The politics of krisis

The era of the anti-revolution

The revolution in which the ‘subjects themselves become the rulers’  has now given way to a period in which the idea of ‘anti-revolution’ permeates social consciousness.  The anti-revolution repudiates the revolutionary method of achieving social change and historical justice, but it is not necessarily reactionary. It opposes the logic of revolution and not just the determinate features of a specific revolution, and is therefore more than simply a counter-revolution.  Its basic spirit has been well described by Gorbachev and Ikeda. Although they stressed the positive spiritual charge of the new epoch, the burden of expectation has noticeably declined and it is difficult to retrieve a sense of ‘genuine human history’,   organised through the Politeia rather than at the mercy of the fates in the Nomoi, where the life of a community depends less on its self-characterisation than on its inherent qualities.

Koselleck notes the shift in the understanding of historical time. Before the eighteenth century temporality was seen as the repeated unfolding of eternal truths. ‘All variation, or change, rerum commutation, rerum converse, was insufficient to introduce anything novel into the political world. Historical experience remained involved in its almost natural givenness, and in the same way that the annual seasons through their succession remain forever the same, so mankind qua political beings remained bound to a process of change which brought forth nothing new under the sun’.  He goes on to describe the new quality with which historical time was imbued as a result of the new concept of ‘revolution’ being more than circularity, but overthrow and transcendence through a process of civil war.

The revolutions of 1989-91 put an end to the age inaugurated by Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which tied the idea of revolution to the notion of the liberation of a class. The Marxist revolution was thus inalienably associated with ‘civil war’, not necessarily taking a violent form but dominated by the logic of a society riven by conflict and characterised by a shifting war of position between two great forces, the so-called bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in which politics was no more than instrumental. In Russia the civil war took a very real form, and ushered in seven decades of communist rule. Like the 240 years of Mongol suzerainty, the 74 years of Communist power endowed Russia with a layer of historical experience that is unique in Europe. 

The domestic roots of the ‘Cold War’ should thus be stressed, which after 1945 took an external form in the Cold War struggle between ideo-political blocs. This was a domestic cold war in which the protagonists were allegedly locked in battle until the end of history. All this was swept away in 1989-91, together with the ideology of civil war and its concomitant Cold War played out on the larger stage. Emancipatory revolutionism had exhausted itself and with it, almost as an afterthought, the Leninist party. The end of Soviet communism put an end to all talk of revolutionary socialism.  Paradoxically, as we shall see, while the domestic sources of Cold War confrontation have been transcended, its external manifestations remain in the form of a ‘legacy’ geopolitical contest between the dominant hegemonic power (the United States) and a number of potential rising great powers, of which Russia is one.

Enlightenment and emancipatory revolutionism sustained critiques that sought to transcend the brute reality of the given. With the crash of the future-oriented Enlightenment and emancipatory revolutionary cycles, the naturalistic appears to have been restored, leaving only the traditionalist revolt typical of the epoch of naturalistic cyclicity. History has lost its goal and, as Jean Bodin always stressed, politics is once again concerned with chance and probability. The revival of the medical metaphor of crisis in public affairs, one that was prevalent in the pre-modern era, reflects the historiosophical reality that the practice and conduct of politics has indeed ‘revolved’ back to an earlier period where class struggle existed but lacked the dimension of societal emancipation, and where revolutions were liberating rather than emancipatory.

The decline in the pursuit of transcendental revolutionary goals, however, has opened the way for the historically located pursuit of ‘politics’, concerned with temporal matters of policy rather than the achievement of supra-political goals. The heresies that the Soviet regime called ‘dissent’, grounded in the religion of communism, has now given way to problems of achieving coherence within the constitutional state. The emancipatory revolution had fulfilled whatever historical potential it may have had, and the culmination of one era makes possible the anti-revolutionary integration of social existence on a new basis. As Zygmunt Bauman notes, the disappearance of ‘emancipation’ from the historical horizon, and with it plans for the wholesale reordering of human affairs, has profound effects on social theory and political practice. Contemporary humanity has to get used to ‘living without an alternative’.  This makes possible a grounded politics, but it also opens the way for a brute politics based on a technocratic-pragmatic rationality and a society of the spectacle and consumption, deprived of progressive let alone transcendent ideals.

