Slavoj Zizek - A Marxist & His World
Monday 14 December 2009 at 03:09 Today's short suspension of the Copenhagen Summit talks, after protests from the G77-China bloc, may be little more than political theatre but it raises interesting questions about the relationship between the Western centre-left and the interests of the developing world.
The Next Phase of the Crisis
One of the curious aspects of the current economic crisis is the lack of impetus that it has given to the traditional Left. If anything, so far, it seems to have pushed Western populations towards the safe centre-right or, at worst, a form of managed populism.
On the other hand, we may merely be in the phoney phase of crisis with the real pain yet to come and perhaps new forms of politics will arise to deal with that pain.
If 2008 was the year of the Lehman Brothers collapse and of Governments moving to transfer tax funds to shore up the private sector, events at the end of 2009 suggest that the primary concern next year will be the economic survival of nations.
Iceland is one thing. Dubai another, but at least three countries within the European Union are now on the global watch list - Ireland, Greece and Latvia - with the United Kingdom and Spain ready to slip into the economic query basket on their own account.
Greece was already facing some very serious political disruption before the latest news of massive budget cut-backs, being made to please the international economic community. All eyes are now on the balance of revolt and repression in Athens and what it will mean for Europe.
A Marxist Writes
One of the last of the serious philosopher kings of Marxism is the Slovenian Slavoj Zisek who shuttles between London and Ljubljana. Recently, the Financial Times published his short list of five conditions for the return of communism and it is worth setting them out here as markers for our own analysis.
He does make one preliminary point that is worth repeating - that the assumptions that we are at the end of history in which liberal-democratic capitalism will be the dominant form and that a progressive can now only dream of 'global capitalism with a human face' are made far too easily.
Neither he nor we know the future but, whether Zisek is right on his five preconditions for communism or not, the human condition is not one of stability. Innovation in information exchange and communications means that current conditions are unprecedented. Change is more likely than not.
Coming from the Hegelian tradition, Zizek finds it difficult not to think in terms of 'antagonisms' or what an older generation of Marxists would have called 'internal contradictions'. Let us list them here ...
- The 'looming catastrophe' of ecological crisis - he likes the word 'looming' and uses it twice.
- The tension between the commons and private ownership of intellectual property - the implication is that shared knowledge will transfer power from the private to the public sector.
- The new sciences of genetic manipulation and the tension between socially created communities of 'genetically superior' individuals and being free and autonomous but 'flawed' (our terms).
- The growing use of walls, borders and boundaries to keep 'threats' from the developed world, recreating the Berlin Wall along its borders as a block to economic migration.
- A somewhat mysterious and abstract sense of apocalypse in the air - that things are changing in ways that will mark out what went before from what is to come.
All this begs a lot of questions. Books could be written not only in defence of Zizek's propositions but in opposition to them and we could add many other potential 'antagonisms' but these five points of tension are all worthy of consideration as markers for increased global political stress.
On Hope
What these 'antagonisms' have in common is that each (except the fifth which is general) represent a sharpening differentiation between those who have and, on the other side, not so much those who have not as those who want what those who have have.
When growth is expected to be eternal and infinite, as the naive right-Hegelianism of (say) Francis Fukuyama might suggest, then the 'haves' can relax. 'Trickle down' will eventually spread freedom and prosperity to everyone who wants it - eventually.
The 'eventually', of course, might be awkwardly distant - hundreds of years - but a sufficient drip-feed of prosperity and, above all, the reasonable hope of prosperity will not only pull the dangerous class of educated outsiders inside the system but it will allow hope to be used a political tool.
This thing called hope is not to be disrespected. Hope of revolution to deal with economic distress fuelled communism in its heyday. When hope went, communism collapsed. The Christian message depends on hope ... if Christian hope disappears, Christianity disappears.
The US in particular has been able to use 'hope', alongside faith and charity, as a driver in building its own constituency in the rising middle classes. President Obama might be regarded as epitomising that mentality. But what happens when the hope goes and the world's middle classes begin to despair.
A Health Warning
This brings us back to Zizek's five preconditions but with a health warning. Zizek is of the Left and wants change. We always have to be careful of Marxist normative statements based on desire being confused with reality. Marxists have always underestimated the resilience and adaptability of conservatism.
