Reforme (Uniunea Europeană)

An Aesthetics of Post-Communist Resistance to Neo-liberal Politics
 

IRINA VELICU
[University of Hawaii]

Abstract:
Current revolts in Romania as well as other spontaneous or long-lasting (social/ecological) movements in former communist countries contradict the mainstream perspective about the silent or passive post-communist transitioning towards a (neo-liberal) globalized world. An important point of controversy has been the lack of unitary leadership and programmatic action, which has often been criticized as either a sign of hidden forces manipulating groups of people or as a lack of professional activism and citizenship. This article uses Foucault’s and Deleuze’s theoretical perspectives to broaden our understanding of movements of revolt/resistance or opposition. I argue for a conceptualization of movements that promotes multiplicity (of sites and forms of resistance), differences, flows, mobility or nomadic thought and practice which is productive and diverse rather than monopolizing, centralizing or unifying.

Keywords: globalization; post-communism; neo-liberalism; resistance; multiplicity

Introduction

In order to understand what power relations are about,
perhaps we should investigate….forms of resistance.¹

In the last week Romania and the world has been surprised by the spontaneous outburst of anger and criticism brought in the streets by youngsters, students, retired seniors, workers, ecologists, feminists, and even parents with their children. In this essay I argue that while forms of (violent) condemnation of dominant political parties in power are becoming visible these days through the street revolts, the atmosphere of resistance and outrage have been lingering within all spheres of social and economic life in the last years after the fall of communism. While acceptance and even celebration of private markets has officially and formally been proclaimed, individual tactics of coping with everyday life has many times contradicted this embrace. An overall understanding of the necessity to preserve as public certain goods or spaces (health/education or other so-called social services) has continuously been inhibited as a dangerous communist habit; however, everyday discourses contradict the absolute internalization of the neo-liberal ideology of ‘one size fits all’ privatization and marketization.

In this article I choose to illustrate the idea of micro-practices of resistance by looking for instance at ‘consumption’ patterns as resistance tactics in post-socialist Eastern Europe. The first section of this article will explain how through an aesthetic archeology of resistance one can detect the micro-practices of resistance in the everyday life. Using illustrations of everyday life consumer practices in post-socialist Eastern Europe, this article will tell us that the persistence of so-called ‘socialist’ mindsets is less a form of blind ideological thinking and rather the current ‘weapons of the weak’”² adapted to (ambiguously) cope with/or resist the contradictions and problems of late neo-liberal capitalism.

Overall, this article argues that post-communist studies should have more in common with post-colonial studies and seek deeper into new „geographies of identity”³ as associated with the geography of disintegrated societies after communism, where the black market dominates the ‘successful’ business activities and ‘informal’ (often illegal) exit mechanisms allow people to ‘make ends meet’ since ‘there is no alternative’ to the current economic neo-liberal policies. Especially after 1989 politics have been forgotten in the ‘technocratic’ supposedly neutral space of institutions where apparently the major decisions are ‘made’. However, politics also lies in the micro-lives of those masses of ‘decision-takers’.

Theoretical Lenses: Aesthetic Archeology of Resistance

The individual is the product of power.⁴

Mainstream political science has predominantly used the ‘major’ language of ‘cohesive forces’, in an attempt to territorialize subjects and ‘capture’ them in manageable structures. The story of the nation-state building is illustrative for this process. A key concept that has been neglected is the ‘minor’, the ‘un-thought’, the ‘unrepresented’ that is made possible through the distributive forces or ‘lines of flight’.⁵ Looking at social movements and particularly the anti (alter)-systemic (globalization) movements we can note the spatial-temporal determinants of ‘distributive forces’ (or lines of ‘flight’) which contribute to the emergence of ‘minor languages’ of resistance. These movements themselves also contain cohesive forces which try to re-territorialize (arrest) moments of de-territorialization created by the distributive forces. The literature on social movements has also been captured by representations (or assumptions) of ‘unity’ and ‘scientific objectivity’; however, pointing to the fluidity of movements allows us to re-think them in the form of ‘diagrams’, (‘plateaus’) the ‘consistency’ of which is multi-layered and visible in complexes of actions, reactions and passions also following a ‘logic of sensation’. The diagram of movements can be looked at from different corners, all equally acceptable. In other words, movements are aesthetic and any ideological containment of them is an actual ‘arrest’ of possibilities.

