Five Conversations with Srećko Horvat

 

This is the  49th in a series of dialogues with artists, writers, and critical thinkers on the question of violence. This conversation is with Srećko Horvat, a Croatian philosopher, writer, and political activist. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, After the Apocalypse (Polity Press, 2021), and is co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25).

 
BRAD EVANS: Let’s begin this conversation with the apocalypse, which is the focus for your latest book. That we live in apocalyptic times, with the long duress of its catastrophes and modes of redemption, seems pretty self-evident. Indeed, as you note in the book, the fact that dystopian fictions have been effectively moved into the realm of current affairs is more than revealing. But I’d like to ask what the term “apocalypse” actually means to you, and why does it deserve our attention right now?
 
SREĆKO HORVAT: In an age of hyper-inflation of the very term “Apocalypse,” I think it’s necessary to go back to the original Greek meaning of apokalýp(tein), with apo- (meaning the prefix “un-”) and kalyptein (meaning “to cover or conceal”). So in that sense I understand the Apocalypse first and foremost as the “unveiling” of something, unlike the prevailing contemporary usage of the term as if it means the “end of the world.” In the book, I go so far to say that we actually live not so much in apocalyptic but in post-apocalyptic times. The Apocalypse as “revelation” about the end of the world (as we know it) the already happened, or to be more precise, it was “unveiled.” One of the most recent ones was the pandemic, and just like every planetary event — take the plague and its role in the demise of feudalism or even the eruption of volcano Laki on Iceland which created the fertile ground for the French Revolution — this event revealed so much about our current capitalist world system, or the Capitalocene. What I’m interested in is to move back to the future, what if even this pandemic was just a footnote for what comes after this Apocalypse? Namely, Extinction. And what if, even if we are aware that we are living in the “End-Time,” we are not able to see it anymore?
 
Yes, we see it all the time, so many horrors all around the world, there is even a rather recent term “doomscrolling” that became quite popular during our current pandemic. But as everyone knows, the Apocalypse can become rather exhausting. You can find it sublime, enjoy gazing at a painting by J. M. W. Turner or Children of Men, but when you are already living in the painting with red skies due to wildfires or in dystopian UK that resembles Alfonso Cuarón’s prophetic masterpiece, how much more can you enjoy it? Then, you can respond to it, by compulsive activity, whether it’s by “doomscrolling” or washing hands. Or you can join the new commodification of the Apocalypse, from postapocalyptic tourism (Chernobyl or melting ice tours) to children’s toys (take Lego’s Apocalypseburg). Or you can build a bunker in New Zealand or construct escape plans to Mars. But in the end, you become blind toward the Apocalypse. Whenever you commodify something, whether it is love or the Apocalypse, you lose the ability to really understand it. This is why Günther Anders, a still neglected thinker who deeply influenced my last years of navigating through the Apocalypse, speaks of “apocalyptic blindness” (Apokalypse Blindheit), because what is at stake is simply too big to comprehend, it is not subliminal, but supraliminal, it goes beyond all known limits.
 
BD :
 
When thinking about the apocalypse in more biblical terms, we invariably have to deal directly with extreme violence. And yet what you suggest in the book is the veritable normalization of earlier modes of apocalyptic mindsets (notably once manifest through ideas of nuclear annihilation). What do you think is different about the violence(s) we encounter in these terrifying states of normality today?
 
SH :
Indeed, the Bible is a very violent book. But so are most of the major religious texts. Perhaps we could say that the whole history of humanity including arts — from the early cave paintings — is nothing else but an attempt to make sense of the catastrophe. There is this famous image from the letters of Pliny the Younger, the only historical eyewitness account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, who said that he doesn’t know whether he should call it courage or folly but he “called for a volume of Livy and went on reading as if I had nothing else to do.” And as the teenage historian — he was only 17 at the time! — remained absorbed in his book, his uncle Pliny the Elder would die because of a large pyroclastic surge while attempting to rescue a friend and his family by ship from the eruption of the volcano that had previously destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
 
Maybe the way out of our current catastrophe, is precisely to construct a heterotopia, maybe you could say his uncle was more courageous and actually tried to help someone, but if Pliny the Younger wasn’t absorbed in his books, perhaps we would have no historical account of Pompeii except its frescoes and the plaster citizens of that ancient city. And the fact that Pompeii is so “sublime” to anyone who visits it, is precisely a consequence of a major catastrophe. What is different today? It’s simple but frightening: after Extinction, there will be no one, not even the frescoes, to be witnessing about our current plight. There is no history — at least not in the human sense — after the collision of climate crisis and nuclear age. What worries me is not those who read books while the world is on fire, but the current hyper-normalization — there is so much violence and catastrophes around the world that we got used to it.
 
But then, again, you have another trend, which is the new return to religion or various conspiracy theories, even a sign in the skies can be a sign from Heavens. In his biography Inside the Third Reich (1969), Hitler’s architect Albert Speer recalls an interesting detail how, just a few days after he received a telegram by Stalin agreeing on the nonaggression pact, the Führer thought “he now stood so high as to be out of the reach of fate.” Then one evening on the terrace of the Berghof, Speer was together with Hitler marveling at a rare natural spectacle, the aurora borealis of the 23rd of August 1939, that could have been seen over the whole of Europe. This is how Speer recollects that event:
 
‘’The last act of Götterdämmerung could not have been more effectively staged. The same red light bathed our faces and our hands. The display produced a curiously pensive mood among us. Abruptly turning to one of his military adjutants, Hitler said: “Looks like a great deal of blood. This time we won’t bring it off without violence.”
 
 
Just a few weeks later after he saw the Götterdämmerung, Germany would invade Poland and World War II would officially break out.
 
The aurora, these beautiful Northern Lights that inspire hundreds of thousands of tourists to travel to the Arctic circle, was a self-fulfilling Apocalypse. It was Hitler’s vision of the renewal of the world. So, either you consume the Apocalypse or turn it into the confirmation of your dark and totalitarian aspirations. What is happening today is a rapid “normalization” of extinction, and the problem is that things that are not “natural” start to appear as “natural.” That’s why I think critical pedagogy and critical theory, including the critique of ideology and semiotics, is so important today, not only to decipher the signs of the Apocalypse, but to navigate us through it — this was Plato’s definition of philosophy (navigation!) — and to build a world beyond the “new normal.”
 
 
BD :
What I found particularly striking about the book with the importance given to how we imagine apocalyptic times. I was especially drawn to the manner in which you deal with the eschatological as a new mobilizing force. While the right has continually fallen back upon theological motifs in order to impose its own moral order upon the world, what I also find distressing about the current moment is the evident shift in certain leftist discourses, which to my mind collapse the radical with the religious. What are your thoughts on this turn to a certain moral certitude, which demands our attention?
 
SH:
This is not particularly new, there was as Frank Kermode famously said always a “sense of an ending,” from the various millenialist movements in the Middle Ages or secularized forms of apocalypticism, take the influence Thomas Müntzer had on Karl Marx or Ernst Bloch. But again, what I find truly new, truly unprecedented, and here I am much closer to Günther Anders than to Kermode, is that we are not simply in times when everyone has a “sense of an ending” and everyone is simply waiting for a new Messiah to appear on horizon. Yes, plenty of false prophets will appear even in Capitol Hill, in all sorts of costumes and forms, and we might even have a Second Coming of a high-tech version of Hitler or nuclear annihilation, or simply a long decay and Apocalypse similar to Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. And even if all these events can serve as “revelations” that will awaken us from narco-capitalism best exemplified in “doomscrolling,” it is becoming clear there is no Messiah to come. Unlike the optimistic “kingdom without Apocalypse,” present both in Judeo-Christian eschatology and various millenialist movements, now is the time to return to Günther Anders, in my view the most important philosopher for understanding our own century, who proclaimed that there is no kingdom to come. Only an “Apocalypse without kingdom.” After the collision of climate crisis and nuclear age, even if Mr. Musk goes to Mars, there won’t be anything left of humans except the radioactivity and changed geology of planet Earth. And perhaps the grave of Elon on the Red Planet. Most revolutionary movements were usually secularized versions of the Apocalypse with a “happy end.” But there is no happy end. Is it possible to rebel against extinction? Yes, of course, many are doing it, but unless you create some sort of real existing heterotopia or autonomy that would be interconnected beyond oceans and generations, it’s pointless. Happenings are not enough. The memento mori has to be reinvented, but at the same time, even if — and precisely because — Extinction is our only horizon, society has to be radically reinvented so that perhaps, one day, retroactively all this might become a false prophecy.
 
 
BD :
 
The image you conjure here also reminds me of the frontispiece to Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory, which is of such symbolic importance. Featuring the empty Catholic throne (sede vacante), what’s also being pointed out here was the providential nature of capitalism that’s bringing about planetary annihilation — its own sense of an ending. What then takes its place, as you suggest, is the proliferation of eschatologies but seemingly without the grand ideological and metaphysical claims of the 20th century. The attack on Capitol Hill was instructive in this regard. Not only was the sight of white supremacist failing to scale the pristine white walls such a tragic mimicry of the real plight suffered by those South of the border. The beamed images of the cosplay insurrectionists suggested we were really immersed in a theater of the absurd. However, while I am tempted to say this is a new chapter in the history of fascism, I am also reminded by Adorno’s point that Hitler (like Trump) was often ridiculed and never really taken seriously when he first assumed power. What do you think all this means for how we are to deal with the problem of fascism today?

 
 
SH :
If there is one lesson in history — and we know Hegel said the only lesson of history is that there is no lesson — it is the following one: proto-fascism should never be underestimated. Interesting that you mention Adorno. What I recently found out is that Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt, while they were still married in Berlin in 1932, had reading groups of Mein Kampf, while the rest of the left intelligentsia thought they were crazy to take seriously a “crazy” book. Anders later confessed: “It would have been easier to do a seminar on Hegel.” A year later, both Arendt and Anders are already in exile in Paris, a few years later — not married anymore — in the United States. Perhaps Lukács had the best description of the Frankfurt philosophers saying they remained trapped in a metaphorical Grand Hotel Abyss (Grand Hotel Abgrund). And so are many today. I find nothing more worrying but the kind of relief everyone felt when Trump was gone. But is he really gone? Or will Trumpism survive and thrive? What grand ideological claims could you hear at the Capitol Hill? None. It was a mixture of conspiracy theories and white supremacy, failed actors and people addicted to “likes” on social media. But, again, we shouldn’t go back to our own Grand Hotel Abyss and enjoy the so-called restoration of “normality.” It’s precisely this “normality” that brought Trump to power. And nice words about “unity” and “truth,” Jennifer Lopez and Lady Gaga won’t stop the proto-fascist restoration. In fact, it is the so called “normality” of neoliberalism, foreign interventions, and US exceptionalism which in the first place created the monsters. And the further you push toward an economy and society where only the rare few benefit, the further you create conditions of structural violence, the more you will foster the rise of fascism. Only this time, it won’t be powered by IBM and Henry Ford, but by Amazon, Palantir, Google, and Tesla. Our situation today is much more complex and dangerous because on the one hand, conspiracy theories are spreading much faster through social networks, and at the same time, monopoly capitalism is even more advanced, affecting everything from how cities operate, health care, transport, education, even personal relations and love. At the same time, the accumulation of profit precisely of these companies is based on extraction of human emotions (desire, anger, fear) and extraction of natural resources (like lithium). So, while Amazon will be delivering your newest vaccine by drones into a lockdown area and you will happily order contactless delivery of food, the monsters will be rising. But so, will resistance.
 
BD :
 
Turning to your book Poetry from the Future, what I felt was most pressing was the call to create a new political imagination. Certainly, in line with my own thinking, if my reading is correct you insist this must be open to the importance of art and poetics and as a form of thinking from the future that can disrupt the present. Why does the poetic matter so much to your political ideas on revolution? And how can we insist upon having a better conversation on the political importance of the arts today?
 
SH :
 
 It’s crucial. You surely remember how the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen caused a scandal when he described the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center as the greatest work of art? Well, whether you agree with him or not, he definitely understood something about what makes some events planetary. 9/11 was 20 years ago and in the meantime, the aestheticization of politics acquired new forms. Wasn’t the storming of Capitol Hill — live-streamed through social media into all corners of the world — the first planetary performance act of the early 21st century? No wonder Q Shaman was a failed — or rather successful? — actor. You know Hitler was a failed painter (there is a timely movie about it with John Cusack called Max). But wasn’t he quite successful in his Götterdämmerung? Wasn’t Albert Speer’s “theory of ruins” a sinister Gesamtkunstwerk that was supposed to show the greatness of Hitler’s art? Or take Gabriele D’Annunzio, the creator of proto-fascism, who influenced Mussolini, who was a poet trying to realize his crazy dreams in occupied Rijeka.
 
Usually the aestheticization of politics, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, serves as a key ingredient for fascism. But art can also take other directions. You don’t have to end up like the Italian futurists. Look at the Russian futurists who were very critical of the fascist version of futurism. Or take the Yugoslav antifascist resistance, where avant-garde art, poetry, and theater went hand in hand with resistance, or later, during so-called “real existing socialism,” the so-called Black Wave in Yugoslav cinema which even from today’s perspective remains pretty subversive — just watch Dušan Makavejev or Želimir Žilnik. The crucial question today is how to translate the “Apocalypse,” namely the “revelation” about Extinction, into a language that can not only mobilize but radically reinvent the current composition of the world. You can often hear “listen to the scientist.” And, indeed, we need science more than ever. But I am afraid this is not enough. Even economy is considered a science. And you surely won’t listen to the IMF or neoliberal economics when you want to run a country in times of a pandemic or constantly faced by earthquakes or tsunamis.
 
There is also what you call the “void” in your book Ecce Humanitas — how do you deal with the void, how do you, as you put it, “stare into the void and return without becoming a monstrous adaptation of what was once defeated”? You can’t simply describe it with numbers or by graphs. How can we translate Extinction, this ultimate void, into something that can be not only understood by everyone in the world, those who live and those who might follow in our wake, but also dealt with? For instance, take radioactivity. All that nuclear waste that will be decaying for thousands of years even if there are no humans anymore. Or microplastics and all those face masks polluting the oceans. Perhaps it’s only through arts that we can understand such an abyss and truly confront it. No wonder, when so-called nuclear semiotics was born in order to reduce the likelihood of future interference in radioactive waste repositories, scientists called science fiction authors, artists, and architects in order to envision a message to a possible future visitor. There were some really crazy but visionary ideas there. Today, more than ever, we need both science and arts, but we also need a new planetary ethics, and indeed, a planetary liberation movement that is both transnational and intergenerational, a new world system treating air, water, technology, and vaccines as planetary commons. And it won’t be successful without arts. Because arts usually have the capability of being already in the future, drawing its inspiration from the future, even before that future arrives.
 
