This text echoes the analyses we develop at The Workshop based on a living communalist social ecology, oriented towards the reconstruction of free and confederated communes.
By contrasting the “fantasy of deliverance” with the quest for autonomy, Nicolas Caseaux—following in the footsteps of Aurélien Berlan—highlights a central confusion: equating freedom with exemption from material and political necessities. This conception, present in both liberalism and certain contemporary forms of Marxism (including that of Slavoj Žižek), tends to perpetuate the very structures of domination.
Social ecology, on the contrary, asserts that there can be no freedom without collective reappropriation of the material conditions of existence, without direct democracy on a human scale, without institutions rooted in communities capable of deciding for themselves—what we call free and confederated communes. State centralization, industrialism, and the technobureaucratic megamachine are not neutral instruments: they engender hierarchy, alienation, and dispossession, and now carry within them a deadly dynamic.
We are therefore relaying this text because it poses a decisive question: can we want emancipation while preserving the social forms that make domination inevitable?
To break free from the myth of deliverance is to reopen the path to a transformation based on material autonomy, direct democracy, and respect for the limits of nature, of which we are, in a world turned right side up, a conscious and responsible part.
Cover: Fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), participate in a military parade during the funeral of a fellow fighter, killed during a military mission, in the Kurdish-controlled city of Qamishly in northeastern Syria, on November 11, 2018. – The Kurdish-led force SDF, joint Arab-Kurdish units backed by the US-led anti-jihadist coalition said today that it was resuming its offensive against the Islamic State (IS) group in eastern Syria. They had announced a suspension to their operation on October 31 after Turkey shelled Kurdish militia posts in northern Syria. (Photo by Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP) (Photo credit should read DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP/Getty Images)
Nicolas Casaux || Doctor of Letters, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, Visiting Professor at New York University, Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School (EGS), a prestigious private university located in Switzerland, Slavoj Žižek is—paradoxically—one of the world’s best-known left-wing thinkers.
Why “paradoxically”? Because if left-wingers really understood what the state and capitalism are, if the left were truly the camp that opposes systems of domination, just by reading his CV, a guy like Žižek would immediately be seen for the impostor that he is. You don’t dabble in the upper echelons of the international academic institution without being (largely) a useful product (in other words, a useful idiot) of the system. The system—the state, capitalism—that designed the university as a means of producing the workforce and cultural conditioning it needs (as “a means of directing political and moral opinions,” as one of the founding fathers of the modern university put it). The more an individual is laden with degrees and prestigious academic positions, the more suspicious they should be in the eyes of those who claim to oppose the dominant institutions.
But in a world turned upside down, left-wingers don’t understand anything, and the left essentially serves as an industry for recuperating and recycling protest for the benefit of technocapitalism.
And so the brave Žižek, as a good communist knighted by the academic institution of the state and capitalism, detests the idea of small, self-governing, local communities that are technically rudimentary. As a good communist, he wants large organizations and/or large machines to take charge of society. And most of the most renowned left-wing thinkers think like him. Socialists or communists like Žižek see the state, capitalism, and technological development as factors of “liberation, emancipation from the ‘reign of necessity,’” ,” as Aurélien Berlan puts it in his excellent book Terre et Liberté – La quête d’autonomie contre le fantasme de délivrance (Land and Freedom: The Quest for Autonomy Against the Fantasy of Deliverance, La Lenteur, 2021). All the quotations I use in the rest of this text are taken from the same book.
Like “all supporters of industrial progress, whether they be left-wing or right-wing, Marxist or liberal,” Žižek adheres to a conception of freedom as liberation “from the material and sociopolitical ‘necessities’ of human life.” For all these people, freedom is associated with “being freed from, exempted from a number of painful tasks related to our condition as ‘political animals’. It seems that these tasks are of two kinds. Either they are political obligations in the broad sense, linked to human plurality and what follows from it: the necessary coexistence with others, which is so difficult to do without, but which is so difficult to bear. Or they are demands related to our material and physical life, that is, to our animal nature, to the fact that we are not pure spirits, but living beings who feel needs, pleasure, and suffering, and are subject to illness and death. “
In other words, their conception of freedom is an ”obsessive desire to be freed from the burdens traditionally associated with the human condition, […] from the material necessities of daily life, […] which are time-consuming and generally considered tedious: obtaining food, drink, and heating, cooking, cleaning, washing dishes and doing laundry, caring for the dependent people around us (young children, elderly parents, sick or disabled relatives, etc.), building and maintaining our homes, etc.“ To be relieved ”of the burden of political activities, with all that they entail in terms of conflict and compromise with others, endless meetings and ‘daily discussions’ .“
The result is not ‘moderate’ or ”reasonable” alienation, as Žižek and his epigones foolishly hope, but an oppressive system of domination.
