Fighting Corruption: Thorns and Chances. Contributions to the Debate #3

contributions by Mariya Ivancheva and Otonom

 MARIYA IVANCHEVA

A compilation of definitions of Oxford and Cambridge Learner’s Dictionaries tells us that corruption means: 1. dishonest behavior especially of people in power; 2. an act or effect of making somebody change from moral to immoral standards of behavior; 3. the form of a word or phrase which has become changed from its original form in some way; 4. when the information on a computer has been changed in a way that it cannot be used any longer. These four meanings of the definition of corruption can of course, lead us into different venues of reflection. It is good to keep all of them in mind because they can tease different aspects of this term and practice that the debate on corruption can engage in. The call for the current debate takes the first definition – dishonest behavior by those in power – as a starting point. It does it in a grounded way, vis-à-vis the growing awareness of the sheer abuse of power and rampant impunity of the political class, visible especially in the periphery of Europe and the developing world. Here, as in my home country Bulgaria, the population is exposed to the arbitrary violence and ransom, enormous rates of political fraud, bribery, and embezzlement. Due to the merging of political life and big business, people suffer high levels of exploitation and precariousness, economic enslavement, and deprivation from food, security, and dignity in every sphere of their existence. 

The way in which ‘corruption’ has been used to refer to these countries in specific, however, throws new light on the subject. While the abuse of power is a common practice for the political classes around the world, so is the merging of politics and capitalism: this is no system error, but how the system has been functioning for the last two centuries or more. The explicit attention paid to corruption as a central problem of the system in the periphery might throw the baby out with the bathwater of Left-wing struggles. Taking the second definition of corruption as a deviation from a moral – or legal – norm makes the unquestioned anti-corruption stance in the debate a bit more problematic. Many peripheral countries in the world system have been under corruption-monitoring, surveillance and scorning by governments and international organizations based in core countries. Not complying with national and international legislation has turned into a venue of castigation, funding and investment suspension. This has also come up with a legislation based on the norms of free market competition, reproduced to cast all countries into the same mould as convenient venues for the expansion of neoliberal capitalism. The resistance to such norms, be it for the purpose of personal enrichment by local elites, or for the survival of all the rest, has all been branded ‘corruption’. It has been portrayed as backward, anti-modern, irrational, and ultimately wrong.  

At the same time, after the peak of the welfare state and third-world developmentalism in the 1960-1970s, core countries have also started introducing legislation that allows for similarly grand abuse of power. It has become legal to destroy trade unions and forms of protest and resistance, privatize common goods and services. It has been seen as ‘advanced’, ‘rational’, and ‘modern’ to bail out banks and default their debt at the expense of their rank-and-file tax-payers and creditors. It has become perfectly legal to lay off people, evict them from their homes, and to leave millions homeless and unemployed with no chances of return to the system. It has remained a normal practice to outsource industries and pillage land, labor, and resources from communities which live under the poverty line home and abroad. It has become part of the normal game of politics, that the checks and balances, accountability, consultation and transparency, which big national and super-national Western powers and their INGOs require from peripheral countries, are gradually written off back home. Against this background, the battles the Left has won in the last century or two, against the existing repressive legislation, are now being quickly reversed by conservative and “left”-liberal governments.

The fight for universal suffrage, gender and ethnic equality, abortion, decriminalizing homosexual sex and allowing homosexual legal union and marriage is just a few cases in point. The legislation that allows for free access to goods and services, to housing, education, and healthcare for all people has now also been seriously infringed upon. We should not forget, however, that all these have been achievements of the Left which were seen as a deviation from dominant norms just a century ago. In many countries they are still considered as such, and often – as the case of the recent homophobic referendum in Croatia about reinstalling the definition to the family back to man-and-woman – are still considered as such. Furthermore, a lot of the resistance practices of the Left as squatting and occupation, hosting and caring about illegal and undocumented immigrants, homeless, and marginalized groups, subversive and violent action against repressive state apparatuses and corporations, and new forms of social organizing, are deviations from hegemonic legal and moral norms. They all can be counted as corruption, which, in this sense of the word, is subversion and it can mean something much simpler: the way to connect point A and point B where there is no legal means to bring you there. It is the intervention in a reality which resists you, and in which you need to install a certain order and pattern.