Foucault’s interpretation of ‘power’ as complexly productive of that which it controls rather than merely repressing leads to the idea that power and resistance are mutually constitutive; resistance sites are just as multiple and pervasive as power sites. Foucault’s broad understanding of both power and resistance relations make us pay more attention to an understanding of the roots of resistance movements rather than judging their ‘rightfulness’ or ‘efficiency’ by fixed standards. Foucault’s contribution read alongside with Deleuze provides an insight into ways in which dominant powers can be resisted not as liberation or emancipation (to an assumed different ‘essence’) but as ‘non-fascist’ way of life. Whether there is a need for political action free from all unitary and totalizing paranoia, or action, thought and desire should be developed by proliferation, juxtaposition, disjunction and not subdivision or hierarchy. Social movements accordingly might benefit more if promoting multiplicity (of sites and forms of resistance), differences, flows, mobility or nomadic thought and practice which is productive and diverse rather than monopolizing, centralizing or unifying. In other words, social movements should not necessarily act as organic groups of hierarchical leadership (as human communities have historically been imagined) but rather ‘de-individualize’; this does not mean giving less importance to the individual, who is the product of power anyway, nor too much stress on an united group but rather displacement of power in diverse and multiple arrangements and combinations of power diffusion.⁶ In a short essay called „Is it useless to revolt” written in 1979, Foucault himself has replied to these types of concerns:

If there are powers that are not absolutely absolute it is due to the fact that behind all the submissions and the coercions, and beyond the menace, the violence, the persuasion, there is the possibility of that moment when life will no longer barter itself, (…) before the gallows and the machine guns, men revolt. I am not in agreement with someone who would say: ‘It is useless to revolt; it will always be the same thing. It is through revolt that subjectivity (not that of great men but that of whomever) introduces itself into history and gives it the breath of life. (…) One does not have to be in solidarity with them. One does not have to maintain that these confused voices sound better than the others and express the ultimate truth.⁷

Foucault’s statements we can find an invitation for what I call an ‘aesthetic archeology of resistance’ namely a non-ideological process of detection and rendering visible that which is less visible and minor in forms of resistance to hegemonic claims (here mainly the hegemony of capitalist practices). As Foucault argues, hegemony is never complete since this may equal suicidal - both power and resistance ‘create’ maps while ‘conquest’ implies alien implementation and ‘native’ internalization as well as ‘alien’ estrangement. The way we understand, conceptualize and practice ‘resistance’ or generally ‘rebellion’ varies according to how and where we see ‘centers’ of dominance; the ‘anti-globalization’ movements promoted an idea of a ‘common enemy’ which appeared as some hybrid partnership between rich Western States and a corporate elite hijacking Empire’s institutions but continuing the historical mission of favoring the White Western, the male, and the rich. But as Deleuze describes, for Foucault power is diagrammatic, it passes through ‘forces’ and presents a relation only between forces that are non-stratified and with flexible segmentarity:

These power relations, which are simultaneously local, unstable and diffuse, do not emanate from a central point or unique locus of sovereignty, but at each moment move from one point to another in a field of forces, marking inflections, resistances, twists and turns (…) They constitute a strategy, an exercise of the non-stratified, and these anonymous strategies are almost mute and blind, since they evade all stable forms of the visible and the articulable.⁸

What is the meaning of resistance if ‘power’ cannot really create a monopoly, a closed-ended hegemony given the (even) „obscure areas of tolerance” and exit-lines? „How was the action of these power relations modified by their very existence …with effects of resistance, so that there never existed one type of stable subjugation, given once and for all?”⁹ What are the potential forms of resistance to hegemonic power? Labor practices in developing countries where Western corporation enjoy ‘paradises’ of cheap labor and very low standards are resembling prisons and ‘armies’ and the coercive force used on poor, docile (mostly women) bodies is outrageous. Following Foucault’s idea, the issue is not ‘who to blame’ or ‘who has the freedom to use ‘power’ but how we all use our powers to shape partially hegemonic centers.

