Idea#1: Destituent vs Constituent Power

There is no unhappy revolution: The communism of destitution by Marcello Tari

About the Author

Marcello Tari seems to be an evasive intellectual, with little available information about him beyond his published work. Described as a "little-known figure on the Anglophone left" by a reviewer, his publisher presents Tari as a "barefoot" researcher of contemporary struggles and movements. There is no unhappy revolution is his first book published in English, with other works published in Italian and French.

As the title suggests, this is a book about power, revolution, and communism with a small "c". It is a book with ideas for revolution but against traditional forms of 'constituent' power, and therefore, against Communism with a capital "C". The author investigates, and aims to resolve, two pressing questions in modern history: why have revolutions failed and why have modern movements failed to turn into revolutions?

Unsurprisingly, Capitalism is the target of the critique that shapes the intellectual and philosophical narrative of the book. This critique is substantiated throughout by the dual, and oppositional ideas, of "constituent" and "destituent" power. In simple terms, (for more in-depth terms) constituent vs destituent power is the dialectic opposition between an intent to reaffirm power through monolithic institutions (governments, political and economic laws, supra-national bodies) and a movement based on empowering individual members of society to yield power themselves.

Tari's work analyses the flaws of modern society through the lenses of political, economic and philosophical theory, and draws on notions of utopia and Romanticism to find the cures. He begins the book by denying the one fact that Capitalism - within and through "Globalisation" - works hard to make us all believe: that our world is a unified world. According to Tari, our "unified world" is a moment caught within the prism of "West-Modernity-Democracy-Capitalism" that conceals the sadder reality of an "Earth with a multiplicity of worlds divided and hierarchised according to cybernetics, capital, metaphysics and spectacle." These notions of metaphysics and spectacle act as evidence of the author's philosophical interpretation of the world, one which takes inspiration from other Marxist-leaning intellectuals such as Baudrillard, for example. This is not a book for the analytical purists who may be seeking data, graphs, or other International Relations theories that attempt to describe the world as it is. If anything, it is a book that deliberately attempts to shy away from common interpretations of the world, it is a breakaway from the conventional, it is an attempt to offer an alternative in a world plagued by "an exhaustion of possibility".

"Revolution means the dissolution of the identities assigned to us by the world and the revolutionary subject can no longer be part of the politics of a means to an end."

A central tenant of the author's rallying cry is for the individual to live in a way that is incompatible with the world, to breakaway from the constituent influence of capitalist society, and ultimately, to breakaway from traditional forms of political interaction/integration. Essentially, lasting change cannot emerge from the opposition that confines itself to the political. He stands against the pragmatism of liberals and reformists who continue to believe that change may only arise if one constituting power opposes itself to an other constituent power. This pragmatism by the "traditional Left" is driven by its ill-advised need to find constituent potential in destituent uprisings, and this same pragmatic drive is the element that condemns these uprisings to fail.

Examples of destituent uprisings that have failed to make a difference in recent memory (and referenced by the author) include les Gilets Jaunes in France and the Black Lives Matter movements. These movements, driven by the common folk, who operate outside the realm of politics, are abandoned by the wider population because they are seen as incapable of claiming power. Hence, pushing members of the Left to "compromise or enthusiastically embrace alternative governments such as Podemos or Momentum, without realising that this will lead to nothingness."

The aim of any counter-movement or revolutionary is to create a politics against history and a communism stronger than modernity

What stands against a movement of genuine alternative is the very society we live in, the very society in which our identities stem from. A world that "lacks the sense of reality" and one in which "the good is identified with narcissism, illusion, and the hypertrophic ability to sell and consume everything - beginning with ourselves." It is a world that obfuscates the most important element of any counter-movement: the truth. It is the government - the purveyor of capitalist expansion - who is to blame for this, it liquidates the truth from reality because " the truth represents an unveiling and thus also the possibility of destituting reality."

It is at this moment in the book that we begin to peer into the romanticism of the author, it is here that he begins to reveal the beginning of his proposed alternative: truth. It is hard to argue against the author's assertion that we are living in a world in which truth seems to have become a precarious element. Whether we speak of "fake news", "alternative facts", or outright lies (hello Boris), we operate in a system upheld by the ability of constituent powers to deceive. For the author, "significant contemporary uprisings are those which because they derive from a shared reality and truth do not concede anything. They exist beyond the world of television and the internet and they move towards the moment of the world or nothing at all."

