“we live in the ruins of political modernity”
INTERVIEW WITH MIKKEL BOLT RASMUsSEN
NOTE: The interview was conducted between July and December 23’
Mandus Ridefelt: I want to speak about the pretty complex narratives and political ideas that are surrounding so-called Nordic welfare states. I am Swedish and my examples come mainly from there, but I know that there are similarities with the Danish context, as well as differences. Whatever entity ‘Sweden’ is, it is persistently invested in itself as an exceptional state. This exceptionality is built on the principles laid down by the longstanding social democratic power: equality, social security, and a strong social contract, as well as being a ‘humanitarian superpower.’ Perhaps this is most clearly seen whenever something bad happens in Sweden; the two main reactions are based on either ‘how can X happen in Sweden?’ or ‘X is not Sweden.’ Disbelief or repression. On the other hand, Sweden has seen an extremely rapid privatisation of state assets, starting from the early 90s, and is currently experiencing the most dramatic rate of increase in the difference between low and high income, at least within the EU. Another undercurrent of the social democratic project that underscores the exceptionality of the welfare state is its pretty much eugenic implementation of social engineering and public health which took place in the context of, among other historical factors, Swedish ‘neutrality’ in the Second World War.
Sometimes, I am just baffled by the strange wiring of this nostalgia for the welfare state, its image as essentially ‘good,’ and the accelerating neoliberal reality of the present. How do you understand the dynamics at play when these narratives of exceptionality are entrenched? When they shift realities, yet remain the same? Are there any interesting dynamics at play in the case of Denmark and the construction of exceptionality?
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen: Thanks for the opportunity to discuss these matters, I very much appreciate that. The creation of so-called Nordic welfare societies is obviously a huge historical achievement. In a historical situation characterised by what many following Adam Tooze have called a ‘polycrisis,’ the benefits of a social order in which large parts of the population have access to social benefits and do not have to pay for education, hospitals et cetera are free for all to see. But the strong identification with the welfare state in Scandinavian countries is pretty unique, it seems to me. We just happen to be part of the over-affluent region of Europe. Living the good life while the planet is burning and sinking into misery. This will continue. Sweden and Denmark are niche players on the global market and so far they have been capable of riding out the crisis, enjoying their privileged position. The chipping away of ‘the social rights’ of workers has happened slower in Scandinavia than elsewhere.
The question of the welfare state is a huge one and I’m not sure that I have any special insight. Let’s start out by saying that responsibility for the wellbeing of the population is not something specifically Scandinavian, nor European; we find that in most religious traditions and civilisations. Relief from hunger and the protection of comfort have been a part of most ethnic communities in different forms.
Historically, what we refer to as the welfare state is a new thing that emerged in the 1930s and was set in place after World War Two in Western Europe (and to some extent in the US.) The welfare state has always been a compromise between capital and labour. The old Marxist Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn (among others) has shown that the welfare state builds on Roman law and on a rights-based conception of social life as well as on the family unit, but the determining factor in the story of the emergence of the welfare state is, however, industrial capitalism, that destroyed feudal forms of life and moved huge numbers of people into cities across Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Previous forms of living were broken apart – the whole All That Is Solid Melts into Air from Marx to Marshall Berman – and new ones emerged.
The working class formed in the bosom of industrial capitalism but for a long time the bourgeoisie primarily looked upon living labour as a cost. It took two world wars, a huge economic crisis, and fascism, to pressure the European bourgeoisie into accepting a compromise with national representatives of the working classes. The welfare state is thus a very specific historical phenomenon that was established on the back of a very large crisis going back to the late 19th century, and the inability to privately control the productive forces of industry and contain the growing power of the workers’ movement.
After 1917, the Russian Revolution seemed to encapsulate the threat of a working-class revolution. The bourgeoise opted for repression and a little socialisation for a long while, Bismarck introduced social insurance legislation in the 1880s after having witnessed the Paris Commune, and it took several decades of war and crisis to finally get to what we normally refer to as the welfare state. After 1945 a compromise was brokered, integrating the working class into the nation state. The post-war economic boom made it possible to afford extensive social policy reforms.
This is the run-down welfare state we still have here in Denmark and Sweden; the ruins of that model. This model was obviously based on a neo-colonial world order and, to put things bluntly, the local working classes in Scandinavia gave up international solidarity in favour of higher wages, access to education, housing, and culture. The abandonment of any notion of internationalism was part and parcel of the welfare model, the working class was a national working class which the welfare state had to take care of. The whole Folkhemmet discourse with all of its biopolitical implications, which have since come back to haunt the local Left.
