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The Public Sphere in the Era of Anti-Capitalism

John Brady

At the risk of offending prose stylists, I’m starting this essay with a cliché. What’s perhaps worse, I’m starting off with a cliché from Marx. I thus risk embodying the most hackneyed of leftist stereotypes: the Marx-quoting writer who, like some cook with a zealous affinity for one particular spice, liberally mixes Marx citations into his work to give it intellectual heft and improve its “redness,” as it were. But in an essay about language, especially the language actors deploy in the public realm, the risks are worth it, I think, if only because they focus our attention on the importance of not only what we say, but how we say it.

So here’s the cliché: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.” The passage is from The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx’s study of the coup d’état led by Napoleon Bonaparte. Oft cited, commentators take from the passage an insight about the structural constraints imposed on political action by the past and the relative freedom political actors do or do not have to move within these constraints.

A perfectly justifiable reading, to be sure. But commonly overlooked is that this passage is part of a more detailed meditation about not only history, but also language and its relationship to realizing fully the political possibilities of the present. Marx goes on:

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something new that never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.

In the paragraphs that follow, similar references to language recur as Marx underlines the significance of the symbolic dimension of political struggle. Thus, the use of “Roman costume and . . . Roman phrases” by the leaders and masses of the French revolution helped them in “glorifying the new struggles . . . and of finding once more the spirit of revolution . . .” However inspiring such a move may be, the reliance on previously produced symbols brings with it certain dangers. Indeed, one of the ways in which the dead weigh upon the living, Marx suggests, is in the use of an antiquated political language to dress up struggles in the present. In deploying such language, the politicos of the present risk deluding themselves and, importantly, also their followers about the true nature of their movement. Taking political metaphors from ancient Rome, France’s revolutionaries glorified their revolution to be sure, but they also “conceal[ed] from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles . . .” The working-class revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, Marx concludes, cannot give in to the temptation of such symbolic appropriation of the past. This revolution “cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.”

In the Brumaire’s opening pages, Marx reminds us that the question “How and what are we going to say?” is just as important as the more often posed “What is to be done?” Along with formulating the appropriate political strategy, any emancipatory social movement must also formulate a new language, one capable of expressing the sufferings and the deprivations, but also the hopes and desires that motivated the movement’s adherents to cross the threshold of their private worlds and engage in collective action in the first place. In short, the movement needs a language for its content.

One of the sites for producing this political language is the public sphere, the network of political spaces in which citizens appear in order to raise new themes and concerns or to debate issues of common concern already raised by others. At present, one of the more significant developments in the public arena has been the anti-capitalist movement. The movement has thematized the underside of globalization, giving voice to the social costs and political injustices lurking just beneath the global market’s glitzy veneer. This essay explores the political vocabulary the movement has deployed in its mobilization against global capitalism, searching it for traces of both borrowed language and future poetry.

The Public Sphere: Between Democracy and Domination

In the West, the public sphere arose in the wake of feudalism’s decline. The emerging bourgeoisie, debating in coffeehouses and penning essays in literary and political journals, began to contest the authority of kings and princes to regulate social, economic, and political affairs without first hearing the voice of the “public.” From the start, the public sphere has been a site of critique, reason, and solidarity. Critique in the sense that social movements have mobilized in public to cast a critical light on the illegitimate use of power by state actors, and later on the colonizing power of the market. Reason in the sense that the rational exchange of opinions, instead of the mobilization of prejudice or the frank assertion of power and status, has always been the ideal medium of communication in public debate. And finally, solidarity in the sense that through intervening in the public sphere, previously excluded groups like workers, women, and minorities have been able to fashion strong political bonds as they pushed to democratize their societies.

But let’s not paint too rosy a picture. The public sphere has been fragile, too. Although providing a space for the mobilization of democratic critique, the public sphere has also served as a platform on which the powerful have stood in order to manipulate popular opinion and conjure up the aura of legitimacy for their policies and political programs. They have exploited the public’s accessibility to repress or at least marginalize opposition groups and emancipatory movements and stymie their attempts to democratize political debate. In these cases, ideological spectacle replaces rational critique as the medium of public communication. And instead of forging bonds of solidarity which can serve as the foundation for future collective action, the domination of the public sphere by special interests aims to produce political passivity and civic privatism among citizens.

