"We are not facing capitalism, but we are living …

From Paris

There are ways of thinking not different, but in dissent, not to repeat the grueling message of the diagnosis of evil and, at the same time, to discover the infinite possibilities of human action. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière belongs to this dynasty of rebels with magic and arguments. Anyone who approaches his work professes will leave with his convictions turned upside down. Disciple of Louis Althusser, Rancière nevertheless escaped the vices of a fossilized Marxist tradition by confronting his thought with the concrete struggles of the workers and the dominated. The word of the workers, The night of the proletarians or The philosophy of the poor were the first books published since the 70s. It was followed by a set of monumental works whose center has always been human emancipation , the clbad struggle and equality. Rancière is an inspired insurgent who, in recent years and among such works as Hate to Democracy, The Emancipated Spectator, Modern Times, Art, Time, Politics or In What World Are We Living? It attracted a young and engaged audience, tired of the thought consumed as a frozen dish cooked in the microwave.

He is a realistic thinker when he writes: "We are not facing capitalism but we live in its world". Cinema, theater, literature, exploring the links between politics and aesthetics are also themes that integrate his work in a constant search to understand the multiplicity of times in which we live. Because for the French philosopher born in Algeria in 1940, the idea that there exists a kind of unique modernity, a universal and linear time is a delicate construction. There is no timeline but many along which our realities and rebellions unfold. This plurality of times is, as he expresses in this interview with PáginaI12 realized in Paris, one of the richest possibilities for reconstructing collective and effective action. In short, a seed to defeat the system. Follower of gaps, islands or moments of rebellion, Rancière defends the idea that the protest movements succeed only if they manage to stop the course of time and to establish, for a moment, another moment, outside objectives of the system. These are seeds of autonomy that produce processing forests. Revolutions, protest movements, possibilities of action against liberalism, the extreme right and the decline of the centered and extreme left are some of the problems that the French philosopher embroidered in this interview, where the French and the French have been working. essential is the human possibility of emancipation before a system of voracious oppression.

– The global liberal system has locked all the possibilities of a cold transformation, that is to say without violence, through consultation and negotiation. In his abundant work, you postulate a spatial and temporal mode of action almost as the only legitimacy of collective action to face the system.

-I tried to show that there was no longer any central power conceived as a fortress and that it might be attacked. Capitalism is everywhere in social life, we are not in front of it but we live in its world. However, capitalism is also fragile. His law meets everywhere with local and specific resistance. Everywhere there has been a series of revolts led by specific communities against the extension of capitalist power and state power. I think that in a situation like this, it is important that communities that have their own political agendas be developed without being subject to the parliamentary agendas because they have become the government's agendas. In almost all our countries, representative systems have become agents of the state, they have ceased to be part of popular power. An effective or alternative policy to the capitalist system and to the power of the state increasingly integrated with capitalist power can only exist autonomously, that is to say with people capable of creating their forms. organization, their agendas and their own means of action. It is to develop movements with the greatest possible autonomy. These may include forms of political autonomy separated from parliamentary agendas, economic autonomy through the creation of an alternative network of production, consumption and exchange, or forms of ideological or even military autonomy, as in Mexico for example. In any case, it has nothing to do with the ideas previously expressed about the insurgency. We have ceased to be in this situation in which it was believed that capitalism produces its own demise. The Marxist logic affirmed that capitalism created a model of production that would exploit it. It is clear that it is not like that. It was even thought that capitalism was nourished by work, but we already know that capitalism destroys labor to perpetuate itself. We do not expect capitalism to produce socialism or for the armed people to rebel because the workers have lost their weapons. There is no defined horizon, no identifiable forces. What we see is the specific creation of specific local autonomies where the system of domination is fragile and can be attacked and from which alternative forces can be formed. Then these areas of autonomy extend their power as much as possible.

In his philosophy, the idea of ​​time and its role in hegemonic systems and attempts to upset them are fundamental. You write about it that "an emancipation policy exists in the form of an interruption of time".

– There is always the idea that there are, on the one hand, ephemeral movements and, on the other hand, long-term strategies. But the history of the world is very different. When alternatives to the system of domination are created, they always occur at singular moments. Revolutions were singular moments that lasted days, weeks, months, or years. That is to say that the normal order of things has been interrupted, that at certain times, the normal rules disappear, this time is suspended and at the same time accelerated because the movements generate high speeds. An example of this is what happened in France in May 1968: the normal order of government and economy stops abruptly, time stops, it is blocked. And when time stops, people begin to think about society and initiatives are launched that have very quick effects. We are in a situation that the system did not foresee.

– The movement of yellow vests in France may answer this logic?

– It's an interesting move because at first it was played by a clbad of people who never protested. And it is interesting because it is a movement of relatively mature people, people who are not from a tradition of the left but who end up adopting forms belonging to the international left. They occupied the roundabouts as the indignant youth occupied the squares in Madrid. They spoke in favor of a horizontal democracy, which corresponds to the anarchism of intellectual youth. I think it's actually a moment of suspension that began as a protest against an ecological tax and ended up casting doubt on the whole system. Later, the yellow vests constituted a paralyzed movement because he did not know exactly what he wanted beyond his initial claims. There was no final horizon, but it's not their fault, but because it's like that: there's no horizon final and no one knows where to look. The yellow vests reflected the overall situation of protest movements in recent years in which we saw forms of interruption that were finally locked because they had an autonomous time that did not know where they were going. It happens then that these movements exhaust or that the governments turn them into clashes. This is so that the political originality of the situation is lost.

– That comes down to thinking that it is impossible to build what you call "a community fighting against the enemy".