Our caution lies not only in the historical fact of conservative resilience but two other 'truths' of history. The first is that the thesis-antithesis model of Hegelian analysis is really not so clear cut in practice and the second is that the world certainly never splits into 'sides' in quite the way democratic politics do.
Each apocalyptic vision of his must be set against the fact that we know that there may be an apocalypse and so we adjust. Our adjustments have a tendency to mean that history rarely results in what we expect and that real threats and surprises will often appear out of the blue.
The vast majority of the world's population will not surge over the West's boundaries and seize what it wants like latter-day German tribes. In practice declining empires can be kept going for a very long time by suborning the leaders and special interests at their periphery.
Class war requires leaders and leaders require ideologically educated followers. Without faith or hope of success, leaders are unlikely not to be suborned into compliance with the ruling order in the long run if they cannot be killed or marginalised. What Zizek wants to offer is hope in this context.
The Countervailing Tendencies
Unfortunately for hope, in each of the areas outlined by Zizek, there is a countervailing tendency that favours the conservative position.
- Starving people are in no fit state for class war. The technological differential between the West and the developing world means that all the West has to do is retreat behind its walls and adopt draconian measures against economic migration and to conserve its own resources to survive.
- In the war between the commons and the private sector, a private corporation's ability to lobby a government is far superior to the commons' ability to organise a successful revolt that threatens the survival of a Government - at least to date
- The control of genetic manipulation is wholly in the hands of the West. If there is turn to genetic enhancement that benefits an elite at the expense of the poor, be sure that it will be offered to developing country elites as a form of suborning them to the West's interest.
- Walls and borders are unpleasant but they may well work to the degree that the public in the West approves draconian (again) measures to meet their needs. We see few street protests in defence of migrants' rights and liberal regimes tend to promote migration only by stealth.
- Placing the Mayan prophecies of 2012 aside, in any 'apocalypse' that is social, the likely division is between a West in its laager and the rest of the world surviving as best as it can.
This is too dark a critique because there are two further factors to take account. The rising nations of the new global economy have no interest in class war. They will take on some of the social and policing responsibilities of the West. The Chinese are already beginning to take on that role at Copenhagen.
Similarly, Western values do not easily permit a return to fascistic thought patterns. Although there is a surge to the 'selfish' centre-right, it is a centre-right committed to democracy, human rights and even a humanitarian foreign policy. This moderates tendencies to populism and 'draconian' autarchies.
But Zizek may be right about the strains on the system. The world may well be dealing with major ecological problems, an arms race between population and corporate states over property rights, serious ethical challenges, increased insecurity and a climate of fear and uncertainty.
However, his hopes for a return to 'communism' depend on actual political reactions to these events. There is no intrinsic reason why any population will be minded to give up its instinct for freedom to permit bureaucracies or cadres to allocate resources and set social standards.
The Fate of the Left
Zizek himself agrees that 20th century socialism is dead. The centrally planned economy and social democratic welfarism based on the nation-state, even if desirable, are no longer achievable. The Left should 'begin from the beginning again'.
He does not tell us what that beginning may be but it is clear to see what he is referring to - the construction of a progressive agenda of developmentalism, international solidarity, environmentalism, the commons (rather than communism as we have known it) and enthusiasm (the 'hope' factor).
There are a lot of people out there who are committed to this strategy and they are organising as we speak through the internet, in localities and through NGOs.
This is the New New Left, imbued with a Marxist spirit but transmuted into something softer, almost religious, with its appeal to the 'planet' (from where it elides into the wealthy bourgeois politics of Zac Goldsmith), to sustainability and to indigenous and localist solutions.
But will it get anywhere? Or has it already peaked? And is it really the best tool for dealing with growing unemployment and the cutting of welfare services in the West. Zizek mentions none of these nor the massive contradictions within the progressive Left.
In The Final Analysis
The Copenhagen Summit may come to be seen as a last ditch attempt of this New Left to dominate the ideological and intellectual agenda of the West through the soft corporatism of working with Government and through NGOs - and history will probably judge that it failed.
This Left does speak for the developing countries but it has not mobilised the peoples of the developing world because that would be far too difficult and dangerous. To promote sustainability, democracy and human rights and development sets up multiple internal contradictions before you even start.
