by Gabriel Tupinambá

Vice-President and Special Envoy

of the Strong Party in Latin America

1. The resistance always is on the side of the Party

Who would disagree with the claim that an important task for any emancipatory political project today is to adequate itself to the demands of the contemporary protester? It seems like any effective political organization must, if it is to engage the masses, abandon its concern with big hierarchical structures in favor of small vertical groups, substitute formal orientations by local directives born out of personal experience, and so on. We all more or less agree with the idea that we need more flexible institutions – if we need institutions at all – if we are to harvest the political potential of the spontaneous protests around the world today and direct them towards substantial change.

Jacques Lacan coined something of an axiom for psychoanalysis when he claimed that “the resistance is always on the side of the analyst”. That is, the hindrances which stop the analytic process are not due to what the analysand does not say, but to what the analyst does not listen to. The hypothesis of the unconscious carries such a corollary: if the unconscious speaks and it does so with indifference to what the speaker wishes to say, then the task of marking this indelible division in speech falls on the analytic intervention and no excuse can be found in the claim that the analysand “didn’t want to face his fears” or something like that. A similar axiom could perhaps find its place in politics as well. The resistance which blocks the dispersion of ideological identifications is not on the side of the masses, but of those who have the ambition to intervene upon it. The question of political direction is always: which form of intervention manages to distinguish between the transitive demands and identifications and the intransitive declarations which speak through them?

The consensus today seems to lead to the following situation: from the standpoint of political organizations, there is a growing tendency to identify with the explicit demands of the protesters, joining the chorus who ask for more horizontal organizations, less bureaucracy, and the laxity of historical emblems of the Left. While, from the side of the protesters, there seems to be a general distrust of the very idea that there is anything else to listen to behind what is explicitly taking place in a protest and, therefore, a distrust of any political institution which maintains this wager. Our political moment seems to be marked by the rise of a new figure of militancy, one which appears in order to complement the consolidated figure of the corrupted socialist governor. For every penny the latter accepts, undoing in the name of power our belief in the authenticity of his past political commitments, there is a partisan ideal that is rejected by the enlightened new militant on account of its dangerous alienating character.

Our current predicament seems therefore profoundly determined by our incapacity to find a conjunction between the two great axioms of 20th Century’s emancipatory politics: to direct the spontaneous force of masses and to have confidence in the masses. Either we accept the former, and are automatically on the road to opportunistic manipulation of the people’s demands, or the latter, and we weaken or disperse our political institutions, because that is what the contemporary protester demands of the Left. To return once more to psychoanalysis, we find in Lacan’s teaching yet another expression in which could serve a clue of how to think the task which challenges any serious emancipatory political project today. The sentence serves as the title of one of Lacan’s most important and technical essays, written in 1958: The direction of Treatment and the Principle of its Power. If we were to summarize this difficult text in one sentence, it would be something like: the direction of the treatment is on the side of the analyst, but the principle of its power is on the side of the analysand’s speech. If directing an analytical treatment requires the analyst to confront in himself what resists the pulsation of the unconscious, the principle of power of an analysis resides in that dimension of the analysand’s speech which speaks “despite” the speaker – that is, it resides in that point where we cease to recognize ourselves, but our speech goes on. Accordingly, we could say that the challenge we face today, when trying to think the conjunction of the two political maxims mentioned above, is framed by these two vectors: directing the masses requires us to confront what in us resists marking the real openings for political intervention, while the confidence in the masses requires that we trust the true power and potential that shines through the very shortcomings of the spontaneous popular movements.

It is precisely because of the courage to face this crucial political task that the Partia e Fortë (The Strong Party) is today of great interest not only from the standpoint of a renewal of the political situation in Kosovo, but also for anyone who desires to think a new political idea. And, in order to confirm the universal import of the novelty brought about by the Partia e Fortë, we must now turn our attention not so much to Prishtina, but to a certain repetitive trait which has consistently appeared in the political struggles throughout the West, from the Paris riots in 2005 to the more recent events in Rio de Janeiro earlier this year.

