Four Antagonisms Limiting Global Capitalism

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 90-91:

The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today's global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are four such antagonisms: the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called "intellectual property"; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. There is a qualitative difference between this last feature--the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included--and the other three, which designate different aspects of what Hardt and Negri call the "commons," the shared substance of our social being, the privatization of which involves violent acts which should, where necessary, be resisted with violent means:

--the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of "cognitive" capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, the postal system, and so on;

--the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to rain forests and the natural habitat itself);

--the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity); with new biogenetic technology, the creation of a New Man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realistic prospect.

What the struggles in all these domains share is an awareness of the potential for destruction, up to and including the self-annihilation of humanity itself, should the capitalist logic of enclosing the commons be allowed a fee run.