Changes

The fate of Joze Jurancic, an old Slovene [[Communist ]] revolutionary, stands out as a perfect [[metaphor ]] for the twists of [[Stalinism]]. In 1943, when Italy capitulated, Jurancic led a rebellion of Yugoslav prisoners in a [[concentration camp ]] on the Adriatic island of Rab: under his leadership, 2000 starved prisoners single-handedly disarmed 2200 Italian soldiers. After the war, he was arrested and put in a prison on a nearby small Goli otok ("naked island"), a [[notorious ]] Communist concentration camp. While there, he was mobilized in 1953, together with [[other ]] prisoners, to build a monument to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 1943 rebellion on Rab – in short, as a prisoner of Communists, Jurancic was building a monument TO HIMSELF, to the rebellion led by him… If poetic (not justice but, rather) injustice means anything, this was it: is the fate of this revolutionary not the fate of the entire [[people ]] under the Stalinist dictatorship, of the millions who, first, heroically overthrew the ancient [[regime ]] in the [[revolution]], and, then, enslaved to the new rules, are [[forced ]] to build monuments to their own revolutionary [[past]]? This revolutionary is thus effectively a "[[universal ]] [[singular]]," an [[individual ]] whose fate stands for the fate of all. <ref> What this means is that, precisely on account of the unbearable [[horror ]] of Stalinism, any direct [[moralistic ]] portrayal of Stalinism as [[evil ]] misses its target – it is only through what Kierkegardian called "indirect [[communication]]," by way of practicing a kind of irony, that one can render its horror.</ref><br />

What makes the [[position ]] of this revolutionary more than simply [[tragic ]] is a kind of convoluted, second level, "reflexive" [[betrayal]]: first you sacrifice everything for the (Communist) [[cause]], then you are rejected by (the bearers of) this Cause itself, finding yourself in a kind of empty [[space ]] with [[nothing]], no point of [[identification]], to hold on. Is there not something similar in today’s position of those who, a decade and a half ago, when US was fully supporting [[Saddam ]] in his war against [[Iran]], were drawing attention to Saddam’s use of the WMD and his other horrors, and were ignored by the US [[state ]] [[apparatus ]] – and who now have to listen to the mantra of Saddam-a-brutal-criminal-dictator turned against themselves? The problem with the [[claim ]] [[about ]] Saddam [[being ]] a war criminal is not that it is [[false]], but that the US administration has no [[right ]] to utter it without admitting its own [[responsibility ]] in Saddam’s stay in [[power ]] – the surprised late discovery that Saddam is a brutal dictator sounds like Stalin’s surprised discovery, in the late 1930, that Yezhov, the head of NKVD who organized the [[terror]], was [[responsible ]] for the [[death ]] of thousands of innocent Communists...<br /><br />

The ultimate [[dimension ]] of the irony of such a convoluted [[situation ]] – that of being reduced to a prisoner building monuments to oneself - is nonetheless something inherent to Stalinism, in contrast to [[Fascism]]: it is in Stalinism only that people are enslaved on behalf of the [[ideology ]] which claims that theirs is all power. The first [[thing ]] one cannot but take note of apropos the Stalinist [[discourse ]] is its contagious [[nature]]: the way (almost) everyone likes to mockingly imitate it, use its [[terms ]] in different [[political ]] contexts, etc., in clear contrast to Fascism. Not only this: in the last decade, we are witnessing in most [[post-Communist ]] countries the [[process ]] of inventing the Communist [[tradition]]. The Communist past is recreated as a [[cultural ]] and [[life]]-style phenomenon, products which, decades ago, were perceived as a miserable copy of the Western "[[true ]] thing" (the Eastern versions of cola-drinks, of hand lotions, the low quality refrigirators and washing machines, the popular muisic...) are not only fondly remembered and sometimes even displayed in museums – sometimes, they are even successfully put on the [[market ]] again (like the Florena hand lotion in the GDR). The political aspect of the Communiust past – in its [[good ]] and bad aspects, from the emancipatory [[dream ]] to the Stalinist terror - is erased, replaced by everyday [[objects ]] which evoke the [[vision ]] of a simple and modest, but for this very [[reason ]] more happy, [[content]], [[satisfying ]] life than the stressful dynamics of [[capitalism]]. The process of the creation of new [[Nation]]-States out of the disintegration of Communist "empires" thus follows the [[logic ]] of what, with [[regard ]] to the rise of capitalism, [[Marx ]] described as the priority of the [[formal ]] subsumption of the forces of production under the [[capital ]] over the [[material ]] subsumption: a [[society ]] was first formally subsumed under the Nation-State, and then followed by elaborating its [[ideological ]] content (fabricating the tradition that grounds this Nation-State). - In short, Stalinism is not prohibited in the same way as [[Nazism]]: even if we are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, one finds <i>Ostalgie</i> acceptable: <em>Goodbye [[Lenin]]</em> is tolerated, "Goodbye [[Hitler]]" not – why? Or, [[another ]] example: in today's [[Germany]], there are on the market many CD's with old DDR revolutionary and party songs, from "[[Stalin]], Freund, Genosse" to <i>Die Partei hat immer Recht</i> - but we look in vain for a CD with the [[Nazi ]] party songs...<br />