2. Rio de Janeiro as a repetition

We have recently gone through what became known in Brazil as the “June Journeys”: a series of large protests which began in June 2013 and brought together hundred thousands of people in the streets of many Brazilian cities. These protests gained their strength and size in great part as a response to the brutality of the police’s reaction to previous, more concise manifestations against the raising of bus fare throughout Brazil. This exponential growth was also followed by an increasing vagueness in the masses’ demands, which was to be expected, given that the great majority of the people involved were either reacting against the State’s violence or joining in a mass movement for the first time in. Nevertheless, such big commotion – and the confrontations with the police which followed – left a lasting mark in the political scenario, paving the way for other protests and strikes, which have been taking place consistently in Rio since June. Two impasses we have previously discerned were both present here: already in the June Journeys an outright and violent rejection of the participation of leftist parties could be seen, justified precisely through the argument that the political leaders only wanted to exploit the movements for the sake of their own agenda. On the other hand, most leftist partisans either joined the chorus against their own political organizations or merely stood by watching resentfully as they were excluded from the political process.

Finally, in the last couple of months, a substitute for the party-form started to appear from within the protests: the so-called “Black Blocs” – organized protesters who distinguished themselves from the other participants by their masks and their use of violence against both the police and public and private property such as banks, shops and the city hall. Rejecting any central organization, the Black Blocs do not claim any direction of political movement, nor do they claim any political ideal as their horizon.

One last point must be added to this panorama: not only did the June Journeys show the rejection of political parties by the protesters, the incapacity of these parties to listen to the truth in this rejection, and the production within the protests of a violent and directionless substitute for organized political institutions, but – more importantly – the protests also showed a staggering lack of participation of the poor. Those whose lives would really be affected by the change in the bus fare – the initial demand of the protests – did not participate in the manifestations, which were led in their substantial majority by the recently expanded middle classes.

We have seen this sequence repeat itself: first, a big commotion led by the middle class, awoken from political slumber by the potential threat of losing the few privileges which distinguish it from the working class, the a first moment which is met by an incapacity of the Left to produce any consistent direction, a failure which, in turn, produces a more violent and aimless substitute, either tainting the political character of the protests or detaching itself from it altogether. The most notable cases thus far have been those of Paris in 2005 and London in 2011, both of which saw the appearance of aimless outburst of violence after mass movements, fighting for the rights of the middle class, dissolved back into the background. But what is there to learn from this repetition?

3. Our emblematic lack of strength

The key point in this sequence is clearly the passage from the first to the second moment: first we have spontaneous mass movements led by the demand to stabilize the small privileges which identify the salaried bourgeoisie, then we have violent protests, without any direct claim to power or change, led by the lower middle classes, destroying and looting precisely those institutions which have failed to maintain the traits which justified their “inclusion out” of the proletariat. In between these two moments, we find a failure of the Left and a failure of the mass movements. The failure of the protests revolves around the structural impasse of a movement organized around the demand not to be reduced to the working class and which suddenly, in order to gain solidity, would need to join forces with the very instance it is striving to get away from. The failure of the Left, on the other hand, is evidently that of not being able to produce a form of organization and an emblem capable of operating this impossible conjunction. Out of this double failure, we witness the proliferation of meaningless violence perpetrated by those who best embody the contradiction at the heart of the movement: the lower middle class, both in need of political organization, if it is to produce any change, and in need of identity and recognition, if it is to really belong to the class it is supposedly a part of.

It is not uncommon for these outbursts of impotent violence to give rise, in a third moment, to a new appreciation of fascism by the working class. And we can now understand why: through the operation which defines fascism – the choice of a particular enemy to stand in for the contradiction at the heart of capitalism – the neo-fascist groups manage to intervene precisely where the Left has failed, organizing the unrecognized lower classes by offering them a way to supplement their lack of recognition through rivalry, thereby substituting the impotent outburst of violence for an insignia of potency and strength. Because the far-Right is not afraid to build up the image of the potent militant, the man who is valuable because he is disciplined in the task of effacing his enemy, it is also able to infuse in the masses those values previously presented as inherently oppressive and extraneous to it – organization, discipline, power – the only ideals capable of truly consolidating a mass movement.

This fascist compromise solution is not the only one to take place in the wake of the Left’s failure. In Brazil, the parallel power exerted by the drug dealers in the slums operates a similar feat, proposing a figure of potency to the young men who have already seen that hard work does not produce any recognition of one’s value and place in brazilian society. The drug factions offer a stage where, armed and organized, the invisible youth from the favelas are seen as soldiers by their community, recognized as dangerous and useful men. But both the illegal and the fascist routes have one thing in common: they are able to produce an emblem which allows the lower classes to recognize themselves as potent actors precisely by staging this potency, by acting it out, either through the fight against a foreign enemy who is supposed to prevent their full inscription into society or through the praise and fear which organized crime installs in the communities which house them.