 
BD :
 
It may seem almost trite to say, but what you describe here is invariably about those who have the courage to speak truth to power. And how we learn from history about those who continue to speak truth to power without being seduced by power once the moment arrives to claim it. While artists do this with their own grammatical interventions of an aesthetic kind, I wonder how you see Julian Assange — who I know you have supported and campaigned for continuously — fitting into this whole drama?
 
SH :
 
Perhaps in some future history book Julian will be remembered as the most courageous publisher of the 21st century, but he still needs to be understood as one of the deepest thinkers of technology. You know, already 10 years ago Assange claimed that for instance Google’s influence on the choices and behavior of the totality of human beings translates into real power to influence the course of history. When Google Met Wikileaks can be read as a prophecy of Julian Assange that everyone should read. During my visits to the Ecuadorian Embassy, often we talked about the power of Silicon Valley, and I remember how back then, much before the current pandemic, Julian claimed they are all aiming at transport, not just Tesla but also Amazon, Apple, etc. Today, this is already true. At that time, he was already following the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, warning that we shouldn’t underestimate it. Today you can see clearly where did this end up, with QAnon taking over even the Capitol Hill. I will dare to say that Julian is in prison not only because he revealed US war crimes, but also because he is the really true dissident of the 21st century, and even the term dissident doesn’t make sense anymore in his case. As an Australian citizen imprisoned in UK and wanted for 175 years in prison in the United States, in relation to which country is he a dissident? I think the old category of “dissidents” doesn’t fit here, simply because he is an enemy for every state and perhaps even for the state as such, which is the concentration of power based on the reproduction of class interests that will always make sure to ensure the monopoly on violence, and now even emotions.
 
  
BD :
 
I would like to conclude by returning to an earlier work on the idea of radical love. Again, this is something that connects to my own interests; after all, it’s impossible to have a concept of the political without a concept of love. I am left to wonder, how do you now see this book in light of the global pandemic? Or how would you revise that text today given the types of responses we have seen to the virus?
 
SH :

While the question that interested me in The Radicality of Love was the relation between Love and Revolution, today it would, naturally, be Love and Revelation. I already am of the Apocalypse. Or to put it differently, while in The Radicality of Love I was mainly exploring the intersection of revolutionary ideas or the reinvention of love, from Alexandra Kollontai to the German communes (notably Kommune 1), what inspires me today is the reinvention of mutual aid, friendship, and love in times of catastrophe. And perhaps this is the true missing and crucial ingredient for any coming emancipatory revolution that doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes from the past or leave the space of desire to the alt-right and conspiracy movements, to various proto-fascists and Silicon Valley. There is a chapter in the book about “Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies” (a reference to Eva Illouz), Grindr and Tindr were just starting, and it was about the commodification of desire. Today, with the never-ending Zoomification of live and pre-programming of desire, this unfortunately looks like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m happy that Alfie Bown decided to dive deeper into this in his new book, which is a timely examination of capitalism and what he calls “the gamification of relationships.” Precisely today we can see how important libidinal economy is. Perhaps, what I would add today is a chapter on the years of the Weimar Republic, as it appears to me as the most succinct parallel to our times, not the 1930s as many point out, but the 1920s. Does it still make any sense to make parallels today? Well, let me risk it: it was a period that started after the end of World War I and the Spanish Flu, a period of massive unemployment, violence, frustration, fear, and anger, a period of the birth of narco-capitalism — as Norman Ohler showed in his stunning Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich — and an age of various conspiracy theories that were crucial for the birth of Nazism, as Eric Kurlander showed in his seminal book Hitler’s Monsters.
 
Today you have a similar mixture of various morbid symptoms that will either lead to a radical reinvention of sociability, or to something much worse than Hitler’s Monsters. Why worse? Because only those who are still not at the stage of using sophisticated technology will still do 20th-century concentration camps, others will do fully automated genocide. Only this time, the final solution does not consist in extinction of a particular race, it’s not even the extinction of humanity itself, it is extinction of other species and the total extinction of the biosphere itself. Now what is love in the “End Time”? Love is everything. Even from the viewpoint of evolution, it is the most radical leap in the universe.
 
Histories of Violence: Apocalypse Now. By Brad Evans. Los Angeles Review of Books, April 5, 2021.

 

Last week, Aaron White and Freddie Stuart caught up with the philosopher, author and political activist Srećko Horvat in London. As well as discussing themes from his latest book Poetry from the Future, and his work at DiEM25, the conversation ranged from building progressive internationalism, to the politics of technology, and taking hope from the youth climate movement.

 
What follows is an edited version of the original interview transcript.
 
Freddie Stuart: I think a good place to start this interview is with the phrase you use from Terry Eagleton – ‘hope without optimism’. This year, even since your book was published, we’ve seen examples of social mobilisations all over the world, from Chile to Hong Kong, to the climate movement spearheaded by Greta Thunberg, so my question is, what particularly about our current moment is giving you cause for hope?
 
Srećko Horvat: All these movements are giving me hope. In my book, Poetry from the Future, I have a chapter on ‘hope without optimism’, and that was written two years ago before any of these movements actually existed.
 
What we see now, from Chile to Lebanon etc gives me this hope, that people are not ready to accept the status quo. People are protesting, people are coming together, and realising that we cannot just protest against something, we must protest for something. Many of the participants of these movements are aware that they are taking aim not only at the current order, but a much deeper underlying structural problem. So if you listen to Greta, you will hear that she is aware that we have to talk about capitalism for instance, and if you talk to the protestors in Chile, they are well aware that it is not just about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years of Chicago style neoliberal economy, which goes back to the coup d’etat and to Pinochet.
 
So that gives me hope. Let us see which way they will go. I am not always so hopeful, especially given the history of similar movements, because very often they can lose their energy. So I use the phrase ‘hope without optimism’; we should be hopeful about all these protests, but not optimistic. If you remember the optimism through the Arab Spring for instance, where philosophers such as Alain Badiou and others were talking about the ‘wind from Africa which will change the course of history’, and a few months later they fell to autocratic regimes, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the IMF came back to Tunisia, and all the energy dissipated. Though it did not vanish. These energies were channelled, very often into melancholy, resentment and depression because they did not succeed immediately in what they wanted to achieve, but that energy can be revived, and I think that is what is happening today in many of these movements.
 
Beyond this, what really gives me hope is the children’s movement. Not in a naive sense, but I think the hope here is in the long term. We are constantly imposed with this alter ego saying there is no time, you have to act immediately, but what I am imagining is that, in a few years when these children are older, when they are taking positions in faculties and institutions, they will take steps to radically transform the system. It won’t happen tomorrow, but what gives me the most hope is this long term perspective. We know that we don’t have much time, but it shouldn’t scare us to think long-term.
 
Aaron White: In your recent book you talk about how we need a rebooted Non-Aligned Movement, “focused on the struggles of occupation and domination by capital.” So do you see the work that you are doing at DiEM25, how it fuses international horizontality and verticality, as a model for a truly global post-capitalist international?
 
Srećko Horvat: I think today we are in a situation that requires something like this. I would call it a Re-Aligned Movement, because it has to be newly aligned on its criticisms and critiques of capitalism. The Non-Aligned Movement mainly consisted of states which didn’t want to be part of the Soviet or American power blocs during the Cold War, so they created a network of countries to cooperate both politically but also economically, particularly in the Global South.
 
Today it is difficult to recreate something similar, although some form of the movement still exists. But in our current moment we have so few progressive governments, the countries in Latin America that historically fought for social reforms, nowadays they are bleeding, you don’t have these progressive governments anymore.
 
What I think we need is a combination of political parties in government, and also social movements. If you think about another internationalist movement, the World Social Forum, it  was the opposite of the Non-Aligned Movement. It wasn’t a formation of states, but only of social movements. I think we need a combination of these two.
 
You mentioned horizontality and verticality, here we need political parties, social movements, whistleblowers, journalists, artists, all different fields, areas and professions, only together can a truly new transnational movement be formed. I see DiEM25 as part of this, we already have more than 100,000 members in Europe and our collective consists of people from Guatemala to Spain, from Austria to Poland, from Croatia to Greece; our membership shows that you can connect transnationally, internationally and work to build power.
 
To give a concrete example, if DiEM25 didn’t run in the European elections in May 2019, it would be unlikely that we would’ve managed to get the 9 MPs into the Greek Parliament in the recent national elections. I think this is good proof that internationalism really makes sense. Many people will criticise – ‘oh you’re an internationalist, but how is it really affecting your local community, how is it affecting your politics in your nation-state?’ – but in Greece we showed that it is possible. The energy behind the program we created on a transnational European level was focused on Greece, and our activists and members were able to gain national support.
 
DiEM25 started after the Greek Spring, when we realised that it isn’t enough to fight on the national level. We need transnational cooperation because those we are fighting against are working transnationally.
 
Freddie Stuart: So you say that transnational campaigning translated into the success you had in the Greek elections, but this is still only a national leverage on power in the Greek state. In your book Poetry from the Future you state: “The movements of 2011 were internationalist in themselves, that is to say their internationalism was implicit potential, but they were not yet explicitly internationalist.” Would you say that the movements we are seeing now, such as DiEM25, and the Progressive International launched last year by Yanis Varoufakis and Bernie Sanders, are examples of developing explicit internationalism?
 
Srećko Horvat: To be completely honest I think there is still a lot of work to be done. It is still relatively implicit. We are still missing a radical transnational movement. The Progressive International, which will be relaunched next year, is definitely a step in that direction. We are aiming at social movements and activists all across the world, because many of us who participated in the World Social Forum are aware that it had certain problems, and one of the biggest ones was its inability to become a political subject. It was a forum of forums, it was a movement of movements, but it was never a movement which was able to initiate big global actions. 
 
So I think what we are trying to do with the Progressive International is to go a step further. First of all to reconnect all these movements which lost cohesion and a common vision after what happened in Latin America, what is happening now after the decline of the World Social Forum. We urgently need to recreate that and we are working on it.
 
Freddie Stuart: So you say there is still a long way to go, and we can see that both with the state of national politics at the moment, and also the dearth of international progressive movements. That brings us nicely on to your theory of change, and how we practically manage to move forward from the world we live in now to the poetry that we want to write in the future.
 
Here I’d like to focus on technology. Marx says that that humans create history but not under conditions of their own making; they build within the parameters of technology available to them. Do you think that the fantastic developments in tech, and the ability they give us to work internationally, albeit within certain property relations, mean the kind of the movements you have been talking about are more likely than ever?
 
Srećko Horvat: It is a good question. Let me start by saying I am completely against what Evgeny Morozov calls ‘technological solutionism’. In the sense that technology will solve all of our problems, we will get to a point of singularity and all live happily in the clouds. That isn’t going to happen.
 
Unfortunately I do not think the Left has been good enough at understanding or using technology. Of course it has to do with property-relations, and you mentioned Marx, today we have to seize the memes of production. The Left has to find a way to use the current available technology, if we are not able to create our own. Of course there are some examples where we are successful, encryption both for communication and exchange. But for the most part we are forced to use the existing technology, and I think it can be used against the system itself. This is the concept of subversion, on which I have a book, and I took part in the Subversive Festival, both of these discussed the ways that we can use the existing technology to fight against the system.
 

Aaron White: One of the lasting legacies of neoliberalism is Thatcher’s statement that “there is no such thing as society.” Something that the Left in the US has done relatively well recently is to challenge this notion by attempting to tap into a collective imagination and build a sense of community through creativity. So how do you see the task of re-building “society” within this internationalist project?
 
Srećko Horvat: It is a crucial political question. The sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato has this pertinent term ‘self-entrepreneur’, and his main thesis is that out of Thatcher’s philosophy we have to come to a stage where everyone is forced to become an entrepreneur. Even if you are going to university, you go as an entrepreneur, you are commodifying yourself, and selling yourself as a product on the market and competing with others. A consequence of this is that, if something happens to you, for instance a car accident or you are ill, it is your own responsibility and not that of society. If you want the help of society, then you have to deal with a privatised healthcare and education system. You are alone as an individual.
 
From this perspective, it is really crucial for the Left to recreate society. As you said, the US Left are doing well on this front, and we are making progress in other countries as well. One of the big failures of the Arab Spring movement is that they failed in this regard. The example I often use is Egypt, why was it that the Muslim Brotherhood was successful after the protests? Because they were the ones who were trying to create a society, going from village to village. If someone needed help or medicine, they were there to help out. I am not saying we have to be like them, I am just saying that this was traditionally the role of the Left – the trade unionists movement, the workers movement, the women’s movement and so on, they were doing precisely that – if you had a repressive system or an individualised society that forced alienation, they would try and build an alternative which promises to provide solidarity both in power but also before, and we have to now work in that direction.
 
Freddie Stuart: To end maybe on a more personal note, I’d like to ask you, where do you get your inspiration from, and where do you get most of your news from?
 
Srećko Horvat: Well, I travel and research like a madman. To be honest, I think the decision to not immediately accept a job as being a professor was a good one, academia is very important and it enables you to get funding for research, and I have to self-fund from my books etc, but I think a precondition for creative working and thinking is free time. It’s not so much a talent, if you have a lot of free time and you use it for research for instance and you’re disciplined enough and crazy enough, even if you don’t have talent you might succeed. It’s not about genius, it’s about accumulating experience and interacting with people, and I’m really happy that I am lucky enough to travel constantly, meet people at the source of change and when you have this you can think better in the way you can connect concrete situations with something universal.
 
Last week I visited Chernobyl because I am writing a new book about the apocalypse, and that was really useful because it is inspiring, especially for my writing. I am not saying you always need practice. I am a philosopher, and very often pure theory is more beautiful than practice, but if you have the luck to visit these places it gives you a different perspective and you can learn for yourself.
 
What really gives me hope is when I see the two of you here now, this gives me hope. I am not giving you a false compliment, I really think so, because I think people are becoming more and more aware that traditional forms of education are not enough – we have to connect on different levels and we can learn not only from books but from traveling and meeting other activists. This is not an individual job which we have in front of us, it is a collective, and any progress we make is a consequence of collective action.
 