Already at the anecdotal level, the [[difference ]] between the Fascist and the Stalinist [[universe ]] is obvious; say, in the Stalinist show trials, the accused has to publicly confess his crimes and to give an account of how he came to commit [[them ]] – in start contrast to Nazism, in which it would be meaningless to [[demand ]] from a Jew the [[confession ]] that he was involved in a [[Jewish ]] plot against the [[German ]] nation. This difference points towards the different attitude towards [[Enlightenment]]: Stalinism still conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, within which [[truth ]] is accessible to any [[rational ]] man, no matter how depraved he is, which is why he is subjectively responsible for his crimes, <ref>Another [[sign ]] of the Enlightenment legacy: if there is one proposition which condenses Stalinist [[politics]], it is the "anti-essentialist" motif, repeated endlessly in his works: "Everything depends on circumstances."</ref> in contrast to the [[Nazis]], for whom the [[guilt ]] of the [[Jews ]] is a direct fact of their very [[biological ]] [[constitution]]; one does not have to prove that they are [[guilty]], they are guilty solely by being Jews – why? The key is provided by the sudden rise, in the Western ideological [[imaginary]], of the [[figure ]] of the wandering „eternal Jew" in the age of Romanticism, i.e., precisely when, in [[real ]] life, with the explosion of capitalism, features attributed to Jews expanded into the [[whole ]] of society (since [[commodity ]] [[exchange ]] became hegemonic). It was thus at the very [[moment ]] when Jews were deprived of their specific properties which made it easy to distinguish them from the rest of the population, and when the "Jewish question" was "resolved" at the political level by the formal emancipation of the Jews, i.e., by granting Jews the same rights as to all other "normal" [[Christian ]] citizens, that their "curse" was inscribed into their very being – they were no longer ridiculous misers and usurers, but demoniac heroes of eternal damnation, haunted by an unspecified and unspeakable guilt, condemned to wander around and longing to find redemption in death. So it was precisely when the specific figure of the Jew disappeared that the ABSOLUTE Jew emerged, and this transformation conditioned the shift of [[anti-Semitism ]] from [[theology ]] to [[race]]: their damnation was their race, they were not guilty for what they did (exploit the Christians, [[murder ]] their [[children]], rape their [[women]], or, ultimately, betray and murder [[Christ]]), but for what they WERE – is it necessary to add that this shift laid the foundations for the [[holocaust]], for the [[physical ]] annihilation of the Jews as the only appropriate final solution of their "problem"? Insofar as Jews were [[identified ]] by a series of their properties, the [[goal ]] was to convert them, to turn them into Christians; but from the moment that Jewishness concerns their very being, only annihilation can solve the "Jewish question."<br />