The end of the revolution

Epochal thinking since the ancient world is characterised by a sense of the unfolding of time, but in the modern era this became allied to a progressive understanding of social change. The Russian revolution was the first large-scale attempt to implement Marxist revolutionary theory, the first attempt to build a society based on the rejection of Western modernity while trying to fulfil it. This utopian project, as it is now called, displaced political discourse from grounded reason towards a political practice that generated closure and exclusivity.  The pursuit of transcendent and universal (epochal) goals undermined appreciation of the particularism of the raw human material and national specificity of the country in which the revolutionaries had to work. In practice communism everywhere assumed national forms, but the tension between universalism and particularism did not disappear.  Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership during the period of perestroika (restructuring, 1985-91) attempted to put an end to revolutionism while retaining the emancipatory core of Marxism, but this combination (which harked back to the Prague Spring of 1968) ultimately failed.
This is what we call emancipatory revolutionism, and this was the project that in one way or another Lenin and Stalin sought to implement in Russia and, after the Second World War, in Eastern Europe. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the notion of emancipatory revolutionism had lost whatever popular resonance it once might have had in the countries that claimed to be building communism. Thus the events of 1989-91, when one Eastern European country after another shook off the communist power systems, represented the overthrow not only of a specific regime type but also the repudiation of the social philosophy of emancipatory revolution on which they were based. It was this, as much as the geopolitical rearrangement of the international order that they entailed, that rendered these events epochal.

The collapse of long-term eschatological projects, which have been the characteristic feature of modernity has changed the nature of historical time. The ‘epochality’ of the fall of communism derived from the repudiation at the social level of revolution as an emancipatory act. By epochality we mean the eschatology of endowing parochial events with universal significance. The emergence during the eighteenth century of a discourse of progressive social change based on a universal model of rationality and development applicable to all societies was clearly an event of epochal significance. This ideology in the hands of some Enlightenment thinkers (but certainly far from all) was combined with a revolutionary approach to social change – that the act of rupture itself had a liberating and progressive political effect. For want of a better term this can be called ‘Enlightenment revolutionism’. In the nineteenth century this idea of political revolution was combined with a social agenda, above all by Karl Marx, based on the idea that through an act of political rupture society could achieve its emancipation not only from oppression but also from subordination to contingency in the very broadest sense.

There is a price, however, to be paid for the end of the revolution, and this has been noted by the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy: ‘In France, politics has always been defined by the Revolution. If the Revolution ceases to be desirable, then so does politics. Perhaps what we are witnessing now is the death of politics’.  The revolution has ended, but a ‘disenchanted’ order takes its place in which the unpredictable and multiple consequences of political intervention paralyse conscious political mobilisation. The bases for political intervention are not clear. The absence of utopia and the possibility (however illusory) of a total and revolutionary change in social existence afflicts art and culture in the broadest sense. Another place of the political imagination (so-called utopias) no longer exists. The very language we use to describe politics, the language of political analysis and the terms applied to describe political concepts, buckle under the pressures generated by the end of the revolution and the absence of a renewed dynamic for the conduct of a post-revolutionary politics. The very act of political imagination is condemned.

The rejection of allegedly utopian aspirations for human emancipation is the theme of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. He casts such projects as Soviet collectivisation and compulsory Ujamaa villagisation in Tanzania as reflections of ‘authoritarian high modernism’, which combined ‘the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society’, ‘the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs’, and the weakened capacity of civil society to resist these plans.   High modernism for him is a strong version of linear beliefs in progress and modernisation that characterised Western Europe and America up to the First World War. It is ‘a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied – usually through the state – in every field of human activity’.  The historical basis of the argument is a powerful one; but the corollary that purposive state action is necessarily destructive is one that reflects the anti-statist dynamic of the ideology of globalisation, itself an ideology that was borne of the fall of communism in Russia.

