Democracy
The idea according to which life in a democracy is fundamentally peaceful, policed, and violence-free (including in the form of war and devastation) does not stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
From their origins, modern democracies have always evinced their tolerance for a certain political violence, including illegal forms of it. They have integrated forms of brutality into their culture, forms borne by a range of private institutions acting on top of the state, whether irregular forces, militias, or other paramilitary or corporatist formations.
In eighteenth-century England, plantation owners in the West Indies amassed the money to enable the financing of a nascent culture of taste, art galleries, and cafés—places par excellence of learning civility.
The “civilization of mores” was also made possible thanks to the new forms of wealth accumulation and consumption inaugurated by the colonial adventure... the capacity to create unequal exchange relations became a decisive element of power.
To pacify mores, you must help yourself to a few colonies, set up con- cessionary companies, and consume ever more products from far-flung parts of the world. Civil peace in the West thus depends in large part on inflicting violence far away, on lighting up centers of atrocities, and on the fiefdom wars and other massacres that accompany the establishment of strongholds and trading posts around the four corners of the planet.
The historian Romain Betrand called it “the colonial policy of terror,” that is to say, the deliberate crossing of a threshold by exacting violence and cruelty on people who, in the lead-up, have been deprived of all rights.
Relaying one another, all three orders—the order of the plantation, of the colony, and of democracy—do not ever separate, just as George Washington and his slave and companion William Lee never did, or again as Thomas Jefferson and his slave Jupiter. Each order lends its aura to the others, in a strict relation of apparent distance and repressed proximity and intimacy.
Mythologies
One of the fundamental questions that arose around that time [up until the 1929 crisis] was to know whether politics could be something other than a state-related activity, one in which the state is utilized to guarantee the privileges of a minority. The other was to know under which conditions the radical forces aiming to precipitate the advent of the future society could invoke a right to use violence to ensure the realization of their utopias.
Mikhail Bakunin, for example, surpassing bourgeois democracy happens by surpassing the state, that institution whose specificity is to aim at its own preservation as well as that of the classes that, having monopolized the state, proceed to colonize it. Surpassing the state inaugurates the advent of the “commune,” which, more than a simple economic or political entity, is the figure par excellence of self- management of the social.
The other criticism of the brutality of democracies is the work of revolutionary trade unionists, for whom at issue is not so much to weigh upon the existing system as to destroy it through violence. Violence differentiates itself from force. “The object of force,” writes Georges Sorel, “is to impose a certain social order in which the minority governs.” It seeks to “bring about an automatic obedience.” Violence, by contrast, “tends to the destruction of that order” and to “smashing that authority.” From 1919 to the start of the 1930s in France, manifold worker demonstrations aimed expressly at this goal.
The history of modern democracies gets painted as though it reduces to a history in- ternal to Western societies, as if, closed in on themselves and closed to the world, these societies confined themselves to the narrow limits of their immediate environment. Well, never has this been the case. The triumph of modern democracy in the West coincides with the period of its history during which this region of the world was engaged in a twofold movement of internal consolidation and expansion across the seas.
The history of modern democracy is, at bottom, a history with two faces, and even two bodies—the solar body, on the one hand, and the nocturnal body, on the other. The major emblems of this nocturnal body are the colonial empire and the pro-slavery state—and more precisely the plantation and the penal colony.
To dissimulate the contingency of its foundations and the violence constituting its hidden aspects, modern democracy needed at its inception to envelop itself in a quasi-mythological structure. As we have just seen, the orders of democracy, the plantation, and colonialism have long maintained relations of twinship (rapports de gémellité). These relations were far from being accidental. Democracy, the plantation, and the colonial empire are objectively all part of the same historical matrix. This originary and struc- turing fact lies at the heart of every historical understanding of the violence of the contemporary global order.
The most decisive of all the technological tools that contributed to shaping colonial empires from the eighteenth century were probably weapons technologies, medicine, and means of locomotion.
Democracies strove as hard as they could to transfer the industrial principles of mass production onto the art of warfare and into the service of mass destruction... Colonial conquests constituted a privileged field of experimentation. They gave rise to a thinking about power and technology that, taken to its ultimate consequences, paved the way for concentration camps and modern genocidal ideologies.
Throughout one and a half centuries of colonial warfare, colonial armies lost few men. Historians estimate the losses at between 280,000 and 300,000—relatively low figures if we consider that close to 250,000 died during the Crimean War alone.
These wars give rise to a violence that obeys no rule of proportionality... Whether or not he bears arms, the enemy to be punished is an intrinsic enemy, an enemy by nature.
At the end of the nineteenth century the foundations of an international humanitarian law emerged. Among other things, this law aimed at “humanizing” war.
In imagination and in practice, the life of con- quered and subjugated natives is represented as a succession of predestined events.
The colonial world, as an offspring of democracy, was not the antithesis of the democratic order. It has always been its double or, again, its nocturnal face. No democracy exists without its double, without its colony—little matter the name and the structure.
As Frantz Fanon indicated, this nocturnal face in effect hides a primordial and founding void—the law that originates in nonlaw and that is instituted as law outside the law. Added to this founding void is a second void—this time one of preservation. These two voids are closely imbricated in one another. Paradoxically, the metropolitan democratic order needs this twofold void, first, to give credence to the existence of an irreducible contrast between it and its apparent opposite; second, to nourish its mythological resources and better hide its underneath on the inside as well as on the outside.
The exteriorized violence in the colonies remained latent in the metropole. Part of the work of democracies is to deaden any awareness of this latency; it is to remove any real chance of interrogating its foundations, its underneath, and the mythologies without which the order that ensures the reproduction of state democracy suddenly falters.
Achille Mbember, Necropolitics, 2019, pp. 15-27
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