Freddie Stuart: So last thing. You talk about collective action. We know DiEM25 and the Labour Party have a Green New Deal conference coming up in January, but what else can people look forward to in the coming months in terms of international collective action?
 
Srećko Horvat: What I am looking forward to with DiEM25 is our first assembly which is taking place at the end of November in Prague. It is the first time that all our members are coming forward with proposals on which way the movement should go. This means changing the organising principles if needed, basically giving a boost to DiEM. I am really looking forward to it, because after three years I think we need to change some things, the situation has changed, we are not just a transnational movement anymore, we also have an electoral wing. And we can connect this to some of the new projects we are developing, going deeper with the Green New Deal, developing new pillars – we are seriously considering developing a theme on post-capitalism. All of these will come together and become a coherent single program.
 
I am also looking forward to relaunching the Progressive International next year; to the conference with Labour in Brussels; to cooperation with the new movements – with the children’s movement Friday’s for Future, and with Extinction Rebellion we cannot forget that we are just part of a bigger picture, and hopefully this bigger picture will be a beautiful and hopeful one.
 
This interview was originally published by The Junction.
 
Srećko Horvat on building on a left transnationalism. By Freddie Stuart and Aaron White. Open Democracy. November 14, 2019.
 

 

Philosopher Srećko Horvat discusses the historical lessons we can learn from the guerrilla struggle against fascism waged by the Partisans in Yugoslavia during World War II. Horvat also talks about the recent surge in extreme right-wing political forces in Europe and what that trend and Julian Assange’s case mean for the future of democracy.
 
We aired an excerpt of this interview on Intercepted. What follows is the audio and transcript of the entire conversation. Intercepted is going on hiatus for the summer and will return with new episodes in September 2019.
 
Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.
 
[Music interlude.]
 
JS: I’m Jeremy Scahill coming to you from the offices of The Intercept in New York City and this is a special bonus episode of Intercepted.
 
Donald Trump has encouraged a new sort of alliance in the world, an alliance of fascists, authoritarians, dictators. It’s striking to contrast this emerging global coalition of thug-ery to a movement formed out of the rubble of World War II. It was known as the Non-Aligned Movement. Marshal Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia and the Indian Prime Minister Nehru along with Nasser of Egypt forged an alliance of nations that had agreed not to place themselves under the ideology or control of the two major emerging empires in the world at the time: the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1961, in Belgrade, the movement was officially formed and it included most nations of Asia and Africa as well as Latin American countries and others in the global south.
 
Among the most central figures in the creation of this movement was Tito of Yugoslavia. During World War II, he led a guerilla struggle against fascism under the banner of the Partisans. Their slogan “Death to fascism. Free people.” The Partisans came from across the Balkans and they successfully defeated both the Italian fascists and the Nazis. This struggle ultimately led to the unification of six territories under the banner of Yugoslavia. As president of this new country, Tito had to strike a balance between a Soviet Union that was enraged that Yugoslavia did not agree to be placed behind the Iron Curtain and a United States that was increasingly imperial in its global outlook.
 
Marshal Tito was famous for standing up to Stalin as well as Winston Churchill and the United States. And the country that he built was an incredible experiment in alternative ways of organizing society. Yugoslavia embraced the centrality of workers to the health of society and implemented socially owned factories. It emphasized national unity and respect for the diversity of its people and geography.
 
That Yugoslavia was crushed in the 1990s, in a brutally murderous civil war where extreme nationalists engaged in historical revisionism and the promotion of ethnocentric spheres of power. The Serbian leader Slobodan Miloševic and the Croat Franjo Tudjman both carried out murderous ethnic cleansing campaigns of mass slaughter and displacement. Much of the killing took place in the multi-ethnic republic of Bosnia which had the largest population of Muslims in Yugoslavia.
 
There’s much that we can learn from the struggle of the Partisans, the society that they sought to build and the horrifying end to the story of Yugoslavia. These lessons resonate strongly in our current moment in history.
 
Joining me now to talk about all of this, the philosopher and author Srecko Horvat. He is the author of “What Does Europe Want?: The Union and its Discontents” — which he wrote with Slavoj Žižek — “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” as well as “The Radicality of Love.” With Yanis Varoufakis, he is one of the founders of the Democracy in Europe Movement. His latest book is “Poetry From the Future: Why a Global Liberation Movement is Our Civilization’s Last Chance.”
 
Srecko Horvat welcome to this bonus episode of Intercepted.
 
Srecko Horvat: Thanks for having me here.
 
JS: So, I want to ask you first, in a very big picture sense, you know, we in the United States, of course, have been following the rise of Donald Trump. And every time he tweets, or sneezes, or whatever, it becomes a big news story, but in Europe there have been sort of parallel movements that have been either rising to power or threatening to take power that seem to share a lot in common with Donald Trump and his world vision. Just for people who don’t follow it closely what has been happening around Europe with the kind of re-ascension of hard right or neo-fascistic movements?
 
SH: Well, I would first say that what we can witness in Europe today is that it’s not only that we have a rise of the hard right-wing, or as you called it, fascist movements and populists leaders who are already in power such as Matteo Salvini in Italy for instance, who doesn’t allow the refugees to sail into the Italian ports for instance, or Viktor Orbán who is in power in Hungary. You know, the one who is famous for saying that it’s finished with democracy and that we are living in the era of so-called “i-liberal democracy.” And then of course you also have different right-wing leaders such as the recent scandal in Austria with Strache which means that Europe is really shifting towards this right-wing, not only ideology, but reality.
 
But since you mentioned Donald Trump and that they are similar to Trump, I would say yes, they’re similar to Trump even if you take for instance, Umberto Eco’s work, the famous Italian writer, but also, a very interesting semiotician and political thinker who has written a very short text called “Ur-Fascism” where he names several characteristics of fascism and one among them is fear of strangers. The other one is misogyny, and then you have other characteristics which he places as you know, the original fascism. And if you take these characteristics for instance, and apply it to Trump, to Salvini, to Bolsonaro, to other leaders all across the world, you will see that the situation actual today is really resembling this kind of Ur-Fascism.
 
But what is important to say, because at this moment, Trump is in the U.K., visiting the U.K. Angela Merkel as you probably know delivered a speech at Harvard very recently. And what is the connection between this? I think what the liberals usually do, this kind of naive interpretation of the rise of the right-wing populist, is that they almost present it as if the right-wing ideology in reality fell from the sky. But Merkel at Harvard, you’ve probably seen in which way also the liberal media was writing about it: “Oh, finally a European leader who will teach Trump, you know, that we have to tear down the walls and so on.” But do you know where Angela Merkel was just a few weeks ago?
 
She visited Croatia the country where I come from, which was part of Yugoslavia. And she visited Croatia just before the European elections. And before the European elections, she held a speech rejecting, where she was talking about rejecting nationalism. And she held the speech at the political rally of the conservative Croatian party, which is very deep into historical revisionism also some problems on the border with refugees and so on. And while she was speaking about rejecting nationalism by actually de facto supporting nationalism.
 
And I think this is the problem, even when Angela Merkel speaks at Harvard, that we have to reject nationalism. What she did and what the political center did in Europe during the last years is that they actually created the monsters, you know. They were creating the fertile ground for the creation of Salvini, Orbán, Sebastian Kurz. In what way? By imposing austerity, for instance, new depths on the periphery of the European Union. Your listeners probably still remember the example of Greece and the 2015 Oxi referendum. And there is a parallel to the United States as well. Donald Trump didn’t fall from the sky. I think the liberal class in the U.S. really has to pose itself a very serious question: Where did Donald Trump actually come from?
 
JS: You’re, of course, talking about Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, she’s been on the cover of Time Magazine in the U.S., people have compared her here in the U.S. to Hillary Clinton that she’s the responsible adult on the world scene. And as you say, she’s the one that’s going to sort of stand up or issue corrective measures against Donald Trump.
 
But I want to go back to you talking about her visit to Croatia. Srecko, one of the things that I’ve noticed over the past several years, and I’ve done a lot of traveling around the former Yugoslavia, including in Croatia, is that I’ve noticed that there’s been this move since the Yugoslav Civil War —the disintegration war of Yugoslavia—to tear down all of these anti-fascist monuments throughout the country in Croatia.
 
And they’re starting to be replaced with monuments that purport to be in honor of the victims of communism. And they often have sort of a Christian biblical overtones to them, but they’re also blowing up the names of people who fought and died to repel either the Italian fascist, or the Nazis from Germany. And there’s this massive historical revisionism going on right now in Croatia. And we can talk about other former republics of Yugoslavia. But given that you’re from Croatia, I just want to ask you about this erasing of history and then presenting a factually inaccurate new version of history in the form of monuments replacing those to the anti-fascist struggle.
 
SH: It’s a very good question, and I’m glad that you asked it. And I know that you traveled a lot through former Yugoslavia and even during the war, and people usually don’t understand on the one hand, the importance of the Yugoslav historical sequence and the experience of real existing socialism. Even Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary of U.K. when he visited Slovenia — which was one of the republics of Yugoslavia — at the press conference in front of the other Slovenian leaders, he even said that Slovenia was a Soviet vassal state. And you probably also know in the U.S. that Donald Trump even claimed that Yugoslavia fell apart in the Baltic, not in the Balkans. So you can see there is you know, a lot of confusion, even about geography, even if Melania comes from Slovenia— Actually, I don’t know how many people in the U.S. know that Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia.
 
JS: One of the hosts of an MSNBC show in the U.S., Joy-Ann Reid said it was — She’s from Soviet Yugoslavia.
 
SH: That’s precisely what’s happening all the time. Even when they present me they say, “Oh, he’s a philosopher from Soviet Yugoslavia.” Which brings us directly into, back to your question, because I think the Yugoslav experience was really special precisely because it wasn’t Soviet. You know, the creation of real existing socialism happened after Tito had a break with Stalin and didn’t want to follow the rules of the Comintern. What you had to come back to your question in the ’90s, after the collapse of Yugoslavia is really this erasure of history, which happened in different ways in different republics of Yugoslavia.
 
In Croatia, unfortunately, on the one hand, it took the form that they were really kicking out, dropping out books from schools connected to Marx to Engels and so on, but also to Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy. Most of the books I have today at my home library, were saved by the gypsies, sold in flea markets, and so on, and I bought it, and so on. But one even more, I would say traumatic consequence was the destruction of anti-fascist monuments. More than thousands of the monuments were destroyed in Croatia, which was really a deliberate move to erase the history of the Partisan struggle and well, I would say, a big modernization project, which happened here in Yugoslavia.
 
This situation is, I would say, not just specific for Croatia. It’s very interesting to see that this kind of historical revisionism, which is actually turning the defeated in the Second World War into those who succeeded to win, which is of course, false, but you can see that this trend is actually happening in many post communist countries. If you go to Poland, if you go to Hungary, like in Hungary, the György Lukács archive was closed, which I think is a big scandal. Then in Poland, of course, you have this rise of the conservative Christian forces connected to abortion and so on. In the same way as in the United States, you have this kind of science fiction Handmaid’s Tale going reality, in Poland, in the U.S., in these countries as well. And basically my conclusion of this is, why is this historical revisionism flourishing so much precisely in post-communist countries?
 
I would say precisely because the so-called transition period, as they call it in academic circles, transition meaning the transition from communism to capitalism didn’t succeed. It didn’t succeed because if you look at these countries — Croatia, Serbia, not to mention Bosnia, or Kosovo — you will see that these countries are semi-dependent peripheries of the European Union, which are in a kind of colonial situation with German, French, Italian companies basically owning all the companies, which were previously state-owned, the infrastructure, from banks to posts, and so on.
 
And then the question is really whether you have any kind of sovereignty. And if you don’t really have any kind of sovereignty, which is the case not only in these countries, but you’ve seen it with a series of experiences in Greece, if you don’t have real sovereignty, then the solution is very often historical revisionism which means building up a kind of identity in the sense of America first, Croatia first, whatever first. But this kind of fake identity of national identity, which I think in the 21st century is a very problematic idea given that the very concept of sovereignty will completely change in the next decades.
 
JS: I was recently in Belgrade, in Serbia and the Prime Minister of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic was Slobodan Miloševic’s information minister during the late 1990s and during the bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo. You have now Serbia trying to figure out which way it’s going to orient itself. Russia has increased its investment in Serbia. You also have the Emirates coming in to Serbia. Then you have Croatia, which is a kind of neo-liberal rump member of the European Union. And it seems as though in the areas of the former Yugoslavia, you have very similar dynamics that occurred in other European countries during the fall of Yugoslavia, where they’re kind of trying to figure out who the patron is going to be. And then Bosnia just continues to be punished economically as a people and is really in horrible economic shape and Bosnians have almost no opportunity. It used to be in Croatia, you would see a lot of Bosnians working in Croatia. Now that Croatia is an EU member, you see that less and less but talk about the landscape of these countries of the former Yugoslavia and the geopolitical games that are being played.
 
SH: I would say that the Balkans and ex-Yugoslavia this part of Europe is geopolitically becoming one of the most interesting, I would say, places for those who just follow it. But for those who live here, the situation is becoming very worrying, I would say, because you can see different trends in different countries. And of course, now we have new borders. Some countries are part of the European Union such as Slovenia, Croatia, then, you know, the European Union sends the Frontex, which is the army dealing with refugees and protecting outer borders. So it’s sending Frontex between Croatia and Bosnia, which then is creating an even bigger divide.
 
But what I find most interesting is Serbia. I spent a lot of time in Serbia, have many friends there, visit it very often. In Serbia, you can see in which way, you can see the failure of the European Union, on the one hand. Failure in the sense that the European Union is not anymore so attractive to accessing countries were 10 years ago, I think everyone in Serbia would have been keen to enter the European Union. If you go there today, there is no enthusiasm for it anymore. Instead of that, as you said, you have Russian capital, Russian influence.
 
Vladimir Putin recently, last year visited Belgrade. There were 100,000 people waiting for him, which was, of course, a theater show by Vucic, who basically paid the people, paid them bus tickets from villages in Serbia, and so on and sandwiches, literally like that to come to Belgrade. So, you can imagine what kind of dire situation the population of Serbia lives in these villages because they usually don’t have an opportunity even to come to Belgrade. But Putin did this for a very particular reason, which is called Nord Stream. So Nord Stream in the sense that you can see that Europe is in the middle of a new energy battle between the United States and Russia. You know, who will provide the natural gas to Europe? Will it be the Russians or will it be the U.S.? And you will see also in Germany, I was living the last two months in Germany. I followed the debate there. There is a big debate also about precisely the same question.
 
