Today we know that the essential condition for a revolutionary reconstitution of society is the self- movement and creative political activity of the mass of the world population.1
~Kimathi Mohammed
Yavor Tarinsky || How come that nationalist, racist, and authoritarian tropes manage to reproduce and sustain themselves, despite the fact that modern societies claim to be based on universalist values that supposedly apply equally to everyone? For years we witness the inhumane treatment of migrants even by the most advanced and progressive of states, while far-right and neo-fascist movements continue to have access to the seats of power despite the devastating calamities such tendencies have produced in the past and present (from WW2 to the recent genocide in Gaza). Are nationalism, racism, and authoritarianism unavoidable part of human development or are they enabled and encouraged by a particular framework that is provided by the dominant political architecture?
To answer this question, we need to take a look at the main building block of the contemporary global order – the Nation-State. It is the only form of social organization accepted by the so-called “international community”. With its repressive police force and bureaucratic administration, it is a suitable entity to ensure the supremacy of the private property and provide the infrastructure for the circulation of Capital. Furthermore, it homogenizes diverse populations into homogenous nations that become easily-manageable labor forces and consumer markets.
While often nation-states present themselves as bearers of universal values, their bureaucratic nature and nation-building makes them in fact ethnocentric, and thus relativist and particularist. This is so because they tend to elevate top-down management and the national element, excluding those who resist homogenization and strive toward alternative ways of living. As philosopher Jacques Ranciere suggests:
The reference to universalism is, in fact, manipulated to the benefit of its opposite: the establishment of a discretionary state power to decide who belongs or doesn’t belong to the class of those who have the right to be here – the power, in short, to confer or cancel identities. Correlative to this power is the power to force individuals to be identifiable at all times, to confine themselves to a place of full visibility by the state.2
The universal values to which various powerful nation-states supposedly abide to are in fact projection of the particular interests of their ruling classes. Thus, their universalism is a tool for domination, rather than a vision of equality. This is why past and present large states have often concealed their imperialist ambitions beneath a veil of “higher purpose” or of the supposed goal of “civilizing” an other. This hypocrisy is pointed out by Palestinian thinker Edward Said, who notes that:
Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.3
The interventions of superpowers abroad are always branded as “export of democratic and liberal universal values”, but in fact were and can never be anything more than the expansion of the globalized capitalist market, with the goal of enriching the already rich and powerful. And the best means for the achievement of this expansionist goal is nationalism, as observed by philosopher Tzvetan Todorov:
The reasons for the colonial conquest were political and economic, rather than humanitarian; if we wanted to go for a single general principle, it would be nationalism – which, as Roussseau understood, is incompatible with humanism.4
With the expansion of statecraft throughout the world as the only acceptable political entity within the dominant globalized order, was ensured the institutionalisation of discrimination and particularism on global scale. It is in the nature of the nation-state to separate people to ones who belong and others who don’t. Some states conceal their dominance beneath the abidence to supposed universal values, while others hide their authoritarianism behind the particularism of “tradition”. And while the relativist nature of the latter is clearly evident, it is also present in the former, but in a more subtle manner for their universalism always stems from within and gets radiated towards the outside. In this sense, national ideologies are being sustained and provide fertile ground for racist and discriminatory passions to thrive. As Ranciere suggests, today’s racism is a rationalization of the state and not a popular passion.5
It must be clear that racist and discriminatory tendencies revolve essentially around relations of power and domination. They aim at establishing inequality between groups of people, positioning some above others. Nation-states, by determining those that belong to the national whole and others that don’t, willingly or not enforces such a relation of inequality – the one who does not belong is stripped of rights and is met with harsher treatment by bureaucratic apparatuses. The unequal configuration of power that comes with racist tendencies is underlined by Todorov, according to whom it is very rare that the ethnic group to which a racialist author belongs does not appear at the top of his own hierarchy.6
As mentioned before, not all countries claim abidence to universal values. There are ones that openly adopt relativism as the tool beneath which to conceal their exploitative nature. Such regimes will claim that they are the expression of the “unique nature” of their population, that the current type of social organization is the one most in line with the traditions and manners of given society. The problem with such relativist approaches is that they lump different peoples together, stripping their coexistence of its complexity, ultimately equating them with the state.
The domination of the nation-state, when either expressed through universalist or relativist prism, is always producing homogenization and inequality. The top layers of its bureaucratic structure produces and enforces values and significations, that are in line with the logic of statecraft and have to be followed and adopted by the great majority. In both cases we have heteronomous settings that are ultimately particularist and relativist, prone to racism and discrimination.