In short, public politics have always swung between democracy and domination.

And it is no different now with anti-capitalism. The loose coalition of associations, affinity groups, revolutionary cells, unions, and civic and political organizations that together make up the anti-capitalist movement has accomplished a surprising amount considering the relatively short time it has been in the public eye. Capitalism’s cantankerous other, the movement, not unlike capitalism itself, has been global, mobile, and spontaneous. Protesters have staged simultaneous demonstrations across the world, giving real meaning to the term “global public.” They’ve hounded world leaders and the representatives of the status quo from one meeting to the next regardless of national borders, enlarging with mobile protest modernity’s political space. And they’ve engaged in refreshing forms of creative, extemporaneous protest, reinvigorating the public sphere as a site of participatory politics, not managed political spin.

In performing this task, the movement has shaken the cultural edifice that has supported the neo-liberal revolution. On the one hand, the movement has articulated a meaningful cosmopolitanism. This is not the glib cosmopolitanism of consumer culture, the cosmopolitanism that celebrates global difference because it sells things faster. No, this is a global perspective more in the tradition of progressive internationalism, one that attempts to forge solidarity across the artificial boundaries of nationality in order to highlight the connections between Western consumption and Third World suffering.

And even more importantly, the movement has contested the hegemony of the market, thus denting neo-liberalism’s ideological armor. As commentators have pointed out, neo-liberalism was unusual for a conservative movement. Instead of trying to preserve the past, it aggressively moved to revolutionize the present.¹ This has included re-naturalizing the market, that is, offering the market as the natural arbiter of not just economic relationships, but all social relationships. By giving voice to the obvious suffering and global inequities caused by the intensification of market relationships, the anti-capitalist movement has interrupted this ideological process.

In reaction to this activism, the state and other defenders of the capitalist status quo have not sat idly by. While surprised in Seattle, state actors have recovered quickly, moving not only to disrupt the protests, but to undermine the very possibility of protest by disrupting the organization and leadership structures of the various groups participating in direct action. Deploying the time-tested arsenal of spying, harassment, the exaggerated show of force, and the swinging baton, the police and the state have attempted to seal off access to the public sphere. As many in both the mainstream and independent press have rightly pointed out, these actions amount to the criminalization of free speech, the denial of rights, and the creation of a hostile, repressive political climate. We can add something more to this list: the erosion of political solidarity. Then, in undermining the public arena of free debate, the police and the courts also deny citizens access to the political solidarity that debate, discussion, and dissent produce. Like the others, this is a harm that tears at the fabric of democracy.

Throughout all of this, there has been no shortage of new words, concepts, and metaphors to describe the politics of anti-capitalism: global grassroots democracy, the perpetual protest machine, the rise of the multitude and the posse, a global carnival against capital, the convergence of an international social movement, a new world social alliance, and on and on. Indeed, so fast and furious has been the production of potential elements of anti-capitalism’s political imaginary that some have worried whether it will at all be possible to form a coherent language of global democracy, one able to express the needs and desires of the globe’s emerging citizenry. While certainly a concern, I am not sure that such diversity can be avoided at this particular developmental juncture in the movement’s history. After all, the mobilization against global capital is still in its infancy. And while the idea of a cosmopolitan republic has long fascinated moderns, its possible institutional infrastructure exists, if at all, in only the barest of outlines. Indeed, the global anti-capitalist movement is less a movement, and more a loose collection of disparate groups who, in certain cases (unions and environmentalists spring most immediately to mind), have quite different agendas. They are acting in a political arena with no real center or structure. Given this protean, even contradictory state of affairs, it will take time for the movement to distill its myriad concerns into a focused collection of issues around which a political language of democratic anti-capitalism can crystallize. In the interim, expect symbolic inflation.

Thus, in the present fluid situation, I think it is more useful to explore the terms of anti-capitalism’s symbolic/conceptual production. It is more fruitful to examine, in other words, the conceptual frameworks and ideological assumptions that guide the left’s construction of its political vocabulary. To what extent is this production burdened by questionable ideological inheritances? To what extent is it necessary to alter these frameworks and assumptions in order to avoid repeating some of the left’s previous mistakes (i.e., anti-democratic sectarianism, elitist vanguardism, pseudo-revolutionary violence). It isn’t only the right that can fall victim to the perils of traditionalism. The left, too, has not always found it easy to leave ossified concepts behind. As a result, it is worthwhile to explore whether—to return to Marx—the movement, as it finds its political voice, speaks in language borrowed from the past.

