on the spirit of sects - Tendance Coatesy

STASIS, SOCIALISM, RELIGION, POLITICS. "From the capital this pestilence was diffused into the provinces and
cities of the East, and the sportive distinction of two colours produced
two strong and irreconcilable factions, which shook the foundations of a
feeble government. The popular dissensions, founded on the most serious
interest or holy pretence, have scarcely equalled the obstinacy of this
wanton discord, which invaded the peace of families, divided friends and
brothers, and tempted the female sex, though seldom seen in the circus, to
espouse the inclinations of their lovers, to contradict the wishes of this
husbands. Every law, either human or divine, was trampled under foot; and
as long as the party was successful, its deluded followers appeared
careless of private distress or public calamity. The licence, without the
freedom, of democracy, was revived at Antioch and Constantinople, and the
support of a faction became necessary to every candidate for civil or
ecclesiastical honours." Vol. IV The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon (1) No democracy is possible without parties, that is, a division into sides.
Parties as well contain differences of opinion, tendencies, and currents;
sometimes appearing to suffer from too great discord, other times to stifle
all opposition. Factionalism, in the sense of strongly standing up for a
side, is both inevitable and, sometimes, healthy. Meaning obsessively hair-
splitting, preferring division to unity, stands at the threshold of the
either the truly political and the religious, a much needed leaven in
otherwise bland debates, promoting dissensus it can lead to revolutionary
social transformations, or it can lead from the sect to the path of
introverted and manipulative cults. Yet, factions - meaning parts of the
whole, groups that set dividing lines - are as necessary to democracy as
voting. They are the core of what we will explore as "stasis", the lever
that upsets order. Or they may have a balancing effect. Partisanship on
mainstream and fringe politics today, a millennium and some centuries after
the Byzantine chariot races, still has something of the flavour of
rivalries between sporting teams. That is, something that helps sustain the
game. Even so, factions divide, inspire shake governments, are charged with
being the bane of political life, and, in some cases, ruin personal lives,
and break up friendships. For the latter they have a bad reputation even
amongst pluralists. As a result some imagine democracies in which rational
communication could produce agreement, or at least an overlapping
consensus, beyond factional interest. Failing that, there are proposals
that representative democracies are best served not by factions, but by a
class of engaged, but less... well, factional, Monitors, surveillance
experts, who bring light and pressure, to bear on politics. If only it were
not for the party-spirited, the tribalists and loyalists, splitters and
wreckers.... Such, then, is then received anti-factional consensus, that
spreads further than Liberal Democratic Institutions. There are two wrong
approaches to them. The first is the attempt to suppress them, either by
creating Monolithic Parties (Stalinism, Fascism, Nazism) or to disaggregate
them (the liberal pluralist one). This policy showed its weakness with the
fall of Official Communism. The moment the lid was lifted they appeared
again, and these societies have had great difficulties adjusting to any
form of democracy that can cope with them. The second is found in those who
support a form of religious or secular version of the Parousia (the Kingdom
of the Beyond realised on Earth). This imagines division out of the way by
promoting a picture of a movement that will sweep all factionalism away.
Neither copes with the enduring nature of factionalism nor faces up to its
positive role. What could be the contribution of factions to strengthening democracy?
Julien Benda remarked that democracy rests upon an "aesthetic feeling" that
it requires an "idea of equilibrium, infinitely more complex than the idea
of order". This suggests that forces of disequilibria are needed as well as
means of bringing people together in order for a possible balance to exist.
The prevailing agreement around the market state suppresses, dampens, the
factionalising that might overwhelm it and force a real, not a utopian,
basis for socialism: a complex and problematic, idea in itself, battered by
history and torn apart by multiple theories. Much of the left, seeking a
way out in a reforged unity, ignores its value. The new Marxist or
Socialist millennialists, who seek a rupture in time and bringing forth a
society in which division is burnt out by a living Utopia, ignore the
material constraints and vital flame of democratic discord. All projects
for self-dispossession and radical remaking, and above all the political
socialism advocated here, need grounding on this fundamental reality.
Factions need a defence. They are as indispensable as they are obnoxious.
Our own factional contribution is, in short, intended to be both. Democracy, stasis and socialism, the relationship between the mobile forms
of popular rule that could inform the left, require more writing and acting
than one can possibly cram into a single book or life. This is an attempt
to offer some alternative ways of thinking to the present-day left's
projects. It begins with the confrontation, one of the most significant of
our time, between the newly invigorated forces of religion (if not always
in the numbers of practising believers but very visibly in their social
presence), and one of the main pillars of democratic expression,
secularism. Terry Eagleton asserts that in "tragic humanism" there is
something shared "in socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties,
(which) holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical
remaking can humanity come into its own.." For others, a religion without
God, incorporating less the tragedy of faith than its hopes for the future,
is preferable to 'bourgeois' secular democracy. Perhaps as Alistair Crooke
asserts, seen in the Iranian revolution, an "attempt to shape a new
consciousness", a religious "Other History of Being". Or Ernest Bloch's
efforts - undergoing a revival - to argue for the necessity of a sense of
a Concrete Utopia emerging from the present, a feeling of the 'not yet' of
(present just beyond the tips of our fingers) the Kingdom of Freedom. These
responses share, ultimately, a desire to channel mundane conflict and
resolve difference in an anti-political unity of purpose. It was
negotiating away from Eschatology (the Last Days) that the Church was
built, and those who trace the footprints of communism in these times and
believe that it will be by finding its lair there, venturing out again in
the tumult of its revivals, misunderstand the nature of religion. It
against this version of the Apocalypse that socialism here and now will be
created. We need to grasp how democracy rubs up constantly against
religion, and the ultra-utopianism that, both in origins and present
practice, closely resembles it, exploring the history of the fractures in
faith that laid the basis for democratic independent existence. That
factionalism, division, is a vital part of democracy, suppressed under
Stalinist Official Communism, and only partly recognised even by the most
radical forms of agonistic democracy, a lack traceable to a lack of
attention to the above party form, and the potential mechanisms of wide,
strong democracy in potential socialism. Socialism is eminently political,
as opposed to religious, in the way Hannah Arendt described the difference
between Christianity and what she read into the foundations of the American
polis, "men in possession of an ever-lasting life moved in an ever-changing
world whose ultimate fate was death; and the outstanding characteristic of
the modern age was that it turned once more to antiquity to find a
precedent for is new preoccupation with the future of the man made world on
earth." A time to come what will not be found not in utopias, the drive for
the Beyond, the nunc stans, the eternal present, but only through the world
of the nunc movens - the passing now, which is the heart of politics. To elaborate on this requires a wide excursion, around religion, socialist
history, political organisations, literature, and democratic theory. From
an eclectic archive of resources, we will discuss theorists who have
offered tools, ideas of radical or strong democracy, debates about workers'
control, Marxism, Stalinism, the nature of democracy and sovereignty - a
wide range of issue that touch the nature of stasis, democracy and
socialism, or at least those that we have within our grasp How is this
worked with? If there is one theme it is that far from benefiting from an
engagement to the religious cast of mind, it was the left's misfortune to
have been marked by it too much. That the Jesuit Gustav Wetter could write
that the Church argues from the "authority of divine revelation" on "purely
philosophical grounds" while under Stalin "the authority of the 'classics'
of Marxism admits no argument, and has to be blindly taken on trust" shows
something deep entrenched on the left. This can hardly be washed away by
appealing to the authority of revelations of Terry Eagleton who believes
that "The Eucharist, then, celebrates a convivial being-with-others, as a
love-fea