I’ll not try to attempt a comparison of the two Social Democratic parties, but just point to this similarity: the explicitly nationalist dimension of the way they have always talked about the working class and/as the people. Antinationalism was never big in Denmark, unfortunately. I don’t think so either in Sweden. And the whole Folkhemmet discourse is still there, lingering on. What took place in Denmark in the late 1990s was the transformation of that discourse into outright racism and islamophobia. In Denmark as well as Sweden, as you say, the Social Democrats have long since ditched any meaningful concern for inequality and social justice. This process was well underway in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s. Class issues disappeared and the labour market precariats that emerged in both countries were too weak and fragmented to raise their voices.
In retrospect it is evident, I think, that the most important development was the discursive shift towards xenophobia that took place during the same period, much quicker in Denmark but slowly across Scandinavia. The predominant narrative in both Denmark and Sweden, as well as in Norway and Finland today, holds that society is threatened by migration. I will not try to account for the shift that took place in Denmark – I have done so before (see for instance On The Turn to Liberal State Racism in Denmark) – but merely say that the situation is very grim. And there’s no political opposition to the very brutal asylum policies adopted in Denmark. They have become accepted across the political spectrum. I don’t want to point to the inter-war period, but the comparison is pretty evident. People seem to have accepted the situation and few protest when totally inhuman proposals like sending asylum seekers to Rwanda are discussed.
MR: Your extensive work on the Situationist movement is a deep dive into the conditions and enduring implications of this intertwinement between artistic practice and broad social mobilisation. What are the conditions that need to come into place for artistic practices to, initially, re-instantiate the fervor of the internationalist movement and, secondly, to make this movement permanent? There seems to be a never-ending stream of trying to update these largely European concepts of radicality that stem from 68’. Is there a way of productively ‘provincialising’ the European history of radicalism and its relationship to art? What dynamics determine the relevance of this kind of work?
The holy grail for any form of left-wing politically wired art today is for it to pass as carrying a legitimate claim of ‘activism.’ How do you approach activist discourse in art today?
MBR: I would, once again, go back to a dialectical understanding of the function of art and point to the presence of political representation in the art institution. For a long time, the institution of art (the most progressive part of it, that is) functioned as a kind of substitute public sphere, in the absence of both global and local antisystemic movements in which it would be possible to discuss large-scale issues of social transformation and the harmful effects of capitalist under/development. After the end of the last large wave of protests on the back of May ’68, the art institution was one of the places where people could reorient and analyse what had been going on, and ask why the partial rediscovery of the proletarian revolutionary offensive of 1917-1921 failed (or was crushed, as was the case in Italy in the late 1970s.) From the get-go, modern art was one of the few places where it was possible to envision a different life. Therefore, modern art is intimately connected to socialism and communism as visions of a different way of living in modern capitalism. As a modern phenomenon, art was the sphere where the anarchic imagination was allowed to live. The artist could create a new world in the studio or the book, ideally without any kind of consideration of the destination of the artwork, or fear of religious or political interference. This was the modernist dream of the autonomy of art. The lawless freedom of the imagination had its wings clipped by becoming art, tucked away in an institution and with little social effect, as Peter Bürger puts it. The dream is still there. Obviously, it has changed since the days of German Romanticism or the avant-gardes but it is still there. I hope so, at least.
I have tried to analyse this history as a question of the disappearance of the great refusal. Herbert Marcuse used this notion in some of his writings in the 1960s as he was trying to come to terms with the changes taking place in what he called ‘one-dimensional society.’ It was becoming increasingly difficult for Marcuse to uphold a Marxist stance, according to which the local working classes would transform into the proletariat who would put an end to capitalist exploitation. Post-war society appeared to transcend the contradictions of capitalism. With soaring growth rates, the material misery of most people in the West seemed to be a thing of the past.
Marcuse understood this as a ‘metamorphosis’ of capitalism whereby the working class’s reason to oppose the system evaporated. A seemingly endless variety of goods advanced what Adorno called ‘the classless class society.’ Marcuse had to step outside of Marxism; as he put it, “dialectical theory can no longer offer the remedy.” He had to look elsewhere for a critical subject, and pointed towards Blacks in the US and young disgruntled people. The great refusal was conceived of as a new kind of opposition, partly outside of Marxism.