It is none other than [[Nietzsche ]] who proposed the correct [[materialist ]] [[intervention ]] destined to "[[traverse ]] the /anti-Semitic/ [[fantasy]]": in No. 251 of <i>Beyond Good and Evil</i>, he proposed, as a way to "breed a new caste that would rule over [[Europe]]," the mixing of the German and the Jewish race, which would combine the German ability of "giving [[orders ]] and obeying" with the Jewish [[genius ]] of "[[money ]] and patience." <ref>[[Friedrich Nietzsche]], <i>Beyond Good and Evil</i>, Oxford: OUP 1998, par. 251.</ref> The ingenuity of this solution is that if combines two [[fantasies ]] which are a priori incompatible, which cannot meet each other in the same [[symbolic ]] space, as in the [[English ]] publicity spot for a beer from a couple of years ago. Its first part [[stages ]] the well-known fairy-tale anecdote: a [[girl ]] walks along a stream, sees a frog, takes it gently into her lap, kisses it, and, of course, the ugly frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man. However, the story isn't over yet: the young man casts a covetous glance at the girl, draws her towards himself, kisses her - and she turns into a bottle of beer which the man holds triumphantly in his hand... We have either a [[woman ]] with a frog or a man with a bottle of beer - what we can never obtain is the "[[natural]]" couple of the beautiful woman and man - why not? Because the [[fantasmatic ]] support of this "[[ideal ]] couple" would have been the inconsistent figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. This, then, opens up the possibility of undermining the hold a fantasy exerts over us through the very over-identification with it, i.e. by way of embracing simultaneously, within the same space, the [[multitude ]] of inconsistent fantasmatic elements. That is to say, each of the two [[subjects ]] is involved in his or her own [[subjective ]] fantasizing - the girl fantasizes about the frog who is really a young man, the man about the girl who is really a bottle of beer. What modern art and [[writing ]] oppose to this is not [[objective ]] [[reality ]] but the "objectively subjective" underlying fantasy which the two subjects are never able to assume, something similar to a Magrittesque painting of a frog embracing a bottle of beer, with a title "A man and a woman" or "The ideal couple". And is this not exactly what Nietzsche does in his proposal? Is his [[formula ]] of the new race mixed from Germans and Jews not his "frog with a bottle of beer"?<br />

