The receptivity to the idea of change

Barack Obama’s emphasis on change, or the desire for change, as something that unites his supporters in the race for the Democratic nomination in the US, has been so conspicuous that it is difficult not to see in it something significantly symptomatic of the general social and political mood in America, and perhaps in the world.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that, as various commentators have pointed out, his obvious rhetorical skills tend to cover up the lack of specificity in all his talk about change or the need for it. What seems to me significant, however, is the tremendous receptivity on the part of (it appears) especially young, well-educated people for this message of change, amorphous though it may be, that Obama has been disseminating in the course of his campaign. I would like to place this in a wider context.

It seems to me that, behind the appeal of Obama’s message of change lies something of global importance — not only in the fashionable sense related to globalisation, but concerning the well-being of global society. It resonates with the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2001), which addresses the emergence of a new form of sovereignty in the world (at a political, juridical, economic, social and cultural level) — a sovereignty and array of dominant forces (broadly, the capitalist states and their allies) which benefit from, constantly expand, and reinforce the process known as globalisation at various levels. In their more recent work, Multitude (2005: xiii-xiv), they remark that:

“On one face, Empire spreads globally its network of hierarchies and divisions that maintain order through new mechanisms of control and constant conflict. Globalisation, however, is also the creation of new circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents and allow an unlimited number of encounters. This second face of globalisation is not a matter of everyone in the world becoming the same; rather it provides the possibility that, while remaining different, we discover the commonality that enables us to communicate and act together. The multitude might thus be conceived as a network: an open and expansive network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally, a network that provides the means of encounter so that we can work and live in common.”

In Empire, Hardt and Negri already argued that there is a living alternative to the structures of domination and biopolitical production of Empire, and that this alternative power — the democratic promise of “the multitude” — grows within the operations and practices of the representatives of Empire itself. For example, the exemplar of rhizomatic communicational networks, the internet, is not merely the means for expanding the process of globalisation economically; it also provides the communicational means for workers, intellectuals, journalists, political and ecological activists, artists, filmmakers and creative writers (all those who comprise the heterogeneous multitude) to use the resources of Empire to subvert it, that is, for purposes of preparing a truly democratic transformation of global society.

This is not a fiction; manifestations of the desire for such a democratic transformation — distinct from the existing so-called democracies — are detectable across the globe. For instance, in Multitude Hardt and Negri list and discuss in detail a number of “global demands for democracy” in the contemporary world, which have been increasing in strength. In so far as they are directed at governmental authorities and multinationals, they attempt to communicate a wide variety of demands and grievances pertaining to serious encroachments on the principles of democracy, which is understood by them as a form of social and political organisation which can only, justifiably, happen or “arise from below”, as “the rule of everyone by everyone” (as Hardt and Negri put it), that is, governance with the participation of the people (who would thus be both the rulers and the ruled). Is this kind of rule the case today in the world’s supposed “democracies”, or do we witness, time and again, the abuse of representational power by governments across the globe in multiple ways, from oligarchical excesses and corruption to downright power (and wealth) grabs?

Although one could challenge the authors of Empire and Multitude on certain interpretive issues, I tend to agree with them that the latter is the rule rather than the exception. And behind the success of Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on the need for change, one may discern a growing awareness on the part of ordinary people that the synthesis of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism is not all it is made out to be.

The worldwide protests (enumerated by Hardt and Negri) against the global political and economic system can therefore be understood as a sign that “democracy cannot be made or imposed from above”. They list three principal elements which recur in all the recent and current global demands as preconditions for democracy, namely: “… the critique of existing forms of representation, the protest against poverty, and the opposition to war”. These are manifestations of what may be thought of as the contemporary crisis in communication and the lack of representation at many levels.

One may gain some understanding of this crisis of representation and communication (and its link with the receptivity to change apparent in Obama’s campaign) from the parallel that Hardt and Negri draw in Multitude between the social and political significance of the more than 40 000 cahiers de doléances (lists of grievances) compiled all over France and submitted to Louis XVI just prior to the French Revolution of 1789. Today one witnesses growing lists of similar grievances, ranging from the most local contexts to the highest, most encompassing levels of governance, that is, at national as well as international level.

The fact that Hardt and Negri can write that “[m]ost contemporary protests focus, at least in part, on the lack of representation”, draws attention to the lack of communication between constituencies and those who supposedly represent them worldwide, from local through national to global (international) institutions of representation. This, I suspect, is at least in part what animates those voters in the United States who are receptive to Obama’s message of change.

Seen in this light, I would guess that it is mainly this receptivity to the idea that fundamental change is needed in societies across the globe (as argued and substantiated by Hardt and Negri) which explains Obama’s astonishing success so far in the race for the Democratic nomination, and not so much his ability to give concrete content to what such change would entail. In the process Obama may be seen, in the words of the African-American philosopher, Cornel West, as “restoring hope”.