The krisis of our time

Reinhart Koselleck notes how the critique of the eighteenth century provoked a crisis whose first major symptom was the French revolution.  The meta-cycle of critique and crisis, however, has not ended with the fall of the communist systems: all that has ended is one particular sub-cycle (the Marxian revolutionary challenge), but the crisis continues. Crisis denotes a special type of temporality which western society has endured, if Koselleck is correct, for at least two centuries. The meta-crisis identified by Koselleck continues, but the post-revolutionary era is trapped in the smaller cycle of disappointment and reaction.

We use the word ‘crisis’ in three senses. The first draws on the Greek word krisis to suggest a period of reflection in the life of the community, suggesting a moment of decision.  Used in a second and conventional sense, evidence of ‘crisis’ is manifest in the contemporary world economy and, interestingly enough from our perspective, the current period is known as ‘the crisis’, to denote the turbulence that has been compared to the great depression of the 1930s. This brings us to the third sense in which the term is used. This draws on the Chinese approach that depicts a crisis as both a danger and an opportunity and is reminiscent of the first meaning. As in the turning point of an illness, a crisis can prove cathartic: either the patient is healed, or they die. Thus crisis in this sense means not sclerosis but the struggle for life.

The central argument of this paper is that with the end of the idea of revolution as a way of overcoming contingency in human affairs, the notion of ‘crisis’ needs to be given greater elaboration. For the Greeks krisis was a moment to take stock of its situation, but the tragedy of our times has been that the end of the Cold War and of the whole era of revolutionary politics has not been used as just such an opportunity. Instead, the fall of communism turned out to be a false turning point, only reinforcing the power and intellectual prestige of one of the protagonists, without reflecting on the fact that the emancipatory revolution in part arose as a response to the crisis of that very model.

The transcending anti-revolution of our epoch has enormous consequences for the conduct of politics in the post-revolutionary era. The new politics is torn between a return to naturalistic cyclicity and the development of a new cycle of political activism grounded in the practices of the transcending revolution itself. The language of crisis in part reflects a return to naturalistic interpretations of human destiny, but it also poses a new challenge. Today we no longer have revolution but we still have crisis; but now a crisis no longer born out of a belief in progress but by its absence. Contemporary politics and popular political subjectivity has a tendency towards the passive,  but at the same time the positive spirit of the anti-revolution lives on in movements such as the World Social Forum and, dare I say it, in this forum of the Dialogue of Civilisations – World Public Forum.

The politics of krisis is a form of resistance to the passivity of naturalistic cyclicity and provides an opportunity to devise non-epochal but not necessarily pragmatic-technocratic solutions to the problems that arise from the realities of society. The utopian element in politics remains necessary in that it allows a politics of transcendence – the refusal to be trapped in the given by posing the vision of a new politics. More broadly, at the heart of the new politics is an attempt to rethink ‘the political’, while striving for new interpretations of ‘the international’, rejecting the fatalism and passivity that is associated with the concept of globalisation while generating new forms of political community.

A classic instance of this passivity and political fatalism is the New Labour administration in Britain after 1997. The government became locked into a pragmatic-technocratic mode of governance (governmentality) that undermined the already weak practices of popular democracy and in the end destroyed the Labour Party as a political organisation, while missing a historic opportunity to recast British politics. The technocratic-pragmatism of the Putin system in Russia, while undoubtedly providing an important range of public goods (the elimination of wage arrears, support for the budgetniki, the end of the egregiously political power of ‘the oligarchs’, and some domestic and international consolidation of Russian positions, on which its enduring popularity relies), yet the regime’s lack of a transcendent vision means that it inevitably succumbs to the social power of the bureaucracy and the security apparatus while espousing a liberal-conservative ideology.

Only a critique of naturalism can allow human development itself to become the subject of history. In the countries of the anti-revolution this remains latent. Contemporary Russia and other post-communist countries have done little more than to objectify social processes in ways reminiscent of Enlightenment and emancipatory revolutionism, but now without a social subject other than the state itself acting in the name of objectified processes like ‘globalisation’ and ‘marketisation’. The anti-revolution has not yet fulfilled its potential by provoking a politics of krisis.