It is precisely on account of the legacy of Enlightenment that, as [[Jean-Claude Milner ]] put it, comparing Rousseau to the Stalinist show trials, "in the matter of [[confessions]], Geneva does not necessarily win over Moscow." <ref>Jean-Claude Milner, <i>Le periple [[structural]]</i>, [[Paris]]: [[Editions du Seuil ]] 2002, p. 214.</ref> In the Stalinist ideological imaginary, the universal Reason is objectivized in the guise of the inexorable laws of historical [[progress ]] and we are all its servants, the [[leader ]] included – which is why, after a Nazi leader delivers a [[speech ]] and the crowd applauds, he just stands and silently accepts the applause, positing himself as its addressee, while in Stalinism, when the obligatory applause explodes at the end of the leader's speech, the leader stands up and joins [[others ]] in applauding. <ref>The mutual [[fascination ]] between Stalin and the Russian writers who are today perceived as "[[dissidents]]," displays not only Stalin’s [[belief ]] in the [[secret ]] wisdom of poets but, even more, the weird conviction of the writers themselves that Stalin, this [[total ]] [[Master]], a kind of [[Freudian ]] primordial [[father ]] (Ur-Vater), detains a mysterious insight into the ultimate secrets of life and death. In April 1930, Stalin unexpectedly phoned Bulgakov to convince him not to emigrate; after assuring him that he will get a job at the Art Theater, he added: "We should meet, to talk together." Bulgakov immediately replied: "Yes, yes! Iosif Vissarionovich, I really [[need ]] to talk to you." After this, Stalin unexpectedly cut the conversation. (Quoted from Solomon Volkov, <em>Shostakovich and Stalin</em>, New York: Little, Brown 2004, p. 90.) A similar thing happened to Pasternak in June 1934, when he got a phone call from Stalin, asking him about Mandelstam who was at that [[time ]] out of mercy and in exile: "This is Stalin. Are you interceding on behalf of your friend Mandelstam?" Fearing a trap, the confused Pasternak replied: "We were never actually friends. Rather the reverse. I found it difficult dealing with him. But I’ve always wanted dreamed about talking to you. About life and death." Stalin cut here the conversation short, reprimanding Shostakovich for not standing for his friend: "We old Bolsheviks never deny our friends. And I have no reason to talk to you about other things."(Volkov, op.cit., p. 106.) The same ambiguous fascination is clearly discernible in Shostakovich and Meyerhold, and even in Mandelstam.</ref> [[Recall ]] the wonderful detail from the beginning of Lubitch's To Be or not to Be: when Hitler enters a room, all the Nazi officers in the room raise their hands into a Nazi salute and shout their »Heil Hitler!«; in reply to it, Hitler himself raises his hand and says: "Heil myself!" - in Hitler's [[case]], this is pure [[humor]], a thing which could not happen in reality, while Stalin effectively could (and did) "hail himself" when he joined others in applauding himself. For this same reason, on Stalin's birthday, the prisoners were sending telegrams to Stalin, wishing him all the best and the success of [[Socialism]], even from the darkest gulags like Norilsk or Vorkuta, while one cannot even imagine Jews from Auschwitz sending Hitler a telegram for his birthday... Crazy and tasteless as this may sound, this last [[distinction ]] bears [[witness ]] to the fact that the opposition between Stalinism and Nazism was the opposition between [[civilization ]] and barbarism: Stalinism did not cut the last [[threat ]] that linked it to civilization. This is why the biggest war of the XXth century, the [[World ]] War II, was the war in which Stalinist Communist AND [[capitalist ]] democracies fought together against Fascism. <ref>One of the standard arguments of rabid anti-Communists concerns the [[number ]] of secret agents in, respectively, Communist countries and the Nazi Germany: the ex-GDR, with its ten million inhabitants, had 100.000 fully employed secret police agents to [[control ]] its population, while [[Gestapo ]] covered ENTIRE Germany with cca 10000 fully employed agents... However, what this argument demonstrates is rather the opposite: the degree of [[participation ]] of the "ordinary" Germans in the political terror – there was no need of a larger number of agents for the massive network of denunciations to function, since Gestapo could rely on the cooperation of the wide circles of [[civil society]]. In other [[words]], the massive [[moral ]] corruption was much stronger in Nazism than in [[Communism]].</ref> This is also why we do not find in Nazism anything that could be compared to the "[[humanist]]" dissident Communists, those who went even up to risking their physical survival in fighting what they perceived as the "bureaucratic deformation" of Socialism in the USSR and its [[empire]]: in the Nazi Germany, there were no [[figures ]] who advocated "Nazism with a [[human ]] face"… Therein resides the flaw (and the secret bias) of all attempts a la Nolte to adopt a neutral position of "objectively comparing [[Fascism and Stalinism]]," i.e., of the line of argumentation which asks: "If we condemn Nazis for illegally killing millions, why do we not apply the same standards to Communism? If [[Heidegger ]] cannot be pardoned his brief Nazi engagement, why can [[Lukacs ]] and [[Brecht ]] and others be pardoned their much longer Stalinist engagement?" In today’s constellation, such a position automatically means privileging Fascism over Communism, i.e., more concretely, reducing Nazism to a reaction to - and [[repetition ]] of - the practices already found in Bolshevism ([[struggle ]] to death against the political [[enemy]], terror and concentration camps), so that the "original sin" is that of Communism.<br />

The proper task is thus to [[think ]] the TRAGEDY of the October Revolution: to perceive its greatness, its unique emancipatory potential, and, simultaneously, the HISTORICAL NECESSITY of its Stalinist outcome. One should oppose both temptations: the Trotskyte [[notion ]] that Stalinism was ultimately a [[contingent ]] deviation, as well as the notion that the Communist [[project ]] is, in its very core, totalitarian. In the [[third ]] volume of his supreme biography of Trotsky, [[Isaac ]] Deutscher makes a perspicuous observation about the forced collectivization of the late 1920s:

<blockquote>/…/ having failed to [[work ]] outwards and to expand and being compressed within the [[Soviet Union]], that [[dynamic ]] force turned inwards and began once again to reshape violently the [[structure ]] of Soviet society. Forcible industrialization and collectivization were now substitutes for the spread of revolution, and the liquidation of the Russian kulaks was the Ersatz for the overthrow of the bourgeois rule abroad. <ref>Isaac Deutscher, <i>The Prophet Outcast</i>, [[London]]: Verso Books 2003, p. 88.</ref>

