Achille Mbembe: "The era of humanism is ending"

Red Portal - "Another long and deadly game has begun. The main clash of the first half of the 21st century will not be between religions or civilizations. It will be between liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism, between the rule of finance and the rule of the people, between humanism and nihilism," writes Achille Mbembe. And he warns: "The growing bifurcation between democracy and capital is the new threat to civilization."

Achille Mbembe (1957, French Cameroon) is a historian, postcolonial thinker, and political scientist; he studied in France in the 1980s and later taught in Africa (South Africa, Senegal) and the United States. He currently teaches at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa). He published Les Jeunes et l'ordre politique en Afrique noire (1985) and La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun. 1920-1960: histoire des usages de la raison en colonie (1996), De la Postcolonie, essay sur l'imagination politique dans l'Afrique contemporaine (2000), Du gouvernement prive indirect (2000), Sortir de la grande nuit – Essai sur l'Afrique décolonisée (2010), Critique de la raison nègre (2013). His new book, The Politics of Enmity, will be published by Duke University Press in 2017.

The article was originally published in English on December 22, 2016, on the Mail & Guardian website in South Africa, under the title "The age of humanism is ending," and translated into Spanish and published by Contemporeafilosofia.blogspot.com on December 31, 2016. The translation is by André Langer.

Here is the article.

There are no signs that 2017 will be much different from 2016.

Under Israeli occupation for decades, Gaza will continue to be the world's largest open-air prison.

In the United States, the killing of Black people by police will continue unabated, and hundreds of thousands more will join those already housed in the prison-industrial complex that was established after plantation slavery and Jim Crow laws.

Europe will continue its slow descent into liberal authoritarianism, or what cultural theorist Stuart Hall called authoritarian populism. Despite the complex agreements reached in international forums, the ecological destruction of the Earth will continue, and the war on terror will increasingly turn into a war of extermination between various forms of nihilism.

Inequalities will continue to grow around the world. But, far from fueling a renewed cycle of class struggle, social conflicts will increasingly take the form of racism, ultranationalism, sexism, ethnic and religious rivalries, xenophobia, homophobia, and other deadly passions.

The denigration of virtues such as care, compassion, and generosity goes hand in hand with the belief, especially among the poor, that winning is the only thing that matters and that winning – by any means necessary – is ultimately the right thing to do.

With the triumph of this neo-Darwinian approach to making history, apartheid, in various forms, will be restored as the new old norm. Its restoration will pave the way for new separatist impulses, for the construction of more walls, for the militarization of more borders, for deadly forms of policing, for more asymmetrical wars, for broken alliances, and for countless internal divisions, including in established democracies.

None of the above alternatives are accidental. In any case, it is a symptom of structural changes, changes that will become increasingly evident as the new century unfolds. The world as we have known it since the end of the Second World War, with the long years of decolonization, the Cold War and the defeat of communism, that world is over.

Another long and deadly game has begun. The main clash of the first half of the 21st century will not be between religions or civilizations. It will be between liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism, between the rule of finance and the rule of the people, between humanism and nihilism.

Capitalism and liberal democracy triumphed over fascism in 1945 and over communism in the early 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the advent of globalization, their destinies have become untangled. The growing bifurcation between democracy and capital is the new threat to civilization.

Supported by technological and military power, finance capital achieved its hegemony over the world by annexing the core of human desires and, in the process, transforming itself into the first global secular theology. Combining the attributes of a technology and a religion, it was based on unquestionable dogmas that modern forms of capitalism have reluctantly shared with democracy since the postwar period – individual freedom, market competition and the rule of commodity and property, the cult of science, technology and reason.

Each of these articles of faith is under threat. At its core, liberal democracy is incompatible with the internal logic of financial capitalism. The clash between these two ideas and principles is likely to be the most significant event in the political landscape of the first half of the 21st century, a landscape shaped less by the rule of reason than by the general unleashing of passions, emotions, and affections.

In this new landscape, knowledge will be defined as knowledge for the market. The market itself will be reimagined as the primary mechanism for validating truth. As markets increasingly transform into algorithmic structures and technologies, the only useful knowledge will be algorithmic. Instead of people with bodies, histories, and flesh, statistical inferences will be all that counts. Statistics and other important data will be derived primarily from computing. As a result of the blurring of lines between knowledge, technology, and markets, contempt will extend to anyone who has nothing to sell.

The humanistic and Enlightenment notion of the rational subject capable of deliberation and choice will be replaced by that of the consciously deliberating and voting consumer. Already under construction, a new type of human will will triumph. This will not be the liberal individual who, not long ago, we believed could be the subject of democracy. The new human being will be constituted through and within digital technologies and computational means.

The computer age – the age of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – is dominated by the idea that there are clean blackboards in the unconscious. The forms of the new media have not only lifted the lid that previous cultural eras placed on the unconscious, but have become the new infrastructures of the unconscious. Yesterday, human sociability consisted of maintaining limits on the unconscious. For producing the social meant exercising surveillance over ourselves, or delegating to specific authorities the right to enforce such surveillance. This was called repression.

The main function of repression was to establish the conditions for sublimation. Not all desires can be fulfilled. Not everything can be said or done. The capacity for self-limitation was the essence of freedom itself and the freedom of all. Partly thanks to the forms of new media and the post-repressive era they unleashed, the unconscious can now roam freely. Sublimation is no longer necessary. Language has shifted. Content is in form, and form is beyond, or exceeding, content. We are now led to believe that mediation is no longer necessary.

This explains the growing anti-humanist stance that now goes hand in hand with a general contempt for democracy. To call this phase of our history fascist might be misleading, unless by fascism we mean the normalization of a social state of war. Such a state would itself be a paradox, since, in any case, war leads to the dissolution of the social. However, under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism, politics will become a poorly sublimated war. This will be a class war that negates its own nature: a war against the poor, a racial war against minorities, a gender war against women, a religious war against Muslims, a war against the disabled.

Neoliberal capitalism has left in its wake a multitude of broken individuals, many of whom are deeply convinced that their immediate future will be a continuous exposure to violence and existential threat. They genuinely yearn for a return to a certain sense of certainty – the sacred, hierarchy, religion, and tradition. They believe that nations have become something like swamps that need draining and that the world as it is must be brought to an end. For this to happen, everything must be cleansed. They are convinced that they can only save themselves through a violent struggle to restore their masculinity, the loss of which they attribute to the weakest among them, the weaklings they do not want to become.

In this context, the most successful political entrepreneurs will be those who speak convincingly to the losers, to the men and women destroyed by globalization and their ruined identities.

Politics will devolve into street battles, and reason will no longer matter. Nor will facts. Politics will once again become a matter of brutal survival in an ultra-competitive environment.

Under such conditions, the future of left-wing, progressive, and future-oriented mass politics is very uncertain. In a world centered on the objectification of everyone and every living being in the name of profit, the elimination of politics by capital is the real threat. The transformation of politics into business risks eliminating the very possibility of politics.

Whether civilization can give rise to some form of political life is the problem of the 21st century.