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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Will the Coronavirus Change the World? On Gramsci’s ‘Interregnum’ and Zizek’s Ethnocentric Philosophy</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Ramzy Baroud, Romana Rubeo - April 23, 2020<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-line-height4 gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div id="gmail-post-content"><p>The
prophecies are here and it is a foregone conclusion: the
post-coronavirus world will look fundamentally different from anything
that we have seen or experienced, at least since the end of World War
II.</p><p>Even before the ‘curve flattened’ in many countries that have
experienced high death tolls – let alone economic devastation – as a
result of the unhindered spread of the COVID-19 disease, thinkers and
philosophers began speculating, from the comfort of their own
quarantines, about the many scenarios that await us.</p><p>The
devastation inflicted by the coronavirus is likely to be as
consequential as “the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the
Lehman Brothers,” wrote Foreign Policy magazine in a widely read
analysis, <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/20/world-order-after-coroanvirus-pandemic/" target="_blank">entitled</a> ‘How the World Will Look After the Coronavirus Pandemic’.</p><p>While
major newspapers and news media outlets jumped on the bandwagon of
trying to construct the various post-coronavirus possibilities, Foreign
Policy sought the views of twelve thinkers, each providing their own
reading of the future.</p><p>Stephen M. Walt concluded that “COVID-19 will create a world that is less open, less prosperous, and less free”.</p><p>Robin
Niblett wrote that it is “highly unlikely… that the world will return
to the idea of mutually beneficial globalization that defined the early
21st century”.</p><p>‘Mutually beneficial’ is a phrase deserving of a
completely different essay, as it is a claim that can easily be
contested by many small and poor countries.</p><p><strong>READ: <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200414-spreading-the-virus-of-occupation-spitting-as-a-weapon-in-the-hand-of-colonial-israel/">Spreading the virus of occupation: Spitting as a weapon in the hand of colonial Israel </a></strong></p><p>Be
that as it may, globalization was a focal point of discussion among
many of the twelve thinkers, although a major point of contention was
whether globalization will remain in place in its current form, whether
it will be redefined or discarded altogether.</p><p>Kishore Mahbubani
wrote that, “the COVID-19 pandemic will not fundamentally alter global
economic directions. It will only accelerate a change that had already
begun: a move away from US-centric globalization to a more China-centric
globalization”.</p><p>And so on…</p><p>While political economists
focused on COVID-19’s impact on major economic trends, globalization and
the resultant shift of political power, environmentalists <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/11/positively-alpine-disbelief-air-pollution-falls-lockdown-coronavirus" target="_blank">emphasized</a>
the fact that the quarantine, which has affected the vast majority of
the world’s population, raises hopes that it might not be too late for
Planet Earth after all.</p><div id="gmail-attachment_395783" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://i1.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/IMG_0654-scaled.jpg?fit=933%2C583&quality=85&strip=all&ssl=1" alt="Stay home is the official advice to tackle coronavirus, but what if you don't have a home? - Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="451" height="282"></p><p class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Stay
home is the official advice to tackle coronavirus, but what if you
don’t have a home? – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]</p></div><p>Numerous articles, citing scientific research and accompanied by photo galleries that illustrate the blue skies over <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-air-pollution-lockdown-a9460841.html" target="_blank">Delhi</a> and the clean waters of <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/coronavirus/venice-canals-clear-dolphins-swim-italy-lockdown/" target="_blank">Venice</a>, all underline the point that the upcoming ‘change’ will prove most consequential for the environment.</p><p>With