Now, coming back to the third definition – what I aim to do here is to subvert the notion of corruption in its prescriptive use by INGOs and governments. This is a call to corrupt the hegemonic notion of corruption and see how it has been used for the purpose of power abuse of core countries over peripheral such. In this sense, corruption becomes problematic not when it stops free market mechanisms to function smoothly. It is problematic when used instrumentally to reassert abusive and exploitative power relations, against which the existing legal or moral code could function. A parallel structure as bribery at a hospital or university is problematic not only because it shows that the legal code at place is not functioning to sanction the abuse: it is such because it inserts an economic dimension to human life, dignity, and prosperity. It jeopardizes them mostly of those for whom these assets are not granted by origin, reproducing the system in its very logic. While this is terribly important struggle to fight against, however, it is important to see that it is the logic of capitalism and repressive orders of class inequality that are at stake in this struggle, and not legality as such.  

Thus, the emphasis of recent social movements on the fight against corruption is potentially dangerous. Taking Bulgaria’s recent protests, by reproducing the anti-corruption discourse, imposed on the country particularly by the EU, protesters have rather closed than opened venues of resistance against the capitalist system and the inequalities it generates. Buying into the neoliberal hegemony of the post-socialist era, protesters have not seen capitalism as a problem, but have instead divided politicians and capitalists into bad (corrupt) and good (non-corrupt). They have demanded legislative and especially electoral reform that would limit the buying of votes, without addressing the dire structural conditions of people in the country side, for whom selling their votes and their labor to local oligarchs is the only way to survive the deep recession.

Which leads us back to the fourth definition – corruption can hardly be a solution, but a new optics on what ‘corruption’ means can offer venues of action that destroy the matrix of the system. Opening the black box of corruption and learning to look for ways it is used as a strategy of organizing and struggle beyond power abuse, teaches us that fighting on the terrain of legality is not enough to struggle against the instrumentalist capitalist logic of competition and greed. Practices subverting the norm without abusing power can function where there is a gap unforeseen by states and businesses. Such practices can teach us lessons as subversive organizing, resistance, and survival.

 

OTONOM

Dear comrades, not to be able to utter even a word in the midst of all that is happening before your eyes. Not to know what to say in the face of a serious enormous problem. Perhaps we have only one thing to say: God damn all of you! You, the bastards! The thieves! The shameless! The dishonorable! We have been undergoing a political turmoil for a month here, but we are all bound hand and foot. The people continue to support the government since they also have shares in distribution of rents. They do not want to let the distributors overthrown from power. Therefore, we beg your pardon and understanding if this small account of our case appears to you somehow pointless.

Fraud, degeneration and corruption… Capital and form of life have been meshed for a long time. Disciplinary society once witnessed the existence of two cultures in opposition particularly in terms of the values they were affiliated with: the culture of the poor and that of the rich. In our county, once the poor were dignified people. Although they were penniless, they were able to retain their self-respect in their dignified lives. They had not yet lost the virtue of self-respect. They always felt themselves valuable. They were not ashamed of their poverty. Furthermore, for them, the rich were nothing but spoiled and snob. A poor man always saw in himself the right to throw their corruption in their face. Once the society had a sense of embarrassment, which was respectful.

Our present society of control coincides with biopolitical subsumption under capital where capital has become the form of life itself.  If we are to survive, we have to produce and reproduce capital as a form of life. In money, capital trusts! Money can buy anything. There is no one that it cannot buy. Even a communist who calls himself as such only cares about his own interests in friendships.

Perhaps at the heart of fraud, degeneration and corruption lies this: in society of control, the poor feel, think and live just like the most corrupt bourgeois. The poor do not consider living with their dignity as a virtue any more. They do not have their own culture any more. They care nothing but money. The families consider their children as a source of rent. Money is the most divine. It is a fetish, and value production or ethics has no sense for nobody. Fraud cannot be separated from degeneration and corruption of life. In bio-political subsumption, it is the poor themselves who produce corruption of life from below. We have lost our ethics. The left is no more able to produce value. We are urgently in need of a struggle for dignity and ethics which would include value production as well. We must create our common wealth with a view to our commons. The unfortunate thing is that it is again the Left itself which constitutes the main barrier to such a struggle! For it is necessary to abandon individualism and hedonism for engagement with the constitution of the common. Since the common is considered as something that one is forced to, as something that bring about burdens; not to be organized is exalted like a virtue. Friendship seems to have been completely lost.

