From proletarians to plebeians, from plebeians to terrorists

Excerpt from the book by Jacob Rogozinsky "Jihadism"

What are the nutritional roots of modern terrorism, which forces migrants who have come to the West to attack innocent people, and prosperous Europeans - to leave for Syria and join the militants of the “Islamic state” (prohibited in Russia)? According to the French philosopher Jacob Rogozinsky, the matter here is not only in the religious character of Jihad, but also in the social structure of modern society, which has lost the usual class character and consciously not noticed those who were previously ranked for proletarians, and now they have to be called plebeians. Read about this in a fragment of the head of the plebeians and the proletarian from his book Jihadism: back to sacrifice. "

Jacob Rogozinsky. Jihadism: Back to sacrifice. M.: New Literary Review, 2021. Translation from French V. Karateeva . Content

The refusal of recognition makes some young migrants turn to jihadism; The humiliation and the anger that they experience turn into hatred and allow the dispositive of terror to seize themselves. Does this always happen that way? In the conversion, undoubtedly, other reasons, purely religious, play a large role. And how did it happen that the field of attraction of jihadist networks spread much further - not only on the migrant children affected by the discrimination of children? What made so many offspring of the Catholic French bourgeoisie go to fight in Syria? Is it possible to explain everything with sympathy for the “victims” and identification with the vengeful warriors of Jihad? Or maybe here are the consequences of the loss of roots and the crisis of recognition , which are no longer limited to migrant children? Does this favors the appearance and expansion of the dispositive of terror? To get answers, you will need historical, social and political analysis, the volume of which will clearly go beyond the borders of the book. At least, let's denote some points.

The first philosopher to speak about the importance of thirst for recognition in a collective life was Hegel. In his “philosophy of law”, he assigns her a decisive role in the relations of civil society and the state, individuals and political power. He also was the first to indicate those who in the modern era remains excluded from the processes of mutual recognition: this is “an unfortunate mass deprived of property”, whose members cannot achieve recognition as employees or as citizens; The mass, which, being a “victim of this mistake”, “rebels against the rich, society, the government.” He calls her Pöbel , and we translate it like a plebs .

The lack of recognition allows us to explain the ambivalence of plebeian uprisings - a strange conspiracy into which plebs and certain power groups can enter. In past times, plebeians were declassed landless peasants and unemployed artisans, bandits, beggars and tramps - all those who were called poor, nasty and black and whom other members of society refused to recognize as equal to themselves. Living in lawlessness and accustomed to violence, they were always ready to rebel against the authorities and were in the center of any popular uprisings. To the painful absence of recognition, they met the creation of counter -communities - secret fraternities with their own recognition mechanisms: before becoming a criminal group, the Sicilian mafia was an underground community of protesting plebeians. Sometimes these counterates completely rejected society and separated from it in the name of the messianic utopias, nostalgia for the golden age or the approaching end of the world. In addition, plebeians, victims of the lack of horizontal recognition from other classes, can look for vertical recognition in sovereign power. Marx already noted that when Napoleon III seized power, he relied on agitators from Wednesday “Lumpen Proletariat”. The British historian Eric Hobsbaum, who studied ordinary rebels , namely, the uprisings of the plebeians in the XVIII and XIX centuries, emphasized that their “desire to be recognized” led them to the “ardent protection” of their king, king or church, as if, “despite the rags and poverty, the crowd identified itself with the magnificence and radiance” sovereign. So the discharges of society are transformed into identification with the glorious body of the sovereign.

The times will come when the plebeians can no longer identify themselves with the traditional monarchy and massively rally around the figure of the charismatic leader. In the totalitarian movements of the 20th century, the features of the plebeian uprisings of the past are again manifested, and above all - the need for vertical recognition, carried out through the loving identification with the leader. It is directly related to another type of identification described by Freud - negative and deadly: this is a gloomy unity in hatred of the enemy appointed leader. It seems that the scum of society, which are the plebeians, could not break out of their depressing position, except to take up their own likes, which were from now doomed to total exception and destruction.