Foucault proposes new coordinates for praxis of resistance that advances by relaying, prolonging, diffusing and connecting forces. An archeology of resistance involves both discursive practices such as statements, ideas and non-discursive environments such as events, economic practices and processes or institutions. These do overlap but they are still heterogeneous and non-causal. In explaining power relations, Foucault criticizes five main (usually labeled as Leftist) postulates of power: property, locality, essence, modality and legality. Power is not the property of a class but a strategy, disposition, manoeuvres, tactics being exercised and not possessed. The locality of power which is usually seen as the State is actually a microphysics that results in the State as an overall effect. Discipline hence is a technology and practice that crosses institutions which diffuses power making it both non-global and non-local. Power is operational rather than an essence or attribute. Also, the modality of power does not come from violence or ideology (such as police and propaganda for instance) but from the beforehand production of consent and truth.

These lines of thought make us be more critical of a potential ‘common enemy’ that would unify the so-called anti-globalization movements and prompt us to diffuse both the centers of power and resistance to include the individual, subjectivity and micro-practices at everyday level as I will elaborate in the next section. Post-communism may be deconstructed given the complexity of ‘everyday’ cultural systems that respond unpredictably to the ‘shocks’ of new policies and transformations; these mirror ‘Other stories’ and ‘images’ of transitions. Resistance to power-knowledge domination comes hence in various forms as de Certeau stresses:

Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving, shopping, cooking) are tactical in character. And so are, more generally, many ‘ways of operating’, victories of the weak over the strong, (whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc), clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, ‘hunter’s cunning maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries.¹⁰

Micro-Practices of Resistance in Post-Socialist Europe

This section problematises the concept of resistance movements along the lines of Foucault’s subjectivity as site of resistance using illustrations of everyday life consumer practices in post-socialist Eastern Europe. These illustrations will tell us that socialism is still alive; however, we argue that this persistence should not be received with hostility by either Westerners or Easterners. Socialist ‘weapons of the weak’¹¹ are now re-invented and transformed to (ambiguously) resist the contradictions and problems of capitalism.

After 1989, CEE has faced structural adjustment reforms promoted through the IMF/WB and the EU which have had the severe human ‘costs’ of a Great Depression¹². But by contrast to the other regions facing similar changes, CEE has not been confronted with large-scale contention movements, which usually accompany and strengthen democratization processes.¹³ As Tamas argues:

East European capitalism is, culturally, the purest version of capitalism. Obvious alternatives are deeply compromised and are mentioned in the public arena only by irresponsible demagogues and nostalgic fools. (…) Unlike everywhere else, in Eastern Europe the global economic, environmental, health and cultural crisis is not attributed to the misdeeds of capital, but to a lack of capitalism or to, as yet, insufficient capitalism. (…) In Eastern Europe, blind faith in capitalism is caused by many factors. First, „really existing socialism” (in reality, of course, state capitalism with exploitation, oppression, wage labour, preponderance of dead capital) had annihilated the workers’ movement (no strikes, no trade unions, no resistance), therefore socialist tradition had become utterly meaningless and incomprehensible and, moreover, it had annihilated feudal aristocracy, independent farmers and the church - thus it has crushed any real opposition, either on the Left or the Right, to capital.¹⁴

Hence, people in CEE are often simply assumed to be pro-globalization (i.e. the economic policies of neo-liberalism) because they suffered under command economies and are now grateful to be out of them. This precise goal of transition seems to have been already imagined for us (though not necessarily with us) at the macro-political level. For example, after the Romanian Revolution in December 1989 it seemed that there was no time for the Romanian people to figure out a political and economic alternative since THE alternative was already given to them in a package of reforms towards Westernization. We had to be ‘civilized’ and ‘trained’ into it. The prevailing way of thinking was ‘there is no other way”.

However, a more complex analysis would convince us to use the term ‘transformation’ rather than transition. As everyday life shows us, the post-communist transformations have been rather ambiguous and we need to pay more attention to „how the unfolding uncertainties of macro institutions affect practices within micro worlds and also to how family, work, and community are refashioned”¹⁵ often in confrontation to both States and markets.

