Slavoj Zizek - A Marxist & His World

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 ...

1. The 'looming catastrophe' of ecological crisis - he likes the word 'looming' and uses it twice.
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. 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.
5. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

The European Left and the Current Crisis

The future for the Left in Europe is harder to assess than at any time in the last hundred or so years. We start with the problem of defining what the Left is in the first place.

A Little Bit of History

In the mid-twentieth century, the definition seemed easy enough. The Left represented various forms of more or less democratic economic planning and some form of redistribution directed at equality.

We took this for granted at the time because nearly all Left responses to politics were conditioned by support for - or resistance to - what took place in St. Petersburg in 1917.

The two great strands of the Left were made up either of various sects and schisms of Marxism-Leninism or of social democratic 'revisionist' and other anti-communist parties where Marxism may have had a role but a minority one compared to the more liberal and labour union elements in their coalitions.

This was a denial of history. The triumph of Marxism in 1917 had been at the expense of many other traditions which had mounted their own democratic challenges to authority or sought a redistribution of the fruits of workers' labour or called for a liberation of body and soul.

The greatest of these alternatives was Anarchism. This dominated the Latin component of European culture at home and overseas right up until the 1930s. It was crushed in Spain, in events famously recorded by George Orwell, as much, or more, by the Communists as by the Falangists.

Marxism-Leninism in the Dustbin of History

Marxism-Leninism has been consigned to the dust-bin of history because the theory, with its flawed vision of human nature and its vulnerabilities as a faith without an after-life, resulted in sclerosis, terror and mass murder in practice.

It survives in small pockets in the third world and amongst strange sects in the developed world, but its last large bastion, China, is almost proof-positive of its intellectual decadence.

Friedrich Engels would have been engaged in supporting the revolt of workers against conditions in Guangzhou, not buttressing the pretensions of a new imperial power.

On the surface, the collapse of Soviet-style sclerosis between 1989 and 1991 should have left the social democratic revisionists in sole charge and merely increased the power of the liberal and union elements at the expense of the Marxists within Left parties. So it did, but with a surprising outcome.

The story of the post-Communist Left is the story of the shift of the Generation of 68 shift from the early Marx of alienation theory through radical liberalism to positions of power in every centre-left party in Western Europe (and most centre-right parties in Eastern Europe).

The mind-set of these individuals, both believers and opportunists, is the story of our times.

In the period from the Thatcher-Reagan revolution in economics, which kick-started globalisation, to the current economic crisis, the Left discovered identity politics, political mass communications and a theory of globalisation that placed Left ideals in a most curious alliance with finance capital and business.

With traditional socialism discredited, figures surrounding Blair and Brown, Royal, Delors and Prodi and many others, saw redistribution and equality coming from within the dynamic of capitalism, admittedly moderated by the enabling state which would be led by technocrats who 'cared for' the people.

From the never-ending growth created by free markets and globalisation, high taxation would create surpluses to sustain welfare programmes and effect social change to help the disadvantaged, as well, of course, serve the interests of traditional regional, trades union and special interest allies.

This had two unfortunate aspects. The political programme depended on this never-ending economic growth. And it did not take account of what happens when a professional political class emerges with weakening connections to the street and no ideology beyond the use of wealth created by others.

European Distinctiveness

The credit crunch in Europe has had the opposite effect than that in America. In the US, the dominance of the Republicans and their economic libertarian outliers since 2000 has meant that the Clinton approach never had the chance to be discredited.

Obama lanced the boil because he was elected at the heart of a crisis in which the American centre-left should have been implicated (after all, the toxic bonds largely derived from policies on Clinton's watch).

In Europe, most post-Soviet era socialist parties were either deeply in bed with finance capital as in London or, by 2007, were raring to go, as in France, with a 'reform' programme that would follow the Anglo-Saxon route.

