Few days before the new year's eve, Michael Lwy visited Athens and spoke in the

RNB's event on the crisis of democracy. His intervention on the current conjuncture
was an good chance for a more demanding- though equally interesting- discussion
about his work, his theoretical choices and his involvement in the International
Ecosocialist Network. With background the ongoing crisis, we had the opportunity to
discuss with him about Brecht and Benjamin, Lukcs and Gramsci, Poulantzas and
the tradition of revolutionary romanticism.

G. Souvlis: According to Gramsci, any political force that is aiming to transcend the
present order of things is necessary to get detached from the pseudo-dilemmas posed
by the dominant rhetoric and raise, instead, its own questions that are challenging
substantially the existing order of things. Which are questions that the left should pose
in the conjuncture of the ongoing crisis?

M. Lwy: I entirely agree with Gramscis argument. We must get rid of the mock-
dilemmas of the official discourse, of the dominant doxa : free exchange or
protectionism, liberal globalization or national development, growth or
depression, Europe or nonEurope, brutal right-wing neo-liberalism or compassionate
left-center socialliberalism. The questions that the left should raise should be radical
ones : isnt this crisis systemic ? To be radical is to go after the roots of the crisis, and
the root is the capitalist system itself. So the next question should be : how can we get
rid of this system, which necessarily produces crisis, unemployment, brutal inequality,
wars, and depressions. How can be build an anti-systemic force, able to put an end to
capitalism?

G. Souvlis: In your study Fire Alarms: Reading Walter Benjamin's "One the concept
of History" you argue that: "The Nostalgic gaze in the past does not imply necessarily
backwardness: counter-revolution and revolution coexist as potential forms of the
romantic view of the world. For the revolutionary romanticism, the point at issue is
not the returning to the past but a change of course towards a utopian future". Given
the increasing disintegration of the neoliberal paradigm and its value forms, do you
believe that the left could draw upon the romantic tradition in order to gap the "value
lacunae" that have been emerged?
M. Lwy: Revolutionary romanticism only visits the past in its movement toward the
utopian future; nostalgia of the lost paradise is invested in the hope of a radically new
future. Marx wrote in Misery of Philosophy (1847) that values that once were given
or transmitted but never bought, such as virtue, love, opinon, consciousness, are now,
under capitalism, being brought to the market to the sold for their price. We can think
of many such values that once existed - human dignity, integrity, friendship,
solidarity - and one must add also the new values brought by the modern revolutions
but betrayed by the bourgeoisie : Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. There is no room for
qualitative ethic or cultural values in capitalism, a system that reduces everything to a
quantative - monetary measure.

G. Souvlis: Walter Benjamin wrote "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the
'emergency situation', in which we live, is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of
history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is
the introduction of a real state of emergency". What kind of "emergency situation"
should introduce the anticapitalist left in the present conjuncture;

M. Lwy: We have at the moment in Europe a sort of economic/political state of

exception in the sense of Carl Schmitt. But who is the sovereign that has the right to
proclaim, according to Schmitt, the state of exception ? Today, the absolute and total
sovereign in Europe is, as we all know, the global financial market. It is they, and not
any elected officials, that dictate to each country the wages and pensions, the cuts in
social expenses, the privatisations, the rate of unemployment. Democracy, in any real
sense, has become a luxury that the ruling classes cannot afford anymore. The true
state of exception, or emergency situation that we have to provoke, would mean
breaking the iron grip of financial capital over our lives. This would require the
common action of the victims of the system, workers, unemployed, women, youth,
immigrants, students. Anti-capitalist consciousness is on the rise worldwide, but we
are still far from being able to create a real state of exception.
G. Souvlis: In the well-known Brecht's play The Life of Galileo the protagonist,
Galileo, says: "I maintain that the only purpose of science is to ease the hardship of
human existence. If scientists, intimidated by self-seeking people in power, are
content to amass knowledge for the sake of knowledge, then science can become
crippled, and your new machines will represent nothing but new means of oppression.
With time you may discover all that is to be discovered, and your progress will only
be a progression away from mankind". Do you find analogies between Galileo's quote
and the stance of the intellectuals today?

