At first glance, the simultaneity of these two phenomena seems paradoxical, which blurs our comprehension and leaves us confused: the high degree of complexity and perverse refinement proper to the neoliberal way of life is light-years ahead of the narrow-minded archaism of the brute forces of this new conservatism. They are symptoms of radically different reactive forces, originating in distinct historical moments, coexisting in our contemporaneity. But after the initial shock, we understand that neoliberalism needs these rude subjectivities to do the dirty work of destroying all the achievements of democratic, republican culture, dissolving its imaginary and eradicating from the scene its protagonists—including the lefts in all their nuances, but not only them. Lacking moral limits of any kind, reactive subjectivities fulfil their task at a dizzying speed and with intense violence—as soon as we recognise one of their coups, another has already happened. Carrying out this task gives them a perverse narcissistic jouissance to the point of being pathetic. The ground is prepared for a frictionless and unencumbered free flow of transnational capital.

In addition to fear and astonishment, there is a deep frustration with the recent dissolution of several leftist governments across the world, especially in Latin America— which, not by chance, occurs at the same time as the rise of reactive forces of conservatism and neoliberalism, temporarily united. Such frustration mobilises the traumatic memory of the unfortunate fate of twentieth-century revolutions. A state of alert settles into our subjectivity, as when the scarcity of essential resources crosses a threshold, putting life itself at risk. These are traumatic situations before which we either succumb (a pathological response that saps our vital potency) or we widen the horizon of our gaze, which gives us more precision in deciphering the violence and inventing ways of fighting it (a response which preserves our vital potency, and even intensifies it, in certain cases). In the moments when, in the face of the trauma that we are experiencing, the second response wins, we can see an insurmountable limit against which left-wing projects stumble, especially institutional ones. Such a view imposes on us the task of problematising this limit, in order to create the conditions of its overcoming.

First of all, we are forced to recognise that this barrier is not located only outside the territory of the left, imposed by adverse forces that are external to it. In fact, it is chiefly located inside the left’s own territory, whose horizon ends at the borders of the macropolitical sphere. This is the sphere of the shapes of a world, and its own modes of existence: the positions and functions set out in the social map, the modes of relation between them, as well as their codes and their representations.

Even when the left, especially the institutional left, talks about modes of existence, it tends to do so only from a macropolitical perspective. It thinks of the oppressed as identitarian entities and tends to crystallise them, neutralising the ‘creating power’ (potency) of their subjectivity, and preventing this creating power from fulfilling its function: to respond to the need for change that emerges in the relational fabric of collective life. Worse still is when the focus is on groups of disadvantaged people who don’t fit into the category of the ‘worker’—the identitarian place to which the oppressed are confined in much of the left’s imaginary, reduced as it is to class relations. The left tends to fetishise the workers or even to render them folkloric, imparting a lot to these figures-turned-caricatures within the official map of democracy, which only allows access to civil rights. This is the central goal of the lefts’ resistance: what moves them in this operation is the urge to promote the ‘inclusion’ of such groups into the existing map, resulting in their submissive adaptation to the hegemonic mode of subjectivation. That is the case, for example, with the left’s approach towards Indigenous peoples in Brazil. This focus on mere inclusion suggests to us that the left wing not only assumes the dominant mode of existence as its reference, but also considers it as the sole and universal reference, denying any alterity. The consequence is that they lose the crucial opportunity to inhabit the relational fabric woven by decidedly different modes of existence and, above all, to sustain the possible shifting effects that could render the dominant cartography void. More worryingly, when such effects are felt and new modes of existence emerge within collective life, they are read by the left wing through the same lens and tend to be similarly confined to identitarian entities. This is the case, for example, with movements that continue to disrupt dominant notions of gender, sexuality and race. The singularisation processes underway in these insurrections are ignored, thereby neutralising their vital impulse for transmuting the dominant modes of subjectivation and the changes to individual and collective forms of existence this impulse could unleash. In short, what is ignored and neutralised is these groups’ strength for micropolitical resistance.