The twists of contemporary politics render palpable a kind of [[Hegelian ]] [[dialectical ]] law: a fundamental historical task that "[[naturally]]" expresses the orientation of one political block can only be accomplished by the opposite block. In [[Argentina ]] a decade ago, it was Menem, elected on a populist platform, who pursued tight monetary politics and the IMF-agenda of privatizations much more radically than his "[[liberal]]" market-oriented radical opponents. In [[France ]] in 1960, it was the [[conservative ]] [[de Gaulle ]] (and not the Socialists) who broke the Gordian [[knot ]] by giving [[full ]] independence to Alger. It was the conservative Nixon who established diplomatic relations between the US and China. It was the "hawkish" Begin who concluded the Camp David treaty with Egypt. Or, further back in Argentinean [[history]], in 1830s and 1840s, the heyday of the struggle between "barbarian" Federalists (representatives of provincial cattle-owners) and "[[civilized]]" Unitarians (merchants etc. from Buenos Aires interested in a strong central state), it was Juan Manuel Rosas, the Federalist populist dictator, who established a centralist [[system ]] of [[government]], much stronger than Unitarians dared to dream. The same logic was at work in the crisis of the Soviet Union of the second half of the 1920s: in 1927, the ruling coalition of Stalinists and Bukharinists, pursuing the policy of appeasement of the private farmers, was ferociously attacking the [[Left ]] united Opposition of Trotskists and Zinovievists who called for the accelerated industrialization and the fights against rich peasants (higher taxes, collectivization). One can imagine the surprise of the Left Opposition when, in 1928, Stalin enforced a sudden "[[Leftist]]" turn, imposing a politics of fast industrialization and brutal collectivization of land, not only stealing their program, but even realizing it in a much more brutal way they dared to imagine – their criticism of Stalin as a "Thermidorian" Right-winger vall of a sudden became meaningless. No wonder that many Trotskytes recanted and joined the Stalinists who, at the very moment of the ruthless extermination of the Trotskist faction, realized their program. Communist parties knew how to apply "the rule which permitted the Roman [[Church ]] to endure for two thousand years: condemn those whose politics one takes over, canonize those from whom one does not take anything." <ref>Jean-Claude Milner, <i>Le periple structural</i>, p. 213.</ref> And, incidentally, there was the same tragic-comic misunderstanding in [[Yugoslavia ]] of the early 1970s: after the large student demonstrations, where, along the calls for [[democracy]], accusations that the ruling Communists pursue the politics which favors the new "rich" technocrats were heard, the Communist counter-attack that stifled all opposition was legitimized, among others, by the [[idea ]] that Communists heard the [[message ]] of the student protests and were meeting their demands… Therein resides the [[tragedy ]] of the Leftist Communist opposition which pursued the oxymoron of the anti-market "radical" [[economic ]] politics combined with the calls for direct and true democracy.<br />

So where do we stand today? Is the deadlock [[complete]]? A century ago, Vilfredo Pareto was the first to describe the so-called 80/20 rule of (not only) [[social ]] life: 80 &#37; of land is owned by 20 &#37; of people, 80 &#37; of profits are produced by 20 &#37; of the employees, 80 &#37; of decisions are made during 20 &#37; of meeting time, 80 &#37; of the [[links ]] on the Web point to less than 20 &#37; of Web-pages, 80 &#37; of peas are produced by 20 &#37; of the peapods… As some social [[analysts ]] and economists suggested, today’s explosion of economic productivity confronts us with the ultimate case of this rule: the coming [[global ]] [[economy ]] tends towards a state in which only 20 &#37; of the workforce can do all the necessary job, so that 80 &#37; of the people are basically irrelevant and of no use, potentially unemployed.<br />

This 80/20 rule follows from what is called "scale-free networks" in which a small number of nodes with the greatest number of links is followed by an ever larger number of nodes with an ever smaller number of links. Say, among any group of people, a small number of them [[know ]] (have links to) a large number of other people, while the majority of people know only a small number of people – social networks spontaneously [[form ]] "nodes," people with large number of links to other people. In such a scale-free network, competition remains: while the overall distribution remains the same, the [[identity ]] of top nodes changes all the time, a late-comer replacing the earlier winners. However, some of the networks can [[pass ]] the critical threshold beyond which competition breaks down and the winner takes it all: one [[node ]] grabs all the links, leaving none for the rest – this is what basically happened with Microsoft which emerged as the privileged node: it grabbed all the links, i.e., we have to relate to him in [[order ]] to [[communicate ]] with other entities. The big structural question is, of course: what defines the threshold, which networks tend to pass the threshold, above which competition breaks down and the winner takes it all? <ref>See Chapters 6 and 8 in Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, <i>Linked</i>, New York: Plume 2003.</ref><br />