I have described the period since the late 1970s as being “after the great refusal.” Take some of the most interesting parts of conceptual art, such as the Artist Placement Group, or different kinds of early media art, like L’Art Sociologique with Hervé Fischer and Fred Forest; none of these were really part of any kind of revolutionary push. They tried to expand the audience of art and to introduce art into non-art contexts. This was all very well and interesting, but the grand claim of modern art was disappearing.
This disappearance was part of a more general transformation. In the almost 40-year ‘neoliberal’ or counter-revolutionary period that followed the ’68 revolts, wherein Marcuse was a reference for the Situationists and other heretic Marxists, the notion of refusal more or less completely disappeared. If the 1960s were the culmination of a 25 year period of staggering economic growth in the advanced economies, the following decades were characterised by repeated economic crises and the slow dismantling of the social state created as part of the postwar wage/productivity compromise. The violent crackdown on the protest movements’ more experimental factions – in the US in the early 1970s, as described by Marcuse in Counterrevolution and Revolt, and in Italy from 1978 to 1980 – combined with economic contractions, set the stage for a complete ideological shift whereby the idea of the great refusal simply disappeared. The refusal of the boring new consumer life and the old pretentious leaders – de Gaulle, Adenauer, et cetera – in ‘68 gave way to a perfidious new strategy of capitalist exploitation. Authenticity became a neoliberalist catchphrase. The demand for a different life was turned into the desperate search for individual satisfaction and quick identity fixes, what Pasolini called ‘mass hedonism.’ The experiments of the long ’68 were transformed into a hedonistic lifestyle culture, and politics dissolved into business and the stock market. “The subculture of power has absporbed the subculture of opposition,” Pasoloni desperately warned.
The great refusal was nowhere to be seen after the early 1970s. Not that there were no poor people – more and more people were excluded from the world economy, effectively creating a ‘planet of slums,’ as Mike Davis called it – but the ruling ideology was so powerful that this was not really considered a systemic problem. Once in a while, slum riots broke out in countries subjected to the IMF’s structural adjustment programmes, but they did not constitute a new kind of Bandung movement or ‘Refusalist International.’ The alter-globalisation movement of the late 1990s was quickly beaten down, while global anti-war mobilisation in 2003 amounted to nothing and was unable to prevent the invasion of Iraq.
When talking about the disappearance of the great refusal in or as art, we have to zoom out and consider the broader historical development in which a previous political vocabulary was transformed. During the 1980s, but especially from the mid 1990s onwards, contemporary art functioned as a space where it was possible to engage in discussions of issues that had more or less been evicted from the ruling political discourse. This was really important. These discussions often tended to invoke previous historical experiments – the whole re-discovery of a long list of practices from the 60s and 70s that had themselves, to a large extent, sought to build on practices from the inter-war period – but often did so without considering the different contexts. When Bourriaud started theorising what he called ‘relational aesthetics’ he explicitly invoked the avant-garde movements in trying to explain how these new practices were down-scaled attempts to do something. Relational art was not content in deconstructing representations, but instead wanted to create relations between people, he argued. Bourriaud referred to Lyotard and the whole postmodernist discussion; he was fully aware of the transformations taking place. In retrospect I find his texts quite interesting. We have a long list of critical readings of his theory, which all show the fairly shaky art-theoretical grounds on which his theory stood, but the attempt to try and negotiate a critical position in that moment was interesting. In retrospect we can see that most of the theories of Bourriaud, Bishop, Kester, et cetera were based on a fairly loose understanding of the social or the political . The different kinds of practices, whether they were named relational or participatory art, dialogic art, contextual art, or just socially engaged art, were understood as somehow challenging the relative autonomy of art, pushing the limits of what was conceivable as art. But often these theories jump the gun and argue that art works produce real effects, somehow escaping the autonomy of art activating or provoking the spectator. This is achieved through an intersubjective dialogue or through some kind of vague dissensus. All of these different theories about the social or political dimensions of contemporary art are, however, all characterised by a fairly loose understanding of politics, and they very rarely engage in a kind of in-depth analysis of the larger structural changes taking place, that has to do with how we understand the relationship between historical development and agency.