Although some left-wing groups recognise micropolitical movements, their readings tend to reduce these to the issue of inequality, narrowing the focus of such uprisings to the class struggle. This persistent reduction of such vision and modes of action to the macropolitical sphere is responsible for the left’s helplessness in the face of the challenges of the present, keeping them imprisoned in sterile academic lucubrations of democracy. In such lucubrations various lefts emphasise ‘demo’ (referring to δεμος or ‘people’ in Greek) in the notion of ‘democracy’, which they translate as “government of the people”. This denies a fundamental detail of its original sense in Greek, which gives it the meaning of ‘self-government’ by the people. This reduces the discussion of the current crisis of democracy to the question of how to reform the state machine in order to better represent ‘the people’.

The dreary fate of left resistance today and the repeated frustration it provokes in us, added to the confusion and fear provoked by the current state of things, leads us to become aware of the absolute limitations of the macropolitical horizon. Here and there insurrections erupt with new strategies in response to the violences against life, in all their nuances, for which the pair right/left is no longer a sufficient designator of forces or stakes. Isn’t the new presence of micropolitical insurrection what surprises us in the resistance movements bursting forth all around, mainly among younger generations and among women, black and LGBTQ people from the metropolitan suburbs, as well as in Indigenous communities? Isn’t this precisely what fascinates us in these movements, despite the difficulty of deciphering and naming it? Is it not just such movements that prevent us from succumbing to melancholic and fatalistic paralysis within the bleak landscape that surrounds us? In these territories-in-formation that are increasingly populated, there is an effective change of the politics of subjectivation. Their horizons expand the reach of our vision, enabling us to foresee the micropolitical sphere. How does the violence of colonial capital operate in this sphere?

The Abuse of the Vital Force

What distinguishes the colonial-capitalistic system is the pimping of life as a force for creation and transmutation. This force is life’s essence and its condition for persistence, in which lies its greater goal, or, its ethical destiny. The matrix of the system relies on the profane rape of life to the point that we can designate it as ‘pimping-capitalistic’. This system expropriates and corrupts the vital force of the entire biosphere: land, air, water, sky, plants, animals and humans. In our species, such rape has particular characteristics, arising from the way the vital force is materialised; it depends on a process of creation with multiple options, implying the need to make a choice. For this reason, Freud assigned the name ‘drive’ to the human vital force, distinguishing this from ‘instinct’. On the one hand, our specificity broadens the possibilities for the transmutation of world-forms when life asks for it; on the other, it makes our species the only one that can prevent the fulfilment of this ethical exigency. And when that happens, the effect is a disempowerment of life, interrupting its germinative process, destroying the vital energy sources of the biosphere—which, in humans, includes the subjective resources for its preservation.

If the Marxist tradition originating in industrial capitalism made us realise that the expropriation of the human vital force in its manifestation as labour is the source of capital accumulation, the latest version of capitalism leads us to recognise that such expropriation is not confined to the domain of labour. In its new fold, this regime feeds off the energy of the drive: the very impulse to create forms of existence and cooperation in which the claims of life materialise into new modes of existence, transforming present scenarios and their attendant values. Diverted by pimping-capitalism from its ethical fate, the drive is channelled to build worlds according to the purposes of the dominant regime: the accumulation of economic, political, cultural and narcissistic capital. This violation of the vital force produces a trauma that makes subjectivity turn deaf to the drive’s claims: it stops being guided by the impulse to preserve life, it corrupts desire and can even act against it. This increasing deterioration of life is precisely the violence of the colonial-capitalistic regime in the micropolitical sphere: a cruelty typical of a perverse politics of desire—subtle, refined, invisible, unreachable by perception. It is a violence similar to that of the pimp who, in order to instrumentalise his prey, operates by means of seduction. Under his spell, the prostitute tends not to realise the pimp’s cruelty; on the contrary, she tends to idealise him, which leads her to surrender to the abuse of her own desire.