prophecies afoot, even discredited philosophers such as Slavoj Zizek,
tried to stage a comeback, offering their own predictions of
‘ideological viruses’, including “the virus of thinking about an
alternate society, a society beyond nation-state, a society that
actualizes itself in the forms of global solidarity and cooperation”.</p><p>In his article, published in the German newspaper Die Welt, Zizek <a href="https://www.welt.de/kultur/article206269547/Corona-Epidemic-The-End-of-the-World-As-We-Know-It.html" target="_blank">proposes</a>
what he describes as a ‘paradox’: while COVID-19 constitutes a ‘blow to
capitalism’ it “will also compel us to re-invent communism based on
trust in the people and in science”.</p><p>Ironically, only a few years
ago, Zizek, who is often referred to as a ‘celebrity philosopher’,
advocated an ethnocentric discourse targeting refugees, immigrants and
Muslims.</p><p>“I never liked this humanitarian approach that if you
really talk with them (meaning war refugees who sought safety in Europe)
you discover we are all the same people,” Zizek said in his book
‘Refugees, Terror and other Troubles with the Neighbors’. “No, we are
not — we have fundamental differences.”</p><p>In an article discussing Zizek’s book, published in <a href="https://qz.com/767751/marxist-philosopher-slavoj-zizek-on-europes-refugee-crisis-the-left-is-wrong-to-pity-and-romanticize-migrants/" target="_blank">Quartz</a>,
Annalisa Merelli wrote, “Following the terrorist attacks in Paris in
2015, Zizek warned that liberals need to let go of the taboos that
prevent open discussion of the problems that come from admitting people
of different cultures to Europe, and in particular the denial of any
public safety danger caused by refugees.”</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200407-solidarity-in-the-age-of-coronavirus-what-the-arabs-must-do/">Solidarity in the age of coronavirus: What the Arabs must do </a></strong></p><p>This
supposedly ‘Marxist philosopher’ went even further, borrowing from
Christian theology in explaining that “the Christian motto ‘love your
neighbor as yourself’ is not as simple as it appears,” criticizing the
alleged ‘prohibition’ by some leftist circles of “any critique of
Islam”.</p><p>“It is a simple fact that most of the refugees come from a
culture that is incompatible with Western European notions of human
rights,” Zizek wrote, conveniently omitting that it is Western
imperialism, colonialism and wars of economic dominance that have been
the main triggers of Middle Eastern crises for at least a century.</p><p>It
would be safe to assume that Zizek’s unorthodox ‘reinvention of
communism’ excludes millions of refugees who are paying the price, not
for the ills of ‘the global economy’ – as he conveniently proposes – but
for war-driven Western hegemony and neo-colonialism.</p><p>Our
seemingly-disproportionate emphasis on Zizek’s unsettling ideas is only
meant to illustrate that ‘celebrity philosophy’ is not only useless in
this context, but also a distraction from a truly urgent discussion on
the mechanics of equitable change in society, a process currently
hindered by war, racism, xenophobia, and populist-centric far-right
ideologies.</p><p>In truth, it is far easier to predict the future of
globalization or air-pollution when analysts are confronted with
straight-forward indicators – technological advancement, exports,
currency valuation, and air quality.</p><p>But speaking of the
reinvention of society, with little credibility to boot, is the
equivalence of intellectual guesswork, especially when the so-called
intellectual is almost entirely detached from the trials of everyday
society.</p><p>The problem with most analyses of the various ‘futures’
that lie ahead is that very few of these predictions are predicated on
an honest examination of the problems that have plagued our past and
afflicted our present.</p><p>But how are we to chart a better
understanding and a suitable response to the future and its many
challenges if we do not truly and honestly confront and dissect the
problems that have taken us to this dismal point of global crisis?</p><p>We
concur. The future will bring about change. It ought to. It must.