The alternative to this reality stems from the grassroots struggles around the world. While each and every one of these has its own unique set of characteristics that derive from the intersections of specific social, temporal, and spatial contexts, they often exhibit one thing that is common – the popular desire for citizen self-management, or in other words – direct democracy. They tend to assert universalism not as a dry and rigid set of “natural laws”, as some of the minds of the Enlightenment age tried to do, but as the universal potential of human beings to take active, unmediated part in shaping their own destiny and that of the communities they are part of. Cornelius Castoriadis underlines this, when saying that:
we think that the aim of autonomy ineluctably tends to emerge wherever we find humans and history, that, like consciousness, the aim of autonomy is human destiny and that, present from the start, it constitutes history rather than being constituted by it.7
Unlike the passive liberal perception of universal equality that seeks enlightened rulers and state entities to ensure its primacy (something that inevitably breeds more inequality), autonomy stems from the self-action of toilers and commoners. It is a universal potential to enact new forms of social life and reclaim one’s own destiny via collective means. That’s why Castoriadis insists that autonomy is not to be passively awaited but actively sought through grassroots appropriation of liberatory principles and practices, suggestin that “the condition for the universalization of these values[…] is that the others appropriate those values for themselves”.8
And while Castoriadis focused his sight on Europe and its past, it is not difficult to see how this desire for autonomy manifests in other parts of the world as well. There are whole societies that have major cultural and geographical differences, while share commonalities regarding the autonomous political projects they have been building.
One of the most notable ones can be found among the communities of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico. Since their rebellion against neoliberalism in 1994, they have established a federative network of self-managed municipal caracoles, in which power flows horizontally, rather than vertically. And after so many decades they have managed to not only preserve their direct-democratic ways, but to even deepen them, furthering decentralization, gender equality, and grassroots participation.9
The way they percieve their autonomy bears on an universalist outlook, expressed in one of their core principles: Queremos Un Mundo Donde Quepan Muchos Mundos [We Want a World Where Many Worlds Fit].10 A clear negation of superiority and domination, it expresses a strong embracement of human diversity, pluralism, and equality, binded by the act of collective self-emancipation. It is no wonder that for so many years the Zapatistas have consistently sided with the oppressed from all parts of the world in their respective struggles for justice.
In the other side of the planet, in the war-torn Middle East, there is another society that has been building its own system of autonomy – the Kurdish freedom movement. Following the Arab Spring, amidst the Syrian Civil War, the predominantly Kurdish region of North-East Syria, more widely known as Rojava, announced the establishment of an autonomous administration. The result is the creation of a democratic confederation that allows to communities to peacefully coexist within a common democratic framework, while also sustaining cultural pluralism, political self-management, and gender equality.
Since then, amidst constant imperialist pressures and attacks, the Rojava Revolution showed in practice the ability of oppressed peoples to reclaim the control over their lives on direct-democratic basis. Kurdish activist scholar Havin Guneser suggests that the Kurdish freedom movement and the Kurdish people are aware of how autonomy binds them to other peoples from around the world, and that they see themselves as part of the wider universal struggle for the freedom of humanity, women, peoples, and workers.11
With all this in mind we can conclude that nationalism and racism are not part of human nature, but by-products of the current dominant order. These ills cannot be omitted from our societies because of the way they are structured – hierarchically through the bureaucratic means of capitalism and statecraft. These vertical structures are imbued with hypocritical “state-centered universalism” and relativism, both of which tend to elevate certain ethnic and/or cultural traits above others, thus separating peoples into superior and inferior ones. Such a reality can reproduce nothing but oppression and inequality. An alternative path is being advanced by social movements and communities worldwide that see autonomy not as a set of values and principles determined by bureaucratic elites or holy scriptures, but as a common horizon for collective and individual liberation. Rather than a passive framework of legalistic isotimy, it presents a pro-active project where equality is asserted via the direct and unmediated participation of all in public affairs. Autonomy thus stands as a true universal paradigm that rejects determinism and embraces the democratic potential of each and every human being.
Footnotes
1 Kimathi Mohammed, “Organization and Spontaneity: The Theory of the Vanguard Party and its Application to the Black Movement in the U.S. Today,” 1974, The Anarchist Library [available online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kimathi-mohammed-organization-and-spontaneity]
2 Jacques Rancière, “Racism: A Passion from Above,” Diagonal Thoughts, January 2, 2011 [available online at https://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1234]
3 Edward Said, “Blind Imperial Arrogance,” Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003 [available online at https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jul-20-oe-said20-story.html]
4 Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 68–69.
5 Jacques Rancière, “Racism: A Passion from Above,” Diagonal Thoughts, January 2, 2011 [available online at https://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1234]
6 Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 93.
7 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 175.
8 Cornelius Castoriadis, Democracy and Relativism: Discussion with the “MAUSS” Group (unauthorized translation, Not Bored!, 2013), 16.
9 Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), “Ninth Part: The New Structure of Zapatista Autonomy,” Enlace Zapatista, November 13, 2023 [available online at https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2023/11/13/ninth-part-the-new-structure-of-zapastista-autonomy/]
10 Center for the Study of Social Justice, University of Arizona, “Sharing Leadership Series Handout 5.6.09: Some Zapatista Principles & Practices,” The Anarchist Library, 2009 [available online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-some-zapatista-principles-practices]
11 Havin Guneser, The Art of Freedom: A Brief History of the Kurdish Liberation Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2021), 2