MR: It is often remarked these days that the conditions of the public sphere have changed dramatically in a place like Denmark, perhaps even to the point where the very existence of a public sphere is debatable. In these remarks, the public sphere is implicitly summoned as a site of true and idealised political engagement. What constitutes a public sphere in your eyes? What functional properties does a public sphere have? If disinvesting in the idealised image of the public sphere, where do you see its functions being enacted/repressed today, yet not perhaps recognisable as such?
MBR: I’m not sure if the concept of a public sphere is of much use today. I mean, we can invoke it and use it as a historical reference – as Habermas did himself when he coined the term and before he slid into using it as a normative concept – and that can sometimes be useful. But in the present historical situation I think the concept tends to have a system-conforming function. After Debord and Baudrillard it is difficult to enter the public sphere with any kind of naivety. Since the advent of mass media, the public sphere functions through applause. And with social media it is difficult to understand mass communication as anything other than distortion and disqualification. Entertainment and fascination as the opposite of critique, whereby any kind of interpretation always necessarily refers to an identifiable signature. Even the most desperate attack against mass media can only be a victory of mass representation. No matter how all-encompassing a critique gesture becomes, it will not only consolidate but strengthen the authenticity of mass media. The difficulty of a radical critique is obviously that it is a perspective in itself, a position that can be voiced or affirmed publicly. This was the dream of the most ruthless iconoclasts, such as Debord, who continued to hope that authentic images could somehow make a difference.
MR: Your 2021 book Late Capitalist Fascism (Polity Press) is a succinct and focused rundown of the thin varnish of today’s fascistoid political forms, and the way in which these make up a new aesthetic that might not align with the canonised historical examples of fascist institutional forms. If, as Deleuze, Guattari, Reich and many others have explored, fascism basically exists everywhere, at every scale, and is carried in psyches, social forms and material infrastructures, what images and organisations could allow us to have an understanding of this onset fascistoid immersion?
MBR: The last decade has been characterised by the formation of a fiercely counterrevolutionary international, with a common agenda and language, centred on the idea of a foreign threat to an original national community. The reformist Left is left-looking, completely anachronistic, and unable to respond and unite around a competing vision. If they manage to hold onto power, they do so as examples of post-politics 2.0, managing the crisis. The new fascists, on the other hand, have a programme, and as we have seen in the case of Denmark this programme can fairly easily become hegemonic. From the late 1990s onwards, the Danish state has introduced a seriously horrible asylum policy program, and is doing its best to differentiate between Danish citizens and migrants from the Middle East and Africa. The continued indifference to the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean is a sad testament to this development in the EU. The wildfires in Greece happening right now are blamed on migrants, and there have been several instances of local vigilante squads.
When analysing the emergence of the new fascist parties and movements, from Trump, to Fratelli d’Italia, to Sverigedemokraterna, it is important to stress the continuity between national democracy as a political form and these new-old fascist trends. Democracy is not the opposite of fascist control. As anti-colonial and Black revolutionaries have long since argued, Western democracies have had no problem in setting up fascist zones for dangerous subjects, from camps in the colonies to prisons and Black sites.
The emergence of the new fascist movements and parties has to be situated in a longer development, that has to do with the transformation of politics in the West. What we can understand, along with Reiner Schürman, as a closure. Politics no longer takes place in politics. Politics is no longer situated in the institutions we normally associate with politics. The new fascist parties emerged in this displacement. Politics is emptied out and this paves the way for the fascists. We know about this hollowing out of politics from analyses by, among others, Wendy Brown, who talks about neoliberalism’s ‘undoing of the demos,’ Colin Crouch, who talks about a process of depolitisisation, the late Peter Mair, who analysed this as a hollowing out of parliamentary democracy, and Jacques Rancière, who addresses this as consensus. We have this strange situation where it is the new fascist parties who seem capable of simultaneously embodying the refusal of politics, and presenting themselves as a restoration of an original politics. These parties want to secure order at all costs. They desperately want an arche and strive to rehabilitate a new notion of politics.
We can see the transformation of politics in the new fascist movements that appear tired even as they go online screaming and yelling about Critical Race Theory and Muslims. Even fascism looks less sure of itself today that it did in the interwar period. Meloni has not introduced a project to build new cities, unlike the nuove città of Mussolini, and Trump’s Wall is not very impressive when compared to the many architectural projects of Nazi Germany. This does not mean that we should not take these projects seriously – we should – but we need to expand the analysis to include a focus on: 1. the slow emptying out of politics, and 2. the way in which national democracy can shift to a situation of exception, and create zones of fascist control where some people are stripped of their political and juridical rights.
