Some on the left would rather wallow in impotence than support the Syriza's leader's bid to be president of European commission
Alexis Tsipras, leader of the opposition in Greece, as a candidate for the president of the European commission? Is that a joke? The best answer to this question has recently been given by the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi Bifo, who said "I will vote for Tsipras, even if it's useless", and added in his characteristic tone: "Taking those 200 metres that separate me from the polling station is not such a big effort to make an action that is completely useless".
Even political philosophers Antonio Negri and Sandro Mezzadra, otherwise known as fierce critics of elections, acknowledge the relevance of the forthcoming European parliament elections.
Until recently Negri and Michael Hardt, in their "Declaration" (2012), celebrated the political maturity of the "indignados" who did not vote in the Spanish elections of 2011. However, it was precisely the lack of a credible left party that led to this abstinence. This time the situation is different, and there is a growing pan-European left power that is able to subvert and potentially disrupt the existing state of affairs. Negri and Mezzadra argue that the European elections in May 2014 are essential: "The issue of wages and the issue of income, the definition of rights and dimensions of welfare, the topic of constitutional transformations related to single countries and to the European constituent issue can, today, only be addressed at a European level. Outside of this sphere there is no such thing as political realism."
While the French philosopher Alain Badiou so persistently insists on "subtraction" from the state, for Negri it is clear that the forthcoming elections create a space for the imposition of a new "political grammar". And that is why Badiou, his sharp text published in Radical Philosophy, was wrong when speaking about the left's "contemporary impotence".
Badiou first accuses Costas Douzinas of "avowed optimism", arguing that there is nothing new in what Douzinas, in his book Philosophy and Resistance in Crisis, called a "new political subject". For Badiou, the demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Cairo and Athens' Syntagma Square are nothing but "the communist invariants". Here, there is no point going into Badiou's critique, it is simply enough to press Ctrl+F and find what is missing throughout his text: the word Syriza. Badiou does not ever mention the great political success of Alexis Tsipras's radical left party that leads all opinion polls in Greece.
Our contemporary impotence lies not so much in the fact that all these "communist invariants" failed to change the balance of power, but that one part of the left is not willing to accept the risk of engaging in institutional struggle, even at the cost of failure or defeat.
A nice illustration of this situation lies in the American sitcom Sex and the City. Charlotte, who is the opposite of the sexual predator Samantha, believes in romantic love and decides not to have sex with her fiancé Trey until the honeymoon. However, the night before the wedding she is confronted with Trey's impotence. Trying to find out whether it is a physical or psychological erectile dysfunction, Charlotte investigates whether Trey's erection wakes up when he goes to sleep.
Is the real problem only in the "head" or is it "physical"? It is no surprise that Charlotte one day discovers that her fiancé is actually masturbating in the bathroom to pornographic magazines. "Our contemporary impotence" comes exactly from this: on the one hand, we find the old left melancholy when it comes to waging concrete struggles in the existing institutions and in the streets and squares, and on the other hand, there is the masturbation on a utopia that will never come true.
Here we should use Badiou's own words and the lesson of his master [maître], Mao Zedong, who used to say: "No investigation, no right to speak!" In other words, to investigate a problem is, indeed, to try to solve it. The European elections offer an opportunity not only to new political parties but also to popular movements who can have their direct representatives in the existing institutions, with the goal to deliver at least minimum demands for social justice and effectively confront the policies of the Troika.
What we need today is a combination of the old Gramscian difference between the "war of position" and the "war of manoeuvre". It is becoming more and more clear that a movement without a party is impotent, and that a party without a movement can only repeat the failures of the past. We need both. And that's the reason why Tsipras's nomination as a candidate for the presidency of the European Commission is not a joke. Even if it seems useless, we should walk this 200 metres in order to step out from our contemporary impotence.
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