So, coming back to Serbia. So on the one hand, you can see Russia’s influence, which is connected to natural gas. On the other hand, Belgrade as a city is completely changing. It’s turning into a new Dubai. You have skyscrapers. You have the United Arab Emirates building these completely senseless, ugly projects in Belgrade. And then, of course, you have China. And then speaking about China, it becomes really interesting in which way, China is actually using the failure and utter incompetence of European foreign policy because there is no such thing as European foreign policy as you can see. On the one hand you have Angela Merkel giving a speech at Harvard, criticizing Trump, although she didn’t name him by name, but we know. And on the other hand, you have the royal family in London, greeting Trump as in a bad sort of Terry Gilliam, Brazil movie or something like that.
 
So Europe’s incompetence when it comes to foreign policy has created an open field in the Balkans for different geopolitical interests. With China it’s interesting that I would say, this is one of the biggest infrastructure projects of the early 21st century, the One Belt One Road project, building this speed railway from China to Europe. We should go a step back. In which way Europe’s foreign policy but also economic policy actually created the possibility for China to move in this big way into Europe, building the infrastructure.
 
And if you go back to Greece to 2015, which was quite an important momentum, because 61 percent of the Greek population voted “oxi” [no] at the referendum. They voted against austerity measures, which were imposed by European institutions, the European Central Bank, and others, which is this official line of Europe: you know that, you need more austerity, you need to sell off your public assets —your airports, your ports. And then what happened is, of course, that the Greek Syriza government was forced to sell the Port of Piraeus in Greece, which is one of the most strategic ports in the Mediterranean Sea, to the Chinese company called COSCO.
 
And the Chinese — that was 2015 — the Chinese in the meantime, of course, if you look at the map, if you can visualize the map, so you have Greece a bit down there. What they want to do now is by ships, they will transport the goods, and they’re already doing it directly to the port of Piraeus, then the railway will go up to Macedonia, then it will go to Bulgaria to Serbia. The Chinese Prime Minister was in Serbia last year, and they made an agreement together with Vucic and Viktor Orban, which means they’re now already in a project, I think, of building a new railway, from Belgrade to Budapest —

JS: And what are the consequences of this railway that China is laying down in the aftermath of the implosion of the Greek economy or the forced implosion of the Greek economy?
 
SH: Well, I think the consequences are really big. I mean, already now, today, it’s impossible to avoid Chinese products anywhere. But what they will do is what they realized, what China realized is that the transport of products by ships is just too slow. And then sometimes you also have the problem with the Somali pirates and so on. I don’t know whether they’re still active, but it’s just too slow. And time is money as the mantra of capitalism says, and they realize that if they are able to transport the products from Beijing to let’s say, Hamburg in two weeks, it will actually bring them to an even bigger geopolitical power. What it means for the Balkans and for the future of European Union, I will put it like this: Why isn’t it Europe itself, which is investing into big infrastructure projects? Why isn’t Europe building railway trains? Did you know that China builds every year more fast train railway tracks than Germany has altogether? You know
 
JS: We have none in the United States, Srecko. We don’t have any high speed trains in this country.
 
SH: Yeah, but you have, you will have Hyperloop and all this shit. I mean, I’m joking. But yeah, I know, it sounds as a European complaining to you who don’t have it. But let me tell you an anecdote. One year ago, or during this time, the trip from Zagreb to Belgrade by train is now taking around seven or eight hours. It is like 350-400 kilometers. And according to the data I found, this same trip during the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy, which was, you know, a lot of time ago, took less time than today. So you can see that the infrastructure is completely devastated. It’s devastated, of course, because of corruption, because of austerity and so on.
 
And for a Chinese train, this trip will take one hour, probably, but there is a problem, of course. You know, there is a problem that the constructs which the Chinese makes is that basically, these railway tracks, as far as I know, maybe I’m wrong, will not be used so much for passenger travels, but mainly for the transport of goods.
 
But to come back to Europe, you know, what you can detect here with all this what we have talked about, Serbia in this situation, Croatia in this situation, not to mention, you know, Austria, what’s happening there. There will be snap elections in September. There are now snap elections in Greece, with New Democracy rising this month. You can see that Europe is in a deep crisis. Europe is and it’s not just, you know, this kind of identity crisis, I think it’s a serious internal crisis and a serious geopolitical crisis. And while Europe is in this crisis, not being able to find a common political path, which will it will follow, and which it should follow. It is losing the ground, I would say, to other players to China, Russia, Arabs, and so on, and even the U.S. You can see it with Trump’s visit to the U.K.
 
So, you have a Europe which is not united anymore. You have a Europe, which is actually giving away its own infrastructure instead of investing in the infrastructure. You have a Europe which is maybe from the American point of view, Europe still looks like Paris in the movies, Rome and all this kind of utopian bullshit about Europe. But the situation here is actually very worrying. And what happens in Europe will have deep consequences on the U.S. on and on, as it always had on the rest of the world. Don’t forget that two world wars started in Europe, that in the 90s, we had the breakup of Yugoslavia, which also, as we can see now has also consequences on the rest of Europe.
 
JS: Of course, you had a Serbian guy, Gavrilo Princip, who is, you know, history states, ultimately, his assassination attempt on the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his concubine, was the inciting event for World War I and then of course, you also have Yugoslavia popping up in a very serious historically significant way in World War II. And part of why I wanted to talk to you is because you have this new book out “Poetry From the Future” which I highly recommend people pick up and read. And in it you talk about the significance of what became known as the Partisans establishing a new society and joining together these six republics into this country, Yugoslavia.
 
And you write, “Instead of being victims of their historical circumstances, the Yugoslav people took control of them and turned them to their own advantage. From the mountains of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro through the woods of Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, and finally on the Island of Vis, fighting a guerrilla war against outnumbered Nazis and fascists including the local collaborators, the Ustaše and Chetniks. The Partisans succeeded not only in liberating the Yugoslav territory, but in establishing a new society based on the revolutionary struggle.” Before we talk about that building post-war, explain for people that don’t know this history the significance of Josip Broz Tito, known as Marshal Tito, and the Partisan forces that successfully defeated the Nazis and the Italian fascists.
 
SH: It’s a great question and I think the whole Yugoslav experimental experience has so many lessons for our situation today. So let me first say that I’m definitely not someone who is nostalgic. I’m someone who is very critical, at the same time of the Yugoslav experience for different reasons we can talk about. At the same time, I think, precisely this historical sequence from the second World War is so important today, because it shows several things. First of all, in order to understand it better, you have to imagine a map of Europe with the red color, and the red color represents the Nazis who occupied countries. And if you look at Europe in the ’40s, beginning of ’40s, for instance, of the last century, you will see that most of Europe is red. Not red in the sense of communism, but it is occupied by the Nazis.
 

And ex-Yugoslavia, at that time, it was Yugoslavia, but not socialist yet, was occupied as well. You had puppet regimes in Croatia. You had collaborators in Serbia and in this situation, there was a communist guerrilla movement. Basically, it was really a guerrilla movement, even before the guerrilla movements in Latin America, and so on. Because the terrain in Yugoslavia is full of mountains, rivers, islands, and so on. And the Yugoslav Partisans led by Tito and many others, also women, was actually the only resistance movement I would say in Europe. We had resistance movements as we know, resistance in France. We had the Greek resistance movement and so on but I would say the Yugoslav Partisans are the only ones which succeeded to use the situation of war and total occupation in order to create a social revolution, you know. It wasn’t just, oh, we came out of the war and then everything has to change so that everything can stay the same, as Lampedusa would say.
 
Here, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t just a continuation of a liberal kind of system. It was an attempt to radically transform the society. And you mentioned Gavrilo Princip, who was the one who shot at Franz Ferdinand. People say he’s the one responsible for the first world war. Well, during the time when Gavrilo Princip left, this is the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, 95 percent of the Bosnian population Gavrilo Princip came from — I mean he was there — 95 percent of the population in Bosnia were illiterate.
 
Now, the situation is completely the opposite. You know, because of the modernization project of Yugoslavia, which was you know, building highways, building architecture, you know, in MoMA, the museum in New York recently had an exhibition, a really good one called Concrete Utopia, about Yugoslav architecture. And it’s really sad that here in Croatia, in Serbia, and so on these fantastic buildings which look like science fiction, are devastated, ruined, no one really cares. And then you have the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which is showing us what kind of architecture we had. So it was architecture, it was a modernization project, which included all spheres of the life.
 
And well, I could talk more about it, but let me just say that if there are three lessons of the Yugoslav experience, I would say the first one — three lessons for our dark, dystopian times today — the first lesson is anti-fascism and in which way you can actually lead a successful struggle against fascism. Here it is also important to name all the negotiations which took place between Tito and Fitzroy Maclean — on the one hand who was the true inspiration for the character of James Bond, and who was fighting together with the Partisans from Bosnia to the Island of Vis — and Winston Churchill whom I don’t find the most positive character in history. But, and that’s a big lesson I would say, Winston Churchill realized that the only way to win the second World War is to make an alliance even with those whom he despised the most, namely the communists, but he did it because for strategic reasons.
 
And I think this is, you know, a failure today where you can see that the liberal establishment, the so-called political center is very afraid of alliances with the left. Instead of having alliances with the left, they’re doing everything in order to diminish the left. Yugoslavia is a good lesson, I would say, to show that if we really want to get out of this today’s very dangerous geopolitical situation, we will need some new alliances, even if they are just tactical.
 
The second lesson — so, the first lesson is anti-fascism and which way to defeat fascism. The second lesson is self-management. This is why I’m really so annoyed when all these people talk about Soviet Yugoslavia. The main difference was really what Tito did in 1948, is that when he broke with Stalin and the Comintern, is that he introduced the project of self-management which in practice well, it didn’t really function but the idea was good. The idea was that the surplus value of the work done by workers wouldn’t go, you know, to the managers and to the bankers and so on but would go back and they could decide on their future. So, it’s not just democracy. It was supposed to be economic democracy.
 
For different reasons that didn’t succeed. We can talk about it as well but I think today it’s a very important idea as well where you know, a manager in a company as CEO has 400 or 1,000 times bigger salary than a worker in the same company and this is what started with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan, this trend in the ’70s and so on.
 
JS: Before you go to the third, I just want to also just share one fact that I’ve always found incredible about the story of Yugoslavia and that is that when Yugoslavia existed and they were experimenting with socially-owned property, the most common way that workers got a home in Yugoslavia was through their work. In the same way that Americans are dependent on employers for healthcare, which is a bad system, in Yugoslavia, the way that most people graduated from living with their parents, you know, with their young families to their own apartment is that they would earn an apartment through their labor. And that was the most common way that people were obtaining a place to live, right?
 
SH: Yes, thanks for this because I think it’s becoming also a relevant topic today. You know, I just came back from Berlin and in Berlin, there have, like in all European cities, there is a huge housing crisis, which is on the one hand, the consequence of monopoly capitalism. You know, big companies buying a lot of flats in a city and then the prices are rising and on the other side, it’s a consequence of so-called platform capitalism which means Airbnb-ization of everything. Which you know to put it very simple, it means that if a student from a small Croatian or Spanish village wants to come to Barcelona or to Zagreb, the price, everyone, it’s very difficult to find even a flat to live in the center of the city because it’s much more profitable to rent an apartment to Airbnb and that’s a big problem.
 
In Berlin, they had such a problem that one company that’s very recent, one company succeeded to own more than 3,000 flats in Berlin and it completely changed the whole market of housing in Berlin. Because if you have 3,000 flats, basically, you’re the one who can decide on the prices. It’s called monopoly capitalism. In Yugoslavia, and like that we had social housing. Not only that it might surprise you because it will sound as fake news as if I invented it just now but come to the Croatian Coast, you will know, you’ve been to the Croatian Coast. You will see even hotels where the workers would go for vacation which was part of their contract.
 
JS: Part of what I think is so fascinating, to give the concrete examples that we’re talking about here is because it’s such a foreign concept to people in the United States, but last summer I was in a small village on the Adriatic Coast outside of the city of Zadar and I saw this abandoned, what looked like a series of really nice bungalows and it’s going to be razed to the ground and there’s going to be some high rise condos or a hotel put there probably with Turkish money. A lot of Turkish companies are now investing on the Adriatic coast. But what it was under Yugoslavia were summer bungalows for postal workers from all around Yugoslavia. They had a right to go there on vacation every year and it was a series of bungalows just for postal workers to take their time off.

 

SH: Yeah, but that’s precisely that’s the fascinating thing. I think most of the people who are listening to us now will think that we came from a communist past, you know, this kind of propaganda department, but it is not. You know, you go to the I mean, I don’t know whether it’s open but the Concrete Utopia exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York also shows these hotels as bungalows, and so on. And besides just giving all these people, the workers the opportunity to go for vacation on the coast, you know, it also I think, was very important for the diversity and exchange between the different countries of Yugoslavia, because I think really, you know, Europe had or still has this program of Erasmus, which is mainly for students who then get a scholarship to travel around Europe. But I think what we need today is a kind of universal Erasmus, you know. What if for instance, a British postal worker could go to Croatia and the Croatian postal worker could go to London and there will be an organized system of exchanges and so on? I would say that you would immediately see the downfall of right-wing populism and so on because most of the people just don’t travel that’s a big problem.
 
Of course, with climate change and the climate crisis, we could also pose other questions whether people should travel so much. You mentioned tourism. A big problem for these countries of the periphery of the European Union — Spain, Portugal, Greece, Croatia included— is tourism. Why is it a problem? It’s a problem because — I’ll give you just the figures for Croatia — Croatia and Malta are the two top countries in the world when it comes to the share of GDP for tourism. For Croatia, I think it’s over 18 percent now which means that basically you have an economy which is completely dependent on tourism.
 
And you know, when you are completely dependent on tourism, then you are also dependent on the weather, for instance or if some geopolitical situation changes or you have a terrorist attack as in Tunisia for instance, everything can change and then there is no 18 percent of the GDP anymore and there is no industry anymore because we don’t have any industry anymore after the so-called period of transition from communism to capitalism. This is a big problem.
 
It’s like a semi-colonial situation in which we are here today and not to mention also the climate costs in which way it is ruining the coast, in which way it is ruining small communities, which were dependent on fishing, for instance. Now, they’re dependent on Airbnb.