If, then, today's "postindustrial" society [[needs ]] less and less [[workers ]] to reproduce itself (20 &#37; of the [[working ]] force, on some accounts), then it is not workers who are in [[excess]], but the Capital itself. – However, unemployed are only one among the many candidates for today’s "universal individual," for a [[particular ]] group whose fate stands for the injustice of today’s world: Palestinians, [[Guantanamo ]] prisoners… [[Palestine ]] is today the site of a potential [[event ]] precisely because all the standard "pragmatic" solutions to the "[[Middle East ]] crisis" repeatedly fail, so that a [[utopian ]] invention of a new space is the only "realistic" [[choice]]. Furthermore, Palestinians are a good candidate on account of their paradoxical position of being the victims of the ultimate Victims themselves (Jews), which, of course, puts them in an extremely difficult spot: when they resist, their [[resistance ]] can immediately be denounced as a prolongation of anti-Semitism, as a secret [[solidarity ]] with the Nazi "final solution." Indeed, if – as [[Lacanian ]] Zionists like to claim – Jews are the <i>[[objet ]] [[petit a]]</i> among nations, the troubling excess of Western history, how can one resist them with impunity? Is it possible to be the <i>[[objet a]]</i> of objet a itself? It is precisely this [[ethical ]] [[blackmail ]] that one should reject. <ref>Elie Wiesel sees the holocaust as equal to the revelation at Sinai in its [[religious ]] [[significance]]: attempts to 'desanctify' or 'demystify' the Holocaust are a subtle form of anti-Semitism. In this type of discourse, holocaust is effectively elevated into a unique [[agalma]], hidden treasure, objet a of the Jews – they are ready to give up everything except holocaust... Recently, after I was attacked by a Jewish Lacanian for being a covert anti-Semite, I asked a common friend why this extreme reaction? His reply: "You should [[understand ]] the guy – he does not [[want ]] the Jews to be deprived of the holocaust, the focal point of their lives..."</ref><br />

However, there is a privileged site in this series: what if the new proletarian position is those of the inhabitants of [[slums ]] in the new megalopolises? The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, especially in the Third World megalopolises from [[Mexico ]] City and other [[Latin ]] American capitals through Africa (Lagos, Chad) to [[India]], China, Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our [[times]]. <ref>See the excellent report of Mike Davis, "Planet of Slums. Urban Revolution and the Informal [[Proletariat]]," <i>[[New Left ]] Review</i> 26 (March/April 2004).</ref> The case of Lagos, the biggest node in the shanty-town corridor of 70 million people that stretches from Abidjan to Ibadan, is exemplary here: according to the [[official ]] sources themselves, about two thirds of the Lagos State total land mass of 3.577 square kilometers could be classified as shanties or slums; no one even [[knows ]] the size of its population – officially it is 6 million, but most experts estimate it at 10 million. Since, sometime very soon (or maybe, given the imprecision of the Third World censuses, it already happened), the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural population, and since slum inhabitants will compose the majority of the urban population, we are in no way dealing with a marginal phenomenon. We are thus witnessing the fast growth of the population [[outside ]] the state control, [[living ]] in [[conditions ]] half outside the law, in terrible need of the minimal forms of [[self]]-organization. Although their population is composed of marginalized laborers, redundant civil servants and ex-peasants, they are not simple a redundant [[surplus]]: they are incorporated into the [[global economy ]] in numerous ways, many of them working as informal [[wage ]] workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, with no adequate health or [[social security ]] coverage. (The main source of their rise is the inclusion of the Third World countries in the global economy, with cheap food imports from the First World countries ruining local agriculture.) They are the true "[[symptom]]" of slogans like "[[Development]]," "[[Modernization]]," and "World Market": not an unfortunate accident, but a necessary product of the innermost logic of global capitalism. <ref>Are then slum-dwellers not to be classified as that what Marx, with barely concealed contempt, dismissed as "lumpen-proletariat," the degenerate "refuse" of all classes which, when politicized, as a rule serves as the support of [[proto-Fascist ]] and Fascist regimes (in Marx’s case, of Napoleon III)? A closer [[analysis ]] should focus on the changed structural [[role ]] of these "lumpen" elements in the conditions of global capitalism (especially large-scale migrations). </ref><br />