The Levers of Power

The suddenness with which the anti-capitalism movement emerged has been breathtaking. In the space of five short days in Seattle, the movement went from operating at the margins of the world’s consciousness to sitting-in in its center. Demonstrating communicative savvy, the movement successfully negotiated the corporate mediasphere’s rules to become an attention-grabbing political spectacle. But, of course, anti-capitalist activists have done more than create compelling visuals for the evening news. More importantly and more substantively, they have subjected global capitalism’s political and economic elites, who for so long have acted without much resistance or even much attention, to the public’s critical gaze. The demos stood up to the dominant. Much to the satisfaction of movement activists, the dominant have reacted in part by seemingly going on the defensive. They have shielded their meetings from anti-capitalist forces with lines of riot police, clouds of tear gas, miles of chain-link fences, even going so far as to meet in far-away locales beyond the protesters’ reach.

Movement activists have read this defensiveness as a useful illustration of the anti-democratic, authoritarian face of the emerging global order. In this reading one hears echoes of earlier leftist critique. In the 1960s and 1970s, many on the left argued that protest, especially militant protest, forced the state to reveal its true violent character and, importantly, contributed to the popular mobilization against the state apparatus and capitalism. The purported link between protest, state authoritarianism, and popular mobilization is not at all obvious to me. Provoking state violence can just as easily lead to political resignation and fear among an emerging movement. But questionable logic aside, a revival of this earlier perspective is to my mind also problematic because it obscures another, more politically productive reading of elite reaction to anti-capitalism. In retreating behind the riot police and chain-link fences and into the Canadian wilderness, the representatives of global capital have exercised one of the oldest prerogatives of power: the privilege to ignore the powerless, or, in the case of the anti-capitalist movement, the relatively powerless. Given their superior political resources, it has always been possible for the powerful to insulate themselves from protest in the public sphere. It is no different now. Global political and economic elites surrounded themselves with riot police because they can, because that’s power.

This suggests that the anti-capitalist movement cannot only rely on the streets and the power of popular mobilization in the public sphere to achieve its goals. It may be possible to combat capitalism by revealing its authoritarian soul. But more effective is subjecting it to democratic control. And here we must simply concede a central weakness of public politics. Effective as an arena for generating awareness and political influence, the public sphere is far removed from the actual levers of power and political decision-making—levers which control not only the decision to deploy riot police, but also control the policy decisions shaping the global and economic and political arena. The path to these levers travels through political parties, parliament, and the state administration. And this is the path the anti-capitalist left must follow.

I think it is fair to say that since the ’60s, most of the radical democratic left’s energy has been focused on the public sphere and civil society. There has been less of an effort to mobilize within the electoral arena. Up to this point, much of the current politics of anti-capitalism has replicated this pattern. Yet, if the second reading of the elite reaction to anti-capitalism is correct, the left cannot neglect political parties and electoral politics. After all, in modern democracies the will of the people is expressed most directly through elections. Electoral politics, of course, is slow, demands a longterm commitment, and often involves painful choices (just ask the German Greens). But it also confers political legitimacy on a movement’s agenda and further exposes it to a wider audience of potential supporters. And electoral politics forces a movement to test its ideas before the court of critical public opinion, thereby giving it the opportunity to temper the more unworkable and outlandish elements of its agenda. Most importantly, if successful, an electoral strategy places a party and its supporters in a position to concretely wield power and make, not just influence, political decisions.

Fashioning a more just and equitable future is clearly a complex task. The anti-capitalist political response should reflect this complexity in part by expanding its conception of the legitimate arenas for political action. Entering the electoral arena, speaking the language of party politics, is one of the more obvious directions to move in this regard.