 JS: You know, when Woody Guthrie wrote and would sing, “This land is your land,” you know, every American knows at least part of that song because it’s used in you know, commercials, and it’s become part of pop culture. But if you dig down into the other verses of it, he has a line where he talks about a sign on the side of the road and one side said private property. And the other side of it was blank. And he says that that land was made for you and me meaning, you know, he was taking a stand against the notion of private property. And in Croatia right now, one of the biggest political issues is what you’re talking about that you have this dependence on tourism, you have this gorgeous coastal territory and it is. It’s remarkable. Anyone who’s been to Croatia will tell you it’s absolutely stunningly gorgeous. And what is being —
 
SH: Don’t mention that. Even more people will come —
 
JS: The flip side of this is that of the staples of the former Yugoslavia was the notion that the coastline belongs to no one. It belongs to everyone. And yes, you had government corruption including under Tito and you had private islands and all of that but in general, the coastal areas of Yugoslavia were considered common property that anyone could use. And now, you have these huge hotel conglomerates, you have foreign investors coming in. And they’re saying no, we want to be able to have a private beach, because the current law would allow anyone to go even to a five star resort’s so-called private beach, and they can say, I have a right to put my towel next to your fancy chairs. I can sit on this beach because it belongs to the people. Well now, that may change and it’s for the exact reasons you’re talking about. It’s the privatization. It’s the dependence on tourism and then it’s very aggressive foreign investors working with corrupt Croatian business people to backdoor privatize the coast that belongs to the people.
 
SH: Yes, you described it as it is. I would say it’s even a bit worse. That, yes, certainly you have a privatization of the coast. I mean we already had this trend. You know, the first things which were privatized after the, just during actually, the breakup of Yugoslavia were for instance water sources. Coca-Cola bought several water sources in Bosnia and Croatia and so on, in the ’90s when the war was still going on, which was really this kind of shock doctrine — what Naomi Klein talks about, in the sense that you have a situation of a shock of a war and then basically you sell off, the corrupt Croatian politicians together with the corrupt Western politicians make deals to sell off the natural resources.
 
And this, what is happening now to the coast is a logical consequence of it. But why I’m saying it’s even worse, it’s even worse because precisely in Croatia, you can see all the problems of global capitalism. On the one hand, you know, we are happy that we are now connected to the world and so on. But all these EasyJet flights, this EasyJet culture and so on is not only contributing to the climate crisis, and I think actually, people should travel more by train, but there is no functioning train system in Croatia because Europe didn’t or Croatia didn’t invest in it and so on. So we are opening again the same problems we have.
 
But it’s not only EasyJet. I don’t know, you notice probably that recently, Croatia also became a set for big Hollywood movies. Like when I was in Dubrovnik recently, and there are so many Chinese and also American tourists. Basically, Dubrovnik is a fascinating city. It’s history is even more fascinating.
 
JS: No, no, no, it’s just King’s Landing. There’s no history. It’s just King’s Landing, man.
 
SH: Yeah, Game of Thrones. And, you know, and everyone just recognizes this. And if you go to the Island of Vis, it is an island, which recently became the set for the famous Mamma Mia movie. And, you know, OK, you could say this is making Croatia even more popular, which will be good because the local people will then rent their apartments and so on. But it’s really, it’s a sort of, I would say, you know, that movie called Idiocracy, you know, where people watch a movie, and then they will go there and then they will say, oh, King’s Landing, you know. No, it’s not just the King’s Landing, actually, it has a much more important and much more fascinating history than the Game of Thrones.
 
But you can see that these countries are kind of, even in that way, in the visual representation, it’s again, becoming a sort of colony or just a set of for a movie. And that’s bad, of course, I mean, it’s bad for the local culture. I’m not saying we have to retreat and go back to the local culture. I’m not so naive. I don’t believe in it. But yes, habits are being lost. Local languages are being lost, not to mention the rising skyrocketing prices of properties in cities such as Dubrovnik or others on the coast, precisely because of a Hollywood movie, and so on.
 
And then if you go to Dubrovnik or any other Croatian touristic city in the winter, you will find no people in the center of the city. There, the cities are basically dead, even split and so on. Because most of the people are just doing tourism. No one lives there anymore in the center. It’s like Venice, for instance, take Venice, take the recent accident which happened with a big cruiser in Venice. I mean, it’s disgusting. You know, the human civilization is really ruining itself. I’m not against tourism. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t travel. I think they should travel much more precisely to meet other cultures. And some people also need vacation from time to time. But I think we have to radically rethink global tourism and what it means and in which way it could be more sustainable, how it can be connected to a Green New Deal, to massive investment into public infrastructure—trains, other sorts of transport. There is so much to be done when it comes to tourism.
 
JS: I know we need to get to your third lesson that we can take from this but the reason that I’m drilling down and people may think “Oh, these guys are just talking in the weeds,” is because I think you cited my colleague and friend Naomi Klein, and her writing in the “Shock Doctrine.” And of course, much of what she’s doing now is focused on the climate catastrophe that we are facing in this world. And I think that in these neoliberal states that converted from socialism or communism into whatever it is now that you have multinational banks. You have powerful Western countries imposing austerity measures, etc, on smaller countries that are new members of the non-communist club, is that you also have climate disaster in Croatia in the form of these either wildfires or fires that are started by somebody who threw a cigarette out and there is no effective response and people are kind of left to maybe the state is going to send planes or helicopters to put out our fire or maybe we need to hire private individuals to do this?
 
I mean, this is the reality that we are now facing also in parts of the United States in California where people have to hire or have insurance through private companies that if my house is on fire, I’m going to have a private fire force that’s going to make sure to put out my fire first, rather than wait for 911 dispatchers to send out a fire truck. So, explain how climate is affecting Croatia and then it’s compounded by the kind of implosion of state services or the disappearance of it and the move toward privatized disaster response.
 
SH: The example from California which you gave is excellent because it proves that Margaret Thatcher’s mantra is completely right today, unfortunately. You know when Margaret Thatcher said that famously, that there is no such thing as society, only individuals. And you can see it in California and other countries and so on where more and more you have a private sector which will basically just help the rich people. I mean it’s simple as that.
 

When it comes to Europe what you can see connected to the climate crisis is it’s not just wildfires, for instance. Croatia, for instance, and the Croatian Coast and islands has a big problem with plastics and the waste. Which it goes like this, you know, I come every year to a certain island in Croatia and if I come in the spring, the beaches are full of plastic. And then me and local friends — and I’m coming to the lesson also of one of the lessons of Yugoslavia, I would say — me and my friends go there on the beach, we clean the beach, and so on. And the very next day the plastic comes back.
 
If you look from where the products come half of them are Albanian, and others are French or German —French or German medical equipment, for instance. And then you ask yourself, “OK, why is there Albanian, French and German garbage on Croatian islands?” And then you have to come to the source of this problem. And the source is that, on the one hand, Albania after the collapse of the communist regime there, doesn’t really have a sustainable waste management system. On the other hand —and here we come to a more global problem— the rich countries of the European Union including Germany, France, and so on are basically sending a lot of waste including medical equipment to Albania. And then following sea currents, the waste from Albania, together with Albanian waste and from Western Europe comes to the Croatian islands.
 
And what is then the lesson of Yugoslavia? The lesson is that even if I clean the beach every fucking day, the next day the plastics will come. Even if there is no plastics on the beaches, we are all already eating microplastics, you know. Scientists have found microplastics from the Swiss Alps to the Antarctic.
 
So, there is no way out in that way and the only way out is and this is one of the lessons of Yugoslavia, which has to be rethought seriously, is the Non-Aligned Movement namely that was the movement of the 20th century which was founded by Nehru, Tito, and Nasser with the basic idea that the countries of the global south have to cooperate together. Of course, it was a situation of the Cold War where the main reason for the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement was that you don’t join Soviet Russia and you don’t join the United States, but you actually try to create a genuine third option and I think we need that more and more today.
You’ve seen probably in the news recently that Malaysia was sending back the waste which the Western countries were sending to Malaysia. I think that’s a very good thing and it also shows, because I follow the debate in the United States. I respect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a lot. Although, I think she should speak much more about Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange but that’s another topic. But what she’s doing and I think that’s really good is really to push forward the Green New Deal.
 
But what is also important with the Green New Deal, which is basically very often forgotten — like now here after the European elections, everyone is talking about the so-called green wave, you know, the Green Party did very well, and so on. This is proof that Europe is going in a better direction. Well, I’m old enough, though, I’m not so old. But I’m old enough to remember that the Green Party supported the war in Afghanistan, and so on, and they didn’t really do much things for the so-called green transition in Germany.
 
So, the lesson of this is that even with Malaysia or the waste which is coming to Albania and then to Croatia, the lesson is that there is no Green New Deal only in one country and that the Green New Deal has to be not only social but anti-capitalist or more precisely post-capitalist. So you cannot have a green New Deal just in Germany, which is now exporting the diesel cars to the periphery of the European Union to Hungary, which is the second country in the world of premature deaths because of air pollution.
 
So, you know, you could imagine the kind of world which resembles the science fiction from China now, which I think is one of the best, you know, most interesting science fiction where you have a world which is basically divided. You have countries where people enjoy beautiful air, you know, sand and so on beaches, and you have countries which are literally, literally drowning in garbage. And I think that’s so important with the Green New Deal because I see two dangers for the Green New Deal. One danger for the Green New Deal is that it might soon become a sort of new green capitalism, you know, that capitalism will realize, well, maybe it’s better to turn to solar panels and so on. It’s already realizing it.
 
JS: This was the Barack Obama sort of idea about the Green New Deal was sort of green capitalism.
 
SH: Yeah, I mean, you see it now even The Greens in Germany. What else is it? I mean, it’s the same I would say, and that’s a big danger. And capitalism is already working on co-optation and making profits out of it. And the other fear I have is that you’ve seen it, for instance, with Le Pen recently during the European elections is something what we should call eco-fascism. And it’s not something completely new, if you go back to Hitler — to Hitler’s Germany —and if you look at the photos, you will see for instance, Eva Brown who was his mistress, doing yoga on a beautiful lake and then all the ideology was a kind of return to the you know, blut und boden [blood and soil.]
 
And you can see it today as well that this is precisely the fascists who are also using their — OK, they’re not talking about the Green New Deal, but they are also speaking about the return to the nature and so on, which is a very, very dangerous trend, I would say. So, these are the two dangers for the Green New Deal.
 
And I think the lesson of the Non-Aligned Movement from the 20th century, which was founded by the Tito, Nehru, Nasser, and many countries joined is that instead of following, let’s say the Western countries, which are the countries which are most responsible for the climate crisis, the global south should build new ways of cooperation. And it should send its garbage back to the Western countries.
 
JS: Yeah, I want to talk a little bit more about the Non-Aligned Movement because I think it’s such an important history, particularly for young people to study. You know, you mentioned Nehru, Nasser, and Tito but ultimately dozens and dozens of countries joined together to declare: We are not under the Soviet Union and we are not under the American empire capitalistic program.
 
And they tried to carve out their own third way, and then you had these liberation movements from around Asia and Africa joining together with Yugoslavia, with India, with Egypt and other countries to say we don’t want to participate in what you’re now calling this Cold War. We want to build an alternative model for how societies can interact with each other and organize. And in fact, Malcolm X talked about the Non-Aligned Movement in some of his speeches and the Bandung Conference in the mid-1950s.
 
And now all of these nations came together and realized that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States were going to solve the world’s problems and that the disempowered or the economic global south countries needed to join together to create a third way so that they wouldn’t be economically dependent on these two opposing empires, but also so that they could forge their own moral, social, and justice-oriented visions of how the world should be organized.
 
SH: I would say, yes, we definitely need something similar today, although the problem is that the whole situation changed of course. We are not in a Cold war anymore. We don’t have, you know, this kind of a polar world where on the one hand you have the United States, on the other hand, you have Soviet Russia —
 
JS: Have you watch television in the United States lately? Because that’s all they talk about is how we have this new Cold War and the Bolsheviks are coming to steal our elections.
 
SH: Yeah, I didn’t, but I’ve seen — but that, you can also see that it’s not just the Bolsheviks, it’s also the Chinese, you know. It’s not just the Russians anymore with the trade war with the Chinese. So, even if you watch television, you will see that there are different players now. So I would say it also reflects the fact that we live in a multicentric world, which is kind of different, but yeah, the propaganda and the ideology is very similar to the Cold War, you know.
 
Although it’s much more dangerous, because today, you know, it’s not just about seizing the means of production. I would say today, it’s about seizing the memes of production. You can see that this propaganda is much more successful, because of technology and memes, on the one hand, which is, you know, this creation of images for a very short attention span, and pretty popular, as you have seen with Bolsonaro, for instance, and the role of What’s App. And on the other hand, you have a sort of pre-programming of politics, like with the case of Cambridge Analytica, for instance, and Facebook showed.
 
So, that’s very dangerous, but precisely in this kind of situation, you need a sort of new global liberation movement, which would learn the lessons of the Non-Aligned Movement. What was successful and what were the failures? Because the Non-Aligned Movement nominally still exists today and well, how often do you hear about it? It tells a lot.
 
I would say one of the problems and one thing which we have to really rethink is that the Non-Aligned Movement consisted only of nation-states that was the 20th century. I think even if you have today everywhere the retreat to the nation-state, America first, Hungary first, Somalia first, whatever, I think the nation-state as a concept given the trend towards an even bigger climate crisis, might be a concept from the past.
 
What do I mean by that? If you have rising sea levels, if according to the — I think, it was even the World Bank. If according to their statistics, by 2050, you will have hundreds of millions of refugees mainly from the global South trying to come to Europe, then the very concept of the nation-state has to change. The very concept of sovereignty has to change and we will need more global cooperation, you know.
 
I don’t know if you recently watched, so I don’t watch U.S. television, unfortunately. I would love to watch it. I love to watch ideology and deconstruct it. But I’ve been recently watching Chinese science fiction and on Netflix, I don’t know if I can mention them. But they’ve been doing some good stuff as well, not only will Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which appeared there. But recently, a Chinese blockbuster science fiction movie appeared on Netflix. And it’s amazing, actually, whatever you think about the quality and the narrative, and so on. But the story is actually very interesting, very unusual, where you know, you have a situation in which the sun is turning into a red giant, so that the whole world has to unite. They form a sort of world government, you know, this old Emmanuel Kant’s idea that the candidates, the states would come together and create a world government. To create a world government —sounds completely crazy what I will say now — they install 10,000 motors on the back of the planet of Earth, and then they try to bring planet Earth out of its orbit towards a new sun. And, you know, OK, it’s science fiction, but couldn’t have imagined that — You know, I think we cannot even imagine what might be happening because of the climate crisis.
 