No wonder that the hegemonic form of ideology in slums is the Pentecostal [[Christianity]], with its mixture of charismatic miracles-and-spectacles-oriented [[fundamentalism ]] and of social programs like [[community ]] kitchens and taking care of children and old. While, of course, one should resist the easy temptation to elevate and idealize the slum dwellers into a new revolutionary [[class]], one should nonetheless, in Badiou’s terms, perceive slums as one of the few authentic "evental sites" in today’s society – the slum-dwellers are literally a collection of those who are the "part of no part," the "[[surnumerary]]" element of society, excluded from the benefits of [[citizenship]], the uprooted and dispossessed, those who effectively "have nothing to loose but their chains." It is effectively surprising how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old [[Marxist ]] determination of the proletarian revolutionary [[subject]]: they are "free" in the [[double ]] [[meaning ]] of the [[word ]] even more than the classic proletariat ("freed" from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, "thrown" into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-forms.<br />

Of course, there is a crucial break between the slum-dwellers and the classic Marxist [[working class]]: while the latter is defined in the precise terms of economic "exploitation" (the appropriation of surplus-[[value ]] generated by the situation of having to sell one’s own labor force as a commodity on the market), the defining feature of the slum-dwellers is socio-political, it concerns their (non)integration into the [[legal ]] space of citizenship with (most of) its incumbent rights – to put it in somewhat simplified terms, much more than a refugee, a slum-dweller is a <i>[[homo sacer]]</i>, the systemically generated "living [[dead]]" of global capitalism. He is a kind of [[negative ]] of the refugee: a refugee from his own community, the one whom the power is not trying to control through concentration, where (to [[repeat ]] the unforgettable pun from Ernst Lubitch’s <i>To Be Or Not to Be</i>) those in power do the concentrating while the refugees do the camping, but pushed into the space of the out-of-control; in contrast to the Foucauldian micro-practices of [[discipline]], a slum-dweller is the one with regard to whom the power renounces its right to exert full control and discipline, finding it more appropriate to let him dwell in the twilight zone of slums. <ref>The precise Marxian definition of the proletarian position is: substanceless [[subjectivity ]] which emerges when a certain structural short-circuit occurs - not only producers exchange their products on the market, but there are producers who are forced to sell on the market not the product of their labor, but directly their working force as such. It is here, through this redoubled/reflected [[alienation]], that the surplus-[[object ]] emerges: surplus-value is literally correlative to the emptied subject, it is the objectal [[counterpart ]] of &#36;. This redoubled alienation means that not only "social relations appear as relations between things," as in every market economy, but that the very core of subjectivity itself is posited as equivalent to a thing. One should be attentive here to the [[paradox ]] of universalization: market economy can only become universal when working force itself is also sold on the market as a commodity, i.e., there can be no universal market economy with the majority of producers selling their products.</ref><br />

What one finds in the "really-existing slums" is, of course, a mixture of improvised modes of social life, from religious "fundamentalist" groups hold together by a charismatic leader and criminal gangs up to germs of new "socialist" solidarity. The slum dwellers are the counter-class to the other newly emerging class, the so-called "symbolic class" (managers, journalists and PR people, academics, artists, etc.) which is also uprooted and perceives itself as directly universal (a New York academic has more in common with a Slovene academic than with blacks in Harlem half a mile from his camps). Is this the new axis of [[class struggle]], or is the "symbolic class" inherently [[split]], so that one can make the emancipatory wager on the coalition between the slum-dwellers and the "progressive" part of [[the symbolic ]] class? What we should be [[looking ]] for are the [[signs ]] of the new forms of social [[awareness ]] that will emerge from the slum collectives: they will be the germs of [[future]].