Because the status quo is simply unsustainable. Because the wars in
Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan; the Israeli occupation of
Palestine; the dehumanization and economic strangulation of Africa and
South America, and so on, must not be allowed to become an everyday
occurrence.</p><p>But for that better, more equitable future to arrive,
our understanding of it must be situated within a historically valid,
ideologically defensible, and humane view of our troubled world, of
ourselves and of others – and not within the detached and callous view
of mainstream Western economists or celebrity philosophers.</p><div id="gmail-attachment_391315" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://i1.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/IMG_0461-scaled.jpg?fit=933%2C583&quality=85&strip=all&ssl=1" alt="Coronavirus is affecting the whole world, will it unite us - Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]" width="933" height="583"></p><p class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Coronavirus is affecting the whole world, will it unite us? – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]</p></div><p>It
is indeed strange how Zizek and his like can still embrace an
ethnocentric view of Europe and Christianity while still being viewed as
‘communist’. What strange breed of communism is this ideology that does
not acknowledge the centrality and history of global class struggles?</p><p>If
we are to place the Marxist class struggle within broader and more
global terms, it is befitting and tenable, then to assume that Western
powers have historically represented the ‘ruling classes’, while the
colonized and historically oppressed Southern hemisphere makes up the
‘subordinate classes’.</p><p>It is this dynamic of oppression, usurpation and enslavement that fueled the ‘engine of history’ – the <a href="http://routledgesoc.com/category/profile-tags/historical-materialism" target="_blank">Marxist notion</a> that history is propelled by internal contradictions within the system of material production.</p><p>It
would be simply naive to assume that an outbreak of a pandemic can
automatically and inexorably, in itself, propel and produce change, and
that such a romanticized ‘change’ will intuitively favor the
‘subordinate classes’, whether within local societal structures or at a
global level.</p><p>There is no denial that the current crisis – whether
economic or within the healthcare system – is fundamentally a
structural crisis that can be traced to the numerous fault-lines within
the capitalist system, which is enduring what Italian anti-fascist
intellectual and politician Antonio Gramsci refers to as ‘interregnum’.</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200303-a-terrifying-scenario-coronavirus-in-quarantined-gaza/">A Terrifying Scenario: Coronavirus in ‘Quarantined’ Gaza </a></strong></p><p>In
his ‘Prison Notebooks’, Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely
in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this
interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”</p><p>The
‘variety of morbid symptoms’ were expressed in the last two decades in
the gradual decay, if not decimation, of the very global system that was
constructed ever so diligently by capitalist Western forces, which
shaped the world to pursue their own interests for nearly a century.</p><p>The <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/06/20/everything-you-think-you-know-about-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union-is-wrong/" target="_blank">collapse</a>
of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s was meant to usher in a whole new
world – uncontested, militaristic to the core and unapologetically
capitalist. Little of that has actualized, however. The first US-led <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/the-first-iraq-war-1990-1991/a-16763334" target="_blank">Iraq military adventure</a> (1990-91), the parallel ‘new world order’ and subsequent ‘new Middle East’, and so on, ultimately, amounted to naught.</p><p>Frustrated
by its inability to translate its military and technological
superiority to sustainable dominance on the ground, the US and its
Western allies fell apart at a much faster rate than ever expected.
Barack Obama’s administration’s ‘<a href="https://www.countercurrents.org/baroud100414.htm" target="_blank">Pivot to Asia</a>’
– accompanied by military retreat from the oil-rich Middle East – was
only the beginning of an inevitable course of decline that no US
administration, however belligerent and irrational, can possibly stop.</p><p>Largely
helpless before relentless crises facing the once-triumphant capitalist
order, dominant Western institutions, the likes of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU), grew useless and
dysfunctional. No prophecies are required here to assume that the
post-coronavirus world will further undermine the very idea behind the
EU. Interestingly, although not surprisingly, the ‘European community,’
at the time of Europe’s greatest crisis since World War II, turned out
to be a farce, since it was China and Cuba that <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/03/25/821345465/for-help-on-coronavirus-italy-turns-to-china-russia-and-cuba" target="_blank">extended</a> a helping hand to Italy and Spain, not Germany, France or the Netherlands.</p><p>It
is rather ironic that the very forces that championed economic
globalization – and derided reluctant countries that refused to join in –
are the same as those that are now <a href="https://sgpjournal.mgimo.ru/2019-5/eu-sovereignism-spread-italian-case" target="_blank">advocating</a> some form of sovereignism, isolationism, and nationalism.</p><p>This