– These wrestling communities have been created and many have won. These are punctual and local victories. But in reality, in the history of emancipation, this has always been the case: there are moments of collective emancipation. These moments can be considered as stages in an extended temporality and, at the same time, as moments in which people lived in freedom and equality. It would be like the moments of the movements: to live some time in total collective freedom. Spaces, voids, oases are created and we try to develop them, but it is not obvious. That's why I like the idea of ​​occupation of squares, spaces because it indicates that when space is busy, another form of temporality is created .

How to last beyond these moments?

-There have been attempts to create movements that go beyond protest to extend into time and become movements capable of organizing alternative life forms. History shows, however, that it is these autonomous movements that have won even partial victories against capital and the state. Today, we clearly see that neither the revolutionary parties nor the unionized parties have won anything. No. When there are measures going against work, the most effective action is not the action of the unions, but that of autonomous movements such as the indignant, standing night or yellow jackets. Party or union strategies are worthless. Left-wing forces have been integrated into the state and are pursuing a policy similar to that of right-wing forces. It's paradoxical, because even though we do not know where these movements are going, they are actually the only real movements that challenge power. In France, the traditional left does not exist anymore. This left-wing populism that tries to recover what is there and to endow itself with a parliamentary force is left: Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain or France Insumisa here. But these parties do not organize any victorious struggle against the enemy. On the other hand, movements like those who were indignant had done so. In Greece, for example, Syriza has changed sides. In the end, we have movements that we know where they are going, but they are the only ones that exist.

– These three European left, that of Greece, France and Spain, have finally ended in nothing. They are in a situation of slow decline.

– I was very struck by the fact that in Spain, Podemos, at its constitution, had for first action to present a list for the European elections instead of acting where their action had one direction. I think, however, that since the left has everywhere adopted the profile of the right, there is a place for the left of the left. However, until now, this left left was not able to organize a standalone action.

-What should we reformulate? Take inventory of all the legacy of the revolutionary left and that of transformation and, from there, think of something else?

-The only real legacy with what we have today is the legacy left by the momentary movements. There is no legacy leftist parties, or revolutionary parties that get just a few percentages in elections. I am not saying that leftist parties should be rejected. It is to verify the truth. In France, the resistance to liberalism may have been stronger than elsewhere, but it is only thanks to the legacy of May 68 and not to the left-wing parties that rather confiscated this legacy. .

-The ephemeral is then the transcendent.

-The ephemeral is what breaks the course of times of domination and leaves a legacy. It's not just a sentimental heritage, it's a fact. In France, the victories obtained against the pension reform (1995) and against a law on the labor reform in 2006 were obtained by the legacy of May 68 and not by the action of the left-wing parties .

-The far right is the great renaissance figure of the world panorama. They grew in proportion to the decline of social democracy. For you, is this return an ephemeral moment or will we see a more consistent temporal root?

-The major phenomenon, for me, is not that of an extreme right that comes back after being hidden. No, the essential is how the traditional right has gone to the extreme. To the extent that the left implements the same economic and social policy as the right, it had to look for a specific figure. That is why the right must radicalize and appeal to a whole series of instincts and pbadions that he did not need. Previously, the right was a central force, half liberal, half modernist. Now it's over. To exist in parliament, they must be radicalized. That's why I do not think the far right is an expression of the popular clbades. This is the official badysis. The rise of the far right is due to the radicalization of the right. I do not trust the idea of ​​a so-called popular right-wing root. The idea of ​​a racist Frenchman facing immigrants was built by a whole system of propaganda.

-I make a stop in one of his most beautiful books: "Modern times". We generally speak of "modernity" and not modern times. What is the difference between modernity and modern times?

– For me, the idea of ​​modernity is totally false, as is the badertion that modernity has functioned as a statement of the autonomy of the art. I've always tried to show that it was the opposite, that is to say that if there was an artistic modernity, it was about wanting to unite art to life and not to make art autonomous. With this book, I wanted to show that there is no temporality of modernity, but that there are many ways to build modernity. Modern times because they are many: there is an economic modernity and an industrial modernity and the two do not correspond to the political or spiritual modernity. There is not a single modern time. A story with a big H and a homogeneous time does not exist. There are, yes, different temporalities. The misconception that modernity is a continuous process in a unique and similar time has also been invented. No, there is no time but time. The art and the artists create some modern time that is not at all homogeneous. It is a sort of paradigm of modernity, a way of linking time, movement, community, present, future.

-Today, we live many times dictated by technology and in the concept of "pos": pos modernidad, pos verdad. The end of everything is evoked but everything continues …

-The term pos, in fact, corresponds somewhat to the speech of the tired intellectual who says "everything is finished". We have already begun to say that everything was over in the 1820s … At that time, there was already talk of industrial literature and it was said that literature and culture were over, that only the market mattered. It has been affirmed for two centuries. This discourse is suitable for everyone: both those who present themselves as the last defenders of civilization and those who think they are innovators of a new era and speakers of the time. These are irrelevant notions because later, well, everything continues, continues, we are neither at the post nor at the end of civilization. This is a false construction, even though it is intellectually as useful to crepuscular philosophers as to avant-garde thinkers. It is a double game where, as far as the truth is concerned, it is decreed that the truth is over, that the facts are unimportant and that the important thing is the badysis and the l & # 39; interpretation, because we are beyond all, in an infinite position. . Here we clearly see that we are dealing with a way of managing the opinion where the facts are no longer needed and where the important thing is to integrate them into a pre-existing explanation system and, therefore, it is not necessary that the facts be true.

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