For “to be freed from the necessities of daily life, the only way is to offload onto others the efforts necessary to satisfy our needs, that is, to make them do the corresponding tasks. This means coercing them, by force and/or other stratagems: in practice, material deliverance comes through social domination. It is even its hallmark, more reliable than physical violence. For a person in a position of domination may never have to resort to force themselves, either because they delegate it or because the awareness that violence hangs over their heads is enough for the dominated to agree to take care of some of their masters’ needs. On the other hand, history shows that the dominant have always offloaded a number of material tasks onto the groups they dominated, whether women, slaves, serfs, or workers. They make them do routine domestic tasks and hard work and, ideally, they have some of them, whether stewards, foremen, or police officers, do the work of supervising and repressing their subordinates, so that they too are relieved of these tedious and painful political tasks.
To dominate, therefore, is to make others do things. In this expression, the two occurrences of the verb “to do” do not have the same meaning. While the second refers to actual “doing,” i.e., a physical activity (in general, this occurrence is replaced by the verb denoting the practice in question: having one’s clothes washed, building one’s house, etc.), the first is in fact synonymous with “giving the order to.” Those who “make others do” things do nothing themselves; they simply tell them what to do. By linking the question of command to that of delivery, this expression constitutes the key formula of social domination, which is always based on the separation between those who do and those who make others do. “
Thus, by ”making the work of some available to those who have the financial means to appropriate it, the market effectively makes the poor available to the rich. It is a mechanism that increases the power of those who have money, over things as well as people.
And what idiots like Žižek refuse to see (partly, no doubt, because their comfortable salaries and social positions dissuade them from doing so) is that “failing to bring freedom to all,
Western modernity has in fact spread a disastrous conception of emancipation in which exemption from the tasks of subsistence, which has always characterized the ruling classes, has ended up eclipsing the original goal of abolishing social domination. And by supporting industrial development in the imagination, this conception is also one of the vectors of the ongoing ecological disaster. This is why the “natural question” cannot be separated from the “social question”: “End of the world, end of the month, same fight!”
Because, in fact, this aspiration to be freed from the material necessities of life has always characterized the ruling classes, not the working classes (“the working classes did not so much want to be freed from work as from the oppression and overwork that the powerful imposed on them in order to relieve themselves of ‘menial material tasks’), nor did indigenous, tribal, hunter-gatherer societies, etc. All of these aspired and still aspire to another kind of freedom, the only one worthy of the name.
” For the working classes, emancipation does not mean being freed from the tasks of daily life, but abolishing relations of domination. Hence, throughout history, these “recurring struggles to defend common goods and the right to land,” these “attempts to seek elsewhere the conditions for freedom,” which “testify to a desire to live without a master, not to be relieved of ‘necessity.’”
“To name this freedom, we often speak of autonomy. But it is not just a matter of ‘making one’s own laws’, as the etymology suggests. Under this legal-political meaning, there is now a material significance: ‘providing for one’s own needs’. To speak of food or energy autonomy is in fact to want to take back control of one’s living conditions, to reconnect with the subsistence practices that characterized the lifestyles of the working classes in the West, particularly peasants, until the mid-20th century—and which still characterize part of the population in the Global South. “
Moreover,
”it was the ecofeminists of the ‘subsistence perspective’ who formulated the most accomplished conception of freedom as autonomy. By revaluing subsistence activities (the local production of goods intended to satisfy the needs of those who produce them, as opposed to the industrial manufacture of commodities), they break with the desire for deliverance, which leads to making employees, women, or slaves do what we want without bothering to do it ourselves.“
For these ecofeminists:
”the emancipation of women does not consist in ‘raising’ themselves to the extraterrestrial conception of freedom as ‘transcending necessity’. Not only because such an alignment is an act of intellectual submission (is emancipation following the dominant model?), but because this ideology, by claiming to rise above the immanence of life, can only be deadly, inviting us to deny ourselves as embodied beings.