The transformation of politics into administration and a dose of populism has opened the door for fascist parties that present themselves as being against the political system. In many places they have been capable of mediating discontent. In my two books on the new fascism, Trump’s Counter-Revolution and Late Capitalist Fascism, I have stressed the counter-revolutionary nature of the new fascist movements, arguing that they should be understood as a response to the new cycle of protests that broke out in 2010/11 with the Arab revolts, continued to the European square occupation movements, and are still ongoing (as we saw with the riots in France this summer, after the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk.)
We are living through a period wherein more or less all of the big political representations have become hollow. They are in crisis everywhere, the disappearance of the identity of the worker being a case in point. This has left the big social democratic parties in chaos and emptied the communist parties of content. The result of this process has been a destabilisation of democratic politics. It is difficult to integrate the ‘dangerous’ classes in democracy today apart from through populism and xenophobia. It is difficult to control the national community in a situation where the economy is shrinking. The development in France is telling; it is very difficult for the local capitalist class to create any kind of hegemony, and Macron has to unleash an ever more violent police force. Le Pen might never become president of the Republic, but in many places in France, in abandoned neighbourhoods, the state has already been reduced to a gang.
MR: How does an international ‘anti-fascism’ form, if departing from historical specificities in which fascism is ridden with a European overdetermination, while international struggles against various forms of oppression depart from other preconditions, be they military states formed in colonial power vacua, slow expansion mob-adjacent power grabs, or extra-statecraft by more or less enduring militias? What is ‘anti-fascism’ if the fascist subject adheres to another history, with a complicated relationship to the European canonisation of fascist politics and attributes?
MBR: Well, if we combine the Marxist interpretation of fascism as an attempt to save a crisis-ridden capitalist economy by outsourcing politics with anti-colonial theories of racial fascism that focus on the continuity of colonial-racial violence from colonial dispossession and racial slavery to mass incarceration and refugee camps, we should be capable of expanding the focus from the inter-war fascist movements that tend to monopolise most uses of the term of fascism. Aimé Césaire’s analysis of fascism as the boomerang effect of European imperialist violence would be an obvious starting point for such an endeavour, to which we could add George Jackson’s analysis in Blood in My Eye and other texts from the 1960s and 1970s. The Black anti-fascist tradition is important; Alberto Toscano has done some important work reintegrating it into the analysis of the new fascist movements. The other strand I would point to would be the heterodox interwar Marxist analyses put forth by avant-garde critics such as Benjamin and Bataille who both sought to describe the contemporary fascist movement with a kind of proto-affect theoretical focus, stressing the way that fascist parties managed to channel the energy of the masses. In a situation where fascism takes place as much online as in the streets, Benjamin and Bataille can help us to analyse the way that fascist image politics presents itself, and does so without reproducing the helpless democracy/fascism opposition that underpins so many readings of phenomena like Trump and Bolsonaro. Only insofar as antifascist activity is rooted in a radical project that envisions a break with racial capitalism will it be possible to combat the fascist dynamics that are on the rise almost everywhere.
MR: What is normality to you? I am asking this on the basis of the (at the time of writing) ongoing genocide, committed by the settler state of Israel, against the Palestinian people. I don't think we need to rehearse the historical continuity from which these corruptions are emerging. What I am interested in here is the way in which many European contexts are facing an increase in police violence, racism, and political repression, in and beyond cultural practices. Some voices speak of this as the onset of a nightmare. But also this gradual realisation of fascist forces is narrativised as an inevitable element in the sustenance of the liberal status quo. What is this kind of normality and how does it sustain itself? How does artistic work operate in sustaining and disrupting this normality? What are the conditions of possibility within upholding the baroque idea that the genocide is legitimate, inevitable and ultimately desirable? How has the story of Europe been able to see fascism as a mere ‘historical anomaly’ as, for example, Michael Ortiz recently phrased it? This is certainly several questions in one, just feel free to pick up on any thread from this.