Peoples under economic pressure are just as likely to be traditionalist and contemptuous of liberal values as supportive of social programmes of redistribution and sustainability. It is no accident that liberals more concerned with democracy and human rights are rapidly shifting to the 'right'.
The ideals of the intellectual and progressive Left have captured many friends at the soft end of the Western elite, right into the very heart of some centre-right parties, the churches and the consumer or new economy-driven corporations but it has lost the frightened and deprived of the West itself.
The Decline of the Left
The Left is not dead but it is like Christianity after the Enlightenment - powerful enough not to insult, able to fight a rearguard action and hold ground in places but ultimately doomed as a hegemonic force, and increasingly obliged to get its mass support on the periphery of the heartland where power lies.
As time goes on, its profile is also like that of the modern Church - a mix of tribal loyalties in uneasy relationship with idealistic enthusiasm, the same very volatile mix that is at the heart of the failed New Labour experiment. As idealists, the churches, the NGOs and progressives are now in the same camp.
Zizek is right that something new is on the way - 'the present state of things cannot go on indefinitely' - but he has not identified what it is. The chances are that change will arise out of a struggle between states and peoples in the West rather than between the West and the rest.
If this results in a victory for the people in the West, then, to the consternation of Left-liberals, this may mean less political leverage for the states of the developing world and so for the global vision of progressives.
Reader Comments (3)
I think you are neutering Zizek. You write: "The Left should 'begin from the beginning again'. He does not tell us what that beginning may be but it is clear to see what he is referring to - the construction of a progressive agenda of developmentalism, international solidarity, environmentalism, the commons (rather than communism as we have known it) and enthusiasm (the 'hope' factor)."
I think you misunderstand the weight of Zizek reading of Lenin's "we should begin from beginning again." You also misunderstand who this "we" is the left for zizek is constituted in opposition to liberals. We, the radical left, have failed so we should begin re-articulate radical emancipatory politics by re-encountering the traumatic event, by making contact with the real. This contact is a contact with the neighbor in all his monstrous dimension. It is only by re-encountering the neighbor that we can redefine the political, as such. This encounter is the transcendent in his transcendental materialism. Transcendental Materialism is necessarily opposed with any notion of developmentalism, or a progressive agenda.
In fact it is this very agenda which we should opposed. As zizek says in First as Tragedy than As Farce. The future will either be socialist or communist. By socialist he means this progressivist liberal politics or Capitalism with Asian values. Contrary to post-modern nonsense that the state is now irrelevant, socialism/ or capitalism with Asian values shows how capital under state control is much more dynamic.
Real progress, in the enlightenment sense, isn't progressive, it is transcendent. To use Zizeks favorite example, the Jewish ethic didn't just organically developed it was IMPOSED by a transcendental encounter with the real(god). Don't let Zizek celebrity fool you he is not an advocate of so-called socialism with a human face. He is a Jacobin, and with good reason.
I think we can safely say that Zizek is as obscure as they come. There is a real problem here in saying precisely what he means at any one time. He is no fool and he has interesting things to say philosophically but the piece above is solely concerned with his politics - equally obscure - where his Jacobinism and what he wrote in the Financial Times need to be squared almost imaginatively.
So, I am in the curious position of interpreting what I understand is the political issue with Zizek and responding to you (Mr. Gonzalez) trying doing the same. So I suspect we are not so much dealing with Zizek the person as Zizek as provocative symbol of a debate on ideology within the Left.
Even if Professor Zizek saw this exchange and commented, it would do no more than tell us what he in fact believed and would not detract from either your or my comments on the problem of ideology. So, with that caveat, let us debate as if there was this clear thing called Zizek and see if we can smoke out a conclusion.
Thank you for the contribution which I respect as informed commentary. There is what Zizek means to those who read him with care (such as yourself) and what he means 'historically' (to purloin Marxist forms of speech). I agree with you as to what he is trying to do and that I have indeed neutered him a little.
But I am afraid that he can be a bit tricky on occasions - a public intellectual who seems to be trying to pull a 'progressive' largely 'bourgeois liberal' protest movement back into a very traditional class war model whilst trying to create a red line in public (the clear message of his Financial Times piece) between it and the 'mistakes' of Marxism-Leninism and 'failures' of social democracy.
