Ecce Homo! Occupy God?
Marc James LégerIn a recent online article written for Roar magazine, the Halifax-based activist and scholar Max Haiven defines the concept of the commons in terms of grassroots democracy, horizontalism, sustainable reciprocity, community-level decision-making and radical autonomy. 1 What is at issue in this article is not so much what he says about the need to replace state sovereignty with commons, but the way that individuals and individualism figure in his discussion. Whereas most Marxists would agree on the question of the withering of the state, and on the socialist critique of bourgeois ideology, not all Marxists would agree with the anti-humanist and postmodern presuppositions that are at play the immanentist critique of concepts like autonomy or sovereignty. Haiven's article is typical of the tendency of social movement activists to dismiss the category of the individual that for previous generations was essential to Freudo-Marxism, but that today, after the influence of discourse theory, has seemingly disappeared, as Michel Foucault once said, like a face in the sand at the edge of the sea. I contrast Haiven's critique of individualism to the ideas of the Not An Alternative collective, an activist group for whom individualism is also a problem, but where, in contrast, psychoanalytic concepts are adopted and made use of in their Occupy strategies. Brushing up against liberal ideology, Haiven's text replaces the notion of "the public" and "counterpublics" with that of the commons. He challenges the idea of the individual as an Enlightenment concept that presupposes the public as its counterpart. The principle of egalitarian reciprocity that underwrites the commons involves, he says, "rich reciprocity, inter-reliance and the connections between communal and individual responsibility and autonomy." 2 He takes this beyond the idea of human rights, made in our capitalist world into a notion of the "irreducible and self-contained, contract-making individual," which he decries as the source of political and economic power-the liberal social contract writ small. 3 We must deconstruct this politics of white, male property owners-a "lethal fantasy," he says, since none of us are self-sufficient monads. 4 Instead, we "rely on community, collaboration, cooperation and commons." 5 He writes: "Our powers have been turned against us, to the point where we are at risk of undermining the network ecology of collaborative life that actually sustains us. Ecce Homo! This is what comes of the fetishization of the individual!" 6 Woe to all would-be saviours! Further, the individual, according to Haiven, "is a dangerous but intoxicating fiction," a "political box" that we must deconstruct so that we can build commons. 7 Since privacy implies private property regimes, as opposed to creative commons, neither are people or even the objects they make fully free, and so we must wake up from the dream of complete liberation from community, responsibility and accountability. Whatever social structures we have, he says, they should be used to build commons-instruggle: human rights beyond human rights transformed into "rights to the commons" of education, health, material abundance, lifeways, migration, and the freedom to "practice one's identity and body and mind and sexuality as one chooses." 8 Haiven's article contrasts interestingly with another text published in Roar magazine: "Occupy the Party: The Sanders Campaign as a Site of Struggle," written by the New York-based art collective Not An Alternative (NAA), a group comprised of core members Beka Economopoulos, Jason Jones and political theorist Jodi Dean. 9 Beka Economopulos was recently depicted on the news show Democracy Now! She was participating in a campaign in which supporters of Democratic Party nominee Bernie Sanders had gathered in Zuccotti Park to telephone voters in the states of Illinois, Florida and Ohio and encourage them to vote for Bernie. 10 I myself endorse the Sanders campaign and encourage people to use the hashtags: #hillarysowallstreet, #killarywarhawk and #bernienumnum.
