The Graz school shooting leaves us with a mix of bitter feelings: sadness, incomprehension, despair, fear, disgust. The gravity of the event, the mediocrity and obscenity of the political reactions succeeding the tragedy, the incoherence between the apparent seriousness of official discourse and the striking fact that it was for them about managing the crisis, another one.

In 2002, the first French “mass killer” of the new century, Richard Dure wrote in his private journal: “I’m tired of always having in my head this sentence that keeps repeating: ‘I haven’t lived, I haven’t lived at all at the age of 30.’ [...] Why continue pretending to live? I can only feel myself living for a few moments by killing.”

Dylan Klebold, one of the two conspirators of Columbine High School confided to his notebooks: “The meek are trampled on, the assholes prevail, the gods are deceiving [...] Farther and farther distant...That’s what’s happening...me and everything that zombies consider real…just images, not life. [...] The zombies and their society band together and try to destroy what is superior and what they don’t understand and what they are afraid of.”

There you have some people who clearly took revenge instead of continuing to stew in their resentment. They dealt death and destruction because they didn’t see life anywhere. A point has been reached where it’s become impossible to maintain that the existential pertains to private life.

The public debate on the issue of arms legislation in Austria is a smokescreen. It cannot hide the fact that the malaise runs deeper, that these events are an expression of our times, i.e., that they are historically determined. The form of solitary carnage reflects the fragmentation process of the individual from himself, the separation of the political and life, the colonization of our lives by capitalism, the absence of lived communism.

A lot can be said about it. The point of view of this article is slightly different. It doesn’t aim at analyzing the shooting itself, what it says about the level of alienation, loneliness and despair of our society. The event is recent, requires a distant, “cold” point of view. Some broad considerations can be drawn from the event; some can’t be made.

Instead, we want to focus here on governance in times of crisis, trying to draw some general principles that we need to keep in mind to not lost ourselves in state’s narrative. This article is an attempt to escape what became the norm, governance through astonishment in time of crisis. It is an attempt to fight our difficulty to articulate the embarrassment, the discomfort that we feel when such acts happen with critical political thoughts, to develop a counter-narrative and to be able to resist in such contexts. We consider this theoretical work as essential not by itself but as far as it can provide tools to act strategically, avoiding political mistakes like those that occurred during the COVID crisis. Here are 3 theses to keep in mind in times of crisis.

I/ A crisis holds a double potentiality, either destabilizing or reinforcing instituted power

A crisis can take multiple forms (economic, social, political, health). Most of the time, the State reacts to it with the rhetoric of exception, which is the first step before establishing so-called “exceptional” measures and policies. The strength of this rhetoric is to play on the emotion largely shared in society, in other words to use the fragility of the population when it faces the crisis to consolidate its domination. We can therefore say that a crisis doesn’t exist by itself but is rather constructed by power.

Moreover, the recent crisis should bury the idea that a crisis is necessarily a crisis of instituted power. The Covid-19 sequence is maybe the best example of how the state can use a crisis to consolidate its domination over the population and implement surveillance and control tactics with consent. We could go even further by asserting that crisis is the driving force of power, in the same way that class struggle is the driving force of capitalism. Politics is a theater of operations, civil and social war. An event is a political opportunity, but not inherently good or bad for the revolutionary camp. A crisis is an open window for both revolutionary forces and counter-revolutionary power.

A key rhetorical tactic to consolidate its position during times of crisis is the multiple calls for the unity of society behind the State when facing a threat, with the State being conceptualized as a neutral body representing the general will. Adopting a critical perspective on this narrative is essential to uncover the mechanisms of governance at play.

II/ The reinforcement of State’s power happens through calls for a mystified unity

In general, the dominant narrative during times of crisis acknowledges and supports the emotion shared and widespread within society. What power cannot tolerate, however, is the politicization of that emotion. The dominant narrative typically follows this pattern:

• Acceptance/legitimization of the emotion

• Organization of a time for emotion opposed to a time for politics

• Framing the State as the single entity capable of ensuring security/responding to the emotion expressed by society

Creation of a strong “us versus them” dynamic that serves to disqualify any alternative narrative

The underlying assumption here is that the state constitutes a neutral tool representing the general will and every citizen. It often goes along the use of expert vocabulary to depict the state as a neutral machine. Moreover, using expert vocabulary to talk about a topic often participates in depoliticizing it and making it less debatable and understandable by people. This dispossession supports the idea that everything is functional, that decisions are no longer choices of values, but rather evaluated on results, abstractly defined. This strategy is not new; it is constituting of the bourgeois mystification of the society we live in. To depict the State as a neutral tool is indeed a way to avoid the simple fact that the State is a weapon of the bourgeoisie, defending its interests as a class and ensuring the continuation of accumulation.