The idea of truth and reality seem quite simple, almost too simple, notions to be included in any serious analysis of the modern ills; however, it is often these simple ideas that make the most sense. We reside in a world in which we have taken truth for granted, and have allowed for too long its opposite to roam free without consequence. Perhaps, all modern movements, because they stem from a cybernetic world that blurs the line of truth and lie, are doomed to fail. For no other reason other than because we exist in a society cursed with an inability to constitute a unified subject bound by a shared reality.

Constituent violence: is a machine that continually produces further violence, beginning with the need to conserve the law that it has produced

If the books begins with abstract notions and ideas such as power, truth and reality, the author quickly moves onto the more tangible elements of "constituent violence" and Capitalism's incessant drive for growth, otherwise known as "accelerationism". If we live in a world devoid of truth, then we also live in a world of paradoxes. According to the author, we, as members of society, face the paradox of living with the notion that constituent power is represented as peaceful and only violent when forced to do so whereas destituent power is represented as violent and only peaceful when coerced by the coercive strength of the law. The Black Lives Matter movement and the various uprisings from the marginalised communities across Europe in recent years represent the ultimate embodiment of this idea.

This is a pertinent observation of how "grass-roots" movements, whose aims are to displace power and re-imagine society, are seen as violent however peaceful these may be (e.g., Extinction Rebellion). Whereas movements that use real violence - the military and the police - are seen as movements that "seek to keep the peace". For Tari, this constituent violence is inherent to the formation of the state, "once the state has established itself, not only does it wage an external war to trace its borders over and over again, but uses the external war to cancel out the internal one. It continuously carries violence over its own borders in order to deny any other truth and every genuine form of autonomy. ”

This is an idea that perhaps remains under-explored in the book, however, it is an idea worth exploring independently, for it forces the reader to re-evaluate the institutions that have been created within the state. The army and the police that are very often seen as torch-bearers of peace, of law & order, can perhaps begin to be seen as something else. Something a tad more sinister; as elements that seek law & order yes, but for capital, not for the individual. A perspective long adopted by the oppressed communities existing within and outside the Western world.

The aim of destituent power is to “sabotage the train of progress and not jump on top of it in order to continue the journey forever.”

Capitalism is more than just an economic system, more than an ideology, it is a framework that shapes and cements social relations - or the relationships within society. We operate in a system in which interactions are increasingly determined by value and our worth is determined by how much we can sell our labour for. It is a system powered by "frenetic acceleration"; in which society tries to keep up with the speed and desire for infinite growth and profit. We are victims of this acceleration when we live in a society whose interactions have also been accelerated, most prominently by the rapid expansion of technology. Perhaps the anxiety of modern society is exacerbated by a feeling that we are all running out of time. We have internalised the slow-ticking of the Doomsday Clock.

Against this reality, the author suggests that "the original task of a genuine revolution is never merely to change the world but also - and above all - to change time.” This is where the potential of revolution, of change, really exists: in the potential of changing our relationship to time. It is for the destituent movement to help individuals reclaim their time; the movement must deliver "destituent strikes". To disrupt the status quo, to disrupt time and accelerationism, is the aim of the destituent strike, which unlike the traditional "constituent" or "political strike" (i.e. political opposition strikes), does "not aim for some partial, exterior result." It becomes "truly destituent when it no longer allows for the reconstruction of the enemy’s power."

According to Tari, via the work of Walter Benjamin, destituent power aims to interrupt work, to arrest normal time and abandon its relationship with power, unlike the traditional strikes of constituent power that simply lend to a best case scenario in which individuals "return with some new law or perhaps a few more cents in their pockets.” This opinion was forged at a time in which labour and the factory played a much bigger role in the fabric of society, nonetheless, the idea still holds true today. We may not be fighting for a few more cents, but we do seem to go into a protest fighting for change and returning with a new law that appeases the appetite for a short time. Yet, we return hungrier (and perhaps weaker) over and over again.

Tari displays his affection for Romanticism - not unlike Walter Benjamin - in the manner in which he vouches for the eminence of destituent strike. This strike refuses to occupy any seat of power, to engage in any simple substitution, and instead wants to destitute power. The destituent strike demands nothing; "it makes a negative claim.” This movement does not claim power, it does not claim anything, it demands simply the conditions for a "revolutionary becoming". We must seek to exit this world to find justice, and we must cease to have faith in traditional forms of protest or political mobilisation. For the simple reason that these represent a "temporality controlled and commanded by an economic logic, a calculation made in the short term in order to indicate a distant future in which everyone is better off." This refusal to wait for a better future, a symptom of the liberal and counter-movements, is a recurring theme for the author. He refutes optimism for the future and champions a mobilisation of the pessimistic present; “the coming revolution is not something that awaits us in a distant room in the palace of the future. Either it is already here, among us, or it is nothing at all.”