Krisis and the displacement of temporality

At the present time two types of post-communist crisis intersect. There is the thirty-year crisis of globalisation, focused on banking deregulation and financialisation beginning from the mid-1970s, which ultimately provoked the meltdown of the international financial system from August 2008 to create ‘the crisis’. The disappearance of the communist alternative allowed capitalism to weaken the regulatory regime that had accompanied the post-war welfarist bargain, which had in part been generated as a response to the communist threat.  At the same time, there is a geopolitical crisis provoked by the disintegration of bipolar bloc politics. Russia in particular is involved in this new twenty-year crisis, beginning from the collapse of the communist system in 1989-91. None of the problems facing Europe, if not the world, provoked by the disintegration of the Soviet pole in the international system have yet been resolved. Early hopes that the extension of the existing instruments of European security (Nato) and solidarity (Council of Europe), accompanied by the broadening of the remit of common security bodies, such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), would adequately respond to the new circumstances were soon disappointed. Instead, both Nato and the OSCE became the source of conflict rather than instruments to build an enduring post-cold war security system.

The post-communist era remains liminal. No stable new order, in security or political terms, has been established in the post Cold War era, to which all the parties are committed. On the one side, Russia is certainly not a fully-fledged revisionist power. The basis for its new assertiveness is not an attempt to change the normative basis of the existing world order but the claim that its equal participation in that system has not been fully acknowledged. There is a more profound element in the contemporary crisis, however. The new twenty years’ crisis emerges out of the very nature of the anti-revolutions of 1989-91. These revolutions repudiated the logic of what went before, and not just the facts of the previous era. The postcommunist era is based on a fundamental asymmetry: the active repudiation of one set of principles and the passive acceptance of another. The asymmetry itself provoked a permanent crisis in post-Soviet Eurasia. There is an absence of the ontological basis for a new ‘normality’. Russia since 1991 has tried to adapt to a normality that is itself in crisis. Russia represents a parallel sphere where the conscience and bad faith of our era are played out. Disappointment with the utopian aspirations of emancipatory socialism has given way to a reaction that not only repudiates the communist system but also the intellectual terrain from which the movement sprang.

The post-communist era is associated with endings, collapse and crisis, which lacks, other than in the most primitive Hegelian triumphal form, a sustained collective vision of what the ancients called ‘the good life’. Lacking a basis in contemporary epochality, there is an intensified structural demand on the past to provide legitimacy and the ordering principles for the postcommunist present. This has provoked attempts to revalorise important aspects of the communist past. This is why the struggle over history textbooks and the politics of memory have become so critical in postcommunist public discourse. The broader problem has been explored by Sergei Prozorov, who reinterprets Hegelian notions of the end of history through the prism of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy. He argues that with the demise of the communist order Russia has entered a post-historical terrain in which the teleological dimension of politics has been demobilised.  In his view the 1990s in Russia was a period of ‘timelessness’, and postcommunism in general can be characterised as paradoxical ‘time out of time’ in which the ordinary flow of temporality is disrupted, and the lack of the teleological dimension provokes an exaggerated political praxis oriented to the maximisation of the present.

Easy expectations of a transition from one type of historicity to another were disappointed. The temporality of the so-called transition in Russia ran aground on the realities of spatiality (the geopolitical struggle for territorial influence and prestige), and instead of conforming to the ready-made political praxis devised elsewhere, Russia entered into a period of intensified liminality generated, however, not only by its own civilisational identity but also reflecting the broader crises of our epoch.

