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Title
Clash of temporalities: Capital, democracy, and squares
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1r01p4b5
Journal
South Atlantic Quarterly, 113(2)
ISSN
0038-2876
Author
Tomba, M
Publication Date
2014
DOI
10.1215/00382876-2643666
Peer reviewed
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The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:2, Spring 2014
10.1215/00382876-2643666 © 2014 Duke University Press
Massimiliano Tomba
Clash of Temporalities:
Capital, Democracy, and Squares
While the Western world was celebrating the
“peaceful transition into democracy” in the Arab
world, one could read the following slogans in
many squares around the world: Democracy Is
a Joke (Brussels) and Democracy Is an Illusion
(London). “Democracy has been kidnapped,” said
the Spanish Indignados outside the parliament
on September 25, 2012: “We are going to save it.”
Real Democracy Now!, claim people in different
parts of the world. At the very least, the “transition
into democracy” requires us to investigate: Which
democracy are we talking about?
Western powers have tried both to neutral-
ize and to co-opt the protests in the Arab world by
pointing to them as the correct pathway of transi-
tion from one governmental form to another. Such
a transition, on the one hand, allows the West to
maintain its hegemony in the oil-rich Gulf and, on
the other, envisages the Western model of repre-
sentative democracy as the singular configuration
of contemporary democracy. This model is now in
crisis. And it is not because there was a golden age
of democracy, but because internal and external
strains are showing that even its self-legitimation
no longer works. The conflict of temporalities that
characterizes the recent crisis shows us that the
354 The South Atlantic Quarterly
•
Spring 2014
time of liberal democracy has passed. An activist from Mali, who was asked
to comment on the economic crisis in 2009, reacted: “What crisis? We live in
a permanent crisis” (Crossing Borders 2009). From the perspective of per-
manent crisis, in which the West has organized the colonial world system, the
current crisis expresses a violent resynchronization of temporalities that are
out of sync.
A 2011 article in the New York Times denounced the current situation of
disastrously high unemployment in both the United States and Europe and
the mistrust of leaders and institutions as part of a general context in which
“democratic values are under siege” (Krugman 2011). Actually, this state of
emergency has become the rule in countries such as Greece, Portugal, Spain,
and Italy, and the ascendency of right-wing populists and neofascist groups
and the rise of new authoritarian governments can be observed in many
countries. An article in the Washington Post states: “Globalization has clearly
begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies” (Applebaum
2011). This statement is vague, but it contains an element of truth, possibly
beyond the intentions of the author: Western democracy cannot be the
model for the “transition to democracy” anymore. It is not that globalization
as such undermines democracy. It is that the clash of political, economic,
and juridical temporalities in the globalized world is destabilizing the form
of political democracy that was born in the modern West.
The Clash of Temporalities
Democracy is currently caught amid a clash of different temporalities. When
Sheldon Wolin (1997: 4) posed the question “what time is it?” he argued that
“political time is out of synch with the temporalities, rhythms, and pace gov-
erning economy and culture.” The crux of the matter, according to Wolin
(2000: 20), is that “high technology, globalized capitalism is radically incon-
gruent with democracy.” In a response to Wolin, William E. Connolly (2002:
141) denounced his romantic vision of democracy that wants “the world to
slow down so that democracy can flourish.” He also argued to accelerate its
speed in the name of pluralism and melting identities (Connolly 2002;
McIvor 2011). That discussion is important because it represents two appar-
ently opposite perspectives: the longing for the return of a golden democratic
past, on the one hand, and the postmodern enthusiasm for acceleration, on
the other. However, the real question concerns neither the acceleration or
deceleration of contemporary political life nor the speed limit of democracy
but rather the mechanism of the synchronization of different temporalities
Tomba
•
Clash of Temporalities 355
and their different tempos and the possibilities of different forms of “social
relations” that the crisis is disclosing.
Liberal democracy as we know it is collapsing under the forces of syn-
chronization:
1
on the one hand, there is the economic temporality that
imposes the speed of decision making; on the other, there is the temporality
of the state and the slowness of the participatory process of decision making.