For instance, take the Arctic, take the melting ice, which is now making true what Fredric Jameson said, you know, that it’s possible to imagine everything, even the end of the world but not the end of capitalism. So, you know, you can imagine the end of the world. Ice is melting and so on but capitalism will go on.
 
Last year, Donald Trump gave the permission for the drilling of the Arctic. You’ve seen also that NATO had one of its biggest — I was just there in Norway at that time. So, I remember it. It had the biggest military exercises precisely in the Arctic. So, there is a big interest for that area and you can see that the climate crisis will create new routes not only for transport of goods but also for the exploitation of fossil fuels. Or take for instance, permafrost. Not many people speak about permafrost, but with disappearing permafrost, it might be even more dangerous than with climate change. And we cannot even predict what might happen because of that.
 
So, if you have these trends, if you have hundreds of millions of refugees in the next two or three decades coming to the U.S. or to Europe and so on, I think we will need a kind of global cooperation which never existed yet in the history of humanity, I would say, because you will also need to use for instance the army, you know, not to lead wars, you know, but to help people, you know, to provide routes to save them and so on. And unfortunately, I see that we are already going in that direction. Unless we are able to create a global community which would be a result of a global liberation movement and a sort of new realigned movement, I would say, which would be realigned against capitalism, against exploitation of natural resources, against the commodification of humans, their emotions and free will —what is happening with technology —unless we succeed to create this global movement and global society, which would be the first truly global society, I’m afraid that by 2050, we will see a world which would really resemble Chinese science fiction in the worst way.
 
JS: I want to end by asking you about where we should look for hope. You write, “What we need more than ever today is hope without optimism. This is the only path from resistance to liberation.” Explain what you mean.
 
SH: I would say optimism in the same way, pessimism is a very dangerous concept. Because if you’re a pessimist, then you don’t even have the will to wake up, and you know, to be active in society. Optimism is also dangerous because it promises false hopes. And that’s why I think we need hope, without optimism. Hope, I think for the 21st century is the most crucial concept, I would say. Hope in the sense that I think the progressives around the world have to stop just criticizing capitalism, the rise of right-wing populism, authoritarianism, and so on and they have to offer not only hope, but a vision of a society in which we want to live, you know, to really go in the direction to imagine things which are unimaginable.
 
For instance, let me give you a completely crazy idea which could be done tomorrow morning, if there was a global government. Of course, it cannot be done tomorrow morning because to arrive to sort of global government, we need a lot of time. And then there is a question because I have an anarchist past as well, whether you want the government or not, that’s not important. But let’s imagine that we succeed to create the kind of system of redistribution of international flights on the global level, because we know that international flights are contributing to the rising levels of CO2 and to the climate crisis. So couldn’t we imagine, for instance, or work on this kind of program that, well, if you want to fly, you can fly twice a year, for instance? I know that many people who fly to Bilderberg these days wouldn’t be happy about this particularly.

 
But then if you don’t want to fly, you can, for instance, you could imagine a sort of market where you could sell your flight to someone else who wants to fly. Although I don’t think that the market is a good solution we’ve seen it with air pollution as well, in which way you can then just outsource it. But I think we have to imagine, you know, the Green New Deal, I think, as long as it remains anti-capitalist and post-capitalist is a means of not only imagining, but creating this kind of future with the hope, you know, why wouldn’t we travel more by trains than by cars? I mean, if you go to the United States, every time I come to the United States, I’m immediately depressed as soon as I leave the airport, when I come to the highway, and I’ll see so many bloody cars. And when you see that, in every car there is one single person, you know, instead of four people inside of it, for instance, or instead of having trains.
 
This is — how to say it? It’s an offense for human rationality that we still drive all these cars, I would say, you know. And a future which is coming with the automation and technological advancement will basically, you know, what’s happening to the truck drivers in the United States, that 3.5 million of them in the next decade or two, will lose their jobs. I don’t think that the solution then is, you know, to go back into this kind of green capitalism or something, but to really create new means of transport, which would be at the same time public and not privately owned.
 
You know, you could even go so far to say that what Elon Musk is doing with Tesla forcing the other competitors on the market to deploy also this technology and to go into electric cars is actually, it might be good. Although, I might criticize Elon Musk for many, many things, as many people do. But it might be good because you could imagine, and that’s something Yanis Varoufakis gave me that idea while we were talking, unfortunately, in a car in Germany, during the electoral campaign we had a few weeks ago. And then he said, but imagine a future where basically, a government could nationalize all these electric cars which will then exist in five years.
 
I know nationalization and expropriation is not really something which is popular, but why wouldn’t we imagine an electric, 100 percent clean public transport which is not owned, you know, this kind of stupid situation where humans really look like those actors in the movie, Idiocracy, you know. One person, one car, fossil fuels, and just driving around, not even driving. I mean, if you looked at the U.S. highways, people are not even driving. They’re just standing and sitting, you know, in these stupid cars, and they have to own the car. Why do they have to own the car? Well, it’s capitalist ideology, because for all these decades, they were convincing us that you are a successful man or woman if you own a car, if you own a house, if you own, if you buy, buy, buy, and use the same shitty products.
 
JS: So, as we know Julian Assange, one of the founders of WikiLeaks, is now in British prison. We understand that his health is deteriorating. He was moved to the Belmar Medical Ward. He is facing 17 espionage counts in the United States right now. The U.S. is demanding his extradition. This is very clearly a war against all publishers not just Assange. And at the same time, Chelsea Manning is once again, in jail for refusing to give testimony in the grand jury proceedings that led to these new indictments under the Espionage Act of Julian Assange. You and Ai Weiwei and other international figures have been protesting against the, first, the arrest of Assange, now the imprisonment of Assange and the facing of these espionage charges. Why are you taking time out of your life to protest the treatment of Julian Assange?
 
SH: Because he took the time out of his life to fight for us. And when I say to fight for us to fight for the very possibility to have information. To have information, what the most powerful governments or secret organizations or companies are doing in the world, from the war in Afghanistan to the war in Iraq. Wouldn’t it be great that, for instance, now with all these tensions with Iran someone would leak actually what the Pentagon and what Bolton and Pompeo and all these white male warriors are actually plotting against Iran? And what WikiLeaks did is that for the first time in modern history, it created a system where you can protect those courageous whistle blowers like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and others who would then publish this information and it would be available to all of us. Precisely in this world of fake news and memes and this situation which truth doesn’t matter anymore. I found already the arbitrary detention at the Ecuadorian Embassy a big scandal for Western democracies.
 
I visited Julian quite often at the Ecuadorian Embassy and the scene when you would enter the Ecuadorian Embassy at Knightsbridge in London tells you everything that is wrong with today’s world. You know, he was basically for seven years arbitrarily detained in a very small space of the Ecuadorian embassy. Before you enter the Ecuadorian embassy, you will see this most luxurious shopping center called Harrods. You would see Ferraris, Lamborghinis, just in front of the Ecuadorian embassy with Saudi Arabian plates. You will see that, you know, a publisher was already for seven years basically imprisoned. He got a political asylum by the former courageous Ecuadorian government, unlike the current one, which is selling off Julian for loans with the IMF and so on. And that was already a scandal. What is happening now, I think, it’s an even bigger scandal because democracy in the West is dying if someone like Julian Assange is in prison.
 
And I found, Jeremy Hunt, what he recently said about Julian Assange that he could have walked out anytime I find, I mean, I find Jeremy Hunt the worst foreign secretary in the history of U.K. Not only because he called Slovenia a vassal state, and he obviously doesn’t know even geography or history compared to leaders such as Churchill, and so on, who at least had an understanding of geography and geopolitics, but also his stance over Julian Assange. What you can see what is happening today is that all these governments, Ecuador, now even U.K., they are meeting with John Bolton, with Pompeo, with the U.S. officials who want Julian Assange to be extradited to the United States as soon as possible.
 
And why is this dangerous? If that happens, I think, to even speak about democracy anymore will be impossible because there is no democracy without the freedom of speech. There is no democracy without the First Amendment in the U.S. There is no democracy without the freedom of press. And there is no democracy if you don’t have the ability to check the information, to have information, what is happening on a daily level, not only in foreign countries, such as Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, but in your own country.
 
How deeply for instance, the Democratic Party was corrupted? And instead of having Bernie Sanders as a candidate, they’d chosen Hillary Clinton and Hillary Clinton was making fun of Trump thinking that Trump was the best candidate because he stands no chance. I mean, this was revealed by WikiLeaks, not to mention also the revelations about the role of one of the most powerful global corporations Google in the U.S. elections, or what for instance, Palantir is doing now with the detention camps for children, wouldn’t it be great that we have an organization which would publish all this information which is still secret?
 
So, if the extradition of Julian Assange happens, I think it will be impossible to speak about democracy anymore. Many other people, including journalists, might end up in prison as well. And this is not happening in China. This is not happening in Russia. This is happening in the center of European civilization, in London. It’s happening in Europe. And I think this is the biggest scandal of the early 21st century. The very fact that someone who didn’t kill anyone is kept in a prison with mass murderers, with terrorists and other people basically 23 hours in his cell.
 
JS: Well, Srecko Horvat, I want to thank you very much for all the work that you’ve done and continue to do and thanks for being with us here on Intercepted.
 
SH: Thank you a lot and I also want to thank you for all the work which Intercepted is doing. It’s very important. Not only in the United States but also for Europe to have this kind of media which we miss more than ever.
 
JS: Srecko Horvat is a philosopher and poet from Croatia in the former Yugoslavia. He’s the author of “What Does Europe Want?: The Union and its Discontents” as well as, “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” and “The Radicality of Love.” With Yanis Varoufakis, he is one of the founders of the Democracy in Europe Movement. His latest book is “Poetry From the Future: Why a Global Liberation Movement is Our Civilization’s Last Chance.”
 
Philosopher  Srećko Horvat on the Yugoslav Fight against Fascism and the rising Right-Wing Political Forces in Europe.  By Jeremy Scahill. The Intercept ,  July 3, 2019. 

Up until the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, foreigners were not allowed to visit the beautiful Dalmatian island of Vis, then home to a major naval base. Two years ago it was the location for Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, doubling as the fictional Greek island of Kalokairi.
 
One way of looking at the transformation from military redoubt to Hollywood idyll is as a triumph of freedom of movement over draconian restrictions. But that’s not how the Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat sees the resulting media attention, rising real estate prices and what he calls the “tourist occupation” of Vis, where he now lives, when he’s not travelling and organising.
 
 “Where once there was a sustainable local community,” he writes in his new book, Poetry from the Future, “there are weekending easyJet tourists; where fishermen’s boats once rode at anchor, now luxury yachts are moored.”
 
You probably haven’t heard of Horvat, though you will have heard of plenty of people who have. He’s friends with the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, with whom he set up the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25). He was a regular visitor to Julian Assange, before he was extracted from the Ecuadorian embassy. He’s also in close contact with Assange’s friend, the former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson.
 
He is a staunch friend of Slavoj Žižek, the maverick Slovenian celebrity academic (they co-wrote a book in 2013 entitled What Does Europe Want?), as well as being on good terms with one of Žižek’s most vituperative critics, the renowned American academic Noam Chomsky. He also hangs out with the celebrated Mexican film-maker Alfonso Cuarón.
 
But at 36, Horvat is far from being some kind of right-on hanger-on. In fact he’s one of the busiest leftwing political activists in Europe. Aside from DiEM25, which campaigns to reform the EU into a “realm of shared prosperity, peace and solidarity”, and for whom he’s standing in the European elections, he is a founder of the Subversive festival, an annual jamboree in Zagreb of radical thought that has featured the likes of Oliver Stone and Antonio Negri, he set up the Philosophical theatre in the same city, whose contributors have included Adam Curtis, Vanessa Redgrave and Thomas Piketty. And he has been involved in everything from Occupy Wall Street to the World Social Forum and protests about the 2017 G20 Hamburg summit.
 
Yet in leftist circles in the UK Horvat remains unknown. When I mentioned his name to several leading young British anticapitalists, I received blank expressions. His publishers are hoping that will change with the publication of his new book, Poetry from the Future: Why a Global Liberation Movement Is Our Civilisation’s Last Chance.
 
Despite the apocalyptic subtitle, the book is a series of discursive essays in the continental tradition: all ideas, epigrams and lyrical flourishes. Unafraid to mention Mamma Mia! and The X-Files along with erudite references to Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Horvat is the kind of free-ranging thinker who reminds you of Sartre’s observation on Nietzsche: “A poet who had the bad luck to be mistaken for a philosopher.”
 
All the same, tourist occupation? Isn’t that a little melodramatic in relation to an island that was literally occupied, and by Italian fascists, in the second world war?
 
And then there’s the tone of mournful despair. “Today,” he writes, “we are living in a long winter of melancholy, not only in Europe but across the world.” Or this: “The past is forgotten, and the future is without hope. Dystopia has become a reality.”
 
What’s the good news?
 
As my bus pulled into Komiža, the more remote of Vis’s two coastal villages, I wondered if I was going to be meeting some gloomily earnest revolutionary, bristling with disgust for western decadence and aching with the misery of it all. But the moment I was greeted by Horvat’s beaming countenance, I was not just disarmed, but practically ready to take up arms by his side.
 
A passionate yet playful character with a patchy beard and high forehead that seems to forewarn of his formidable intellect, he bears a sparkling-eyed resemblance to a young Billy Crystal – if you can imagine the American comedian mastering the vocabulary of critical theory.
 
Horvat may lack Žižek’s gift for comic provocation or Varoufakis’s charismatic air of danger, but in person he more than makes up for it with an instantly infectious warmth and unaffected enthusiasm. As he leads me to the hotel he recommended I stay in, he sings its proletarian praises.
 
The Bisevo, he tells me, is an unreconstructed socialist-era hotel that represents a slice of the former Yugoslavia he fears has almost disappeared.
 
“This is the kind of place that all workers could come to each year for a holiday by the sea,” he says, ushering me into the large crepuscular reception.
 
The near-empty building, with its long silent corridors, feels not just out of season, but out of time – a strange throwback to the dream of universal provision, when the concept of service culture was all but a crime of bourgeois deviationism. It may lack a few mod cons, but it’s clean and quiet and yards from the gently lapping sea.
 