Such is, then, the failure – and the challenge – at stake today when trying to combine both direction and confidence in the masses: the difficulty of inventing a political emblem which would cut across the demands for identification which distinguish different sectors of the working class while, at the same time, having confidence that such an emblem is capable of evoking passionate discipline and organization in the masses without turning popular power into a totalitarian tendency. In other words, our task is to engage with that monstrous force which has given rise to the seductive figures of the fascist and the drug soldier without ever forgetting that these two types do not mark the success but rather the failure to truly grasp this popular force.

The question posed to us by this repetitive sequence could finally be formulated as follows: what is an emblem that would capture popular potency without its acting out – without the requirement of a foreign enemy as a guarantee of its unity or of crime as a condition for its discipline. Unfashionable as this may seem, what is at stake here is the necessity to think a theory of masculinity, a theory of how to infuse the emblems of the Left with the traits necessary to win over the youth which today is offered only three false alternatives against our current cowardice: to have their power recognized through the power to consume more commodities (middle class), or through their power to fight the imaginary avatars of their impotence to consume (fascism) or to be recognized through the power to imaginarily circumvent the real cause of this impotence (crime).

The Strong Party, however, begins to sketch a true alternative, one that, being compatible with the party-form, might also start to spell out what a form of organization adequate to our current conjuncture would be.

4. Why we need the Strong Party

We all know that classic situation so beautifully orchestrated by the hysteric: with a hint of debauchery, she tells her partner “I want you to act like a man!”, only too aware of the metaphysical conundrum she has just staged for him – after all, if the guy tries to actually be a man, the very actualization of his manly potency will become a proof of its opposite, his impotence, since in acting it out his explicit behaviour would take the place of its potential status, and if he does nothing, the potency does not reveal itself enough to be recognized as such. Since metaphysics always leads to laughter, this common situation is usually quite ridiculous, but it also tells us something about the difficulty at stake in our problem.

In the groundwork of militancy, there is in fact no other destiny for emancipatory politics: very little can be achieved by telling a poor person that one should beware of organization and power, that horizontal organizations are more authentic, or that a true militant does not fall into any ideological “box”. These are either truisms, because poverty is a school of distrust, or useless remarks. This is in fact an important lesson of the lumpenproletariat: the demands of the poor are not actually political, they cannot be divided between a “relative” and an “absolute” struggle, partially seeking the fulfillment of present demands and partially striving to abolish the causes of their poverty. Misery is miserable precisely because there is no positive content marking the place of class struggle as such, no recognized distinction between survival and living. Unable to count either with a praise of fragility or with the reference to a particular positive content, the patient work of militancy in the slums and in the peripheries is confronted with an analogous problem to that of masculinity. If one is asked to act in accordance to a universal political ideal, the actualization of this potency into a particular demand becomes its very opposite, the local fight for private interests (housing, food, health services, so on), proving the impotence of the Left to produce consistent and universal orientations which would not succumb to private interests, whereas if it remains only a looming background with no actuality, it is too bleak and ephemeral to inspire any confidence or organization. No wonder the Left is such a cause for laughter!

But it is only with this laughter in mind that we can fully appreciate the fundamental twist introduced in this scene by the Strong Party. Our tired intuition tells us that this impotence to actualize our ideals should be fixed by conjuring even more general ideals, ones which would effectively survive their passage into actuality and therefore offer themselves as veritable emblems for popular organization. The Strong Party, on the other hand, upholds the paradoxical wager of a politics of pure semblance – rehabilitating the most precious lesson of Stalinism, the Party has confidence in feigning its own potency.

Let us try to understand what is at stake in this wager, and why it is the only strong position today.

We have already seen that, in the repetitive cycle exemplified by the recent events in Rio de Janeiro, a certain insistent failure of the Left to produce emblems capable of capturing the political potential of mass movements leads to the impotent and violent acting out of this potency through non-political means – from fascist groups to organized crime (passing through support groups and disperse complaints). We have then discussed the way this failure is connected with the difficulty of producing an overarching political orientation when its very actualization turns into its opposite, into a proof of the purely local and self-interested demands of the poor, who are concerned solely with their survival, or of the politicians themselves, who are all too easily seduced by the games of power. The question, then, becomes that of thinking an emblem which would resist the passage to actualization without corrupting itself, the thought of a potency whose realization is not impotence. The answer, the Strong Party declares, in the great tradition of our legendary philosopher, Hegel, is in the power of appearance as appearance.