This process was described in the 1930s Georges Batai, mainly in the article "The psychological structure of fascism." He believed that any homogeneous system inevitably produces a heterogeneous element, extremely ambivalent, at the same time repulsive and sacred. The crisis of bourgeois society - that is, a homogeneous society organized around production - releases powerful, but deeply divided heterogeneous forces. One of his poles appears in the “form of the imperative” of a heterogeneous element striving to establish absolute power. At the other pole, “low forms” are concentrated - the same unfortunate masses, a kind of waste of homogeneous society that cause disgust like dirt and bodily discharge. Nevertheless, they can allow themselves to attract themselves to another pole and connect with the “imperative sovereignty” in the person of the leader sent down by the sky until the formation of a single body with him. So "this outcast mass ceases to be itself in order to become <...> the leader of the leader and as if part of his own body in an affective impulse." Such synthetic embodiment characterizes fascism. It creates a “center of attraction”, capable of attracting scattered elements of other classes to the pole of sovereignty. Its strength lies in the fact that it synthesizes military discipline and religious exaltation, since "the religious value of the leader is actually the fundamental value of fascism." This synthesis underlies everything that other thinkers characterized as a “political religion” - one of those secular religions on which totalitarian movements are based. At the same time, Batay claims that the “subverse” attraction is opposed by the “subversive” attraction, the focus of which is the proletariat, so that we observe the inexorable confrontation of fascism and the “deep subversion, which still accompanies the liberation of human lives”.

In fact, identification with the figure of sovereign and the inclusion of terror in the dispositives is not the only possible outcome for plebs. In the 19th century, with the development of the working class and large industry, another prospect appeared. Taking themselves the old Latin name “proletariat”, members of this class also defined themselves as deprived of the property of the outcasts of a bourgeois society. The proletariat was not deprived of a religious and messianic dimension: for example, the young Marx glorified the proletariat as a class that has a “universal character due to the universality of its suffering”, which embodies the “complete loss of a person” and makes the “complete return of a person” possible. He makes him a Messiah, suffering and triumphant the Messiah - the new Christ, and this secular religion will be inspired by proletarian organizations for a long time.

In Western countries, the labor movement will choose a completely different orientation than the past uprisings of the plebeians. Instead of vertical recognition from the sovereign, it will look for conditions for horizontal recognition, more and more involved in the dynamics of the democratic process of modern societies and without refusing at the same time from the project of social emancipation. So, it left the former culture of rebellions and uprisings without looking back at tomorrow and learned the strategy of the struggle to recognize its rights and gain dignity. Getting rid of the heterogeneous plebeian element and partially absorbing it, the labor movement eventually neutralized its charge of violence and sublimated it in the political struggle in the framework of democratic institutions. It managed to offer an alternative to oppression, operation and inequality; To restrain and invert the processes that contributed to the transition from anger to hatred and ended with fatal stripping. Forcing to recognize in the proletariat as a class of the carrier of the universal project of emancipation (what we once called "socialism"), it opened the horizon of hope. The confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, capitalism and socialism became the central axis around which the political field was formed, and the prospect of the “proletarian revolution” (or “transition to socialism”) gave the future struggle - and the meaning of human history.

All this is in the past - after all, we can only wear mourning in the proletariat. If he left our world, then this was partly the result of the mutations of capital and its globalization, the result of which was the dispersal of production and the growing instability in the employment market. The decline in the religion of the proletariat also has political reasons: the labor movement partially compromised itself due to totalitarian drift in communism, and the fall of the Soviet regime only exacerbated the crisis and the process of its decomposition. This does not mean that the working class will cease to exist - but it no longer brings hope for a more fair future. From now on, it is impossible to achieve recognition and respect by involvement in the worker "we". The project of universal emancipation, the guardian of which was this class, has exhausted itself, which destroyed the possibility of universalization of lawlessness , unifying the whole variety of protests in the historical perspective of independence. These circumstances led to unexpected consequences: today we are witnesses to the return of plebs.