This element of refuting a better future, of going against the optimism pegged to progress that seems insoluble from democracy can be an idea that gives a vocabulary to the screams of people unable to live for tomorrow. It can act as a rallying-cry for those too hungry, too angry, too stressed and too distressed to accept the present for a future that may never appear.

Organisations structured on the constituent model always attempt to recreate a centralised subject externally, given the absence of a subject historically bound to modernity’s struggles for freedom, such as the working class.

The role of the subject, or lack thereof a subject, is an other interesting element of Marcello Tari's analysis of the failures of modern counter-movements. Movements have attempted to create - through the mobilisation of students, the youth or migrants - a hypostatised embodiment of the revolutionary subject that no longer exists. The author points towards the modern slogan of "the 99% vs the 1%" as nothing other than a consequence of the impossibility of movements to choose a "subject of transformation". My interpretation of this idea, is that counter-movements are made of individuals whose subjectivity has been de-territorialised by the unrooting of late capitalism. We are no longer workforces or members of a class, we are alienated individuals who co-exist within the same confides of a geographical area that is no longer ours. Surprisingly, it is in this lack of subjectivity that the author finds the recipe for change, real change.

It is by accepting our non-subjectivity and by "losing all hope in the ruling present", that we "can have any hope at all." The individual that seeks to form a destituent power must be a creature who is the "becoming-proletariat, a social nothing, and thus not only has nothing to lose but has within itself - through its own powerlessness - the potential to be everything. But, it can only access this fullness upon agreeing to destitute everything that it is." The potential of the individual exists within the dismantling of the elements of its identity.

Kafka said: “Man does not grow from below upwards, but from within outwards.”

The Romanticism of the author starts dominating the book as we reach closer to finding a remedy to the dominance of constituent power. Unlike traditional theorists or commentators, Tari exudes a faith in the potential of the individual, and at the same time, deplores the optimism placed in the future and vouches for a pessimism of the present: "only by losing all hope in the ruling present can we have any hope at all." My interpretation is that Tari calls for people to not lose hope in the future, but to lose hope in the now so we can build a hopeful of future. He goes further and explains that a pessimism for the future manifests in our collective anxiety, and that this anxiety is an "affect." An affect is an emotion that is policed, circulated and upheld by governments which are nothing other than "governments based on affects". To put it more simply, anxiety - alongside fear, euphoria, melancholy, depression, jealousy, egoism - is an emotion that is manipulated and heightened to keep us submissive. Therefore, we must break from these affects, and organise this pessimism for the present to avoid the anxiety of a future that helps to uphold governments as our purveyors of power that will keep us safe.

The book does attempt to provide some praxis on how to implement a revolution, but that is not its existential purpose. It's intent is to reintegrate Romanticism at the centre of human existence; it is a piece of work that seeks to break down the monotony of the rational, calculated present of capitalism. More than that, it is a love letter to dispel the ugliness of an ideology without any heart. The real destituent power isn't a counter movement or a political opposition, it is love.

If I was to summarise Tari's work in an, arguably regressive, political formula I would say: "if capitalism = Ego, then revolution = Love." The current state of affairs promotes a mode of living devoid of Love and in which Ego is the main drive. Our social relations are dominated by the Ego not by Love, and this is represented by how we treat each interaction as a mercantile transaction, and how governments operate in a way to uphold the Ego of a nation rather than promote the Love for the individual. Destituent power will lead us to a world in which "Love appears in place where the Ego disappears", it will lead us to a place in which "happiness has no need for the future, but is entirely absorbed in the epoch we are living."

It will lead us to a love that is unlike the liberal version of love which "defines itself through a lack of sensitivity, through being opportunist and calculating, deprived of its own language. It is where the body is usually an exchange value, a currency of flesh, in which the good of the Ego functions as the treasurer and absolute legislator of unhappiness which condemns the Ego to an existence deprived of truth, and thus of love. It is the ultimate unhappiness."

A destituent revolution, like truth or love, is not a particular form of a morality, a movement, or an act of history; it can be defeated, "but there is no unhappy revolution".

One Quote to End it All

An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire - a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations, always taking on more density. To the point that any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.

Bibliographic Information

Title: There Is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution

Author: Marcello Tari

Translated by: Gerardo Munoz, Richard Braude

Publisher: Common Notions