every appearance of multiple positions to a combination of “binary” opposites. Today, we don’t have three main positions (liberal-centrist hegemony, Rightist populism, and the new Left) but two antagonisms – Rightist populism versus a liberal-centrist establishment – and both of them together (the two sides of the existing capitalist order) face the Leftist challenge.
Let’s begin with a simple example: Macedonia – what’s in a name? Not long ago, the governments of Macedonia and Greece concluded an agreement on how to resolve the problem of the name “Macedonia”: it should be changed to “Northern Macedonia.” This solution was instantly attacked by radicals in both countries. Greek opponents insisted that “Macedonia” is an old Greek name, and Macedonian opponents felt humiliated by being reduced to a “Northern” province, since they are the only people who call themselves “Macedonians.” Imperfect as it was, this solution offered a glimpse of hope toward ending a long and meaningless struggle by a reasonable compromise. But it was caught in another “contradiction”: the struggle between big powers (the US and EU on the one side, Russia on the other). The West put pressure on both sides to accept the compromise so that Macedonia could quickly join the EU and NATO, while, for exactly the same reason (seeing in it the danger of its loss of influence in the Balkans), Russia opposed it, supporting rabid conservative nationalist forces in both countries. So which side should we take here? I think we should decidedly take the side of the compromise, for the simple reason that it is the only realist solution to the problem – Russia opposed it simply because of its geopolitical interests, without offering another solution, so supporting Russia here would have meant sacrificing the reasonable solution of the singular problem of Macedonian and Greek relations to international geopolitical interests.
Now let’s take the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and daughter of the firm’s founder, in Vancouver. She is accused of breaking US sanctions on Iran and faces extradition to the US, where she could be jailed for up to 30 years if found guilty. What is true here? In all probability, one way or another, all big corporations discreetly break the laws. But it’s more than evident that this is just a “secondary contradiction” and that another battle is actually being fought here: it’s not about trade with Iran, it’s about the big struggle for domination in the production of digital hardware and software. What Huawei symbolizes is a China that is no longer the Foxconn China, the place of half-slave labor assembling machines developed elsewhere, but a place where software and hardware are also conceived. China has the potential to become a much stronger agent in the digital market than Japan with Sony or South Korea with Samsung. Reports abound now in our media on grueling work conditions in Huawei factories in China, and there are even suggestions that the sanctions against Huawei will really help these workers – but no one called for a boycott when the same (or even worse) appalling conditions were discovered in Foxconn factories.
But enough of particular examples – things get more complex with the “contradiction” between the alt-Right descent into racist/sexist vulgarity and the politically correct stiff regulatory moralism. It is crucial, from the standpoint of progressive struggle for emancipation, not to accept this “contradiction” as primary, but to unravel in it the displaced and distorted echoes of class struggle. As in fascist ideology, the Rightist populist figure of the Enemy (the combination of financial elites and invading immigrants) combines both extremes of the social hierarchy, thereby blurring the class struggle; on the opposite end, and in an almost symmetrical way, politically correct antiracism and antisexism barely conceal the fact that their ultimate target is white working-class racism and sexism, thereby also neutralizing class struggle. That’s why the designation of political correctness as “cultural Marxism” is false: political correctness, in all its pseudo-radicality, is, on the contrary, the last defense of “bourgeois” liberalism against the Marxism concept, obfuscating/displacing class struggle as the “principal contradiction.”
Things get more complex with the struggle for universal human rights. Here, there is a “contradiction” between proponents of these rights and those who warn that, in their standard version, universal human rights are not truly universal but implicitly privilege Western values (individuals have primacy over collectives, etc.) and are thereby a form of ideological neocolonialism – it is no wonder that the reference to human rights served as a justification for many military interventions, from Iraq to Libya. Partisans of universal human rights counter that their rejection often serves to justify local forms of authoritarian rule and repression as elements of a particular way of life. How to decide here? A middle-of-the-road compromise is not enough; one should give preference to universal human rights for a very precise reason: a dimension of universality has to serve as a medium in which multiple ways of life can coexist, and the Western notion of universality of human rights contains the self-critical dimension that makes visible its own limitations. When the standard Western notion of universal human rights is criticized for its particular bias, this critique itself has to refer to some notion of more authentic universality, which makes us see the distortion of a false universality. But some form of universality is always here, even a modest vision of the coexistence of different and ultimately incompatible ways of life has to rely on it. In short, what this means is that the “principal contradiction” is not that of the tension(s) between different ways of life, but the “contradiction” within each way of life (“culture,” organization of its jouissance) between its particularity and its universal claim – to use a technical term, each particular way of life is by definition caught in “pragmatic contradiction,” its claim to validity is undermined not by the presence of other ways of life but by its own inconsistency.
The ultimate example of the importance of secondary contradictions were the European elections of 2019 – are there any lessons to be learned from them? The sometimes spectacular details (like the crushing defeat of both main parties in the UK) should not blind us to the basic fact that nothing really big and surprising happened. Yes, the populist new Right did make progress, but it remains far from prevailing. The phrase, repeated like a mantra, that people demanded change, is deeply deceptive – yes, but what kind of change? It was basically the variation on the old motto “some things have to change so that all remains the same.”
The self-perception of Europeans in toto is that they have too much to lose to risk a revolution (a radical upheaval), and that’s why the majority tend to vote for the parties that promise them peace and a calm life (against financial elites, against the “immigrant threat,” …). That’s also why one of the losers of the 2019 European elections was the populist Left, especially in France and Germany: the majority doesn’t want political mobilization. Rightist populists understood this message much better: what they really offer is not active democracy but a strong authoritarian power which would work for (what they present as) the people’s interests. Therein resides also the fatal limitation of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s DIEM (Democracy in Europe Movement): the core of its ideology is the hope of mobilizing the bulk of ordinary people, to give them a voice by way of breaking the hegemony of the ruling elites.
Some years ago, I heard an anecdote from a friend of Willy Brandt. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev – at this time already a private citizen – wanted to visit Brandt, and he appeared unannounced at the door of his house in Berlin, but Brandt (or his servant) ignored the ringing of the bell and refused even to open the door. Brandt later explained to his friend his reaction as being an expression of his rage at Gorbachev: by allowing the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, Gorbachev had ruined the foundations of Western social democracy. It was the constant comparison with the East European communist countries that maintained the pressure on the West to tolerate the social democratic welfare state, and once the communist threat disappeared, exploitation in the West became more open and ruthless and the welfare state also began to disintegrate.
Simplified as this idea is, there is a moment of truth in it: the final result of the fall of communist regimes is the fall (or, rather, the prolonged disintegration) of social democracy itself. The naive expectation that the fall of the bad “totalitarian” Left will open up space for the good “democratic” Left sadly proved wrong. A new division of the political space in Europe is gradually replacing the old opposition between a