This was the world of a centre-left presence at Davos alongside multinational barons, of admiration for the electoral success of a man (Blair) who clearly admired a Republican President, of pulling even the far Left into grand coalitions led by moderates and, if necessary, of coalitions with the centre-right.

But it is the weakening connections of socialists with the street that has created the greatest problem for the current centre-left. The centre-left deliberately eschewed ideology, the glue of political organisation, and adopted strategies of direct appeal to the electorate at large that by-passed activists.

This is fine if the centre-left is constantly delivering the goodies to a disinterested mass. The plan then works. Growth means higher tax takes on lower taxes. The Government can then both reward cronies and look after the deserving disadvantaged.

But, underneath the surface, things were not going so well. If an activist did not want a political career, he or she had no incentive to work or fund the party. Political parties of all types started to 'hollow out' with only aging loyalists left, griping about policies but still knocking on doors on election day and voting.

No new blood was coming in. Every top-down policy decision designed to keep the system as a whole goingmay have been fine with the majority but not with the traditional Left. Each would see a few more individuals cease to be engaged or even engage elsewhere.

Die Linke Signals Change

The general trend, as in Italy, had been for various Left groups to coalesce under the dominant 'reform' banner. Everywhere, Communist parties that were strong in the 1970s were in terminal decline.

Die Linke [literally, The Left] in Germany showed that, under certain conditions, even before a crisis, a sufficient block of the discontented (in this case, resentful 'Ossies') with the right leadership (in this case, a senior Social Democrat and former Communists) could challenge the '68 consensus.

Now we are 'in crisis' and it does not look like we are coming out of it soon. Where do the victims turn? Will more and more workers choose the route of Die Linke, splitting the dominant Left Party and opening the door to some form of neo-communist alternative?

The two political architects of the crisis often overlap in personality and programme - Anglo-Saxon capitalism and the 'reform' wing of the centre-left which has embraced market solutions to social problems. If redistribution ends and job losses mount, victims are scarcely going to look kindly on either.

Many observers have rightly pointed out that neither the general population nor the ideological Left and the disadvantaged may have much incentive to stick with New Labour in the UK or with the 'reform' wing of Social Democracy elsewhere if the crisis worsens.

Across Europe, conservatives who seem untainted with the rush to credit and globalisation seem likely to be a much safer pair of hands. Support from the Left for the 'crumbs from the table' seems increasingly absurd if there is no bread at all. Already, the German SDP is being forced to the Left.

The Crisis in the Anti-Communist Working Class

Let us go further east to the old Soviet bloc and take a lesson from Poland. Poland is economically relatively strong and it has earned the right to a major role within the EU, alongside Italy and Spain, if below the EU3.

It has a tendency to a centre-right nationalism (because of old feuds with the Russian bear) that can work well enough within the EU. The nearest British equivalent is the workerist anti-communist sentiment that has buttressed New Labour from within the skilled engineeering parts of Amicus.

But even in Poland, there are social tensions emerging that have forced Prime Minister Donald Tusk to move a regional summit to celebrate twenty years of democracy from Gdansk to Krakow in case of worker protests. The cause of the tension is interesting because it strikes at the heart of the EU project.

As we will see, the EU project and European post-war reform socialism are intimately connected and may rise and fall together ...

The Gdansk shipyard workers had led a Catholic workerist revolt against communism more than twenty years ago but they have found that the EU Single Market, which provides the rest of Poland with its prosperity, means that the State cannot give the subsidies required to keep the shipyards going.

The Szczecin and Gdynia shipyards are accordingly being sold off and/or closed down on European Commission orders because of improper state aid. This almost encapsulates the crisis of the EU as well as of the Left at this time.

The EU was presented, like much else, as never-ending prosperity on the back of liberal economics and of democracy in preference to the sclerosis and restrictions of communism. The ‘losers’ could always be managed through opportunities elsewhere. Now those alternative opportunities are drying up.