Dooming millions to unemployment and despair, the current crisis actually contributes to the emergence of new excluded, which do not find recognition either in old social categories or in political action. The detachments of the working class got rid of the heterogeneous element - new plebeians, who, in turn, split into a few more strata. People who consider themselves a rabble no longer consider themselves to be a working movement, and even more so - for communism fighters or revolutionaries. If they are separated not by the boundaries of the quarter or city, then this makes ethnic origin. In dull suburbs, it is increasingly intertwining with religious differences: to call yourself a Muslim means to identify simultaneously by religious, “racial” and social attribute, as well as declare a group that considers itself excluded and discriminated. Those who suffer from the position of the minority in the land of the kafir are characteristic of identifying themselves in the imagination with the World Ummah, which seems numerous and powerful ... It turns out that the appeal to Islam can be compared with the entry into the Communist Party or extremely left -wing political movements.

It is a mistake to think that most new plebeians are obsessed with hatred. Anger as a result of injustice and the refusal of recognition caused to her - this is what they feel in the first place. Sometimes their protest leads to riots like those that covered our suburbs in 2005. Nevertheless, in the absence of a political project that could give him meaning, he came to a dead end. As soon as the unrest was subsided, they gave way to the feeling of failure and impotent malice. Some following this can allow themselves to attract the dispositive of terror, as it was with Italian and German plebeians in the era of fascism. Interested in the dispositives that amazes our society with maximum cruelty, they find the possibility of revenge, identity and hope. Not that all the rebels inevitably turned into jihadists (we know that this is not so); This only means that the dispositives of terror eats fruitless uprisings and failures in the struggle for integration.

It is obvious that the plebeians from the suburbs become the social base of the jihadists, but why, like other “indigenous” French, the son of a Norman peasant can join ISIS in Syria and become the same executioner? .. It must be admitted that the failure in the traditional structures of recognition and the accompanying despair is so deep that men and women of any origin, age and class, age and classes, are reached. Bringing them to desperate searches of the solution, up to the point that they adjoin the disposctions of terror. How did we come to this? Is it necessary to blame globalization, economic crisis, delicitimation of political action? And in addition, unpromising isolation in the present, the lack of the future, the reason for which was the end of the "large narrative" of the proletariat?

All of the above is important. Nevertheless, it is possible that the historical process, as a result of which to find yourself, get recognition and find your place in the world is becoming more and more difficult, goes much deeper. In old -regime societies, each individual occupied a certain niche and had an identity determined by his belonging to the collective body, headed by Sovereign. This belonging allowed him to live in one (or several) communities where, at the same time recognizing others, he received recognition as a subject of sovereign, but also a member of the family, employee, resident of the city or province, follower of a certain religion, and so on. The idea of ​​society as a great body has simultaneously political and religious dimensions, since it answers - at least in the West - the Christian concept of the Church as a mystical body of Christ.

It is this organic total that began to decompose with the advent of the revolutions of the modern type. As Claude Lefort showed, the development of democracy in modern times coincided with the process of dismemberment , when society and individual individuals began to evade the inclusion of the government of the state in a single body. Having gained freedom, they at the same time lost confidence in stable identity and their place in society. The decomposition was accompanied by the loss of identification, a sense of involvement and, I will add from myself, “bewildering” or, rather, the loss of faith capable of destroying the religious foundation of the political - and maybe the foundations of any religious belief. So the modern man of the West arose, devoid of connections and roots, which cannot achieve recognition in either others or the other and from this suffers.

As traditional societies weakened, the process of decomposition led to erasing the boundaries between his own personality and other, internal and external, his and strangers; This made differences between political parties and the grounds for the interclass struggle with less stable (and distinguishable). The political field is increasingly a homogeneous “system”, where old conflicts disappear, “everything is rotten” and all - accomplices ... Right and left -wing parties replace each other in power to pursue the same policy. The neutralization of antagonisms does not allow the victims of crises - those who live as excluded - to express their dissatisfaction through democratic institutions. Thus, it gives the course of “anti -system” uprisings, splashes of anger, or, in some cases, joining the movements of a total rupture calling for destroying the alleged “system” through violence and terror. From the anarchist terrorist attacks at the beginning of the 20th century to the Italian “red brigades” and jihadists in the process of democratic patients, they arose from time to time as its bloody exposure. Will terror become an “insurmountable horizon” of modern democracy - the threat that its dynamics itself gives rise to and which it is forced to resist?