The explosion of scandals of fraud is no matter to the greater part of society. They have already been adapted to corruption as a form of life. This is why we need to underline above all that fraud cannot be separated from degeneration and corruption in life. The future seems to lie in struggle for values, ethics and dignity. It is not sufficient only to criticize. It is also necessary to create constitutive values.

The corporation or the biopolitical life

We used to think of the capitalist as the personified form of capital. To be capitalist was a matter of personal identity. Now the notion of “capitalist” should be reconsidered from the point of view of social relations rather than persons. Today it is the corporation through which the singularity of capitalism is constituted. Everything functions and is organized like a corporation. The individual itself is now a corporation. The family is a corporation. NGOs are corporations. The corporation is not a legal entity any more but a form of life where desiring-production is carried out. The satisfaction of social passions (in Humean sense) is only possible through corporation. Now the state itself is a corporation.

We have to invest more efforts on reflecting on corporation. The corporations are desiring-machines of money. For instance, in our country, the corporations function like mafia. For them, the laws are always there not to be obeyed but to be bypassed and violated. The corporate governance is an exemplary of state of exception. Corporation knows no reason: be practical, chase your business like a hunter, and expand your business circle, always better if you have contacts! Instead of the friendship of the wealth of the common, the hypocrisy of the alliance of interests… Bribery or special presents would always work. Corporation as a form of life is like a factory of degeneration and corruption. The state is no exception. For the same reason, it is an institution of corruption.

The corporate state

Surplus value production is no more possible without forging organic links with global capital. Previously, the working of the law of unequal and combined development was based on the protection of the national economies. Now the working of this law manifests itself in the fierce competition for having a share in global capital. Countries like Turkey are dependent upon the permanent flows of hot money in order to be able to close their balance of payment deficit and to maintain their growth rates. For Turkey, flows of hot money serve like blood that a body lives from. There are two ways to attract hot money flows: to increase the interest rates and to provide a safe haven of illegal economy. 

Greece and Turkey may be taken as exemplary cases of this situation. Greece as a member country of EU is obliged to achieve a certain rate of balance of payment deficit. This is why global banks had to channel money into Greece on the basis of secret agreements. It was necessary for concealing the real balance of payment deficit. And it was the state itself who organized and governed the whole process.

The situation is worse for Turkey. As stated before, it is dependent upon constant flows of hot money. It is among the countries which offer the highest interest rates. It has turned into a safe haven for illegal money flows. This is how the AKP government has achieved to attract high volumes of money flow for the last 10 years. The rents were shared among its supporters.

The recent developments of the last one month are just astonishing. If even the smallest part of all these were to happen in an EU country, it would be enough for the fall of the government. The irony is that our government keeps standing! The turbulence started with the detainment of the sons of the four Ministers on grounds of international illegal money flow. It is claimed that the second operation which is said to be prevented in the last minute targeted the son of the Prime Minister. All these events were so serious as to lead to the overthrow of the government. However the government responded with replacement of nearly 4000 chiefs of police, and a hundred public prosecutors and judges. There is no reason to expect that there are still public prosecutors who would dare to investigate or chiefs of police to enforce the court decisions. The state has become the AKP state. No one knows what will happen. The society is in a deep silence while the fierce violence of the state against revolutionaries keeps its pace as always.

Hence is it really still possible to talk of fraud when the world economy is characterized with its illegal functioning? The real mission of the governments is now to attract global capital. The states have become the main guarantors of the illegal world economy. They are like legal corporations which organize the flows within global economy.

We strongly agree with the urgent need for thinking on the question of corruption. However we really do not have access to data as much as to comment further. Perhaps this is the very part of the matter in question. We can intuitively see but cannot understand. We are not bankers. The stock-exchange keeps its enigma for us. We are not familiar with the governance of global corporations. We do not have contacts with those within or at the top of the system. But perhaps there is at least one thing that we are sure of! For today’s movements, the struggle for dignity based on value production is so important.