Russia for many generations has acted as the canary in the cage of modernity. At the boundaries of European civilisation and an uncomfortable member of the club of European powers, Russia since the reforms of Peter the Great has endured a type of permanent liminality, which waxes and wanes in intensity.  The fall of communism signalled a period of intensified liminality, given the absence of a normality to which Russia could adapt, thus indicating a condition of permanent krisis. Some societies can find themselves in a liminal state for quite some time, and in Russia’s case the journey from the anti-revolution of 1989-1991 to krisis was a short one. The crisis reflects not only Russia’s permanent liminality but also the liminality in the global system. For Koselleck the crisis has become pathological and has itself become the new normality.

The measurement of time is a way of assessing the historicity or historical quality of a particular era. Time is, indeed, of the essence; and the interaction of time with historical thought has insistently come to the fore, suggesting that contexts are not timeless but connected with epistemic and moral consciousness.  Gorbachev notes that the ‘Idolization of the future inevitably led to scepticism about the present, in which millions live’.   Temporality concerns the immanence of an era, an issue explored by Eric Voegelin in his essay on consciousness, where he discusses the ‘time-consciousness of world-immanent man’.  Awareness of an event in time distinguishes one epoch from another, the before from the after, and when raised to the level of philosophy it become constitutive of an understanding of history as a process. The novelty of the new century from this perspective is what could be called the ‘detemporalisation’ of time. Koselleck argued earlier that the more intensely a particular time is experienced as a ‘new temporality’, the greater ‘the demands on the future increase’.  This may well have been the case in an earlier era, but it is no longer so. When the ‘epochality’ of an era diminishes, collective ‘demands on the future’ decline, and increasingly focus on individual strategies and an obsession with the past.

The politics of krisis in the post-revolutionary era

The devalorisation of time, lacking a sense of the progressive dimension of an activist politics, has the inevitable consequence of ‘decitizening’ the individual, with the  concomitant advance of a consumptionist ideology, in a society populated by consumers, in which even passengers are reduced to ‘customers’. A side effect is that intellectuals become part of  apost-revolutionary lumpen-intelligentsia. New Labour, incidentally, represents precisely the ideology of this new lumpen-intelligentsia class, where scholarly work is measured by ‘impact’, iteslef defined in technocratic-pragmatic terms of effect on the market. Liminality of transformation has given way to liminality of change without meaning, purpose and direction. The citizen has been privatised, purposive collective action constrained, corporate power extended into governance, and the state increasingly acts as a corporate entity in a competitive global environment where ‘brand democracy’ seeks to assert its values in a permanent market war.

For Wolin the features of ‘inverted totalitarianism’ in advanced democracies have become increasingly pronounced, generated by the development of a new totalising power. Totalising power is based not on charismatic or personal characteristics alone but is sustained by a system in which the leader is not so much the architect as its product.  He talks of ‘managed democracy’ in the United States focused on ‘containing electoral politics’, and accepts social democracy only to the extent that it provides a literate and socially competent workforce for its economy and effective soldiers for its armies: ‘Voters are made as predictable as consumers; a university is nearly as rationalized in its structure as a corporation; a corporate structure is as hierarchical in its chain of command as the military’.  An active citizenry has been replaced by an ‘electorate’, whose support provides legitimacy for the system but citizens are reduced to a pre-political condition. As in the Soviet system, there is ‘politicisation without politics’:   ‘Inverted totalitarianism reverses things: It is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political’.  Let us now examine in more details the features of the contemporary politics of krisis.

a)    The end of epochal time

Historical time, according to Koselleck, is defined by differentiating between past and future, or (as he puts it), in anthropological terms, experience and expectation.  In the post-communist world the balance between experience and expectation is heavily weighted to the former as a result of the failure of utopian aspirations vested in the permanent civil war of emancipatory revolutionism. Transcendental emancipatory historicism has given way to the mean localised historicism of the Fukuyama type. Although demands on the future are structurally increased (given the failure of the past), the expectation that the future will fulfil these expectations is decreased. Societies where modernist progressivism reached its apogee are being re-introduced to modernity at a time when social optimism is on the wane. The future is no longer justice but a thin rationalistic technocratism; the price of the pursuit of justice proved too high. Today the weight of the future in social consciousness has decreased, compensated by the enhanced value of foreign role models as temporal utopianism gave way to spatial ones.
Liminality turns in on itself, and the threshold becomes the world, with movement backwards and forwards constrained. Permanent liminality no longer permits novelty and innovation but imposes formlessness and disorientation as a technique of governmentality. There is permanent change but never transformation.

