Slavoj Žižek 28 October 2011
The protests on Wall Street
and at St Paul’s Cathedral are similar, Anne Applebaum wrote in the Washington Post, ‘in their lack of focus, in their
inchoate nature, and above all in their refusal to engage with existing
democratic institutions’. ‘Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square,’ she went on,
‘to whom the London and New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare
themselves, we have democratic institutions.’
Once you have reduced the
Tahrir Square protests to a call for Western-style democracy, as Applebaum
does, of course it becomes ridiculous to compare the Wall Street protests with
the events in Egypt: how can protesters in the West demand what they already
have? What she blocks from view is the possibility of a general discontent with
the global capitalist system which takes on different forms here or there.
‘Yet in one sense,’ she
conceded, ‘the international Occupy movement’s failure to produce sound
legislative proposals is understandable: both the sources of the global
economic crisis and the solutions to it lie, by definition, outside the
competence of local and national politicians.’ She is forced to the conclusion
that ‘globalisation has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western
democracies.’ This is precisely what the protesters are drawing attention to:
that global capitalism undermines democracy. The logical further conclusion is
that we should start thinking about how to expand democracy beyond its current form,
based on multi-party nation-states, which has proved incapable of managing the
destructive consequences of economic life.
Instead of making this step,
however, Applebaum shifts the blame onto the protesters themselves for raising
these issues:
‘Global’ activists, if they
are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout: ‘We
need to have a process!’ Well, they already have a process: it’s called the
British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply
weaken it further.
So, Applebaum’s argument
appears to be that since the global economy is outside the scope of democratic
politics, any attempt to expand democracy to manage it will accelerate the
decline of democracy. What, then, are we supposed to do? Continue engaging, it
seems, in a political system which, according to her own account, cannot do the
job.
There is no shortage of
anti-capitalist critique at the moment: we are awash with stories about the
companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, the bankers raking in fat
bonuses while their banks are saved by public money, the sweatshops where
children work overtime making cheap clothes for high-street outlets. There is a
catch, however. The assumption is that the fight against these excesses should
take place in the familiar liberal-democratic frame. The (explicit or implied)
goal is to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control over the global
economy, through the pressure of media exposure, parliamentary inquiries,
harsher laws, police investigations etc.
What goes unquestioned is the
institutional framework of the bourgeois democratic state. This remains
sacrosanct even in the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’ – the
Porto Allegre forum, the Seattle movement and so on.
Here, Marx’s key insight
remains as pertinent today as it ever was: the question of freedom should not
be located primarily in the political sphere – i.e. in such things as free
elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, respect for human rights. Real
freedom resides in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the
market to the family, where the change needed in order to make improvements is
not political reform, but a change in the social relations of production. We do
not vote concerning who owns what, or about the relations between workers
in a factory. Such things are left to processes outside the sphere of the
political, and it is an illusion that one can change them by ‘extending’
democracy: say, by setting up ‘democratic’ banks under the people’s control.
Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of such
democratic devices as legal rights etc. They have a positive role to play, of
course, but it must be borne in mind that democratic mechanisms are part of a
bourgeois-state apparatus that is designed to ensure the undisturbed
functioning of capitalist reproduction. Badiou was right to say that the name
of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire, exploitation or anything
of the kind, but democracy: it is the ‘democratic illusion’, the acceptance of
democratic mechanisms as the only legitimate means of change, which prevents a
genuine transformation in capitalist relations.
The Wall Street protests are
just a beginning, but one has to begin this way, with a formal gesture of
rejection which is more important than its positive content, for only such a
gesture can open up the space for new content. So we should not be distracted
by the question: ‘But what do you want?’ This is the question addressed by male
authority to the hysterical woman: ‘All your whining and complaining – do you
have any idea what you really want?’ In psychoanalytic terms, the protests are
a hysterical outburst that provokes the master, undermining his authority, and
the master’s question – ‘But what do you want?’ – disguises its subtext:
‘Answer me in my own terms or shut up!’ So far, the protesters have done well
to avoid exposing themselves to the criticism that Lacan leveled at the
students of 1968: ‘As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new
master. You will get one.’
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