I drop my bag off and Horvat whisks me away to his friend’s restaurant where we discuss how he came to adopt and develop his ideas. His book is a rallying cry for resistance to the rapacious forces of capitalism, an emotive argument against the complacent acceptance of “Tina” – the idea that “there is no alternative”.
 
He takes as his inspiration the Partisans, the Yugoslav resistance fighters who made their base on Vis during the war and ousted the Italian forces.
 
“What the period of fascist occupation of Vis shows,” he says, “is that resistance can acquire many forms and even a small number of determined people on a remote island can defeat a numerically and technologically superior army.”
 
Their achievements were indeed impressive, gaining the respect of British military officers and ultimately Winston Churchill. But Marshal Tito, the head of the Partisans, was to preside for decades over the authoritarian and increasingly sclerotic communist regime that ruled Yugoslavia until its demise.
 
Horvat’s father was an opponent of that regime, a liberal who sought asylum in Germany with his family shortly after Horvat was born. The family didn’t return until Horvat was eight, when the Yugoslav civil war started in 1991. In Germany he had been perceived as a Yugoslav; back in Croatia he was made to feel like a German. Because he was an outsider he turned to books, reading everything he could get his hands on. At that time, the new nationalist Croatian regime was busy getting rid of any books it deemed connected to Marxism, which included any books connected to Russia.
 
 
“Like Dostoevsky,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s a big scandal but I have most of these books at home, because I saved them.”
 
Yet given that his father was a dissident, and had only returned because communism had come to an ignominious end, why was Horvat drawn to the Marxist end of the political spectrum, from which communist Yugoslavia had emerged?
 
“In the 90s,” he says between sips of beer, “it was either nationalism or this dream of the end of history, in the sense that capitalism will solve all our problems and finally we can buy all this stuff we couldn’t buy with communism. Those were the two alternatives.”
 
He rejected both and found an outlet for his disaffection in hardcore punk music, travelling with his band around the different states of the former Yugoslavia, where he met like-minded teenagers. This anarchic scene spawned a lively fanzine culture, which took to publishing renowned revolutionaries.
 
“I translated Kropotkin at 16,” Horvat says, a boast that I’m confident Sid Vicious was never able to make.
 
Of course, it’s all very well denouncing the system when you’re a teenager, and it’s fine to celebrate the courage and commitment of the Partisans, but isn’t the great lesson of socialist revolutions that they start out full of heroism and righteous conviction and descend into state repression and paranoid social control?
 
Horvat was just six when the Berlin Wall came down. It’s a moment in history to him rather than a memory of long-awaited freedom. He’s from a generation for whom opposition to capitalism, and even celebration of communist revolutionaries (Lenin and Che Guevara both receive favourable mention in his books), has little to do with the real-world communist regimes that immiserated hundreds of millions across the globe.
 
He duly distances his ideas from such regimes in Poetry from the Future, and insists he’s “not a nostalgic for Yugoslavia”. But we decide to save the nitty gritty of politics to the following day. In the meantime Horvat wants to take me to ŽŽ, his friend Čedo’s bar, or konoba, which is tucked down a narrow side lane leading to the sea. Horvat describes it as a “cross between an atelier and a social centre”, with room for about 10 people to sit. Apparently it’s packed with tourists in summer.
 
Now in the off-season there are just a few old hands – the regulars are stonemasons, fisherman, painters – drinking rakia, the local hard liquor of choice, rolling joints, sharing jokes and lamenting the direction of the world. In common with many millennial revolutionaries, central to Horvat’s political outlook is the belief that climate change is humanity’s greatest existential threat since the last ice age.
 
It’s a jolly scene, full of high spirits and low expectations. The talk, a little incongruously, is of rising sea levels, growing nationalism and racism, like a shebeen for Corbynistas, though more entertaining than that sounds.
 
Despite a steady flow of drinks and snacks, no money is exchanged that I can see, and my offers to contribute are met with implacable dismissals. Later I ask Horvat how it works. “Most of it functions as exchange,” he says, “on the principles of – using Lyotard’s term – libidinal economy. Or the micro-politics of desire.”
 
I’m not sure what that means but if this is what a post-capitalist economy looks like, I can’t complain.
 
At the end of the night, I stumble back to the Bisevo, ready to volunteer for the cause, even if I can’t remember what it is.
 
The following day Horvat is keen to show me the island’s sights. There’s Tito’s cave, in which the Partisan hero was said to have hidden – Evelyn Waugh, on an army mission, actually flew out to meet him. There’s also an abandoned network of military bunkers and tunnels, and a secret submarine shelter. Before we see these delights we sit down for an interview.
 
I’m intrigued at how and why the shadow of 20th-century communism seems to leave so little mark on the anticapitalists of today, especially those living in former communist countries. For despite his reservations about Yugoslavia, Horvat doesn’t want its strengths to be forgotten. He speaks glowingly of a recent exhibition at MoMA in New York entitled Toward a Concrete Utopia, “which showed that Yugoslavia had a modernisation project that was also connected to arts, culture, architecture”. And, he continues, Yugoslavia “had economic democracy, which came immediately after the break with Stalin [in 1948 Tito established independence from Moscow]. It was called self-management. Of course it had many problems. The biggest problem was that in practice it didn’t really function.”
 
He speaks in such an ecstatic rush of eloquent English that sometimes it’s hard to work out whether or not he’s making a joke. But he’s serious when he suggests that the standard of living enjoyed by Yugoslavs was higher than that of Croatians today. Statistics don’t bear this out, but Horvat bases his comparison on the experiences of his family and friends.
 
“Just the ability to go to the sea for vacation. In Yugoslav times almost everyone had this as a fundamental right. This architecture,” he says, gesturing to the Bisevo behind us. “Hotels were built for workers – in that sense the living standard was higher. There was more equality of course but today healthcare and higher education are gradually being privatised and there is huge emigration from Croatia. There are no shipyards any more. Once we had the strongest shipyards in Europe.”
 
What Croatia does have is tourism, which Horvat says accounts for a higher percentage of its GDP (18%) than any other European nation. Any economy that is reliant on such a large foreign presence will inevitably breed resentments. But as much as Horvat wants to preserve the livelihoods and lifestyles that have been subordinated to the tourist industry, he is also a fierce proponent of an open borders policy.
 
He rightly attacks the xenophobia that is growing in Hungary, Poland, Austria and Italy – not to mention elsewhere – and believes Europe must prepare for hundreds of millions of refugees. But how can a culture like Vis hope to contend with potentially vast numbers of migrants if its culture is so vulnerable to a much smaller number of tourists?
 
We have to transform society so that it would be impossible that Buffett or Bezos can be the richest person in the world
“First,” he says, “I’m not a naive leftist who advocates open borders and what happens happens. The policy of letting in people who are fleeing wars or, in the future, climate change is the only correct policy – in the way Germany welcomed me when we came from Yugoslavia. But that’s not enough. We are advocating a Green New Deal that’s connected to migration policy.”
 
This deal amounts to a massive investment in infrastructure which, he says, will guarantee jobs and therefore remove the perceived threat of migrants undercutting native workers.
 
Perhaps, I say, but it’s not just an economic question. There seems to be a growing anxiety about identity right across the political spectrum. In his book he talks about the importance of “shared values”. That’s the kind of language, employed with a different meaning, that’s used by his political opponents to describe what makes up people’s collective identities. Right or wrong, it’s the thing that many people fear losing.
 
“They’re not losing their identities because of migration but because of global capitalism. And this migration is also happening because of global capitalism,” he says.
 
Horvat rejects categories like communist or Marxist as self-descriptions, but he can certainly sound like one when he wants.
 
“The only identity that’s worth fighting for,” he concludes, “is one that comes out of the struggle and class solidarity.”
 
Interestingly, he barely touches on identity politics in his book. The whole fashionable discourse of intersectionality doesn’t get a mention. Perhaps it’s something to do with coming from a country that collapsed and reverted to religious identities – Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim – that were largely buried for half a century.
 
 “I’m very critical of so-called cultural Marxism and identity politics,” he says. “I don’t think the solution to today’s problems is just to advocate more of your identity whether you are gay or vegetarian or whatever. I think we need something much deeper. The Greek worker and German worker have to realise they’re in the same shit even if the German worker has a better salary and lives in a more functional country.”
 
Is it better, I ask hypothetically, to have greater equality but a lower standard of living or to raise the base standard of living even if there are greater inequalities? He gives a long, thoughtful reply that doesn’t answer my question, finishing with an attack on simple redistribution: “Rutger Bregman and Thomas Piketty constantly talk about taxation, taxation as if the true solution of inequality lies in taking more from the rich and redistributing it. I think we have to radically transform society so that it would be impossible that Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos can be the richest person in the world. I think taxation is not enough.”
 

At the time of my visit, Assange is still in the Ecuadoran embassy, where Horvat believes he is effectively held “prisoner”. I ask him what he thinks about the WikiLeaks founder, particularly in the light of the allegations, currently dropped or suspended, of rape in Sweden, his links with people like Nigel Farage and his preference for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
 
“Julian is my friend,” he says. “We often agree, and we often disagree. One of our disagreements was Brexit. He advocated the Leave option while me and Yanis campaigned for the Remain option. But I really think there is a character assassination going on.”
 
He is sympathetic to Assange’s claim that the Swedish investigation was part of an attempt to frame him so that he could be extradited to America. But if the allegations haven’t been put to legal test (because Assange avoided going to Sweden), what of the suggestion, explicit in Andrew O’Hagan’s long LRB profile, that Assange had a “sleazy” attitude towards women.
 
“I never experienced that. And most of the collaborators at WikiLeaks were women. I know he’s a controversial, divisive figure. But many important historical figures are like that. WikiLeaks should be appreciated.”
 
A couple of weeks later, in London, with Assange now in custody, and many MPs suggesting that he should be extradited to Sweden to face the original allegations, I go back to Horvat and ask him where he now stands.
 
“Whether you like him or not,” he replies, “we should be opposed to his extradition to the US, on the basis of protecting the freedom of the press. And if he is extradited to Sweden, Sweden should guarantee he won’t be extradited to the US. I’ve been to the embassy plenty of times and can assure you that all these stories about his hygiene, or his cat spying, are lies constructed in order to further discredit someone who has suffered enough. The UK shouldn’t be a puppet in the hands of Trump but a sovereign state protecting whistleblowers and publishers, and the basis of liberal democracy.”
 
Back in Vis, it’s time to go on our tour. We meet Horvat’s girlfriend, Saša, and her friend Jelena, who are both originally from Novi Sad in Serbia. Horvat met Sasa at a political festival. She works for an NGO and, although she seems to share his ideological world view, she’s clearly an independent spirit.
 
Horvat’s previous book was called The Radicality of Love, in which, paraphrasing the French far-left philosopher Alain Badiou, he wrote: “Love is communism for two. But love is as difficult as communism, and can often end up as tragic as communism. Like revolution, true love is the creation of a new world.”
 
I can’t say if Srećko and Saša amount to communism for two. But they seem quite happy together.
 
Tito’s cave is rather underwhelming. It is just a small cave high in the mountains with an inconspicuous commemorative plaque. But Horvat is energised by the thought of resistance fighters hiding up here from the planes overhead, as though he can visualise their plight. We drive on to see the submarine base, a huge hole in the cliff that drops into the sea. I say that it looks like something from a James Bond film.
 
“Yes!” he exclaims indignantly. “We’re not a Mamma Mia! island! We’re a James Bond island!”
 
Later that night, Horvat attempts to persuade me to stay on in Vis. I want to, despite work commitments, because it’s a truly lovely place. Indeed, it’s such a paradise that I find it hard to imagine how Horvat can remember that the world is such a nightmare.
 
“I think it’s paradise but I’m nostalgic for things that will disappear,” he says. “I see things that are already disappearing and changing. The local population feels it even better than me. We need to be mad prophets who might turn out wrong. We need to shock the people with the dystopian facts. No sea fish, only plastics, no air.”
 
In many respects, of course, he’s not wrong. We do need to be aware of the dangers of climate change and environmental despoliation. And the inequalities he rails against are real and growing and require urgent attention. But Horvat writes in revolutionary terms and revolutions have a habit of quickly betraying their ideals. He seems to me the most gentle and benign of characters, the kind of person who would probably not thrive in the ruthless power struggles of dramatic sociopolitical upheaval.
 
He confides that he’s ambivalent about the prospect of becoming an MEP. A big part of him just wants to stay on Vis and write. But while I’m there, his phone keeps ringing – often it’s Varoufakis – and he’s dragged into the tiresome business of political management and internal conflict resolution.
 
Back in London, I write to ask him if he thinks the radical change he’s calling for can take place without the use or threat of large-scale violence.
 
“I believe that the current system,” he replies, “with its never-ending war against the majority of people, other species and nature, is already more violent than any revolution. That said, I don’t like violence of any sort. But a revolution is not a dinner party or writing an essay. Although it often starts like that.”
 
I disagree, because revolutions can be and certainly have been more violent than the current system, for all its injustices. But at the same time, Srećko Horvat is the kind of guy you’d never be disappointed to see at a dinner party.
 
 Poetry from the Future by Srećko Horvat is published by Penguin (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
 
 Srećko Horvat will be live in conversation with Brian Eno at EartH, London N16, 14 May, 7pm
 
 Srećko Horvat: ‘The current system is more violent than any revolution’ By Andrew Anthony. The Observer, April  21, 2019.
 

Recent weeks have seen a shock to France’s elites. President Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax hike sparked widespread protests, with road blockades across the country and violent clashes with police in Paris. The gilets jaunes movement (so named after protesters’ distinctive yellow vests) imposed a humiliating climbdown by the liberal president, who was forced to abandon the tax and raise the minimum wage.

 
These protests have given voice to often-ignored parts of French society. But while much media has shown its contempt for those involved, the movement has found a vocal ally in Pamela Anderson. The former Baywatch star and Playboy model has spoken out on multiple causes before, from her pro-animal rights work with PETA to her environmental stances and support for earthquake relief in Haiti. Now she has become a keen backer of the revolt against austerity.
 
In her tweets and blog posts Anderson emphasized the wider importance of the protests, terming them a battle against the “politics represented by Macron and the 99% who are fed up with inequality, not only in France, all over the world.” She similarly responded to claims of protester violence by tweeting “I despise violence . . . but what is the violence of all these people and burned luxurious cars, compared to the structural violence of the French — and global — elites?”
 