Instead of the corruption of great ideals, the Strong Party has the strength to construct a pure corruption, a corruption without a corrupted idea or object, instead of an overinvestment in an authentic emblem leading to fascist discipline, it celebrates a fascism without enemies, and in the place of the substitution of legitimate popular democracy for organized crime, it turns political power itself into a parallel power, lawfulness itself is the crime. This step leads to a veritable “transubstantiation” of impotence into something else, into a strange potency that is confirmed, rather than disproved, by its actual inversion – that is, it leads us from impotence to impossibility. How else are we to call a political organization led not by the empty praise of democracy, honesty and equality – something all candidates, everywhere, in all parties, are all too eager to take up – but by a democratic, honest and egalitarian praise of the failure of these very ideals?

Consider, for example, the following extract from an interview conceded by the Strong Party’s Legendary President, Visar Arifaj. When asked about what could the Party promise to the people of Prishtina, the President answered:

“We will promise the citizens of Prishtina anything that they want to hear from a candidate. Since our main goal is the citizen’s vote, we will never hesitate to weave sweet sentences and promises for the eradication of all local problems, and even go as far as promises for development. To ensure that the promises are more believable we will explain them in short points on how they can become realized. It’s understood that the explanations will be formulated in a way which will make it look confusing for the common citizen, but at the same time it will look like we know exactly how it will be realized. The impression is everything.” (https://strongparty.wordpress.com/)

What are we to make of this preposterous response? Is the Legendary President mocking us by declaring that his promises only count insofar as they get the elector to vote for the Party – that is, that promises only count as potential promises? Evidently not, since no one could really argue that any of our candidates intend to deliver what they promise or that these promises serve any other purpose than helping with the vote count. But, at the same time, we feel like this is not it, that there is something else at stake, as if he is in fact playing an elusive prank on us, because making explicit the role of promises in the electoral game, not in the form of an accusation, but of an identification, somehow turns this mechanism into its opposite: as an appearance, a promise refers to a potential that is never really going to take place, but as the appearance of an appearance, taking the frustrating outcome of political promises for what these promises essentially are – a political promise is not something we make and later on do not keep, but something whose utterance is already its accomplishment, its failure to take place is nothing but what was said to take place. This is why a promise from the Legendary President Arifaj is always a kept promise: if he enunciates it, then it has already been fulfilled. And what could be a more definitive demonstration of strength and power than that? The ladies – it is well-known – have all surrendered to his charm and might.

This same strategy shines through all the proposals and commitments laid out by the Strong Party in its extensive program, Lorem Ipsum: the transparent house that will be built once the President has been elected, where he will engage in recreational activities while the people join in as spectators (after all, he is enjoying the luxury for their sake), the letters written to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan (“Your approach to green spaces throughout Turkey, especially Gezi Park, stands in full compliance with the Strong Party’s program”) and the soccer players Adnan Jonuzaj (“You, Adnan, need a stable representative. Of a stable country. You need the representation of Pristina city.”), and the constant reaffirmation of Kosovo’s essential political unity (“Because of the high levels of approval that we had for the other parties, it was only logical that the Strong Party would be created, as an umbrella party that would include the best parts of the other parties.”). At all times, the Strong Party practices the unlikely operation of extracting force out of pure semblance (“the impression is everything”), as if harvesting from every circulating fiction a certain indiscernible surface which, despite all cynicism which it harbors as its obverse, nevertheless exists and is universally shared. We all know that public figures praise universal values in appearance, but are, “in their essence”, worried only with their own pockets, and, even worst, we all know that public figures who condition their proposals with an honest and felt admission of their petty little private concerns, while, “deep down”… they continue to be only worried with their own pockets – but what are we to make of our Legendary President, who is selflessly concerned with universalizing pettiness and private gain? We cannot call him neither honest nor dishonest, neither ethical nor unethical: we are ultimately resigned to having to acknowledge him as a true politician.

The novelty of the Strong Party, even more than the surprising electoral success of its first campaign, is the novelty it inaugurates for political thinking. Through this precious experience in Prishtina, we have been exposed to an undeniable strength which until now we have recognized only as a weakness, appearing as the monstrous dimension of different forms of popular acting out. Crime, corruption and power can no longer serve as the universal names of our distrust in the masses and our unwillingness to organize, because it has become possible to extract political consistency out of the debasement that is proper to appearance as such. Through this impossible coincidence between a political idea and its supposedly inevitable perversion, the following paradox has risen to thought: by letting go of the reference to democracy as a future promise, as something yet to come, the Strong Party has invented an already democratic form of organization whose failure to actualize its promises, having no object, fails no one.