M. Lwy: For a long time now knowledge, science, technology and new machines
have been used by the ruling classes to oppress the subaltern, exploit them, and, worst
of all, kill them in their imperialist wars. Isnt the atomic bomb of Hiroschima a
terrible exemple of this capitalist use of science and technology ? At the same time,
there has always been, and still are, scientists and intellectuals that put their
knowledge at the service of human aims. They inevitably clash with the system. An
astonishing example is the brutal campaign by reactionary politicians, media and
think-tanks - all generously financed by oil and chemical interests - against the
scientists that have been warning us of the catastrophic dangers of climate change.
The Bush government tried to silence the chief climatologist of NASA, James
Hansen, because of his alarming reports on global warming. Unlike the Inquisition in
Galileos times, it did not succeed

G. Souvlis: Given your collaboration with Nicos Poulantzas at the University of Paris
VIII, could you tell us what do you think about his work? Does it speak to the current
conjuncture?

M. Lwy: His theoretical works are an important contribution for the understanding
of the functioning of capitalist states, particularly concerning the issue of the
autonomy of the state in relation to the economy and the social classes. Poulantzas
fought against economicist interpretations of Marxism and thus provided us with a
more relevant approach to political issues from a materialist historical position. I
didnt agree with all his theoretical arguments - he was sympathetic to Althusser,
while I sided with Lukacs - but he was a most anti-dogmatic character. Perhaps even
more important are his last political writings, which put the issue of democracy at the
center of any socialist project. We had many discussions and even public debates on
the issue of breaking up the capitalist state, but reading again his last book one is
impressed by the relevance of his arguments for socialist democracy.

G. Souvlis: One epistemological constant of your work is this of "absolute

historicism". Would you like to comment on the implications of this aspect of your
studies?

M. Lwy: Well, following Lukacs, Gramsci, as well as my teacher Lucien Goldmann,

I believe that the Marxist method is fundamentally a historical one. One cannot
understand any economic, political or cultural fact if we pretend to ignore the
historical process that produced it. Historicism also means that present structures,
whether economical or political are transient, and may be transformed or superseded
in the future. One of the main arguments of Marx against bourgeois political economy
in Capital is that they believe that history existed in the past but not in the present : for
them the capitalist system is natural, and therefore eternal.

G. Souvlis: You participate in the Ecosocialist International Network, would like to

tell us a bit about it? Which aims it has?

M. Lwy: The International Ecosocialist Network (EIN) is a modest, but helpful,

attempt to create links between people around the world that believe in the need of an
ecosocialist alternative to the capitalist ecological disaster. It was founded at a
conference in Paris in 2007, and took its inspiration from the International
Ecosocialist Manifesto written in 2001 by Joel Kovel and myself. In 2008, the
Network issued a document, the International Ecosocialist Declaration of Belem,
signed by hundreds of persons around the world which was distributed in English and
Portuguese at the World Social Forum of Belem do Para (Brazil), thanks to the help of
our friends from the Brazilian Ecosocialist Network. The Belem Declaration was
mainly concerned with the issue of global warming, a consequence of the capitalist
logic of infinite expansion, and in presenting the ecosocialist alternative. EIN was also
present in Copenhagen in 2009, where it organized a debate on ecosocialism and
distributed at the demonstrations an illustrated leaflet on the consequences of climate
change . More information can be gathered from the site ecosocialistnetwork.org

G. Souvlis: Would you like to tell us which is the impact of crisis upon the French
society and which - if there are at all- movements have been developed as a response
to it?

M. Lwy: The financial crisis has been used by the French government of Mister
Sarkozy as an alibi to impose unpopular and regressive so-called reforms, such as
obliging aged workers to remain for several years more at their jobs before they can
retire - therefore aggravating the unemployment of young people, which has attained
unprecedent levels in France. Popular reaction was quite impressive in 2010, with
mass strikes and demonstrations, and a very important participation of young people,
but the government ignored the protest as well as public opinion - overwhelmingly
opposed to the reform- since he was only interested in the opinion of the financial
markets. The popularity of M. Sarkozy has fallen to historically unprecedent low
level.