MBR: Yes, the question of normality is interesting. The ongoing genocide in Gaza is being fought with an unbelievable disregard for Palestinian life. It is quite remarkable, the overwhelming force the Israeli military is unleashing on civilian Palestinians. By now more than 16,500 have been killed, most of them women and children. The incursion on October 7th of Hamas into Southern Israel where they killed 395 IDF soldiers, 59 police officers, 10 Shin Bet agents, but also more than 800 civilians, is being presented as an act of pure hatred that legitimises the annihilating power of the Israeli state. It is as if the decades-long state terror and the ongoing genocide disappears behind the figure of Hamas’ terror attack. It is as if there is no context to the action. As if the blockade on Gaza has not taken place, as if the Israeli state has not deliberately sought to derail any kind of political solution to the existence of the Palestinian population in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza for decades.
As Saree Makdisi has explained, it is as if the Palestinians are not there, were not there in 1948, and are not there today. They are not even victims, but merely bystanders to the Israeli military’s attempt to get Hamas. In the language of humanitarism they are collateral damage. And if you claim that Palestinians are the victims of a genocidal campaign by a settler-colonial state, you are antisemitic because you disregard the singularity of the Holocaust. October 7th is likewise a singular event that has no prehistory; it is an event that is immediately written into the history of the Holocaust. Palestinians are human shields, not human beings, according to this logic. This is the new-old normality. New in so far as the Right-wing government doesn’t merely say it out loud, but carries through with a new Nakba. Old in so far as the Israeli state has, from the very beginning, been a state defined on ethnic terms; it was and remains a settler-colonial state with an apartheid system that differentiates between people. Therefore, Jewish victims carry a completely different meaning than Palestinians. Some lives are to be grieved and given names and life stories, others are mere numbers that keep going up.
The new normal is the implementation of a highly sophisticated and brutally barbaric anti-rebellion regime. We have all been living with this regime since at least 9/11, and the occupied territories have functioned as a kind of laboratory for this new control regime where the distinction between war and peace tends to disappear. War is in no way restricted to military matters, but takes place throughout society in activities such as legislation, culture and architecture. War has become a permanent condition.
As Eyal Weizman has convincingly shown, the development of this late-modern war matrix is connected to the widespread notion within the Israeli government and Israeli military that the Israel-Palestine conflict is unsolvable and should remain so. Traditional notions of peace and war no longer make sense in this scenario, where war is understood as constructive chaos.
The result is that the occupied territories are in a state of permanent exception: everything can happen. Targeted assassinations take place on a regular basis, houses are continuously demolished, and new roadblocks are set up all over the place preventing Palestinians from going to work, tending to their crops, or visiting relatives that happen to be on the other side of the security wall. The fragmentation of the occupied territories has created a chaotic territory never likely to become a functioning state. But that’s also the point: the situation is now too ‘complex’ to be solved through a partition of the territory. It is effectively only the Israeli military that can handle the conflict, that it has itself produced.
The Palestinian struggle seems to be a symptom of the breakdown of a revolutionary understanding of politics. We are in a situation characterised by the dominance of a moralistic understanding of politics, which at best ends up with humanistic utterances about the need for a ceasefire and the immediate condemnation of Hamas.
The Palestinian struggle for liberation is currently led by Islamic militants from Hamas. This has to do with the brutal repression and disappearance of socialist alternatives in the region. With the disappearance of progressive forces, militants inspired by ideological fantasies have paradoxically become the avant-garde of liberation. This is obviously a huge problem. But this should not make us forget the role of the Israeli state. This did not begin on October 7th. Israel is a settler-colonial state that is based on the forced removal of more than 700,000 Palestinians in 1948. And, since 2007, Gaza has been under a blockade that has effectively transformed the area into an open-air prison, where the Israeli military controls everything that enters and exits the place. On the West Bank, settlers, with the help of the Israeli state, have established 144 settlements where settlers are endowed with rights as if they were living inside Israel. 450,000 Israeli settlers now live in the West Bank. Any dream of a two-state solution has completely evaporated, and almost seems as far away as Martin Buber and the Ihud party’s proposal of a binational one-state solution. We live in the ruins of political modernity, and it is plain for everyone to see that the political form of the nation state has to go. Of course an ethnic Jewish state with Palestinian Bantustans is much worse than a binational state, but ‘national liberation’ is no solution. History has shown that. Look at South Africa. Getting rid of Apartheid was unquestionably a good thing but we now have a state where the divide between the rich and the poor is absurdly large, and where striking miners are gunned down with machine guns. Liberation struggles cannot be national struggles anymore. We start here. Obviously, we also have to get rid of the money-economy, but right now it seems as if we have to start with capital’s mediating forms, its present processes of reterritorialisation, first and foremost the nation state form.
