Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN
liberties, suppression of all opposition, militarization and totalitarian manipulation of
the people, bourgeois democracy, even in its monopolistic form, still provides a chance
(the last chance?) for the transition to socialism, for the education (in theory and practice)
and organization to prepare this transition. The New Left is therefore faced with
the task of defending this democracy? Defend it as the lesser evil: lesser than suicide and
suppression. And it is faced with the task of defending this democracy while attacking its
capitalist foundations. 29
Marcuse saw bourgeois democracy, with its freedom of speech and association, with
space for self-organization (of, for example, workers and women) as a lesser evil to dictatorship
in as such but also inasmuch as it would provide a real opportunity for its subversion
and eventual transformation. “Defending democracy while attacking its capitalist
foundations” is an articulation of a necessary paradox: could one simultaneously defend
democracy in its liberal form against the encroaching evil of fascism, all the while attacking
its foundations?
***
The problem articulated by Marcuse are somewhat relevant to the political predicaments
pertaining to different kinds of contemporary non governmental activists: being intransigently
in opposition to the neoliberal global order and market hegemony, for example,
while, at the same time using their (infra)structures, and even momentarily cooperating
with their institutions. Negotiating this paradox—and ‘negotiation’ could only merit its
name if it seeks to bring together incompatible positions – must be the most important
challenge to these contemporary activists. How to engage in practiced of “lesser evil”,
but seek to mobilize the effect of these actions in the service of larger political claims;
how to work from ‘inside’ systems while simultaneously seeing beyond them, even precipitating
their end?
Obviously, the argument that the principle of the “lesser evil” is dangerous because it
may produce more harm is a contradiction as blatant as saying that it is a lesser evil to
avoid the lesser evil argument. 30 I am also not suggesting that the horrific spectacles of
‘greater evils’ should be preferred to the incremental damage of ‘lesser’ ones, that the
violence of the present conflicts should be made (even) more brutal in order to shock a
complacent population into mobilizing resistance (the threshold of the ‘intolerable’ is
elastic enough to make most people easily accommodate and domesticate a sense of an
ever worsening reality); rather, that opposition and resistance must dare to think beyond
the economy and the calculations of violence and suffering that liberal ethics touts
forward. Dealing with the political ethics of the lesser evil could be articulated by bypassing
the closed economy that a particular ‘dilemma’ presents with an insistence on the
expansion of the limits of the problem in both space and time – the former by seeking to
identify more extended and intricate political connections leading to the issue at stake
and the latter by looking further into the future.
More about the predicament of contemporary non governmental organizations I hope
to articulate in later versions of this text. The installation 665/The Lesser Evil in Mani-