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.