On a global scale, the temporal disjuncture between national and transna-
tional institutions is growing, and “the slower temporal rhythms of nation
states are marginalized by the transnational proliferation of soft law and fast
policy” (Hope 2009: 79). The speed of formal democracy, with its parlia-
mentarian discussions and search for consent, is too slow compared to the
speed of capital. As the two temporalities diverge, a new process of synchro-
nization appears in the agency of the current “revolution from above,” which
finds its own legitimacy in the economic crisis, austerity measures, and
sometimes even the crisis of legitimacy of the present ruling class itself.
The current conservative revolution aims to redetermine the political
functions of state sovereignty, which, rather than declining, is simply recon-
figuring its authority. The conservative revolution is composed of different
temporalities: the glittering temporality of finance and the reaction of left-
and right-wing countertemporalities that contest banks and their plutocratic
power; the acceleration of political decisions by national and supranational
technocratic governments and the countertemporalities of those who argue
for a reinforcement of the democratic process to the detriment of finance
and through the participation of the people; and the different speeds of func-
tions of state sovereignty relocated at a supranational level and the counter-
temporalities of those who want to reinforce sovereignty and the very role of
the nation-state. Finally, the violence of the synchronization of the states
with their austerity measures encounters the countertemporalities of the
anti-austerity protests. Our task is to understand the current situation as a
clash of temporalities. Their synchronization according to the rhythm of the
global market is attempted by economic and extra-economic violence. In
today’s context in which the financial acceleration of profit-making clashes
with the long-term requirements of capital accumulation (Hope 2011: 97),
the clocks of world stock markets are beating the time for political decisions,
constitutional changes, and the pace of work.
Global capitalism is driven by a constant process of temporalization of
space that Karl Marx (1986: 448) summarized as the “annihilation of space
by time.” This space-time compression in the ongoing process of capitalist
accumulation is driven by the temporality of the socially necessary labor
356 The South Atlantic Quarterly
•
Spring 2014
time that continuously imposes on space a constant rescaling and redefini-
tion of the hierarchical scales of power-regulation that traverse different
nation-states, redefining their sovereignty without abolishing it. In fact, the
most typical functions of sovereignty, such as the decision making with
respect to inclusion and exclusion, are not reduced but just replaced. It is
being resynchronized by means of the “revolution from above” that has
become the new political clothes of synchronization. The current transfor-
mation of democracy represents the most adequate configuration of both
capital and the state in the global market after the defeat of workers’ move-
ments. The welfare state and democratic decision making, themselves the
result of class struggles, are under relentless attack.
The disassembling of the welfare state, especially in Europe, would not
have been possible without the defeat of workers’ struggles over the past
forty years and the outcome of the Cold War. This defeat presents two sides.
During the Cold War, Western democracies were glittering displays that
showed off both luxury commodities and democracy. At the same time, the
working class acted as a collective subject, imposing collective rights and
agreements and putting a minimal standard of democracy in the factories
and in the common life of society. In “the twentieth century, citizenship and
the capitalist class system [were] at war” (Marshall 2009: 153–54), and in this
war the working class won the incorporation of social rights in the status of
citizenship. Social rights, as well as civil and political rights, are not stages of
a necessary juridical development but a conquest that the working class was
able to impose on the state. This virtuous anomaly, in which the working
class imposed collective agreements and social rights and kept the process of
democratization open, is now over, and the train of modernity takes up its
course again on the rails of the individual labor contract and the privatiza-
tion of public utilities. Capital and its state no longer tolerate collective rights,
against which they have already fought a centuries-old war: before, the state
should be individuals with their individual rights, just as before, the employer
there is the individual worker in the capitalist relationship. The first step of
the new conservative revolution is to destroy both the material and the sym-
bolic gains of the working class during the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury in order to obliterate the anomaly.
The declaration of war against the working class as collective subject
claims to impose “normal” relations between the state and society, that is,
atomized private individuals confronting the multinational employer and
the state’s monopoly of power. In the West, this war began in 1981 when
Ronald Reagan crushed the strike of the Professional Air Traffic Control-