Regrettably, post-communism democratization is often perceived as merely party-politics, free elections, restoring property rights or ‘accessing’ the Western institutional structures. This ‘dry’ sense of politics, as Verdery puts it, tends to ignore the more dramatic change at the level of culture and civilization.¹⁶Rationalistic analyses, based on opinion polls and analysis of ‘democratization indices’, are infertile since politics should be conceived more as continual struggles over meanings and it should also refer to feelings, myths, the sacred, the non-rational, or the imaginary: „the formation of new ideologies and identities is more complicated the most discourses of transition or revolution allow.”¹⁷ Hence, deeper questions of culture and meanings bring out issues of subjectivity and micro-level politics of the personal and the everyday life. As Zagajewski reflects in his Two Cities: On exile, History and the Imagination:

For me totalitarianism was both a nightmare and a literary theme, an oppressor and a toy, the policeman watching me and the ecstasy of political humor. I am not pretending to be a skeptical, wise, mature person, but I do not really know at all what the enormous changes in the East signify or what will change in me, in my manner of writing, thinking living. A repugnant civilization is in decline; but it shaped me, I revolted against it. I tried to flee it; whether I like it or not I am almost certainly marked by it.¹⁸

The conventional ‘market’ transition models of post-socialist studies – are challenged by more recent theories of comparative post-socialisms through the lenses of Foucaultian governmentality and subjectivity. For instance, following Foucault’s concept of ‘technologies of self’, Elizabeth Vann describes how Russian and Vietnamese consumers have developed different subjectivities as citizen-consumers based on feelings of collectivity rather than neo-liberal individualism. The globalization story for developing countries has been about cheap labor (Vietnam) and easy markets (Eastern Europe). Through their consumption practices shoppers in Vietnam and Russia are reframing both socialist and neo-liberal notions of self, society and the market. While for Vietnam, globalization has brought new manufacturing centers where people can sell their cheap labor to produce corporate goods for the world, economic change in postsocialist Russia has brought a greater shift from production to consumption¹⁹.

Eastern Europe (EE) after the Fall has exemplified that extraction, production, trade and labor, are circularly connected at the level of transnational capitalist practices: the region is dependent on imports (products from abroad invade EE while internal production is low) but in order to afford them, many Eastern Europeans have to work abroad, often in exploitative conditions.²⁰ Still, the paradox is that this crisis is still explained through insufficient capitalism rather than the deficits of capitalism. Ethnographic observations in EE revive a socialist idea that true value comes from work and not pure market speculations. This may easily be considered a ‘communist legacy’ that needs to be criticized because it reverberates of the Soviet mentality linking people to production rather than commercial processes. It can also be explained through a reaction of almost suffocation to the invasion of foreign products that disconnects any producer-consumer trust relation. ²¹ Unknown traders and unclear locations of production and labor look suspicious not because of some sort of ‘evil-communist’ oppositional mentality but because they represent what Naomi Klein described as the assault of privatization on every aspect of life. Klein warns us about this assault on the intimate life of all of us as it gradually reduces to the status of ‘consumers’ rather than citizen.

„Moscovites may have preferred domestic goods, but local shops and markets were full of foreign, imported goods.”²² Moreover, one might observe that Eastern Europeans (and Russians) „might share a unique set of tastes and values that is not satisfied by imports of other transnational products.²³” While Cadwell’s ethnography on Russia’s consumerism tries to point out to a revived nationalism, and while one can even criticize this attitude as Russian propaganda against the West, one needs to locate these debates within the global context of anti-corporate capitalism that shakes foundations in multiple locations of the globe. „Shoppers in St. Petersburg say that, domestic foodstuff are testier and fresher than imported foods.”²⁴ While the most common explanation is ‘de gustibus non disputandum’ (we don’t fight over tastes!) one has to place this apparently trivial debate on tastes in the context of mass-production and the genetically-modification practices that is expanding nowadays through globalization.

