The power of the ordinary

This year’s May Day celebrations are taking place at a moment of unprecedented uncertainty. The rise of ultra-nationalism threatens the very foundations of liberal societies.

Most recently, in the French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen, a neo-fascist leader, entered the second round of voting, beating the established parties of both the right and the left. This victory is particularly disturbing, as Le Pen conducted a campaign against Muslims (citizens and immigrants) that brought back the haunting memories of fascist rule in France when communities were excluded and brutalised in search of a pure national community.

The pattern of authoritarian leaders coming to power as a result of electoral victories represents the decay of the established political culture across liberal democracies and the rising power of the exclusionary rhetoric. The alternatives to the challenge of the extreme right are often candidates tied to the establishment, committed to defending a failing status quo that itself produces popular rage against the system. In other words, we are caught between a bizarre choice: the causes of fascism and fascism itself.

If politics consists of choosing among the available set of candidates, then the electoral gains of the extreme right are not a departure from the script of liberal democracy. Yet, such faith in ‘free will’ appears naive if one recognises that the choices available, and the voter making the choice, are already products of power relations.

For a candidate to have a reasonable chance of winning the elections – or even being taken seriously – he or she has to be plugged into a wider network of institutions and social relations. In the US, for example, the primary mechanism through which a candidate enters the political fray is the support lent by multinational corporations, the corporate media and the two established parties. However, with the corporate world and the national security apparatus remaining outside the ambit of criticism, election campaigns turn into ‘marketing campaigns’ worth billions of dollars and are aimed at branding and re-branding the image of the candidate.

If the contours of the debate are determined prior to the elections, then we must locate the essential power relations in contemporary societies not at the site of the electoral drama, but through the actors and policies that grant the electorate only a limited choice. The current dispensation pits the individual voter against the organised and increasingly centralised power of the state, corporations, surveillance systems, military power and the media apparatuses.

While the myth of the rational individual voter is perpetually contrasted against the dangerous ‘mobs’, this individual today appears as a lonely and frustrated spectator of politics, rather than a key actor in the political arena.

If the organised nature of the status quo provides it overpowering strength against the disaggregated and individualised citizens, then this very separation of citizens from their collective power is at the heart of contemporary alienation from society. Jodi Dean, an American political theorist, argues that the transformation of the masses into self-interested individuals is not a victory of ‘civilisation’, but is exactly what the powerful want in order to further monopolise power.

The celebrated individual is not a natural human form. It is a result of a violent separation from their social being and a disarming of their organised power that could pose a challenge to the status quo.

We should not accept the notion that the concept of a rational individual gained hegemony simply through the force of ideas. In fact, the ideological battle waged by global capitalism to overpower those challenging its authority was complemented by the use of brute force, with incalculable human suffering. This included Western-backed military coups against governments such as those of Arbenz in Guatemala and Mosaddegh in Iran for daring to take control of national resources away from multinationals, as well as the destruction of Vietnam by the ruthless military might of the American empire as punishment to the Vietnamese for daring to chart an independent path for themselves.

In Pakistan, the murder of over a hundred workers at the colony textile mills in Multan in 1978 is symptomatic of the methods used to destroy the power of organised labour by the state. Thus, the world of uninspiring and manufactured choices is not merely an ideological triumph of liberal values. It is stained by the blood of millions who once dared to dream of a more just world.

Labour Day is an ideal moment to remember the repressed desire for a different world forged by the power of ordinary people. Celebrated as homage to workers martyred at Chicago in 1886 while agitating for the reduction of working hours and better pay, it posits a unique vision of political power. Politics here is not a choice made by passive and disaggregated individuals, but a process of transformation through collective, disciplined and organised practices.

The idea of an active and sovereign citizenry also implies that people need not adjust to the status quo, and instead can collectively seek to re-arrange the very coordinates of possibility in a given situation. In other words, politics becomes a collective act of creation.

This vision of politics has been largely wiped out of popular memory through the organs of ideological control, but needs to be retrieved and rehabilitated if we are to pose an adequate response to the challenges of the day. A mere regurgitation from the handbooks of Western democracies will not be effective, as such models are not even working in the West itself. But we can identify a few nodal points crucial to any political project that takes its point of departure to be the construction of new choices, rather than maintaining emaciated consumers in the marketplace of elections.

The first group is the surplus, or superfluous, working people bearing the brunt of deindustrialisation and automation across the globe. This group also includes the immigrants and refugees produced by wars and the collapse of nation-states across the global South. In essence, these people are the victims of the decomposition of the old world as we knew it, particularly the model of growth and development that promised certainty to the working class.

The second vulnerable group is the global youth today. According to a European Broadcasting Union study, more than 50 percent of Europe’s youth (aged between 18 and 34) is willing to participate in an uprising against their governments. Many feel an intense sense of betrayal, as they were promised opportunities for personal growth if they worked hard and acquired education. Today, with increasing indebtedness and the lack of adequate jobs for the young, they feel their future has been stolen by the elites.

A meeting of these groups is perhaps the encounter the world is waiting for. At a recent event in Lahore, organised by the People’s Solidarity Forum, to commemorate the life of Mirza Ibrahim, the great trade union leader of Pakistan, many of us saw a glimpse of what this encounter could mean. Dozens of enthusiastic students from the Progressive Students Collective spent an entire day with railway workers. The teary-eyed workers and the emotionally-charged students related to each other as if they were not strangers, but were meeting after a long break. It seemed as if they were meeting their own collective being, their own lost power. In other words, they were encountering a part of themselves that had been separated from them by those in power.

For such an encounter to be effective, it will be necessary to develop a new vision of society distinct from the logic that produces authoritarianism, violence and exclusion in the name of democracy. If they succeed, they will be able to fulfil the latent promise that simultaneously guides and haunts the modern imaginary; that ordinary people are capable of becoming the architects of a new, better world.

The writer is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge and a lecturer at the Government College University, Lahore.

Email: ammarjan86@gmail.com