Democracy and Democrats

At the end of Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri draw a striking and evocative picture of the multitude, that dynamic mass of people that is simultaneously the product of Empire’s economic and political forces and the collective political subject of this same Empire’s possible transformation into a just and humane global order. Hardt and Negri by no means assume that such a transformation will be automatic: indeed, although hopeful, they note that any victory of the multitude will be the result of a long, bitter struggle. Part of theory’s task at this historical juncture, Hardt and Negri argue, is to explore this struggle and reveal the conditions shaping the rise of this “new political subjectivity, [this] insurgent multitude against imperial power.” The two authors take up this task with gusto. Not content to tinker with old concepts, gerry-rigging them to fit the imperial age, they search for a new theoretical language with which to capture the changes wrought by the latest incarnation of global capitalism. Such creativity and daring is refreshing. Yet with respect to the multitude and the political struggle to transform imperial capitalism, they make one serious mistake that the anti-capitalist movement cannot duplicate. They assume the multitude’s democratic credentials. They take for granted that when the multitude mobilizes, it will do so on the side of enlightenment values and democratic justice.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 revealed many things. They demonstrated the ease with which the emerging discourse about global justice can be eclipsed by a discourse of much older provenance: the discourse of retribution, punishment, and military justice. Of more importance for the anti-capitalist movement, the attacks revealed what some activists were just beginning to recognize: the superficiality of the globe’s democratic consciousness.² While before September 11 the talk of a global grassroots democracy seemed rather premature, if only because the movement was so new, such talk now seems downright utopian because there seem to be so few progressive democrats the world over.

In America and across the West, popular sentiment has been quickly and successfully diverted away from a critical engagement with the events, and mobilized instead for the Bush administration’s militarized solution. Outside the West, the attacks re-introduced the world to the public sphere of the “Arab street,” in which one of the louder voices communicates less through democratic demands for justice and global citizenship and more through the anti-modern, moralistic argot of religious fundamentalism.

From the left’s response to the attacks, there seems to be little indication that this fact has been taken to heart. Instead of reflecting on what the attacks have revealed regarding the relative absence of a constituency supportive of a transformative project of global democracy, the left has fallen back on an older pattern of denouncing U.S. imperialism. This critique is justified, to be sure, but risks missing the larger picture. U.S. hegemony is a constant and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. No doubt, it represents a real impediment to democratic progress. But so, too, does a lack of democrats. After all, democracy must be popular, although not necessarily populist, if it is to succeed, and democratic institutions need a democratic political culture in which to take root.

Taking this fact seriously necessitates a significant shift in the anti-capitalist project from one of critique to one of democratization. To this point, the anti-capitalist movement has communicated in the medium of critique, offering compelling indictments of sweatshop labor, global environmental destruction, world poverty, and now U.S. imperialism. The implicit claim has always been that in offering this critique, the movement speaks for the world’s people, a people who share the movement’s democratic aspirations. But in the wake of September 11, this claim seems questionable at least and hollow at worst. What has become apparent is the necessity of coupling critique with cultural production. The anti-capitalist movement faces the task of deepening the democratic consciousness across the globe so that it can cash in on its claim to represent the wider global citizenry. This demands communicating in a new medium: the medium of democratic values and norms. The cultivation of these values and norms is an enormous, but not impossible task. The left already possesses significant resources—its activist networks, its tradition of fostering popular participation—that can help accomplish this. In today’s world, it is now a matter of deploying these resources to cultivate an enduring commitment to democratic norms and values in the same creative, spontaneous manner the movement has used to construct its public sphere of anti-capitalist protest.

Democracy’s Open Horizon

There are no formal requirements to enter the public sphere, no elections to be won, no degrees to attain before speaking. Money helps, of course, but a well-conceived protest or a well-organized campaign of consciousness-raising can offset some of the political advantages of wealth. Compared to other institutions in society—the state or parliament—the barriers to participation in the public sphere are low; it takes relatively little to garner publicity and recognition there. This accessibility is the public sphere’s weakness and strength.

Weakness, because in the absence of high barriers to participation, it is just as likely that the powerful will enter the public arena as the powerless. Once there, they can deploy their superior resources to dominate debate and extract political loyalty and legitimacy from the citizenry. In such cases, the democratic norms we usually expect to govern political debate—equality, reciprocity, accountability, transparency—prove to be flimsy guards against political manipulation. Yet this absence is also a strength. It opens up a space for democratic agency and creativity. Like the powerful, the relatively powerless have the opportunity to organize and enter the public sphere where they can actualize the public’s democratic potential by thematizing new issues and sensitizing their fellow citizens about pressing problems of common concern. Because there are few rules of behavior or pre-defined roles to play, these actors can and do realize this potential in a myriad of creative ways, from street theater to street parties to civil disobedience to direct action to public education campaigns to . . . the next innovation in popular politics.