One recurrent theme about ‘tastes’ in my experience as an Eastern European living in Romania and abroad is relevant for ‘micro-politics’ and mass-production in capitalism: I am referring here to shopping in big supermarkets. People lament the coldness and lack of actual choice and trust within the propaganda of abundance. Easterners are similarly disappointed by what the ‘market’ (‘abundantly’) offers. Drawing a ‘geography of everyday life’ Van Hoven’s interviews with Eastern Europeans in her book Europe: Lives in Transition, reveal similar tensions:

I’m sorry but I don’t like big shops. They’re a nightmare for me…I don’t like these crowds and hordes…so I go to shops here in the neighborhood, in which I know where the butter is, where the milk is. (Polish female secretary).

I don’t like those places, those supermarkets. You go to the market, walk around for two hours, buy 30 dekagrams of cheese and leave. (…) I prefer to go round here, in the neighborhood, to the little shop, and to buy what suits me. I know that it’s fresh, that the price isn’t hiked. (Polish female worker at steelworks).

Before I buy something for myself, I think about it ten times (…). I don’t like going to the shops. One is always pressed to buy things (…) It makes me feel like a second-class citizen. (Former GDR, female, unemployed)²⁵

All these ‘opinions’ may seem trivial and hilarious for a Westerner used to big supermarkets. And needless to point out that many Easterners are now habituating the joy of supermarket shopping. However, the preference for small-neighborhood business as opposed to big cold shops where you might find yourself lonely and lost in the depressing sameness of abundant wealth has to be analyzed closely. In EE it is not the critical discourses of vegetarianism, organic farming and anti-GMOs that prompts such reactions, or fortunately at least not yet. Though globally, large corporations such as Monsanto, Cargill, DuPont/Pioneer order the rhythms of our daily life their impact is still smaller in CEE. The recent food scandals between US, the European Union and Russia reveal the problems associated with the intensification of mass-industrialization of food production and the corporate interest of profit above even health.

In post-communism we can see how the shaping of consumer-citizen life may not have been exclusively hijacked but also locally molded. While it is common to interpret indigenous tactics in the face of dominant power as a manifestation of resistance, in the case of post-communist consumption, the colonial binary oppositions (self and ‘the Other’) may be somewhat different „It is not so much an act of resistance (…) as one of self-protection.”²⁶ This explanation makes us reiterate the Foucaultian argument of power and resistance as mutually constitutive and ‘resistance’ being inclusively looked at as not merely ‘rejection’ but also internalization with ambiguous subjective tones of transformative effects. A blend of cautiously acceptance of capitalism and pragmatic maintenance of ‘old habits/practices/objects are characterizing post-socialist life which should not be simplistically labeled as ‘incapacity of adaptation’, given the continuous media ‘victimization’ of Eastern Europe as not ‘good’ or ‘prepared’ enough for integration into the global markets.

After a while the old refrigerator broke down and Nikolai’s parents moved it into the empty bedroom, purchasing at the same time a deep freezer (…). They insisted on keeping the old refrigerator ‘just in case’ – or in Russian, ‘in case of fire emergency’ – therefore it was used as storage for about a year (…). None of the cooling devices, however, liberated Nikolai’s parents frm their life long habit of hanging frozen products out of their windows during the long Siberian winters. (…) Apparently his parents never got to the point of actually using their expensive kitchen equipment to its full capacity.²⁷

A closer look into these practices might tell us different stories of habituation and enjoyment. Beyond class differences, practices of products’ acquisition and consumption reflect a need to re-adjust both, the Past and the present into the new ambiguous narrative of everyday life. This comes as almost an instinctive resistance to the push for ‘forgetfulness’ that we have been facing after the Fall of communism. But „The sooner we forget it (the Berlin Wall), the more we’ll have to fear.”²⁸ We might have to reconcile with rather than aggressively reject our past history in order to express (rather than repress) the ambiguities of (post)-communist identity. And we might need to re-write history in a way that does not lie by hiding emotions.

As I have argued in these chapters, power and resistance blend in ambiguous ways. If any (meta)-theory is given to explain and institutionalize ‘transitional’ lives one has to question the precise attempt of this handout: „Institutionalization of (any) theory is a moment of profound danger.”²⁹ My addition of ‘any’ is meant to point out to the potential danger of any theory to become fixed and rigid while institutionalized, that is the danger of meta-narratives, even post-modern ones. The understanding of these macro-political reactions has to be analyzed in connection to the everyday burden of ‘figuring out life’ that citizens in Eastern Europe feel.