is precisely the ‘interregnum’ that Gramsci has talked about. It should
not be taken for granted, however, that this political vacuum can be
filled through wishful thinking alone, for real, lasting and sustainable
change can only be the outcome of a mindful process, one that keeps in
mind the nature of future conflicts and our ideological and moral
position in response to these conflicts.</p><p>Celebrity philosophers
certainly do not represent, nor do they earn the right to speak on
behalf of the ‘subordinate classes’ – neither locally nor globally. What
is needed, instead, is a counter ‘cultural hegemony’, championed by the
true representatives of oppressed societies (minorities united by
mutual solidarity, oppressed nations, and so on), who must be aware of
the historical opportunity and challenges that lie ahead.</p><p>A distinct symptom of ‘<a href="https://isreview.org/issue/108/morbid-symptoms" target="_blank">interregnum</a>’
is the palpable detachment exhibited by the masses towards traditional
ideologies – a process which has begun much earlier than the outbreak
of the coronavirus.</p><div id="gmail-attachment_394478" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/20200329_2_41614143_53474270.jpg?fit=933%2C622&quality=85&strip=all&ssl=1" alt="" width="933" height="622"></p><p class="gmail-wp-caption-text">A
group of volunteer youth carry out disinfections works at Cold River
Camp as part of coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic precautions, in Khan
Yunis, Gaza on March 29, 2020. ( Mustafa Hassona – Anadolu Agency )</p></div><p>“If
the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e., is no longer ‘leading’
but only ‘dominant,’ exercising coercive force alone, this means
precisely that the great masses have become detached from their
traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe
previously”, Gramsci wrote.</p><p>Admittedly, there is a problem with
true democratic representation all over the world, due to the rise of
military dictatorships (as in the case of Egypt), and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/hating-muslims-loving-zionists-israel-model-190322145619468.html" target="_blank">far-right populism</a> (as in the case of the US, various Western countries, India and so forth).</p><p>Bearing
all of that in mind, simply counting on ‘trust in the people and in
science’ – as disconcertingly prescribed by Zizek – will neither
‘re-invent communism’, restore democracy or redistribute wealth fairly
and equitably among all classes. And, needless to say, it will not bring
the Israeli occupation to an end or humanely end the global refugee
crisis.</p><p>In fact, the opposite is true. Under the cover of trying
to control the spread of the coronavirus, several governments have
carried out <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/24/wartime-coronavirus-powers-state-of-emergency" target="_blank">authoritarian measures</a> that merely aim at strengthening their grip on power, as was the case in Hungary and Israel.</p><p>Not
that Hungary and Israel have been governed according to high democratic
standards prior to the spread of the coronavirus. The collective panic
that resulted from the high death-toll of a barely understood disease,
however, served as the needed collective ‘shock’ – see Naomi Klein’s ‘<a href="https://naomiklein.org/the-shock-doctrine/" target="_blank">Shock Doctrine</a>’
– required by authoritarian regimes to seize the moment and to further
erode any semblance of democracy in their own societies.</p><p>Following
each and every global crisis, analysts, military strategists and
philosophers take on whatever available platform to prophesize seismic
changes and speak of paradigm shifts. Some even go as far as declaring
the ‘<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/21/bring-back-ideology-fukuyama-end-history-25-years-on" target="_blank">end of history</a>’, ‘<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?next_url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.washingtonpost.com%2fwp-srv%2fstyle%2flongterm%2fbooks%2fchap1%2fclashofcivilizations.htm" target="_blank">clashes of civilizations</a>’, or, as in the case of Zizek, a new form of communism.</p><p><strong>READ: <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200421-covid-19-and-the-oil-market-crash-spell-the-end-for-us-hegemony-and-the-petrodollar/">Covid-19 and the oil market crash spell the end for US hegemony and the petrodollar </a></strong></p><p>French
critic and journalist, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (born November
1808), has once written that “the more things change, the more they
continue to be the same thing”.</p><p>Indeed, without a people-propelled
form of change, the status quo seems to constantly reinvent itself,
restoring its dominance, cultural hegemony and undemocratic claim to
power.</p><p>Undeniably, the global crisis invited by the outbreak of
the coronavirus epidemic embodies within it the opportunity of
fundamental change (towards greater equality or greater
authoritarianism), or no change at all.</p><p>It is us, the people, and our true authentic voices – the ‘<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/04/palestines-organic-intellectuals/" target="_blank">organic intellectuals</a>’,
not the celebrity philosophers – who have the right and the moral
legitimacy to rise up to reclaim our democracy and redefine a new
discourse on a global, not ethnocentric, form of justice.</p><p>It is either that we exercise this option, or the current ‘interregnum’ will fizzle out into yet another missed opportunity.</p><p><br></p> </div></div></div>
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