As the anti-capitalist movement progresses and attempts to realize the regulative ideals of democratic participation and social justice in concrete policies and institutions, it needs to maintain horizons as open as those of the public sphere. This is necessary not just for strategic reasons—not only to give the movement maximum flexibility in order to adjust to new situations and changing political conditions. It is a demand of democracy itself.

At democracy’s heart is the ideal of self-determination. The people should determine the laws and conditions that shape their collective lives. But this ideal tells us relatively little about how democratic politics should be organized. How, for example, should representation be organized in a democracy? The ideal of self-determination also tells us relatively little about the relationship between the democratic process and other political institutions such as rights and constitutional norms. To what extent must the democratic process be constrained by individual and human rights in order to ensure the fair and equal treatment of all people? How can we protect against the tyranny of the majority? These are fundamental questions that must be answered through deliberation and debate. So far, the anti-capitalist movement has done an admirable job publicizing the unfairness of global capitalism and the suffering it engenders. As the movement develops, it should work to create a similarly vibrant discourse about the possible institutional outlines of a future global democracy.

Because, after all, the whole world is watching. This chant, a favorite of social movements since television became the dominant medium of political communication, has, of course, been applied to the police and other detachments of the state apparatus in an effort to remind them that their brutal tactics will not go unobserved. But the chant’s sentiment applies directly to the anti-capitalist movement as well. Certainly one of the worst inheritances of the left tradition has been the tendency of political radicals to believe that they possess the sole authoritative conception of the end of democratic politics. The audience observing the police also observes the anti-capitalist protesters, watching for an indication of whether this new generation of leftists have shaken off their tradition’s doctrinaire past, watching to see if the movement is something they wish to support or even to join, watching to see if the movement can include their needs and concerns. By self-consciously maintaining open horizons with regard to its issue agenda and its conception of democracy, the anti-capitalist movement can demonstrate its attractiveness as an emancipatory political project.

* * *

In anticipating the language of the workers’ revolution he never lived to see, Marx argued that unlike past revolutions, this revolution’s content must go “beyond the phrase.” This is a rather cryptic remark. Marx seemed to suggest that the workers’ revolution will be so radical, so total, and so unique, or, in other words, so modern, that it will exhaust the expressive power of society’s existing stock of metaphors, images, and concepts used to describe its political life. Although Marx didn’t explicitly say so, this would demand that society develop a new language with which to capture the essence of the revolution and its results.

With over a century’s worth of hindsight, we can remark with both irony and sadness that it has been capitalism, and neither the workers’ nor any other social movement, that has more often than not revolutionized society’s content beyond the phrase. The capitalist mode of production has produced both affluence and suffering to degrees that defy categorization. It has torn apart the fabric of countless communities and traditional ways of life in modes that strain our ability to capture symbolically the ensuing loss and absence. And it continues to push the calculus of profit maximization into areas of human life and experience at a dizzying pace. We struggle even now to describe these developments, as evidenced most simply by our inability to find a term to characterize the present era. Globalization? Neo-liberalism? Empire? The End of History, or, simply, Capitalism as Usual? In a tangible way, we lack the words to express the reality of our situation.

It is also with hindsight that we can question Marx’s faith in total revolution. But this does not entail giving up his hope in a more democratic future. After all, the history of modernity has not simply been the history of capitalist victory. It has been punctuated, too, by significant victories on the part of social movements, victories that have realized modernity’s own potential for increased political freedom and social justice. And so with Marx, we should continue to hope for and organize toward the moment when the demos can once again gain power over the phrase and content of social progress.

Endnotes

1. Eric Hobsbawm with Antonio Polito, On the Edge of the New Century (New York: The New Press, 2000), 97.

2. See Aiden Enns’s brief article about the evolution of the indymedia network, “Indy Nation: the Whole World is Watching—Really,” in Adbusters 38 (Nov/Dec 2001).