Nothing to Lose but Our Fear by Fiona Jeffries

Author:Fiona Jeffries [Jeffries, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Political, Social Science, Political Science, Anthropology, Communication Studies, Sociology, Language Arts & Disciplines, General, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781783604166
Google: QP40EAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 23258285
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2015-03-12T11:42:36+00:00

Thinking through Crisis

JOHN: I think that has a lot to do with thinking of the world from the perspective of crisis. What we are really looking for is hope, for cracks, and trying to think about the world from the standpoint of its fragility. This means trying to understand domination as a system of domination in crisis. That is the importance of Marxism. Marxism sees history as a system. It is not a period of domination; it is really a period of crisis in domination. For me, that is what distinguishes Marxism from other forms of left thought, which are very good indeed at throwing light on domination. Feminism, for example, showed just how all-pervasive patriarchal domination is. Ecological thought has shown just how terrible the destruction of nature is. But they don’t, at least as far as I know, really focus on the fragility of domination, whereas I think that Marxism, at least the way I understand it, really takes the crisis of domination as a central question.

For this reason, Marxism urges us to recognize that we ourselves are that fragility. Because that is really our question. The key question is not really how we understand the fragility of the system outside. It is: How do we understand that we ourselves are the fragility of the system, that we are the crisis of the system? So it is crucial to understand the crisis not in terms of objective laws, but in terms of the force of our own struggle.

To bring this back to the question of fear, I suppose that means understanding domination as being something that is in constant crisis. We are in constant crisis, and therefore the dominators are in constant fear and terror. They express it from time to time, although not very often. But they do have a whole apparatus of thought that tries to contain that terror of their fragility, the fear of their own fragility. One book that brings that out particularly is Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. The ruling classes behind their high walls are living in terror. You feel that more and more every day. In Mexico you see more and more people living behind high walls with guards and controls, and that seems to be the trend throughout the world.

FIONA: Are we moving closer to an ever more enhanced version of Hobbes’s infamous state, where adherence to the sovereign is attained through the mobilization of fearful passions?

JOHN: Yes, I suppose if we think of it in those terms, the state is really the expression of the antidote to the ruling classes’ fear. Obviously Hobbes puts it in very general terms, and you could read it that way. If you think of the ruling classes or simply the rich as living in constant fear, the state is their way of dealing with that. From that point of view, you can perhaps see the state as being a process of inverting fear, of turning fear around by trying to make the people they are afraid of live in fear.

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