Showing her broad interest in the political upheavals currently gripping the continent, she has in recent days also voiced her support for left-wing UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn while also sharply criticizing Italy’s far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini for his racist agenda.
 
In an interview with Jacobin’s David Broder, Anderson and philosopher Srećko Horvat discussed the French protests, Europe’s crisis, and Anderson’s own activism.
 
DB :
 
The gilets jaunes protests in France have drawn a lot of scorn from media and political elites, but your comments have been supportive, noting that this “revolt has been simmering for some years.” What do you think these protests represent? Do they respond to a mood that you see in France more generally, since you’ve been living there?
 
PA :
My comments were at first provoked by the images of violence. Everyone was hypnotized. Why? And why did it come as such a surprise? What stands behind the violence? I wanted to understand. I know it’s not easy to accept me as I am. I stir things up in an unconventional way, and will continue to do so.
 
A few days after the protests broke out in France, I traveled to Milan. There I found Mr. Salvini in the newspapers saying that “Macron is a problem for the French.” But I see it differently. I think it’s a European problem. In the same way, the rising xenophobia in Italy is a European problem. Not just an Italian one.
 
Just before I arrived in Italy, the top Italian chef Vittorio Castellani was told not to use “foreign recipes” on his TV show. I love Italian food. But what is Italian — or any — food without “foreign influences”? I am sure Mr. Salvini enjoys “foreign food” too. OK, we moved on from the gilets jaunes . . .
 
 
SH :
 
But this is an excellent detection of the problem. This actually started in 2009 with Silvio Berlusconi’s campaign against “non-Italian” food in Italy, it is a continuous process of “normalization” — the slow introduction of measures or even laws which in a near future will seem “normal.”
 
If I remember rightly, it was Vittorio Castellani who, already then, almost ten years ago, pointed out that there is no such thing as authentic “Italian food,” because tomato came from Peru and spaghetti from China. So, without foreign influence “Italian food” would literally taste different. When you say that Salvini probably enjoys “foreign food” then you name the true problem.
 
As with the case of Macron talking to gilets jaunes from his salon doré surrounded by gold decorations, there is a disconnection between the political elites and the people. Moreover, this is utter cynicism on the part of the ruling elites. As for France, it became obvious that the “world-spirit on the horseback” (as Hegel saw Napoleon, and Jürgen Habermas sees Macron) is nothing other than Jacques Lacan’s king who is mad to believe he is a king.
 
When a cabinet minister from Macron’s party, trying to show the gulf between the working poor and political elite, complains that Paris dinners cost “€200 without wine,” it is another clear sign of the disconnect between the elites and the people.
 
The gilets jaunes believe, and they are right, that Macron doesn’t live in the “real world.” At the same time, these days you could have seen, as if it came from the alternate reality of the Situationists themselves, a graffiti simply saying “Pamela Anderson Présidente!”
 
DB :
 
French government officials and some media claim that the protesters are ignoring the need for environmental protection. As someone with a keen interest in conservation, do you think the gilets jaunes‘ own demands can fit together with a green agenda?
 
PA :
I do not think the poor should pay for climate change. Yet it is the poor who are paying the biggest price. Some say that the protesters in France protested so they could continue polluting the planet. But I do not think this is true. They protest because the rich keep destroying the planet. And the poor are paying.
 
In 2013, after the devastating earthquake, I visited Haiti to distribute aid. I visited a children’s hospital and refugee camps. Again, it was the poor paying the price. Since then, many grassroots projects have been going on in Haiti that show what a green transition could look like.
 
The protests in France started when President Macron announced an increase in carbon and air pollution taxes. This was supposed to collect more money for the state budget and also motivate people to use alternatives to diesel-fueled cars. Macron would like to ban diesel cars by 2040. But the French state encouraged people to buy diesel-fueled cars for many years.
 
For example, in 2016, 62 percent of cars in France were diesel cars, as well as 95 percent of all vans and small lorries. So it is no wonder that many people view the new policy as a total betrayal.
 
Getting a new car is probably not a big deal for President Macron and his ministers. But it is way too difficult for many people who are already financially stretched. Many poor people will not be able to get to work, especially if there is no reliable public transport in place. Many old people will not be able to get to the shops or to the doctor.
 

SH :
You have the same problem in Germany. It’s great that many German cities are banning the use of diesel cars. But do you know where they will be exported? Mainly to the Balkans and Eastern Europe. And you can’t blame those people for buying diesel cars, because it’s cheaper and they already live in precarious conditions. So, as always with capitalism, you don’t only have the internal divide, inside of Western European societies, between the metropolitan rich and the rural- or banlieues-poor, there is also a divide between the center and the periphery of the European Union.
 
According to air monitoring databases, those living in the part of Europe where I come from are usually breathing in more toxic particles because of air pollution than those living in Western Europe. If you look at the map, you will see Germany, France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, parts of the UK, have better air quality, and Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Poland have toxic air.
 
During these winter months the air pollution crisis in Sofia or Sarajevo is becoming the new normal. So while Western Europe is heading towards a “green transition,” the economies of the countries of Eastern Europe are still heavily dependent on exploiting coal reserves.
 
At the same time, despite the Energiewende [energy transition], Germany remains heavily dependent on imports of fossil fuels. Taking all this into consideration, we can see that the solution for our current problems is not a national-based “green transition;” we need a European Green New Deal, as advocated by DiEM25. Moreover, we need a global Green New Deal.
 
DB :
In a recent post you defended the idea of “Lexit”: a Brexit organized in a way that defends ordinary people, and also spoke up for Jeremy Corbyn’s call for a general election rather than a second referendum on Brexit. What do you hope Corbyn can do?
 
PA :
It is vital that the European Union is thoroughly and fundamentally reformed. Europe deserves a much better form of organized cooperation. And I would really support the UK attempting to create an alternative for Europe. But retreating to nationalistic tendencies is not an alternative. The only road to freedom is via a joint fight of the unprivileged. This means foreign workers included.
 
The current deal proposed by Theresa May does not offer such an alternative. I joked that I’m sure I could have negotiated better conditions than this dumb deal. I have been negotiating with Hollywood for decades. I could handle Mr. Michel Barnier [the European Union’s chief negotiator].
 
Did you see Theresa May not being able to get out of her car while Merkel was waiting outside? That’s the best metaphor for Brexit. In such a situation, the solution is not a second referendum, but a general election. And I hope Jeremy Corbyn will be the next prime minister.
 
 
SH :
It’s a good question what Corbyn will be able to do. The solution, in my opinion, is not the retreat to national-based politics, but for Labour to continue working in close ties with other European progressives.
 
It is an interesting question how Labour will relate to the upcoming European elections in May 2019 [the elections will not take place in Britain, assuming the country leaves the European Union by the end of March], where I think they could play an important role. And at the same time, I think we should all campaign in the UK, showing why the European elections are of major relevance for the UK as well.
 
Unless the deep crisis of the European Union is solved, which is not only internal but also concerns its foreign policy, I am afraid we will see the situation deteriorating even more. So instead of the simple “Lexit” solution, I think we need more trans-national politics, not just an inter-national politics (between nations), but a trans-national one. We need to go beyond the nation state.
 
DB :
Both Brexit and the gilets jaunes protests saw people who don’t normally dominate the headlines making themselves heard. But despite Pamela’s own past activism, some media seemed surprised that she spoke out on these issues. Why do you think this is?
 
SH :
My only surprise is that anyone is surprised, she has been active for years in various campaigns or visiting places devastated by earthquakes. Of course, I can understand that people still connect Pamela to Baywatch or Playboy and they might be surprised she has an opinion on Brexit or the gilets jaunes, but isn’t that precisely the beauty of it?
 
If Baywatch, a TV show that was watched weekly by 1.1 billion people in 148 countries, gave Pamela a platform to raise her voice and not only comment but intervene in today’s dire political landscape, then we should embrace it.
 
I still remember, how in the 1990s, during the war in Yugoslavia, me and my sister watched Baywatch and how for us, kids of a country which was disintegrating into pieces just in front of our eyes, television was often our escape into a possible and desired future.
 
In the case of Baywatch it was the alternate reality of the “happy 1990s”: now that “actually existing socialism” was finished, we were on our way to reach “actually existing capitalism.” Yes, of course, Baywatch was full of sharks, serial killers, and earthquakes, but for the kids from Yugoslavia, the jobs that Mitch Buchannon (David Hasselhoff) and C.J. (Pamela Anderson) had as lifeguards on the beautiful coasts of California were the embodiment of the “end of history.”
 
Of course, as young kids, we didn’t know what the “end of history” meant and we didn’t know yet that Pamela, incidentally or not, did her first Playboy cover precisely in 1989, the year when Francis Fukuyama published his famous essay. We also didn’t know that the post-Yugoslav transition from communism to capitalism wouldn’t turn this part of Europe into a new California. Yet there is no one among my generation, and many other generations, who wasn’t watching Baywatch. There is no culture without popular culture.

 
DB :
 
Do you think you have a responsibility to use your public platform to speak up for these causes?
 
PA :
I hear a lot of these kinds of stories from remote parts of Zimbabwe. Baywatch was watched in tents surrounded by native people. And in dangerous areas all over the world, including America. We just weren’t aware we were infiltrating [these places] in our own way — yes, with the dream of a “good” life. The beach. California. Escapism. I was part of it. But this gives me the privilege and opportunity to raise my voice for the many issues I believe in.
 
Recently, when Deutsche Welle asked me to support their campaign about the seventieth anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 19, the declaration in favor of free expression, I spoke about Julian Assange, who is still in “arbitrary detention” (as defined by the United Nations itself) and who faces extradition to the United States.
 
I have the responsibility to speak about these issues. Everyone has. Without freedom of speech and independent journalism, including organizations such as WikiLeaks and whistleblowers, there is no chance to build a better world.

DB :

You’ve been active in campaigns for PETA as well as in earthquake relief in Haiti, and recently you’ve published some more political interventions. What kind of activism are you involved in at the moment?  What publications do you read, and what thinkers or writers have most influenced you?
 
PA :
 
I read books, I watch movies, I am learning French, I am traveling across the world — a mysterious and wonderful place. But a very worrying place. I am worried about climate change. About extinction. I am still active in supporting Sea Shepherd and organizations for helping refugees. And I think of Julian Assange often, especially now that Christmas is coming and he can’t be with his family and friends.
 
I think it is all connected. I am more and more concerned about Europe, a place I love. When I was in Italy in the last few days, just before my comments on Matteo Salvini’s government, I was reading Umberto Eco’s essay “Eternal Fascism” from 1995.
 
There he defines fourteen general properties of fascism, which for him wasn’t a coherent system. So he speaks of “Ur-fascism” and characteristics such as the “cult of tradition,” “fear of difference,” “appeal to a frustrated middle class,” “obsession with conspiracy,” “contempt for the weak,” and “machismo.”
 
Look at leaders such as Trump, Bolsonaro, and Salvini and you will see exactly these properties. They are destroying the Amazon, the Arctic, the whole planet in “real time.” And there is no planet B.
 
 
SH :
 
Except for those white male libertarian utopians from Silicon Valley who might escape to Mars, while the rest of us will inhabit an actually-existing dystopia. I think Pamela is right. Whether you call it “post-fascism,” like Enzo Traverso, or you call it “Ur-fascism” like Eco, the fact is that fascism never died. It is a small step from the “Black International,” from the twentieth century to the formation of an “axis of the willing” between Italy, Germany, and Austria proposed by Austria’s current prime minister Sebastian Kurz.
 
Add to this the technological advances from AI to automation, from Silicon Valley to Cambridge Analytica, and you get an explosive combination for something that might be even worse than traditional fascism. Probably the best historical figure who embodies “ur-fascism” is the Italian poet and warmonger Gabrielle D’Annunzio, who occupied the Croatian coastal town of Rijeka. He invented a bizarre fascist utopia or dystopia there, which wasn’t just fascist (Lenin even called D’Annunzio the “only revolutionary in Europe”), but all the fascist properties were already there plus the embrace of new technology.
 
He practically invented the “balcony speeches” (which Mussolini would adopt), but Marconi let him transmit a message to the world from his yacht. He also invented a fascist form of “narcocapitalism,” even before the Nazis did tons of Pervitin — Fiume was full of drugs. Or as Pasolini used to say, the true anarchy is the anarchy of power.
 
Thanks to the recent renewed interest in D’Annunzio — for instance Lucy Hughes Hallett’s seminal biography The Pike, Bruce Sterling’s science-fiction novel Pirate Utopia, and the work by Croatian filmmaker Igor Bezinović — I hope the lessons of this short historical period can slowly be uncovered.
 
I was talking to Adam Curtis recently, when we visited Rijeka together, saying that it’s too easy to dismiss this crazy and mad period only as an early manifestation of fascism. What makes it truly traumatic but tremendously interesting is that D’Annunzio’s Fiume can’t be described either as dystopia nor as utopia — for it was both at once.
 
DB :
 
In a lot of countries the far right is on the rise, but at the same time there is a radicalization on the Left, shaking up the old political certainties. What do you think is behind all this?
 
SH :
After visiting the burning streets of Paris, Jerome Roos recently published a magnificent analysis saying that gilets jaunes have blown up the old political categories, which presents both dangers and opportunities. He reminds us of a beautiful and appropriate quote by Saint-Just who said: “The present order is the disorder of the future.”
 
Unfortunately, after all the “Springs” we have witnessed, we must turn it around and ask what if the current disorder — all these libidinal energies and revolutionary potential — will not turn into a new order of the future?
 
The “state of exception,” as defined by Carl Schmitt and elaborated by Giorgio Agamben, is already a rule — not an exception — across Europe. After the G20 protests in Hamburg, Europe’s leaders where already advocating for a pan-European “register for activists.” A kind of Minority Report in order to preserve the order. Or the anarchy of power.
 
PA :
I agree with Srećko. As I said, when I was commenting on the gilets jaunes, the real question is whether the disobedience can be constructive, what comes the day after: can the progressives in France, and all over the world, use this energy so that instead of violence we see equal and egalitarian societies being built? It was a wake-up call.
 
I have a dream of a society in which people devour books and art. We have a responsibility to fill our hearts and minds with music and art, not with PlayStations. Human connections are dying out. When we forget how to make love. This is where we forget each other. Let’s fight together. And learn together.
 
Pamela Anderson on Europe’s Turmoil  : an interview with Pamela Anderson and Srećko Horvat. Jacobin , December 17, 2018.