b)    The repudiation of revolution and the triumph of gradualism

An interesting interchange takes place between Ikeda and Gorbachev on the subject of the French Revolution. Ikeda notes that Goethe, unlike Hegel, rejected the revolution ‘on the strength of his organic sense of life’, and quotes Goethe’s comments on revolution as follows:

And, furthermore, nothing is good for a nation but that which arises from its own core and its own general wants, without apish imitation of another; since what to one race of people, of a certain age, is nutrient, may prove poison for another. All endeavours to introduce any foreign innovation, the necessity for which is not rooted in the core of the nation itself, are therefore foolish; and all premeditated revolutions of the kind are unsuccessful, for they are without God, who keeps aloof from such bungling. If, however, there exists an actual necessity for a great reform amongst a people, God is with it, and it prospers.  

This is a theme repeated by numerous Russian commentators. For example, Elgiz Pozdnyakov, the author of numerous books on geopolitics and the philosophy of state and law, devoted his recent work to the ‘fruitlessness of any attempt at substantial social changes by a people on the basis of rational plans or ideas, not taking into account the deep roots of the society and state’.  He developed this Hayekian theme to argue that ‘if the foundations of a society or state change, it is not the result of some internal overturn, however radical they may be, but as a result of lengthy and complex changes and adaptations to the changing world. Internal overturns, shocks and revolutions create only better or worse conditions for this’.  In this spirit contemporary Russia is characterised by a profound anti-revolutionary spirit.  Much Russian patriotic writing today comes close to the view, put forward most eloquently by Rudolf Kjellen, of the state as an almost organic living organism, and it is not surprising that his book on The State as a Life Form has recently been translated into Russian.  Kjellen gives the state almost human characteristics, including ‘temperament, will, character, and living features’.   The tendency to anthropomorphise the state provides ready material for the international political anthropologist. Indeed, one of the best books on the subject in Russia precisely claims to examine ‘the socio-biological and cultural grounds of power, forms of social stratification and mobility’.

The gradualist thesis, or the evolutionary approach to social change, has now triumphed. While clearly this has developed in reaction to the terrors of the radical changes associated with the Jacobin/Bolshevik tradition, some of the deeper implications of the repudiation need to be explored. Above all, the idea of revolution, as Koselleck noted, imbued time with purpose and direction, and thus inspired generations with a sense that the flow of time was intelligible and that human intervention was purposeful and effective. A revolution marked the passage from one condition to another; for the revolutionaries this marked the transcendence of former inadequacies and through civil war entailed a rupture in historical development; whereas for those of a more conservative hue the onset of a civil war could not but destroy the organic unity of the nation and its historical trajectory (viz, Gorbachev, Pozdnyakov) and inaugurates a period of timelessness (Prozorov).

Anti-revolutionism does not necessarily mean reaction or restoration, but it does entail an organic philosophy of history and thus of social development. With the end of the era of revolution a fundamental problem has emerged: how to be between two states when there is no transcendence of the historical present. Permanent liminality gives way to suspended liminality. Liminality without a philosophy of history is something very different from a liminality conceived as a temporality that is rich with the promise of a different future. In other words, while liminality in the anthropological literature suggests that it acts as the portal to a more advanced state of maturity, when applied to the life of nations this directional characteristic may well be absent. The era of revolutions has come to an end and with it the naturalistic restoration of temporality as the eternal changing of the seasons. The exhaustion of the idea of revolution as the positive transcendence of a given condition allowed the return of the traditional meaning of the term as the eternal cycle of life at the mercy of the gods of fate. The practices of peace-time governance and the quality of peace are imbued with the shadowy quality and ambiguity characteristic of liminal periods.

c) The new governmentality

Postcommunist anti-revolutionism is accompanied by the demobilisation not only of liberatory and emancipatory movements but also by a new style in the management of public affairs. The central feature is the dismantlement of government in favour of governance. The underlying public choice philosophy has intensified popular disempowerment, weakened political accountability, and intensified the power of capital over polity, including the financialisation of governance and markets. The privatisation of public functions is accompanied by their commercialisation and the culture (from the Latin, tilling and nurturing) of effective public participation has shrivelled. Instead the practices of Enron and WorldCom have become generalised, whose disastrous consequences were revealed in the crash of 2008.

