see this work as “hope without optimism” as you describe it in your book?
SH: I do not think optimism is useful. And there is certainly no reason for it. On the other hand, there is plenty of reason for pessimism. But it is also not useful. It is demobilizing. Yet, there is something beyond optimism and pessimism. It is what I, influenced by Terry Eagleton's Page-Barbour Lectures, call "hope without optimism". And, perhaps surprisingly, the best definition of hope without optimism comes from Leonard Cohen, who was certainly not an optimist, but he was also not a pessimist. I remember him saying that he doesn't consider himself a pessimist. "I think", he said once, "of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.“ And that's how many people feel today. There is climate grief, there is solastalgia, there is the nostalgia for the future, or even a sort of nostalgia for the present that is rapidly vanishing. Where is the hope then? It's in the crack through which the light gets in. And that little crack of hope at least for us in Europe is DiEM25. Our first campaign for more transparency in the EU was indeed called "Let the light in". And these days we are releasing EuroLeaks, the recordings Yanis Varoufakis made during the notorious Eurogroup meetings, a unique glance into what is best described as the "banality of evil" of Europe's deep establishment. In the meantime, DiEM25 has grown to more than 100,000 members, with hundreds of organized groups all across the EU, but also in Turkey, Serbia, New York and many other places. Besides developing a transformative policy and strategy for a green and just transition, we initiated the platform and coalition called the Green New Deal for Europe, which, unlike the EU's current Green Deal, a colossal exercise in greenwashing, is precisely the opposite, a first step towards postcapitalism. Hopefully, which is why we are super busy at the moment organising the Progressive International, all this will lead to a global Green New Deal, which would be a result of unprecedented trans-national cooperation between social movements, progressive political parties, scientists and policy makers. I am hopeful, but not optimistic. Perhaps we already live after the Apocalypse, maybe we already reached the eschatological "tipping points", but once you are soaked to the skin, there is nothing else but to continue and it's actually a liberating feeling. Or as the old saying goes, in the end everything will be OK — if it's not OK, it's not the end.