For [Maria] Mies, female emancipation consists rather in bringing men back down to earth, in making them aware of the realities of everyday life and of the fact that these are no more “external” to them than our bodies are foreign to us. Even if it means speaking the language of “necessity,” which disguises life choices as inevitable facts, we must help men reestablish a “living relationship” with these necessities, to consider them as their necessities as living beings and not as necessities imposed on them from outside. Once the denial of reality has been overcome, it will be easier to share the burden of daily life equitably, as well as the simple joys and pleasures associated with it.
And it will then be possible to imagine another form of freedom—not an acosmic freedom based on transcendence, as in Sartre, but a freedom in the world, as in Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This is the condition for ceasing to identify freedom with domination, as most philosophies of freedom have tacitly done, confusing it with deliverance. Beyond women, this ecofeminist gesture therefore has universal significance.
It is therefore a question of “rebuilding personal interdependencies that make it possible to loosen the stranglehold of anonymous dependencies, and to do so in equality. Autonomy does not consist in fending for oneself, but in being part of a world of mutual knowledge where reciprocal obligations and shared rules weave bonds of solidarity that liberate us from impersonal forms of domination.”
It is a question of “ensuring our own subsistence,” that is, “providing for our own needs, doing things by our own means, and living off our own resources” (principles that governed the lives of the vast majority of humans until the middle of the last century, even in the Western world). This implies fighting against the institutions and systems of domination that are in place. It is impossible to build other worlds “without fighting against the existing order.”
“It is time to counter the absurd image of space conquest as liberation with a conception of freedom that does not seek to transcend our living conditions on earth, but to be compatible with them. In other words, we must free ourselves from the fantasy of deliverance in order to reconcile earth and freedom. To this end, there is no need to innovate, but rather to reconnect with the hidden tradition against which the fantasy of deliverance has imposed itself: the quest for autonomy as championed by the subalterns who were able to reject the alienating lifestyles of the ruling classes. “
”If every society is structured by a certain imaginary, we will not change today’s society without freeing ourselves from the dream that haunts it, that of being delivered from the sociopolitical and material necessities of human life. “
Renewing our collective responsibility for the socio-political and material necessities of human life means dismantling gigantic social organizations, mass societies, in order to recreate societies on a human scale (the kind of society that the Žižeks of this world hate). For the simple reason that small size, human size, is the only size compatible with democracy (“direct” democracy, the other variants being oxymorons). Throughout human history, the only societies in which all members participated directly in the development of the rules they set for themselves were (very) small societies—hunter-gatherer societies, horticultural societies, etc. Size is not just an incidental, secondary issue; it is a (the?) crucial variable. You don’t organize 100 people the same way you organize 10,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000. As the number of people increases, more mechanisms for delegating (confiscating) power must be put in place, and the social structure becomes more rigid.
Renewing collective responsibility for the socio-political and material necessities of human life therefore also implies deindustrializing and de-technologizing human societies. Modern industry and technology, which require a mass society and an immense specialized and hierarchical division of labor, are fundamentally incompatible with democracy (and also, perhaps not coincidentally, with the preservation of nature) .
Terrible irony. If we do not live in truly democratic societies at all, if we are so dispossessed, if the planet is being ruthlessly ravaged, it is because the state, capitalism, and technocracy are pursuing their quest for power, of course, but it is also, in part, because the left has as its intellectual leaders eminent idiots, such as Žižek, who hate and aggressively reject the only social conditions that are truly compatible with individual and collective autonomy, with democracy, and with respect for the biosphere.
To extend the reflection
Since we are discussing Central European philosophy here—in this case, Czech philosophy—rather than sticking to over-hyped figures such as Slavoj Žižek, it would undoubtedly be more enlightening and beneficial to (re)read Karel Kosík, particularly The Dialectic of the Concrete—which is significantly less hyped, which is perhaps no coincidence…
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