Indeed, the state does not exist above the economic conditions that make it possible. To give an illustration, capitalism in its Fordist phase, after the Second World War, took the form of large industrial centres, requiring the existence of a large and concentrated working class, and factories sometimes employed tens of thousands of workers. This type of capitalism was matched by a certain type of state, one that planned ahead, associated the working class with the benefits of the economic progress of the period, integrated the unions into the process of developing the productive forces, and had every interest in keeping the workforce in the same factory throughout their careers.

On the contrary, post-Fordist capitalism is significantly increasing the number of subcontracted jobs, making labour more flexible, and decentralizing the working class, even to the point of dissolving it as a unified social class. In response, the state, as we know it, plays a crucial role in managing this mobility. It organizes the conditions that facilitate this phase of capitalism: it promotes lifelong learning, facilitates layoffs and redundancies, and ensures that the unemployed remain part of the consumer cycle through social benefits. The state’s structure and objectives now differ greatly from those of the previous era, but the state still defends the interest of capitalism. The modern state is the continuation of civil war by other means.

III/ There is no state of exception, rather a gradual continuum of repression and control

“There are those who protest against a phantom, the state of emergency, and those who duly note it and deploy their own state of exception in consequence.” Now - Invisible Committee

The state of exception, defined as a derogatory regime of ordinary law temporally limited to a period of crisis and destined to disappear at the end of the crisis, is fiction. The state of exception is always based on an arbitrary decision, made by the real sovereign of society. It is in no way limited by any constitutional order, since it suspends that order itself. Any attentive observer will have observed that the measures introduced during “regimes of exception” are bound to endure in society.

The idea that emergency is now permanent or that the exception is now the rule is, it seems, the standard position on the Left. This often leads to panicked public calls to come back to an “ordinary regime” and to moral indignation toward what is perceived as a violation of the “normal” legal order. We oppose this understanding of emergency measures in times of crisis. We consider them only as other modalities of control by the State, situated in a continuum and not in a sort of binary model of either ordinary law or exceptional law. This moral indignation toward the rise of the state of exception is also deeply white. Indeed, the development and the use of the state of exception must first be understood in terms of a duality that is geographically observable, as in the case of colonial law versus metropolitan law. The criterion to distinguish between both and to justify this contradiction within the liberal order was historically the one of "civilization", completed later by the one of "development" or “market economy”.

Mark Neocleous, in Critique of Security (2008), concludes his chapter on emergency powers by these words that resonate with our position: “The necessity for revolutionary violence is so often omitted when emergency powers are discussed, which is indicative of the extent to which much of the Left has given up any talk of political violence for the far more comfortable world of the rule of law, regardless of how little the latter has achieved in just the last few years. But if the history of emergency powers tells us anything, it is that the least effective response to state violence is to simply insist on the rule of law. Rather than aiming to counter state violence with a demand for legality, then, what is needed is a counter-politics: against the permanent emergency, by all means, but also against the ‘normality’ of everyday class power and the bourgeois world of the rule of law”.

To conclude, we believe one way to escape astonishment is to build concrete solidarity and lived communism, to stay aware of the State’s strategy and to make our own way toward the violence and the crisis of capitalist civilization. Opposing the argument that the State should ultimately be the institution protecting us from a whole range of threats and dangers, we ask the question:

How can the so-called "war of each against each" begin before each person had been produced as each?

And then we see how the modern State presupposes the state of things that it produces; how it grounds the arbitrariness of its own demands in anthropology, how the "war of each against each" is instead the impoverished ethic of civil war imposed everywhere by the modern State under the name of the economic, which is nothing other than the universal reign of hostility.