The advance of democracy has everywhere been accompanied not only by the strengthening of the state in new ways (from the coercive to the infrastructural, to use Michael Mann’s terms), but also by the extension of governmental intrusion into aspects of individual daily life. Although the concept of governmentality in Foucault’s works is susceptible to differing interpretations, reflecting the evolution of the concept in his thinking, it remains a rich source of insight into understanding power and authority. The idea of governmentality combines ‘the practice of governing and the necessary ‘mentalities’ of government that make governing possible’. It focuses therefore not just on the behaviour of institutions but also on discursive articulations of their operation as appreciated by the subjects of governance.  In a liberal democratic society institutional practices are accompanied by practices and techniques that both reinforce and also subvert the proclaimed principles of governance. The idea of governmentality is now also being applied to the study of international politics in an attempt to move away from increasingly sterile juxtapositions of realism versus constructivism or other binary systems.

There is, as Geoff Eley puts it, ‘a pervasive sense in our own times that the state has been passing increasingly beyond accountability’.  Traditional liberal-constitutional constraints on executive power are increasingly weak, while substantive aspirations for popular control and management become an increasingly distant memory. Power has become not only increasingly remote, but is also, as Eley notes, ever less intelligible and susceptible to popular intervention. Gramsci’s model of hegemony at least opened up spaces for resistance, however attenuated the embedded notion of revolutionary transcendence may have been. In distinguishing between coercion and consent, the latter provided an arena for counter-mobilisation against the hegemonic power system. The residual idea of revolutionary transcendence may well have been superfluous, but it provided inspiration for a politics of popular empowerment. The capitalist state has never been homogeneous and has traditionally allowed sites for contestation and incorporation.

In Gramsci’s reading these sites were intelligible, well sign-posted and focused on reasonably demarcated institutions of state power, although even formal institutions were understood to be embedded in networks of impersonal relations, whereas in Foucault’s model of dispersed infrastructural power it is not at all clear how and where patterns of resistance can be generated. Although power may be diffuse and take weakly-institutionalised and structurally undifferentiated forms, any theory of domination that lacks a modality in which strategies of counter-domination may be articulated ultimately becomes an accessory in that domination. This is not for a moment to suggest that this is the outcome of Foucault’s analysis of the decentred patterns of contemporary capitalist domination. Foucault’s late notion of ‘care of the self’, an attitude of autopoesis, provides an insight into how strategies of personal spiritual resistance can begin to articulate a way of overcoming the modern apparatus of subjectivisation’.  By exposing existing patterns of domination, they can begin to be challenged; and thus perhaps a new cycle of revolution will be restored.

d) The international – back to geopolitics?

Gorbachev stressed that the ‘new thinking’ in the Soviet Union had put an end to the Cold War, noting that ‘The Cold War was contrary to the interests of humanity’. However, he was well aware that on its own, ‘the abrogation of ideological conflict did not lead automatically to a general, definitive peace’. While the threat of nuclear catastrophe may have decreased (and even this is not certain), new threats had emerged. As Gorbachev put it, ‘The Cold War froze numerous geopolitical, national, and ethnic conflicts, Not all of which were connected to the Cold War itself. … The Cold War quasi-stability created a reassuring impression that the post-conflict world order was predictable’.  He went on to stress that ‘The ending of the Cold War made our world no safer. Today many people are beginning to look on total Westernization as they once did on the threat of total, forcible communalization. Apparently, the West is incapable of dealing in a reasonable way with the results of the new thinking that freed the world from bloc politics and total confrontation’.  He lamented the fact that the fruits of the new thinking were ‘withering away before our eyes’, and even though Russia had ‘rushed towards the West with open arms and the best possible will’, the West had not reciprocated. It had been incapable of ‘working out either a new doctrine of collective security or a new ideology of peaceful development. Today the fate of the world is in the hands of institutes (sic) formed during the Cold War’. The European process was sacrificed, in his view, to the eastward expansion of NATO, and the ‘possible untoward consequences of this mechanistic approach to the problem of European and global security are overlooked’. 

e) From crisis to war?