His model depends (as Engels' analysis ultimately depended) on a 'crisis' (often cast in apocalyptic terms) that can make liberalism redundant. What he seems to want to do is create sufficient red line from the image of past socialism (while preserving the essence of revolutionary thought) yet build links to desperate hopeless 'liberals' and then rely on the crisis to make those liberals desperate and hopeless enough to abandon liberalism in a moment of transcendent acceptance of the necessity of revolution.
I understand this and do not judge it morally but this is perhaps the chance to consider the ethics of such politics. In the piece I simply raised a doubt that there would be such a crisis (any more than there was sufficient crisis to ensure a Marxist revolution in the capitalist heartland rather than in the developing peasant periphery).
Here, I add the doubt that the 'essence' of class-driven revolutionary politics (which is the business of breaking eggs to make an omelette) can return in any practical form faced with conservative resilience and, equally important, the libertarian and 'created identity' turn promoted by the new information and communications revolution. The 'history' of really existing socialism does not help much either.
Transcendental materialism is a 'nice idea' but, on closer scrutiny, it seems to be merely an attempt to recover Marxist Idealist discourse (the alleged materialism is still basically Hegelian essentialism) after its battering not so much by its conduct in practice ('re-encountering the traumatic event') but by the lack of tenability of all Idealisms after the revolution that was phenomenology.
People find it very difficult to let loose of 'grand projets' - they need to believe: Marxists are no exception. It is a psychological thing, not a truth thing. Zizek's passionate confrontation seems to be with post-modernism, the challenge to the Enlightenment and the collapse of past 'grand projets'.
He has tried to transfer the Marxist mentality to an abstract realm of psychological engagement (the Lacanian aspect) with political issues of ressentiment and engagement from which action and change, no doubt, will eventually ensue. Above all, he is determined on resurrecting the Cartesian - which positions him on one side of a major philosophical divide ...
Before I go any further, I should say that I agree with you (implicitly) and Zizek that the progressive agenda is flawed. It is like classical reformist social democracy in constantly coming up against the point where compromise must neuter it. We see this in the shattering reality for environmentalists of the farce being played out in Copenhagen as I write.
But the critique of the progressive agenda should not require a return to Marxist tropes in order to return to basics and begin at the beginning.
The beginning does not lie in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon or some such text but in the first person whose labour was used exploitatively, who was deprived of information to make choices or who was given a social role on the basis of their appearance, gender or who their parents were. Marxism often gets in the way of this simple truth.
What I find difficult about Zizek is that he wants his cake and to eat it. He wants to capture an aspect of the psychology of irrational protest (Robespierre's nutty worship of the Supreme Being perhaps) and then turn it to a cause of liberation through some sort of mental magic.
The single issue faith-based protester (nearly all causes involving progressivism today are based on essentialist models of the world where core values dictate acceptance of facts rather than facts dictating the expression of core values) is to become an ideological warrior for total liberation without fully accepting that any meaningful individual autonomy must result in doubts being presented about whether being 'transcendental' is anything more than hogwash.
We often have problems with terminology - liberal, socialist and communist are all slippery terms that have different meanings in different contexts. The socialist/communist assessment made by Zizek is a bone of contention here - it is a traditional over-simplified yin/yang dualist way thinking which does not relate to facts on the ground.
It is true that Asian economic systems are proving more effective than Western systems but this has a lot to do with the fact that the former are still catching up and that the Western form of 'socialism' adds major welfare costs which are ignored in the East but which, at some point (and this is a possibility) the West may eliminate in reaction to economic pain - or which the East may add to its cost base of a confucian 'progressive' agenda.
Change (unless you believe in Engels' nonsensical apocalypticism) is just as likely to lead to a tough love libertarian community of the Right or to Rightist corporatism in the West as to anything remotely 'communist'. We just do not know. The choice is not between socialism and communism but between many forms of community survival and growth (or decline) management. Zizek needs the simple dichotomy of socialism/communism to be true. That does not make it true.
I am well aware of Zizek's admiration for the Jacobinical frame of mind and it is certain that this has been influential on many post-Marxist thinkers and even politicians (even where, as in the darker recesses of post-Marxist New Labour) they may seek to hide it for practical reasons.