Everywhere, the great restructuring of economic activity created by the credit crunch means a particular crisis for the ‘old’ industrial working class which is the bed-rock of populist anti-communism in the formerly occupied East and of the traditional centre-left parties in the West.

A European Crisis

Automotive, defence, ship construction and engineering in general are all under threat. This is causing tensions that may make the whole of Europe just that little bit more unstable or inclined to protectionism.

That decision about £1.6-2bn or so of cash for the Eurofighter is not about defence but about 40,000 British jobs that tend to the New Labour interest and those of similar groups of workers across Europe who support various forms of corporatist capitalism because, hitherto, it has worked for them.

We find a strange situation where the base of the pro-EU centre-left is beginning to demand action to protect jobs on lines that either mean protectionism or heavyweight investment in all the tools of the new super state ....

... or maybe they will start to look at some of the 'national' solutions being suggested from the Left. Dare we call them 'national socialist solutions' - if without the racist element?

European policy and the survival of the centre-left are now intimately connected because pure liberal economics based on globalisation is not easily made compatible with saving skilled workers' jobs and the 'national' solutions of the Left work directly against the liberal dream of a united Europe.

The logic is that the 'official' Left, committed to Europe, will be driven remorselessly towards the 'West as bloc' model, with or without the US and Russia, and neo-nationalism, hitherto associated with the Right, may become adopted increasingly by the democratic Left Opposition.

Back to London

With limited cash in the bank and with spending cuts and higher taxation due, New Labour is in trouble because it cannot fulfil any of the promises implicit in its take-up, to a lesser or greater degree, of market reform as a method of redistribution.

Child poverty and inequality have not improved even during the good times and social services are crumbling. Both education and healthcare spending will be under threat within two years, let alone the shibboleth of Great Power status.

It has to be borne in mind that, although we are currently seeing the first signs of a future up-turn in general economic conditions, unemployment and general insecurity will begin to rise in the coming months. There will also be bankruptcies and low asset values fuelling right wing resentment.

Each election - like the Euro Elections currently under way - becomes an opportunity to protest against the incumbent believed responsible for the mess, but also to protest through radical nationalist (UKIP or BNP) or radical Leftist (Greens and No2EU) political programmes.

Alongside this is a genuine popular anger at the political class for incompetence and greed, both attributes that arise from ceasing to be a class of representatives and becoming a class based on political patronage in a system for which they set the rules for themselves.

And, finally, beneath the surface, we see the return, especially amongst the young, of direct action and anarchist alternatives, often with a strongly green hue, that are forcing an increasingly authoritarian response from a Government that has long since lost the plot.

Conclusions

So the situation is complex and chaotic. The public probably tends to conservative populism while the Left is fissuring. The post-68 generation/post-Soviet Left has no role other than redistributing wealth from within a high growth economy. With no or low growth, it is surplus to requirements.

Under such a scenario as we have now, it is inevitable that, at best, the European Left will split into a liberal pro-European centre and a genuinely socialist or even anarcho-syndicalist opposition that chips away at the mainstream party's credibility and power until the good times come again.

At worst (or best if you like this outcome), the European Left will reconstitute itself as a quasi-revolutionary alternative to stale political elites at both EU and national level, provoking EU withdrawal in some cases and violent clashes and factory occupations in others.

The very uncertainty and complexity of the situation means that none of this is certain. The major centre-left parties in Europe may be built on shifting sands but they do have the inertia of size and scale. None of the alternatives has yet demonstrated that it can win over popular opinion.

The bets we would place are on a period of newsworthy strikes and demonstrations whose greatest effect will be to build a bigger constituency for the centre-right and that the only socialist governments in power will be nothing of the sort - merely pale and vulnerable simulacra of their conservative rivals.

This assumes that the crisis is over within a few years. If it embeds itself, then the struggle changes to a very sharp battle over protectionism and government intervention. Economic liberals could be isolated in a pincer movement of right and left that strengthens what may come to be a left-nationalist alternative.

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