While there is no new world to be built, the principles of the old world are aggressively advanced. As the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gennady Zyuganov, put it in his report to the thirteenth party congress on 29 November 2008, ‘With the destruction of the Soviet Union war has again become a legitimate policy instrument for the leading imperialist powers’.
Wolin notes the process of ‘anticommunism as mimesis: the character of the enemy supplied the norm for the power demands that the democratic defender of the free world chose to impose on itself’.  A ‘superpower’ is defined by Wolin ‘as an imaginary of power that emerges from defeat unchastened, more imperious than ever’.   The ‘War’ in the abstract has been declared, while the reality of great power rivalry is occluded.  War is inevitable; the only question is the form in which the conflict will become manifest, the intensity of the fighting and the consequences for human sustainability.

Conclusion

The features of the post-revolutionary epoch can be briefly listed as follows:   a) the deceleration of historical time; b) evolution rather than revolution becomes the dominant principle, and thus the idea of civil war as an instrument of social progress is repudiated; c) revolts or rebellions against historical injustice, subordination or captivity will undoubtedly continue to occur, but these events have lost the transcendental significance as emancipatory acts with some sort of universal significance; d) as a derivative of this, the ‘utopian’ element in programmes of social change (belief in a ‘new future’) has been much reduced, if not delegitimated, because of the perceived ‘totalitarian’ temptation inherent in all utopian projects, accompanied by an overall disenchantment with the notion of ‘progress’ because of its earlier scientistic and rationalistic traps, tending towards the dehumanising managerial resolution of perceived problems; e) a shift from material to spiritual and moral concerns, including a new awareness of ‘the political’ accompanied by the repudiation of social revolutions; f) the spatial compression from ‘world revolution’ to national development; and g) if in the epoch of revolutions ‘all wars have been transformed into civil wars’,   today civil wars retain intense local resonance but little universal significance (including mostly the absence of the escalatory threat of nuclear war), and hence their increasingly protracted and intractable character. One act of violence succeeds the other, but the international organisations established at the end of the Second World War lack the power or mandate to intervene effectively, while the former superpowers are each preoccupied with new problems of their own. The era of the emancipation of classes and the liberation of peoples has given way to a permanent krisis whose liminal potential (ie, transformative capacity) appears minimal.

The fundamental consequence of the end of the revolution is that the epochal thinking associated with the modern revolutionary tradition has now given way to the possibility of a grounded politics. The Enlightenment revolutions were not followed by the anticipated metanoia, that change of heart on which a new society could be built, but rather the regimes, after the delay in the arrival of the anticipated millennium, adapted to the environment and native tradititions;  but for emancipatory revolutions it was precisely the impossibility of adaptation that endowed them with a fundamentally tenuous quality. It is for this reason, where the political is subsumed into the social revolution, that the post-communist restoration is more complex than those following the Enlightenment revolutions. Only with the fall of the revolutionary regime can a politics grounded in the political concerns of society emerge. Ethics and morality, ‘living by truth’ and rejecting the lie, worked as potent weapons against the party-state and they now act as the basis of a new moral culture. The new culturalism, no doubt, contains its own dangers, in particular the neglect of the inequalities emerging out of new patterns of stratification,  but it also provides an opportunity to treat ‘the political’ as a moment to examine hierarchies of sovereignty.  The anti-revolutions of 1989-1991 mark not only the point at which the revolution ended but the inauguration of a new type of politics of ‘crisis’ whose resolution remains to be found.