The phenomenological frame of mind, the influence of Eastern philosophies, the inadequacy of Cartesianism, the existentialist synthesis and the critique of German Idealism and Judaeo-Christianity from the heirs of Kierkegaard and Nietsche have constructed a challenging alternative to the Enlightenment discourse.
The communitarian position of transcendence is one of imposition from without of value - Kierkegaaard introduced the idea of a free choice in embracing the irrational or absurd. This point of choice is critical and Zizek's model seems only to recognise imposition or the 'only choice you can make' - as if he pines for the community certainties of his youth even if he knows that they are absurd.
He clearly does not choose full Marxist absurdity (like a latter day Kierkegaard) but rejects the anarchy of free choices and comes back to a Jacobinical transformation as the only reasonable choice to which a person of the Left must steer themselves - an imposed transformational choice, essentially a Pauline conversion (or is this a completely wrong interpretation!)
The alternative non-transcendental (in community terms) way of seeing competes with an Enlightenment discourse which merges on its intense revolutionary fringe with Jacobinism, dare we say Illuminism, Marxism and other forms of authoritarian essentialism - now in its latest incarnation as the non-democratic Eco-Movement. This seems to be what Zizek is embracing in a private war against post-modern fluidity.
Both ways of thinking (on either side of liberal pragmatism) have had their crimes to contend with - on the one side the dabbling with obscurantism and murder in the fascist period and the other engaging with systematic lying and slave camps in the Soviet era. But Zizek is missing the point. He is in danger of becoming High Priest of a fringe religion that:-
- a) few want where the centre of global power resides,
- b) that will never shake off what it did from Lenin to Pol Pot,
- c) offers an authoritarian collectivism (of the mind rather than managerial organisation) despite claims to the contrary, under conditions where technology promotes libertarian and national or ethnic identity struggles against authority,
- d) gives primacy to an intellectualisation of transcendant emotion (a form of constructed materialist spirituality) when the culture prefers the emotionalisation of facts and of uncertainty as the primary means of relating to others.
(The odd aspect of d) is that his Transcendental Materialism and Cartesianism seems to crave certainty about the world and yet his philosophical thinking , from what I can grasp of it, seems to be quite capable of embracing uncertainty as a positive aspect of being - but then what do I know? :-) )
So, I do not feel fooled in the slightest by Zizek. I think he is trying to fool us. He wants us to believe in the apocalypse. And he wants those protesting now to become so anxious, frightened and disorientated that they have a Pauline moment of engagement with the revolutionary.
He may succeed with some relatively weak minds and, from this basis, there may be a recreation of the communist movement but it will not be significant outside the periphery and, where it is significant, it will be easily contained because the apocalypse is not coming soon - and, as I say repeatedly, conservatism is resilient.
The construction of Judaism through the imposition of a transcendental encounter with God is, in this context, a creative introduction to his thinking. This might tell us something about what was possible before new information and communications tools diminished the ability of some to impose their transcendalism on others (I cannot see a real God in this process, I am afraid).
But if Zizek is saying that the revolutionary Left must be recreated through a transcendental encounter with a new vision of humanity, then he is also saying that the community must subsume itself into a fiction, an essentialism constructed by consent under the leadership of the few - perhaps a natural leader like Robespierre (or Zizek himself).
This is authoritarianism under sociopathy on a magnificent scale, an absolute dehumanisation in order to create a new humanity - everything, in fact, that was wrong with Soviet culture. It is as if, unlike Sartre, Zizek's just cannot escape history because his presuppositions do not permit him to - perhaps he might clarify this for us ...
Fortunately, I cannot take Zizek seriously as a politician but if someone is ever potty enough to try and act on his strategy, using Transcendental Materialism to transform the Progressive Movement into a machinery for the acquisition of power then this might be no liberation beyond the economic.
It would probably be mass psychological enslavement - millions of lost souls lost in a hell of transcendent and somehat confused collectivism ripe for exploitation by psychopathic personalities eager to crack many eggs for their global omelette ...
I add here Y. W Gonzalez' Blog - http://labyrinthsofbelief.blogspot.com - as a courtesy. It contains footage of Zizek in conversation and Mr. Gonzalez is clearly better informed than I could ever be on modern philosophy.