The Spirit of Guy Fawkes This November

Did the spirit of Guy Fawkes visit us this November? WikiLeaks and the Radia Tapes in India have exposed the hollowness of our rulers and their cronies in the media, in big business, and the army. Some of us distrusted them anyway, but now, the evidence is before everyone. Suddenly, it's not the Maoists or Al-Qaeda or some such phantom in the news. It's the state and its allies.

The emptiness of neoliberal "governance" also now stands exposed. We were told that smaller government would mean a more vibrant civil society. The media appeared to be a symbol of that vibrant civil society. Ordinary people can only express shock and dismay at events well beyond their control. Now alas, the grand strategy of neoliberalism has been exposed now as rotten to its core.

Nearly four hundred years after his public execution, Guy Fawkes remains significant for us. What we call freedom might be simply servitude. What we call rights might be merely legal fictions. What we call civil society might be simply a chicken coop belonging to our masters. John Locke, often considered to be the bourgeois philosopher par excellence, had a simple solution to this problem: dissolve an unresponsive, unaccountable government by exercising one's right to rebel. It is unclear what Locke thought of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, but it is quite apparent that the audacious radicalism of Fawkes' actions reverberated down to Locke's age. The Second Treatise of Government opens with an assault on the divine rights of rulers and ends with the conditions under which governments no longer deserve our allegiance. This is the essence of modern democracy. It is nothing without its radical edge. If we ever needed a reminder, this November has given us two.