What Is to Be Done? (Liberté Égalité Fraternité)

It is difficult but urgent to imagine a non-regressive way out of the West’s illness when the authoritarian solution is already here. Since “égalité” has been severely eroded and inequality has eroded “liberté”, the authoritarian way will abolish it by not accepting any correction in the distribution of income. In this way, the contradiction between the rule of law and the rule of fact will be overcome. Extreme inequality will be firmly established by abolishing the freedom to oppose it. This will close the long historical cycle opened by the French Revolution with a tragic regression. What is to be done? One option is to resist now, while it is still possible, and fight for a much greater de facto equality by demanding a progressive tax reform, the strengthening of social services, a substantial minimum wage guaranteed by employment rules and policies and by promoting the bargaining power of workers. However, it has been authoritatively argued that by remaining in the liberal individualistic conception of citizenship, such incisive social policies are highly unlikely. They would be much more so in a communitarian version of citizenship in which participation was an essential element of freedom. “Fraternity” should come into play: the right things can only be done after what is right has been established together. That is the solution which, on the terrain of auspices, should impose itself, judging by the number of analysts from the most diverse disciplines who, after having explored the polycrisis of the West, call for a new spirit of community constructed by direct participation, associations, activism, the third sector, self-help, collective action from below for the common good. Yet, in all these appeals there is little space, often no space, for the explanation of how to do it so that it can be not only a logical and desirable solution, but also a realistic one. If the Panopticon only admits an Anti-panopticon, the problem of how to do it is even more difficult than that of what to do. From a critical realist perspective, collective action is not only the decision of different individual subjects to provide together for a need or for a common interest. It is not even limited to their concretely coming together and then acting as a unitary subject, nor to staying together despite conflicts between individual and collective interests. Deciding, coming together, doing and staying together imply an explicit or implicit assumption of given needs, given subjects, a given collective. It is a static perspective. However, studies in the last 30 years have made substantial progress in the direction of a dynamic perspective and today there is sufficient theory and empirical research to conceive the modalities and conditions of collective action, understood as a “praxis” that does not leave the actors substantially defined once and for all in terms of interests, values, knowledge, resources, objectives of individuals and of the collective. Models and experiences analyzed are today able to suggest a fairly detailed grid of modalities and results of collective action when the transformation it brings about concerns its object but also its subjects. A logical-factual path emerges in which one encounters “traps” that must be overcome in sequence: a difficult path. One could say that the historical prevalence of command and competition has been an “easy” way to avoid the difficult community concertation and collective action from below. The traps are exclusion and conservation, arduous evaluation of outcomes, rhetoric, fundamental contradiction, unpopularity in the face of combative cynicism. Overcoming the first four is achieved with the application of the strategy of using inclusion against conservation and innovation against exclusion. But overcoming the fifth (unpopularity in the face of combative cynicism) requires being “idiots” against “imbecility”. Which is not a comforting conclusion, given that the collective action needed would thus require the genius, heroism, perfect goodness of the “idiot”. This poses the question whether there is any help. Or whether another life is perhaps hidden in the horrible emerging world. Transindividualistic thought seems to be able to answer this question affirmatively by arguing that in deep human reality the collective and the individual are determined together and not in opposition. In deep human reality, that is, there would not be the dilemma of collective action due to the contrast between individual good and common good, to overcome the “traps” which must be overcome, thus arriving at the sophisticated path that clashes with combative cynicism. But not only that. Transindividualistic thought argues that this deep human reality has come to the surface precisely because of neoliberal degeneration, thus being able to imagine a dialectic between the intersubjective, which obviously remains, and the transindividual which is not only “always true” in the depths but has also emerged on the surface. In this way the collective action that this degeneration leads to invoke would be facilitated by the degeneration itself. Except for one important clarification: neoliberalism hinders and slows down the progressive restructuring necessary to give meaning to relationships because neoliberalism survives its failures by using the relationships of the absolute transindividual that have come to light for its own cynical and opportunistic ends. However, since neoliberalism uses “science and faith” to do this by elaborating a myth in which the economic and social relationships it intends to maintain are at the same time “naturalized” and “hidden”, the formula to combat it could be to use faith against science and science against faith to use inclusion against conservation and innovation against exclusion. Science and faith is believing that every determination is necessarily what it is, that the brick is given by the clay and the mold, that every process is established by its routine, that this belief is incontestable. In this way, the relationship with the other, in itself tendentially generative or at least destabilizing, puts the subject against themselves in a sterile opposition between what they firmly believe and what they glimpse in contradiction. For this reason, using faith against science and science against faith implies breaking the cage that forces the subject against themselves. As will be seen in the examples, this formula effectively leads to accepting the risk of change by opening to the generative comparison, and also to the clash with others, from which derives the always provisional individuation, the continuous reciprocal adaptation of the clay and the mold, the dynamic routine, in which everything is always in question. This does not block the action but instead is the only condition that supports it as an effective conjunction between “energheia” and “dynamis”. This formula finds confirmation in the very origin of Western thought and can actually be seen at work in ancient examples: the history of the Jewish people told by Spinoza, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the myth of Ulysses and the Sirens, the trial of Socrates. These are examples in which the formula is applied precisely in circumstances in which collective action is involved in the change of structures when the transindividual plot “re-emerges to the surface”.