Conclusion

After years of lack of confidence in the possibility of the fall of communism (adults were used to say ‘not in my life time”) most Romanians for instance thought that things will radically change after a „natural contamination with the Western normality”³⁰ a normality that was not contested or questioned by most people. As Kristeva mentions the only quarrel of Eastern Europeans has been whether Soviet mentality can be avoided with cosmopolitanism or nationalism, as if there is no other possible way.³¹ Suspicious sameness characterizes the Post-Cold War scholarship with regard to East-West power structures. Consumer practices of resistance illustrate that political science needs a more nuanced awareness of local micro-level everyday practices (individual and collective).

These illustrations of everyday life consumer practices tell us that „socialism ‘still matters’ for the ways people think of their societies, experience institutions of the state and the market, shop, seek out support networks, engage in entrepreneurial practices.”³²Consumption and access to money and commodities nowadays are still challenging and risk-laden as during communism. If before the stores were empty now pockets are empty. „While those in power (vlasti) are commonly depicted as exclusively interested in pillaging the country of its riches (…) the people (narod) (…) can resort to tax evasion, double dealing and other forms of behavior characterized by Scott (1990) as the ‘weapons of the weak’”³³

As I have argued in these chapters, power and resistance blend in ambiguous ways. If any (meta)-theory is given to explain and institutionalize ‘transitional’ lives one has to question the precise attempt of this handout. We do need to emphasize in a post-colonial fashion that maybe the new post-communist challenges have also to do with Western agendas rather than merely Eastern past legacies. Gyurcsany’s admission that he had lied about the situation of the Hungarian economy needs to be examined in the context of the global push for liberalization rather than mainly as a national case of mismanagement. So are the geopolitical recent fears that Russia may want to forge alliances with energy producers from North Africa and Latin America to rival the OPEC. But the understanding of these macro-political reactions has to be analyzed in connection to the everyday burden of ‘figuring out life’ that citizens in Eastern Europe feel.

People from all over the world are designing forms of individual or collective resistance to present their dis-agreement to capitalism’s way of life. They represent various classes, occupational and interest groups; from intellectuals, religious groups or farmers, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, feminists or the unemployed, the Zapatista, the sweatshop worker, single-issue groups working for the Third World debt relief or for the Tobin tax but also nomads, anarchists, pagans, outlaws, Sans Papiers - illegal immigrants, ravers, ’ wild women’: „modernity’s ‘freaks’, everywhere.”³⁴We are interested here in forms of resistance to be imagined beyond the nationalistic or statist attempts and suggesting that the „stakes” of resistance are beyond desires for access to markets or the global flow of money. As I argued here, Eastern Europe can provide a micro-cosmos of everyday practices of resistance that are not necessarily ideologically driven, power seeking or unitary movements. The stakes of resistance here are our ways of life and everyday practices.

Globally and locally, resistance movements’ complexity and ‘disharmony’ (or lack of traditional strategic organization meant to ‘enter politics’ through official channels) can also be as strength. The movements are not to be described or grasped through the lenses and limits of Social Forums or other networking arrangements that are very likely to just re-iterate essentialism, racism, ideological clashes and binary way of thinking. The movements may very well also be forms and choices of our everyday life; in the food we choose to eat after participating in one of the protests; in the songs we listen, the books we read, the conversations we have with people around us or with our teachers/mentors/supervisors; the jobs we choose, the life choices we make after finishing school; the way we travel and if we travel; they are in us not being ashamed to be modernity’s ‘freaks’; they are in our -sometimes unconscious or frustrating - acts of so-called ‘abnormality’. The movements can be ‘noise’ in the streets, but can also be an increasing multiplicity of individual quiet constant refusals to what is presented as a civilizational ‘must’.³⁵

A politics of movement is crucial (…). It is necessary to ask how it has become so easy to forget that capitalism is a movement, that states are always in motion, that histories cannot always be captured by territorial form. A politics of movement cannot be grasped through categories of containment. A politics of connections cannot be grasped through a metaphysics of inclusions and exclusions, whether of insides and outsides or aboves and bellows.”³⁶

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IRINA VELICU – Lecturer in Political Inquiry and Analysis, Outreach College, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA.

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